Rosh Hashanah and ... bees?

MARK WINSTON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

As a beekeeper and a Jew, September and October have always been my favorite months. It is an important time for bees, the final opportunity for colonies to bring in the last dribs and drabs of fall honey, and for beekeepers to prepare our hives for the long winter ahead.

Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot also happen in September or early October, festivals of renewal and reflection. They are holidays where bees and honey play a prominent role, particularly when we dip slices of apple into honey and recite: "May it be your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors, to renew this year for us with sweetness and happiness."

This ritual is repeated before numerous celebratory meals throughout the holiday period, and has deeper meaning for me than for most Jews because I recognize the connection between bees, honey and apples. The simple rhythm of blessing, dipping and merging apple and honey holistically unites my own disparate identities of beekeeper, scientist, teacher and Jew. It is at these moments that I feel most whole, and at these times of celebration that I most deeply understand the role of bees in nature and in my own life.

Beekeepers and apple growers can most fully appreciate the profound symbolism of dipping a slice of apple into a bowl of honey. Apples would not exist were it not for the pollinating influence of the bees, which transfer pollen between flowers every spring, setting the seed for the apple fruit. The apples, for their part, produce sweet nectar in their flowers, which attracts the bees to dip their tongues deep into the flower, knocking pollen off the flower and onto their hairy bodies in the process of imbibing. The pollen rubs off on subsequent floral visits, fertilizing the flowers, and the life and growth of the new apple fruit begins. The nectar from the apple flowers is carried back to the bees' nest, turned into honey and stored for the winter, providing the honey bee colony with the energy it needs to survive until the next spring, when the cycle is renewed as the bees pollinate again.

We Jews recognize this annual cycle, one depending on the other, by joining the apple and honey together to renew the sweetness of the seasons.

This closely intertwined relationship has even deeper meaning, because the quality of the apple depends on the number of bee visits. The more bees that visit each flower, the larger and rounder the fruit. The quality of the fruit is further enhanced when the donor and recipient trees are different varieties. In a similar way, it is the cross-fertilization of ideas and communal worship that draw us together to celebrate in our homes and synagogues. We derive strength and wisdom from our mutual visions, just as the apples are improved by the visits of the bees and the transfer of diverse pollen.

The circular nature of bees pollinating, fruit setting and ripening, and seeds from the fruit leading to future plants and flowers is echoed in other rituals. We eat braided challah weekly on Shabbat but, during the New Year holidays, the challah is round, and baked with honey and raisins. The round challah emphasizes the roundness of our earth and the cycle of the seasons, intertwined with our hopes for sweetness in the upcoming year.

These circular symbols from the bees and the apples transform a simple holiday ritual into a profound expression of our desire to atone within a community, merging our individual concerns and aspirations with those of our friends and neighbors. It is an intensely social experience, reflecting the way a bee colony melds individual actions into those conducted for the good of the colony.

These and other rituals can be taken superficially as pleasant holiday traditions, or considered more acutely as tools to delve deeper into reflections about our own behavior and our place in the world. There is an important role of ritual in all of our lives, whether secular or faith-based.

As beekeeping enriches my Jewish life, so do Jewish practices inform my secular world, adorning common tasks with their own rituals. I, and other beekeepers, change in subtle ways when we put on beekeeping vestments, a ritual practice for me akin to putting on tallit and tefillin before morning prayers. Slipping my pants into my boot tops, putting on a bee suit, tying up my veil, lifting my hive tool, these are all routine activities imbued with deeper meaning because they herald a transition from whatever I had been doing into bee-visiting mode.

I also use icons during my bee-attending, symbols that connect my beekeeping past and present. My most treasured symbol is an old blue backpack that I used while studying bees in South America nearly 30 years ago, and which still contains all of my personal gear. It's an old pack, ripped in places, with an embroidered fabric panel from Panama sewn into the pack's fabric. Inside are rolled-up pieces of cardboard for smoker fuel, a few queen cages, gloves, a handy jar of pheromone-impregnated vaseline and innumerable other gizmos and gadgets accumulated during decades of visits to the bee yard.

Hefting my pack and walking into the yard is a moment totally in the present, but also one connected to innumerable visits to bee yards around the world, with memories of many friends and fellow beekeepers who shared long days with our bees. My pack evokes travel and adventure, periods of tedium and a few glimpses of wisdom. It opens those too-few and brief moments of understanding when the marvelous complexity of our usually unfathomable natural world were revealed, moments whose memory still take my breath away.

I think of my pack, my friends and my bees when I dip my New Year's apple into honey. The feel and smell of the beeyard are right there with me, connected with the cycles of the seasons and the profound beliefs and history from which my own rituals descended and, hopefully, which my descendants will learn from and enjoy.

Yes, there is much that can be revealed when the taste of crunchy apple is mixed with the sweetness of honey. But isn't it always like that, with wonder all around us when we open our eyes to the profound insights imbedded in the simplest of pleasures?

Mark Winston is a professor of biological sciences and a fellow in the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. A modified version of this article first appeared in Bee Culture magazine.

^TOP