The Virtue of Bees - St. Basil the Great

St. Basil's mediation on the many virtues of bees and how Christians do well to imitate them. "Imitate the character of the bee," writes St. Basil, "because it constructs its honeycomb without injuring anyone or destroying another's fruit."An excerpt from homily eight of the Hexaemeron, a collection of nine homilies on the six days of creation. Note: in St. Basil’s time the queen bee was understood to be a king. They didn’t know the leader was a female until much later. I have kept the original text but when you hear “king” know that St. Basil is referring to the queen bee.📖 Hexaemeron by St. Basil the Greathttps://stanthonysmonastery.org/products/hexaemeron?srsltid=AfmBOopEzZqE0t0Z2M-lYo3Fmq7MeVjMJOG4eihWIa9zNc-wK5A5Pegl🎧 Scandalized? Be Like the Bee - St. Paisios the Athonitehttps://youtu.be/i9nRU9KnYIM🎧 A Lament for Sin - St. Basil the Greathttps://youtu.be/I6erTc_FPKI🎧 On Illness, Doctors, and Healing - St. Basil the Greathttps://youtu.be/WOxigGgPenw⛪ FIND an Orthodox parish and monastery near you: https://orthodox-world.org/https://orthodoxyinamerica.org/_______St. Basil teaches:Imitate the character of the bee, because it constructs its honeycomb without injuring anyone or destroying another's fruit. It gathers the wax openly from the flowers, then, sucking in with its mouth the honey, a dew like moisture sprinkled in the flowers, it injects this into the hollows of the wax. At first, therefore, it is liquid, then in time being matured, it attains its proper consistency and sweetness. The bee itself has won honorable and becoming praise from the Proverb, which calls it wise and industrious. It gathers its food so laboriously ("Whose labors," it is said, "kings and private men set before them for their health."), and devises so wisely its storehouses for the honey (stretching the wax into a thin membrane, it builds numerous cells adjacent to each other) that the great number of the connecting walls of the very tiny cells supports the whole. Each cell fastens upon the other, separated from, and at the same time joined to it by a thin partition. Then these compartments are built upon each other two and three stories. The bee avoids making one unbroken cavity lest the liquid, because of its weight, should break through and escape to the outside. Notice how the discoveries of geometry are merely incidental to the very wise bee. The cells of the honeycombs are all hexagonal and equilateral, not resting upon each other in a straight line, lest the supports, coinciding with the empty cells, might meet with disaster; but, the corners of the hexagons below form a base and support for those resting upon them so that they safely sustain the weights above them and hold the liquid separate in each cell.