musings

PERSEVERANCE--something we should all take with us in this New Year, because as sure as the sun rises, we will face obstacles, difficult tasks, and other challenges in the future. They're just part of life.

I was thinking about this marvelous virtue recently when I came across an article about honey bees. Did you know that to produce one pound of honey, the bee must visit 56,000 clover heads? And since each head has over 60 clover tubes, a toatl of 3,360,000 visits are necessary to give us that pound of honey for the breakfast table. Meanwhile, that worker bee has flown the equivalent of three times around the world.

To produce one tablespoon of honey for our toast, the little bee makes 4,200 trips to flowers. How nice of him to persist---so that we can have the joy of tasting nature's sweet jelly. This little insect makes about ten trips a day to the fields, each trip lasting twenty minutes on average and four hundred flowers. A worker bee will fly as far as eight miles if he cannot find a nectar flow that is nearer.

Doesn't all of this information make you feel a little ashamed because you quit too soon? I know there have been a few times when I didn't persist in some difficult task or duty. Think of the bee the next time you entertain the thought of quitting.

One step won't take you very far;
You've got to keep on walking;
One word won't tell folks who you are;
You've got to keep on talking;
One inch won't make you very tall;
You've go to keep on growing;
One deed won't do it all;
You've go to keep on going.