What The Bees Teach Us About Finding Our Way Home

My beekeeper friend keeps me awash in honey and bee gossip.

Every time I visit, I learn something new, ranging from bee sex, fights to the death between wannabe queens, how Fall honey is different from Spring honey, or weird USDA rules about labeling honey. 

The latest bee factoid I learned blew my mind.

Bees don’t care if you move their hives, as long as you do it at night. They don’t mind waking up somewhere new, even if it’s hundreds of miles away, because they get their bearings every morning. They make sure their bee GPS is locked onto “home,” whether it’s the same as yesterday or on another planet, and then get to work.

For bees, moving is a non-event.

What was true yesterday does not need to be true today.  Change is neutral, neither good nor bad; it’s just a new reality to live in. Bees deploy their skills and experience and do their assigned tasks, accepting the conditions such as they are. 

We could learn a thing or two from bees about “home”.

Change is the only constant in life. We can choose to wake up each day and engage with the world, not as it was yesterday, and not as we’d like it to be, but as it is today, without feeling loss or regret.

We can believe that we can thrive, even after being uprooted, literally or metaphorically. Home is where our deepest, truest self lives within us, and we will always find our way back.