Royal Thoughts

It's crossed my mind several times since studying the biology and social structure of bees that something I heard from my dear sister, Cookie, is very true. She had told me that every plot, every character, every story line Hollywood or Bollywood or "whoever" comes up with is in the Bible. It wasn't long after that ABC started showing Desperate Housewives. Yes, I watched a few episodes, more out of curiousity about the murder mystery than anything, and no, I don't watch it now. All that to say this - a Martha wannabe, Potiphar's Wife, the silly woman and Eli's wife were all there. Split them up into their respective years, put robes on them and viola! Bible characters. I think Potiphar's wife was probably the most blatantly obvious of the four original main characters.

But back to bees. Leaning more toward biology than Bible, it's crossed my mind on more than one occasion that si-fi has borrowed heavily from bees. Yes, I watch a bit of si-fi too, mostly Star Trek and Stargate. A lot of the other stuff that poses as si-fi is geeky occult not worth the trash can it needs to go in.

Queen bees have long held a particular reputation as the she-boss of the hive that everything centers around. There is some truth to that, but we'll skip the particulars for now. The important thing to understand for this discussion is that she's the key to hive cohesiveness. It is her pheremone spread throughout the hive from her to one bee, then another, then another as they go about their business, that signals "all is ok." This pheremone determines the "personaility", if you will, of the hive. I had a particularily cantankerous hive once. Replacing the queen caused it to become gentle within a few short weeks. Changes in pheremone tell a hive to prepare to swarm. Absence of pheremone causes a hive to become agitated and worrysome. You can actually hear the difference in a hive when no queen is present.

Relating this to si-fi, it's been interesting to see this concept applied to super villan races in both series mentioned. In Star Trek it was the Borg. Of course they explained it as low frequency sub space transmissions or something like that, but the concept of all within the ship or species being connected via "something" was not new. Same thing for the Raith in Stargate Atlantis. Their ships are called hive ships. Could it be more obvious?

The good part is as believers in Christ, we have such a bond. It's, He's, called the Holy Spirit. His presence in our lives is very precious as He gently (and sometimes not so gently as the need calls for) works to perfect us in Christ. One of my most striking memories is of an event that happened deep in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in the early 80's. Baby Doc was still in power and the country was much safer for Americans then. My dh and our 3 month old were visiting his parents (missionaries) at the time. Dad H drove us into slums that looked worse than anything we had ever seen in Chicago. I was scared to be there. He stopped the jeep in front of what looked like a hole in a wall and we were greeted by a dark skinned man who didn't speak a word of English. We recognized him immediatly though. No, we didn't know his name or his job or anything, but we recognized a brother who loved the same God we love. We visited in his home a while and it was an amazing oasis of peace. Of course Dad H spoke Creole so they conversed, and we never got past "hello", but the bond was there non-the-less.

It's happened many times since then. Deep fellowship with someone you strike converstation with in a tire store in a strange city. (Could that be the reason for that blowout?) Finding someone with a need greater than a clump of bees in their yard who gave you the encouragement your heart desperatly needed? We are after all part of the same body. And Spirit is life.

Ok, so maybe God did that queen pheremone thing as an image of one aspect of Himself. Cool, very cool nontheless.