Pope Bee16

Pope Benedict XVI receives half a million bees

Bee (Maciek Mono / Wikipedia)

The Buzz
Pope Benedict received 500,000 bees (=8 hives) from the Italian agricultural group Coldiretti on September 18, celebrated this year in Italy as the Day for the Protection of Creation. Coldiretti, Italy's largest farming association, gave the bees to the Pope to be kept at the pontifical farm in Castel Gandolfo for pollination and production of more than 600 pounds of honey a year.

Castel Gandolfo will receive technical assistance on honey production from the non-profit agriculture association Campagna Amica. The farm in Castle Gandolfo has 25 dairy cows, 300 hens and 60 cockerels, as well as an ancient olive grove producing three thousand liters of oil a year, an orchard of apricot and peach trees and a greenhouse of ornamental flowers.

Address of Pope Pius XII on Bees on November 27, 1948:

Ah, if men could and would listen to the lesson of the bees: if each one knew how to do his daily duty with order and love at the post assigned to him by Providence; if everyone knew how to enjoy, love, and use in the intimate harmony of the domestic hearth the little treasures accumulated away from home during his working day: if men, with delicacy, and to speak humanly, with elegance, and also, to speak as a Christian, with charity in their dealings with their fellow men, would only profit from the truth and the beauty conceived in their minds, from the nobility and goodness carried about in the intimate depths of their hearts, without offending by indiscretion and stupidity, without soiling the purity of their thought and their love, if they only knew how to assimilate without jealousy and pride the riches acquired by contact with their brothers and to develop them in their turn by reflection and the work of their own minds and hearts; if, in a word, they learned to do by intelligence and wisdom what bees do by instinct—how much better the world would be! (Read full address)