It has been quite interesting to be surrounded by so many bees. Several weeks ago I came across a bee type I had never seen before. Not that I know much about bees, but at least I can tell the difference between honey bees, sweat bees, bumble bees, and wasps...
Anyway, when I saw it I was totally amazed and curiously observed its behavior upon the flower blossom it was visiting. Immediately I noticed a very different behavior and that intrigued me a lot. My observation of regular honey bees is that they usually land on a flower, move around looking for pollen and then away they go onto the next flower. No time to loose or waste.
This bee, which had white stripes and a wider and hairier body than the regular honey bee was different. This bee actually touched the flower. I mean it caressed it and tended it. It felt it with all of its little hairy body. It looked around and took care of it. It submerged itself in it. It just experienced it without apparent movement or purpose. It almost seemed that for this bee, gathering nectar and pollen was a byproduct of a much meaningful experience. It wasn't in a hurry. Neither did it seem focused on gathering as much nectar and pollen as possible like honey bees seem to do. Yet this bee was covered in pollen like I have never seen a honey bee do.
Some time later I noticed the same type of bee on one of the sunflowers. This time, a regular honey was present as well and I was able to watch again in real time the difference in behavior. The honey bee walked on top of the flower, barely touching it. It was an efficient process without closeness to it. The white bee walked through the flower and dived into it. It touched it. Again, the differences were very apparent. This time I took some pictures which you can see below.
As I continued pondering about this observation, the funny realization dawned on me that perhaps the honey bee had been "christianized" so to speak. And by that I mean, it had somehow picked up the christian self denial attitude which denies the sensual experience of creation and transforms life into a pure intellectual routine for the benefit of the "colony." No feelings, no sensuality, just work for the greater good of the community while you wear yourself out doing so.
In contradistinction to this, the white striped bee was 100 percent sensuous. Everything was about feeling, sensing, and yes, even Loving for it carefully and patiently took time to tend the flower a little section at that a time. It was about being in the moment without any sense of rush whatsoever to gather pollen. Believe me, I'm not making this up. It was just there to be observed and as easy to distinguish as day and night.
This experience kind of deflated my initial enthusiasm with "traditional" honey bees and bee hives for it seems that at some point they lost something of great value: the capacity to Live and InJoy Life.
Now the christianized western mind is likely to misinterpret what I say because it only knows either the christian repression of sensuality / natural sexuality or the asocial / deviant drives this repression produces. Thus for such a mind, the notion of letting go of sensual repression automatically gets wrongly associated with giving free reign to the asocial / deviant drives produced by the repression. Hence the sexual insanity that is going on in the world. However this could not be further from the Truth.
As Wilhelm Reich documented so well in his research, neither the repression nor the secondary asocial drives it causes are natural expression of human sexuality. Instead there is what he calls the primary drives or natural sexual drives that are. Therefore, when I describe the sensual nature of the bee and the value of such experience I speak of primary drives that are, as Reich documented so well, always very Respectful of Life. There is nothing asocial or deviant about them even though they do not fit standardized or bastardized morality.
In a way it could be said that this white striped bee belongs to a family of bees that has retained its primary drives which allow it to be fully sensuous in a healthy way. A way that is good for both, itself and the flowers it graces. Really amazing.
How beautifully Life on Earth could be if humanity re-awakened to its true unhampered, unrestricted, uninhibited primary drives...
Who would have thought that the simple act of observing some bees could provide such insights?