Busy Bee

Day 330: My maternal grandmother was a schoolteacher and a thoroughly Christian woman in the old sense of the word. She doted on didactic poems and other Victorian-era means of illustrating life lessons, and one which she quoted to me often was Isaac Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief." If you don't recognize the title, it's no wonder, although you undoubtedly will have heard it in some form, opening with "How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour / And gather honey all the day from every opening flower." It concludes with "For Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do." She also employed a second take on the ending when she was trying to impart the patience required for needlework to me when I was only three: "Idle hands are the devil's playground." So firmly did she instill the lesson in my youthful psyche that today, I cannot sit down for longer than five minutes without some project in my hands. People wonder how I find time for needlework. I wonder how they can waste it in front of a television set.

Reinventing The Honeycomb

Day 60: Every winter, there comes a point when I say, "What in the world am I going to do for a blog post today?" As much as I'd like your daily feed to be one which educates and informs and is related to nature, it's not always possible for me to find subject matter when the weather dictates staying inside. In fact, it's sometimes even difficult to find things to keep myself entertained, let alone my demanding (~cough~) readership. But desperation is often a good motivator, and at least insofar as keeping my hands employed, I've found a project. Not content with making a boring old granny-square afghan to use up tag ends of yarn, I decided to create my own "honeycomb" pattern.

Bees are masters of architecture. The six-sided cells of a honeybee's comb make efficient use of space even while providing structural integrity many other shapes lack. Geometrically speaking, the honeycomb pattern requires less material to create a lattice within a given space. A similar structure occurs when soap bubbles intersect, if not as uniformly laid out. Drawing on our precious pollinators' lesson in efficiency, it took me half an hour to develop a pattern I liked. Maybe I was inspired by my grandmother's repetition of Isaac Watts' poem during my childhood:

How doth the little busy bee   
  Improve each shining hour,   
And gather honey all the day   
  From every opening flower.   

How skilfully she builds her cell;           
  How neat she spreads her wax,   
And labors hard to store it well   
  With the sweet food she makes.   

In works of labor or of skill,   
  I would be busy too;           
For Satan finds some mischief still   
  For idle hands to do.   

In books, or work, or healthful play,   
  Let my first years be passed;   
That I may give for every day           
  Some good account at last.