Tonight's picture was taken in April of 2007. Mattie was five years old and doing something he loved.... which was creating things from cardboard boxes. Mattie's imagination was endless, but I would have to say his favorite boxed structure to create was most likely a car or some type of vehicle.
Quote of the day: Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers. ~ Ray Bradbury
Did you know that globally there are more honey bees than other types of bee and pollinating insects? The honey bee is the world's most important pollinator of food crops. It is estimated that one third of the food that we consume each day relies on pollination mainly by bees. I have to say I did not know that! But I am aware of people all around me becoming beekeepers, yet I really did not give much thought to why. Probably because I associate bees with being stung. Yet that isn't the goal of the honey bee. Even Mattie's lower school has hives on campus and ironically when I dropped off toiletry items at Mattie's hospital yesterday, one of the psychosocial staff was telling me she too is a beekeeper.
Well that is until I saw this photo of the hives located on top of the Cathedral.
Each of these hives has 60,000 bees! Amazing no? Yet given the damage to the Cathedral it really is a miracle that the hives weren't touched or damaged. They weren't in the pathway of the fire, otherwise the wooden hives would have burned and the wax inside the hives would have glued the bees together. Unlike humans though, bees aren't affected the same way by smoke. In fact, beekeepers use cold smoke when they need to work near the hives. As smoke inspires bees to gorge on their honey.
But bees aren't impacted by smoke because they don't have lungs. Rather, bees breathe through a complex structure of tracheae and air sacs. Oxygen is vacuumed into the body through openings on each segment of their bodies. They pull air in, then close their outermost vents and force the air into little tubules that get smaller and smaller until they reach the cells they need to.
As we are approaching Easter, the bees surviving the fire of Notre Dame provides us with a symbolic message, of the importance of renewal and second chances.
The bees living on Notre Dame's roof survived the fire:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/19/europe/notre-dame-bees-fire-intl-scli/index.html
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