We met on what was a stunning summer day for those of us here in the Northeast U.S. – the start of summer, when life in past times felt possibilities growing as strawberries ripen with other fruits and berries soon to follow. This year, of course, is different – surrounding that beauty, pressing it down, threatening to destroy it – as the fascism grows daily around us. Still, we honor our connections to all other beings, and to each other, by coming together for these precious two hours.

Our June service theme every year is bees, including an old European/New England folk tradition of Telling the Bees about our losses, about what we are grieving, so we stay in right relationship with them.

Download the liturgy, including torah study text, here.

Torah study was led by Miriam Geronimus, from a text study she led on Shavuot, about the concept of the “Cosmic Mountain,” which is shared across many ancient cultures. The story of Mt. Sinai clearly grows from this shared world view about where humans go to meet Divinity, and illustrates how deeply Jewish religious understandings have always been in intimate conversation with the cultures around us.

A(Short) History of the Fringes Bee Services

Fringes has done bees/honey service in June since 2009. When we first started, we had many poems about honey and how wonderful honey was, the “flight of 10,000 wings.” By 2013 we were also talking about “saving the bees” as constant concerns about hive collapse circled around us. And also about bats, who are pollinators, and were then dying in vast numbers from a fungal infection.

But then, in 2015, we did a big shift from “save the honey bees” to “crap, the honey bee industry is pretty awful and also native plants need native bees.”  Torah study covered that, and graphics started switching to images of native bees. In 2019, member Terry Fowler told me about the British and New England folk tradition of “telling the bees” – farmers who needed their hives and worked with the bees to survive would tell the bees when a family member died, so the bees wouldn’t fly away. And also bring the bees some cake from family celebrations. Wow. This became part of our service, telling the bees about our losses to make more real our deep interconnectedness with all beings on this planet.

Then, another ground shift, in 2021. Looking for more information about native bees and honey bees, I went down a very disturbing research hole about how industrial farming affects honey bees. I found this about the hives trucked into the almond groves in California each year: “The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.”

That changed everything! Our liturgy started dropping “bee” poems that were really only about how awesome it is that we get honey, and I went looking for new poems that were actually about bees themselves, not what they do for us. Still haven’t found many – nearly all animal poems are really about people because, well, people. But as we were meeting online and using slides, images of many, many kinds of native bees began to appear, sinking us into the astounding diversity and beauty of these small beings. Also, as the world burns around us, more of the poems have a challenging emotional undertone, naming the destruction of the natural world and devastation of species.

This is where our bee service sits in 2026. I’ve no idea where it will go next – wherever trying to honor all life takes us.