I know it's been forever since I've been here! It's been a tumultuous year in which writing was no longer a priority, but perhaps now the time for writing has found its place again. Besides, today could not go undocumented. This particular blog is the ending of an ongoing story of my backyard bees. The picture above, if you can tell, was a very large beehive that had come to grow and thrive in my backyard oak tree. They were always friendly bees and pollinated my garden well. However, unfortunately for them, that branch their hive is hanging on decided to die off - probably suffocated from all that beeswax, if that's possible! So I found myself in a dilemma, the proverbial rock and a hard place - get rid of the bees or risk them crashing to the ground unexpectedly and possibly causing harm to someone. So, of course, the risk to human life overtakes the annihilation of the bees. I was hoping I could find someone to remove and relocate them. However, due to the bees being 40+ feet up in the tree and in the backyard where there is no access for a truck lift, they had to be exterminated. Plus, I was informed by the Hillsborough County Extension Service that beekeeper groups are not even allowed to remove wild bees by state regulation due to possibility of them being or becoming Africanized colonies. Evidently all wild bees in our state are considered Africanized whether they really are or not. That seems like bee profiling to me...
So the bee men came. They were very brave with their fireman ladder, at one point one of them 30+ feet in the air on a ladder in regular pants and a tee shirt, removal pole in one hand, and answering a cell phone in the other hand. A few short bursts of whatever deadly chemical they were using and bees began flying and dropping out of the sky. I was sitting on the screened-in porch so I could see what was going on as the bees were landing mid-flight on the metal roof with little tiny thuds. It sounded like the beginning of a heavy rain storm when you hear those first few big drops of rain before the deluge. I'm sad they were exterminated, but I tried all I could to find an alternative ending for them and it just didn't work out.
So myself and immediate neighbors are, for the moment, safe from possible harm of a beehive crash and from the one-day-might-become-Africanized bees. However, safety is a relative thing, as most of us realize. We are only safe in knowing that we can handle by God's grace whatever comes our way, nothing more and nothing less. We pray for safety and security, and sometimes God provides this in a way that we expect, but at other times all we can receive is His peace in the midst of the storm. The "why" is mostly irrelevant and the rest is what we circumvent.
That beehive is forever changed, gone. They bees don't know why because they can't see the bigger picture. We see the bigger picture and so we understand. It's much the same with God and us. God always sees the bigger picture and works some good, even in the face of tragedy and loss.
So today I can rejoice in knowing that God loves me an abundance more than I loved the bees. Should my home crumble around me and all that I know be lost, I know that He holds me in His hands, that I am blessed regardless of circumstances, and that my soul lives infinitely in Him.
