There are many noble and notable things that are taken for granted. Work, and particularly the work of others, is often one of those things. If idle hands are the work of the devil, as the saying goes, bees are sainted.

Heading to the airport the other day, I noticed a shiny silver 18-wheeler tanker truck.  A Burleson’s truck. As in Burleson’s honey. A tanker full of honey. I haven’t been able to shake the reality behind that truck ever since.

How many bees were involved in making that much honey? How many bee-trips were made to flowers? How many miles were flown by all those bees, in trips short and long, to and from the hive? How many bees finished their lives of work while helping make the honey in that truck? So many questions and wonderments!  And that doesn’t even include how many hives were built and maintained, how many visits by beekeepers to harvest the honey…and so on, and so on.  How many people give any of that a thought when they get the little packet of honey at the diner or snag a jar of honey off the shelf at the grocery store or buy a beauty product that includes honey?

How much thought do we give to the labor, work and toil involved in anything that is around us?  Everything is a product of some sort of work. Some measure of our own work is required to pay for the products of others’ work. I think we too often (almost always) lose sight and value of the noble and notable thing called work. That should change.