Yesterday my friend Randy Chase made his annual visit to our home. Randy is a beekeeper and once a year I buy a year’s supply of honey; six quarts or about eighteen pounds. He told me that this year he harvested about one ton of honey! As usual we shared a cup of coffee, and talked about our families and the events of the past year. He told me the honey would have a distinct clover flavor because he planted lots of clover which survived the near drought we had in southeast Wisconsin.

Think about this for just a minute. The honey bee is a small insect, but is it the major pollinator, without which most of our crops would not produce. However, I’m focusing on the precious content of the jars on our shelf and thinking about what it took to make this sweet treasure. From honeybeesonline.com I learned:

• Bees fly 55,000 miles to bring us 1 pound of honey.
• During her life (approximately 40 days) a honey bee will gather about 1/12 teaspoon of honey.
• Bees must go to two million flowers to gather l pound of honey.

Do the math and you’ll be astounded at what went into my eighteen pound stash, or better yet, into Randy’s one ton of honey. And all this is by God’s design. Just this one small part of what we refer to as “nature” demonstrates the enormous intelligence that went into the careful design that plays such a vital role in our food chain. But it also demonstrates God’s great love for us, that honey, that golden, sweet, and beneficial food, is part of the process.

Every morning, when I squeeze some honey on my cereal, I think about my friend Randy, the multitude of honeybees, and the God who made them all, and I give thanks.

Genesis 1:11-12 (ESV) And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.