Bees are up against a lot of dangers. Sometimes it can be the weather, as I wrote about yesterday. Warm weather like we’ve been having makes the bees want to fly outside, but there’s no nectar or pollen for them to collect, so they waste a lot of energy for no results.
Sometimes they’re picked off by a hungry bird. Sometimes their little wings wear out and they can’t make it home to the hive. Sometimes a skunk or a bear raids the hive--skunks to eat the bees--bears to eat the honey.
As far as I know, bees don’t wage senseless war. Why am I thinking about these things?
Well, for some unknown reason, I went back the other day to take a look at my son’s blog. Now, keep in mind that the last time he posted anything was in April of 2006, shortly after three terrorist bombs went off in a marketplace in Dahab, Egypt.
Eli was there, vacationing. He’d been in the marketplace drinking juice, but he wandered away to a restaurant. Then the bombs went off--near the juice bar where he’d been standing minutes before.
The Egyptian government shut down all internet traffic, so it was almost two days before I knew my son was alive. The email I got from him said, “Alive. More later.”
The next email began, “I carried dead bodies yesterday.” He ended up using parts of that email on his blog. I must warn you that there are pictures (beginning on about the third entry down the page) of the extreme devastation caused by those bombs in April of 2006, including one of the mangled body of a man Eli tried to save. There are also pictures of the hundreds of people who took to the streets the next day begging for peace, demanding that the terrorists stop.
If you don’t want to read his commentary, I’ll understand. If you don’t want to look at the photos, I won’t blame you. But if you do, here’s where to find it all:
Eli stayed in Dahab for several days afterwards, doing his small part to help the local economy that depended on the tourists (the tourists who left the city in droves after the bombings). Then he went to Israel, where he posted his last blog entry for that year (and the next six years, come to think of it).
He wasn’t too excited about traveling for quite a while after that.
Why do we (the collective we of humanity) do such things? Bees are considerably smarter than we are in this aspect.
BEEattitude for Day #43:
Blessed are those who never treat the world or each other in any way they wouldn’t want to be treated themselves.
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2 comments:
Eli definitely had someone watching over him during the bombing. Bless his heart - sounds like a true blessing of a son and a good human being. My heart goes out, too, to the little 'fuzzies' - working so tirelessly and some days for nothing. They, too, are blessings from above.
We've had rain here in Georgia for more than a week now -- bees and cops and power line workers all have extra challenges in rainy weather.
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