How the universe saw fit to put beekeeping, feng shui, and a skilled woman on one lucky man’s path.
May, 1989, and nine of us find ourselves standing in a lush, almost unbearably beautiful location in Aregua, Paraguay. We freshly arrived in this South American country just a couple days before, green as can be, and excited to be so. We are the beekeeping trainees in this latest group of agriculture volunteers to arrive for the Peace Corps.
Conrad, our apiculture instructor, tells us how vitally important honeybees are to the ecology of a whole region which they inhabit. That they not only live in harmony with the environment but actually help to create the harmony in the world they inhabit. When we walk closer to the hives every one of us can feel the energy lift. Each of us to a person can’t help but smile and take a deep breathe, as if the hives are a power source, a source of chi.
In a climate such as Paraguay’s, honeybees will build their honeycomb wherever they see fit: in the cavity of a tree, hanging from vines, even in a hole in the ground. But it intrigues me when Conrad explains where to best place a hive of your own. He says to imagine if you wanted to build a house in a nice protected and fertile area. Place your hives on the side of a hill with the entrance facing south. Put no obstructions in front of the main entrance. If possible there’s some buffer on either side like a tree or bushes. Behind the hive should be trees, bushes or a fence. This makes perfect sense to me.
September, 2000, and I find myself as only one of three men in a room of maybe fifty women, and excited to be so. The first day of The New England School of Feng Shui, and our teacher Amy starts teaching about Form School feng shui. She explains the most auspicious placement of a building: a mountain in the back, rolling hills to the sides, open in the front, preferably facing south.
I think to myself, “Oh, just like you’d place a hive.”
June, 2001, I graduate from The New England School of Feng Shui. When teaching either feng shui or beekeeping today, I relate how one has helped me with the other. Feng shui is immensely important in keeping bees. Conversely, there’s so much we can learn about feng shui from the honeybees, from their awesomely efficient use of space, to their love of harmony with their surroundings, to their unceasing desire to clear clutter! Yes, bees are constantly clearing clutter. And the fabulous energy of the honeybees, along with the hive products they produce, clean and lift our own energy and the energy of our environment like you wouldn’t believe.
Honeybees are at a very high vibration, and are very much in tune with electromagnetic fields. A good strong hive can have upwards of 50,000 bees. So you can see that the placement of even a single hive in a particular area in one’s yard or on one’s property can have a dramatic affect. A beehive by itself can be used as a cure to lift the energy of such a place, and clear stagnation. Just imagine those springtime orchards with ten, twenty, and even more hives spread around them. Millions of blooms with millions of bees on them. As you walk by each tree you can hear, see, and feel the beautiful power that’s there. From the blooms themselves, from the honeybees, and from the intimate interaction between the two. Total acceptance, total giving, total love.
Oftentimes bees will move into a tree on ones’ property, or even into the wall of a house or building itself. According to feng shui, if bees do make a hive in a such a place, that place will be blessed with joy and great fortune. As a matter of fact, the Chinese word for bee is fu. As a homophone (a word that sounds the same, or rhymes with another word), fu rhymes with “happiness”. So in Chinese iconography bee deals with happiness, good luck, prosperity and peace.
The story becomes even more amazing when you realize what the honeybees in each hive are actually doing to the whole region around the hive. In order to have a healthy ecology, there needs to be healthy bees. Honeybees not only want to live in harmony, they by nature help to create and sustain harmony as an integral part of their being. Honeybees will fly up to three miles in every direction from the hive, visiting flowers, trees, and streams. So that means that at any given time, from each and every hive, there are tens of thousands of these little individual energy lifters, working the ecology in a three mile radius of their home. How’s that for lifting some chi?
Yet we still haven’t reached the best part for us. For we cannot easily bring the honeybees with their energy cleansing and lifting powers inside the house. Or can we? It is the raw materials that the bees collect and produce, those which only the bees can collect and produce, by which we can share in the great work they do, and bring inside to benefit our space and our bodies.
The hive products of beeswax and propolis in particular are of great energetic value to us. Beeswax is secreted from the wax glands of the honeybees, and they use it to build their honeycomb. They collect propolis from trees. Actually a part of the immune system of trees, honeybees coat the interior of their hives with this amazing substance, ensuring the hives stay bacteria and fungus free. These materials both are of a very high vibration, and have great cleansing properties. In Paraguay, beeswax and propolis were sought after by some even more so than the honey and pollen. For these are also the raw materials needed by woodworkers, leatherworkers, and seamstresses to make their own goods workable.
August, 2002, standing alone in my back yard performing a feng shui cure. It’s the full moon just prior to my birthday, and I’m blowing bubbles releasing my intention to the universe of my ideal mate.
September, 2002, she calls. Sharyn ran an all-natural cleaning business at the time. She saw my feng shui brochure and thought it would be a good idea to network. What I found was a person who had the absolute highest intuition and the most amazing sensitivity to energy. One that still amazes me to this day. Sharyn is also a master when it comes to essential oils and their energetic makeup. She can figure out combinations to get the best energetic blends for any purpose. It is also uncanny how she knows when an essential oil, or any ingredient, is not the best quality, or past it’s prime.
In the intervening years we have put our heads and hearts together in creating products when we felt that the need was there, but the choices in the marketplace were not. We also wanted pure products of a higher vibration, ones that could actually enhance the energy of our home. We created our company, The Bee Happy Co., from our mutual desire to have particular natural and pure products that we first created for our own use. Sharyn’s skills are at the core of our product development. When we make our products still to this day – and yes, still handmade – we know we’re just sharing what we’re already using ourselves.
This wonderful universe works for us in so many ways in placing opportunities in our path. We never know where the next opportunity is coming from. Or how connected everything really is. Who would have thought that feng shui, and beekeeping, and a little networking would make such a fabulous blend.
Learn more about The Bee Happy Company and their amazing mission and products.