It’s a Bee-sy Time of Year Again

Today we celebrate the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. On this festive day it is customary to gather together and eat foods that symbolize various sentiments and hopes we harbor for the year to come. Perhaps the best known of these practices (and certainly the most delicious) is eating apples dipped in honey and wishing one another a sweet and happy new year: “shana tova u’metuka.”

How appropriate that this tradition corresponds with the start of the school year. With the organized chaos of shopping week upon us, campus becomes abuzz with excitement as students return from across the globe loaded with stories, bustling with ideas, and eager to embrace the many marvelous opportunities this community has to offer. In this exalted state, spirits are high and everything seems possible. “Tabula rasa,” Latin for clean or blank slate, is the expression often used to illustrate this state of renewed reality; a whiteboard wiped clean; an empty notebook waiting to be filled with whatever we dare imagine. In this time, for a short while, the world does indeed seem to taste as sweet as honey.

But there is another layer of meaning in the dipping practice of Rosh Hashanah that is easily overlooked in the frenzy of new beginnings. As we dip the apple in honey and wish each other a sweet and productive new year, we would all do well to remember that the golden goodness with which we coat our fruit is in fact the culmination of the efforts of millions of honeybees that are foraging away to produce just a few drops of nature’s sweet elixir. This is not to say that there is something wrong with enjoying what nature has to offer, far from it, but simply that there is more to honey than sweetness—just as there is more to new beginning than wiping a whiteboard clean and starting fresh. Perhaps we can learn a thing or two more in this regard by looking to the honeybee, whose busy foraging cycle makes Rosh Hashanah’s most celebrated ritual possible.

Bees, you see, know a thing or two about stewardship from generation to generation. It starts from the moment the female worker bees emerge from their cells, they get to work maintaining and refreshing the nursery area, not waiting for the older or more experienced bees to clean up their mess. Instead, they take matters under their own wings and begin immediately to care for the other babies in the brood chamber. There’s an innate sense of cohesion in the hive that permits totally new bees to emerge each season and yet have continuity and ritual in the actions that keep the colony viable. To some degree, the bustling of peer advising fellows and peer counselors and club officers ushering in new members of the community is very much similar to the renewing forces in the bee world. Newly minted upperclassmen assume the responsibility of seasoned veterans, and a new year and another cycle begins afresh.

There are other small synergies we have with bees at this time of year. The joie de vivre in swarming about the Yard, finding new niches for ourselves, and directing those around us toward the good stuff. In many ways our lives are like those of bees—cyclical and seasonally dependent. Bees fly, forage, and fan during the summer and shiver, cluster, and eat all winter. But while bees finish their honey collection and storage before the onset of winter, students work all year long, storing and fanning new nectar into crystallized knowledge. Unlike the bees in their nooks and crannies in trees, our honeycomb is infinite and composite each year we return to the Harvard hive and beyond.

The honey itself, these bees, have so much potential to embody industrious ideals and inspire us during this celebration of the Jewish New Year as well as on the eve of this new semester. But more than sweetness for the future, honey is not only the symbol of looking forward with optimism, but it also reminds us to remain cognizant of the miraculous sequences which underlie so much of what we might take for granted.

This Rosh Hashanah we urge you to dip your apple in honey and wish each other a sweet new year. Just don’t forget to thank the bees when you’re done. Shana Tova!

Zaki Djemal ’15 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. Li E. K. Murphy ’15 is an organismic and evolutionary biology concentrator living in the Dudley Co-op. They are both members of the newly formed Harvard Undergraduate Beekeepers Club.