Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s not your job to save the world. 

At least not in grand gestures.

Consider the humble honey bee.

I am gifted in my yard with countless wild flowers that appear unbidden. I specialize in dandelion, henbit, and clover.  These are the flowers that have followed me throughout my life.  Some of my earliest memories are associated with them.

The lawn is full of clover with its strange white flowers.  The bees visit these tiny flowers one by one, gather imperceptible bits of nectar, and then return with them to the hive. With room for some exceptions that I will leave to entomologists, this is what bees do.

Tiny bits of nectar, from tiny flowers, gathered by tiny bees, taken back to the hive where it becomes honey.

This is astounding. This is marvelous. This is a miracle.

None of the bees is a hero.

My youngest daughter and her husband are in the early stages of becoming beekeepers. (I like that word “beekeepers.” A lot of e’s in it.) As a part of this process, they bought an empty (i.e. without bees) hive, and made the discovery that beehives cost money.  My youngest daughter takes after the rest of the women in my wife’s family and does not like to waste money.  She also is aware that she has a father who likes to do woodwork and has a poor memory: I forget how much I spend on the materials I use to make things, so I just give them away.

This is, to her, a perfect storm. Because of this, other projects have been briefly pushed to the side so that I can make beehives.

This is an apparent contrast to my most recent project of making recorders, but they do have one important thing in common: I’d never been within 20 feet of either before having the idea that I could make one.  

One point of contrast is the Youtube ecosystem of beekeeping and beehive making versus that for recorders. 

When you look for videos on recorder making on Youtube, the pickings are mighty slim.  There are a lot of folks talking (and talking and talking…) about recorders, their properties, the various types of recorders, their history, but very little about making them. Virtually nothing that is helpful in the details.

By way of contrast, the beehive-making videos are quite robust. Details. Simple people, giving simple information, in an easy to understand way.

And–this is important–there is a standard.  While there are variations on how to make hives, a standard hive–the Langstrom Hive–for which many products are available.  Because of this standard and the availability of products for it, there is an incentive to design for that standard.  This means the dimensions are well-known and well-distributed on the whole internet, Youtube included. Hives are constructed in pieces. If you construct your hives to the Langstrom standard, you can mix and max the pieces.

It works. 

The hive itself consists of boxes that contain frames.  The frames frame foundations upon which the bees can build their comb. The Langstrom Hive is designed in such a way as to enable bees to do their business in a manner that is more convenient for the purposes of the beekeeper.

The Langstrom Hive does for the bees what the set of standards does for the beekeepers.  While the open standards allow the beekeepers to do a lot for themselves, it also enables greater commerce. There will always be times when the beekeeper needs to buy something instead of build it.

Now let us go back to the business of saving the world.  Remember, that’s what I started with.

For us, in our interface with the world and all of its problems, Christianity provides a set of standards. The rest of the traditional religions do something similar, but it is not my business to speak for them.  Heck, nobody appointed me the job of speaking for my own religion, so speaking for others is definitely out of bounds. 

Our churches are like hives.  They provide a structure that helps each of us as we do our own tiny things to have some larger impact.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com.