Consider the bee. She has five eyes: three simple ones on top of her head and two compound ones with thousands of lenses. And she has 5000 nostrils – nose enough to smell an apple tree three kilometres away. She has two sets of wings, which can be hooked together in flight so they flap as one 16,000 times a minute. And no matter how she zigzags her dizzy dance of the flowers, she always beelines it back to the home hive and her job there. She may be a street cleaner, a water carrier, a nurse, a sentry, a mason, an engineer or an air conditioner. If she is the last, she may fan 12 hours at a stretch in the hive, on top of 12 hours spent gathering nectar outside. ‘Busy as a bee’ is no overstatement; she literally works herself to death, all for a teaspoon of honey spread upon your breakfast toast, the entire quota of her few short weeks of life. A half-kilo jar of honey on your table represents 80,000 kilometres as the bee flies, or a girdling of the globe twice around. Let us not take the bee so much for granted again. All her dipping into dandelions and daisies and snapdragons is no joyous game but an instinctual obedience to an ordinance of nature that commands “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest shall not cease.” There are 100,000 species of plants which could never properly form seeds without the bee. Without her, our bread would never be sweet; indeed there would be no bread or wine either. And so, in many churches, beeswax candles are used at the traditional service of bread-baking and wine-drinking; it is a way of paying tribute to our good and faithful servant, the bee.