This new series is really delightful. Ever wonder why you, or they, would be part of “Beehives”? Now you can see all the glorious badges, pins, charm bracelets, and extensive knowledge of bees that once stood behind the title Beehives.
Part One:
The Student Manual: The Spirit of the Hive
these mystry woods 
This manual is one of my favorite artifacts in the church. I have my grandmothers patches, stickers, and some pins.
Although, I should note mine is from the 20s or 30s. I’ll have to dig it out again and post some pictures.
for sure, that’d be great.
This book is way cool. It would be great if life were this simplistic but the goals and ideas remain valid.
But….remember bees sting and a whole hive is scary!!
The book is a deliciously innocent, sane and sound little bunch of -maybe naif for out times-but quite useful thoughts anyway. I would like that the Salt Lake City Corporation could rescue some of this innocence in its way to become the New Church of Rome.
Ah, yes…goals, ideas, thoughts…those transcendent, notions (girl/womanhood, faith, love, beauty, work “ethic”), seemingly unchanging, with no basis in reality and made to serve the vanity-du-jour.
What do we read? Of seven great fields (huh?), of firm expectant walking, of the secret (or should that be sacred?) life of the romantic bee, of symbols and mysteries; we see images depicting a particular culture’s girls doing very girly things and dressing in very girly ways; in other words, “exactly what it [meaning the bee, a symbol for the reader] should be doing at all times,” that each Beehive may come to know and fulfill the purpose of its existence. Another good-natured life-manual, another text generated by the Beekeepers of the GA Church, another work of Satan, made to stand in for the “most correct” text, to supplement it, in order to ensure its “true” interpretation and that every bee will know its place, backed and co-branded with the corporation’s trademark, the obvious tie being to some obscure reference in the BoM to “deseret” (maybe not so obvious; I doubt any of the Beehives I teach know bees are mentioned in the BoM). It’s all about the hive. And what of The Spirit? Some mysterious influence (the manual’s words) found in the community of the hive; hard to point to but easy to “illustrate,” assuming you’ve read Materlinck’s “The Spirit of the Hive.”
Not much appears to have changed in the last 60 years in this regard either. We might chuckle at the innocence of this text, its naïveté and styling, but declare its teachings, its principles, as applicable today as then. We have leaders (in my ward at least) providing the Beehives of the church with service opportunities in weed-pulling-for-the-rich-widows-of-the-gated-community-up-on-the-hill type service projects (because, you know, service opportunities are difficult to come by in Zion, and though it doesn’t really matter how important weeding might be in the scheme of things, service requires practice and training under watchful eyes in order to do correctly or efficiently or something, and these young bees couldn’t possibly have motive or imagination enough to come up with service worthy of divine recognition on their own, outside the hive, out of love–or maybe because they might). The “goal?” The perfection of saints. Right. The city of Enoch still ain’t here last time I checked, but we all feel pretty good about having done our collective duties, not really knowing nor expecting to know what the gods think (why would Jesus talk to me or anyone else? I was asked just today), and can now meet next Sunday with clear consciences in order to “renew our covenants with thee” and to spend a couple hours in group therapy superstitiously (lest we become cursed) approaching the divine through the verbal recounting of concrete instances of the abstract (laid out for us, topic-by-topic in yet some other manual) as we recognize them weaved throughout our obedient hives. Evidences, mysteries made manifest, and in these gratuitous acts of recognition of our so blessed state, our lives are said to have meaning.