Beekeeping balances out much of modern life. Too much of our daily lives are ambiguous: the fluidity of friendships, the ever-changing status of being a partner, a spouse, a parent, a wrangler of teenagers, or a worker within a job or organization in which the goals of the daily job are often unclear and amorphous. Bees in a hive are largely binary. They are either there or not, alive or not, producing honey or not. There's little that's postmodern or ironic about building hive bodies, watching the bees do their work, harvesting honey, or filling jars with honey. I love that.