Bees represent the mystical body
In the softest morning light, as I waited for Father to open the church doors to the Sacraments, a gentle buzzing arrested my attention. I stood on the walk, warming in the sun, and watched bees busy upon the arranged landscape of red and white cistaceae. When unfocused, my eyes delighted in the static noise blooming from their myriad movements, discrete workers that at a distance are perceived as washing into a random pattern, but in focus are found to be diligent servants intent upon their task in effortless concentration. Their pollenating is their labor and delight. The morn warms their tiny bodies, allowing them to drive the pace.
A better metaphor for the mystery of the Church could hardly be found. The worker, anagogically, is a limb. In them is represented the abandonment of the self we are called to. The limb acts according to the head; the bee acts according to the queen. I could not help but feel, watching the methodical pollenating of the insects, as though these gentle blimps together composed one body.
It is not slavish. While the bee is an insect without the freedom of will unique to our species, they represent the fulfillment of our kenosis: For in the surrender to the hive, the bee finds its ultimate happiness. One must imagine the worker happy. The book of Nature, most awesomely in these miniscule vignettes, illuminates the flourishing that finds the dutiful limbs of the body.
The world secular rightly claims that true happiness lies in the passionate following of your true desires — but falsely declares those true desires are money, or power, or fame, or, most tantalizing of all, pleasure. Your true desire is of necessity the highest goodness, wherein lies a pleasure and joy beyond understanding, by God's glorious design, yet as Lewis said we are all too often content with our mudpies in the slums. And so it is that God has modelled for us the fulfillment of our desire. It is to make ourselves empty vessels filled with the love of God. Our true desire lies in the emptiness that remains when our clamorous demons are excised.
The bee does not toil. He works, releasing that loud, insistent, lovely sound from his perfect wings, happy in the service of his queen. We work in service to the Bride that is the mystical body of Christ, in total abandonment, and we too find ourselves warmed by the vital sovereign lamp of the heavens.