The Do Bee

This is a fable for a close friend.

The Do Bee
There once was a bee who was the nicest bee you could ever hope to meet, smart, creative, and industrious, she was also somewhat obsessive and quite a perfectionist. The little Do Bee would go out early in the morning to the clover field and would buzz around for long hours. She would only select the most beautiful and perfect clover flowers to land on and collect their nectar. Often she found herself hovering over a flower and looking down on it and thinking, "well it's a very nice flower, but I'm sure if I just fly a little bit more, I will find an even more perfect clover flower, and that would be so much better." And so she would fly on, and she would work long hours selecting just the most perfect flowers for her work. Then, when she got back to the hive she would slave over making honey from her nectar.

Now the simple truth of the matter is, the honey produced by the little Do Bee was absolutely the very best honey ever produced. Occassionally other bees would notice the extremely high quality of her honey, and might even sometimes remark, "oh Do Bee, you make really excellent honey!" But most of the time no one noticed, and more often than not, the little Do Bee heard comments like, "why are you so picky about the flowers you choose?" and "why do you spend so much time on your honey production? If you spent half the amount of time on it, it would still be the best honey in the hive!" But the little Do Bee just couldn't stop herself. She demanded only the absolute best from herself, and she couldn't accept anything less.

And so the little Do Bee began to grow tired and worn out. And the more tired she became, the less she was able to meet her own standards of perfection. And the more that happened, the harder she tried and the harder she became on herself, which just wore her out even more. She grew depressed and resentful of all the hard work she had to do. And even while she recognized that really she was the one making all the hard work for herself, she just couldn't back down. And the Do Bee grew more tired and more depressed and more resentful, and it was just eating her up inside.

Now the Do Bee lived in a hive that was inhabited, as all hives are, by some bees that were not as nice or as smart as her. Obviously most of the bees didn't work as hard as she did. And that made the Do Bee even more angry and resentful and depressed. She would look at all the other bees and she would look at her friends and family and even her husband bee and think, "why aren't they like me? Why don't they see the world the way I do, and only select the most beautiful flowers, and only craft the finest honey? Why don't they live up to my standards?" And of course that only made matters worse for the little Do Bee.

So in the end, the little Do Bee lived an unhappy life of angry, depressed desperation.

The End