On one of our evening walks last week, Mrs. Jones and I came across this pollen-powdered Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica) carb loading on the sweet nectar of a purple passionflower (Passiflora incarnata). There are four passions on display in the picture:
1.) The carpenter bee has a passion for nectar, and it can slurp to its heart’s content near the center of the flower. The passionflower has provided nectar for the bee’s needs, which include energy and food for a bee’s offspring during egg-laying season.
2.) The passionflower needs to multiply into more passionflower plants, and the carpenter bee is a creature well designed to provide for the passionflower’s need. See those yellowish brake-pad looking things suspended on the ends of the speckled-green arms near the bee? The brake pads are called anthers (there are normally five of them, which you can see in the second photo below that I took of another flower on this plant) and the anthers rub pollen onto the bulky bee’s back as it makes its way to the much-needed nectar.
See those three trumpet-looking things at the top of the flower, above the anthers? Those are part of the pistil, and the trumpet opening at the tip is called the stigma. When a bee comes by all slathered in pollen from another flower, the sticky stigma picks up that pollen, then the pollen shoots down the trumpet body (aka style) and down to the ovary, where ovules are fertilized by the pollen. Next thing you know, we’ve got a fertilized ovule (egg) that becomes a seed in a fruit, and the bee has helped the passionflower achieve its need to multiply.
3.) The name, passionflower, is a reference to a different kind of passion. Over 400 years ago, Spaniards who first encountered the flower in South America saw several reminders of the crucifixion of Jesus in the various parts of the flower (those wiry purple filaments radiating out from the flower a reminder of the crown of thorns placed upon Jesus, the stigma looking like the nails that were used to hang Jesus on the cross, etc.). In those days, the Latin word for passion was a way to describe suffering, which represented what Jesus went through on the cross. So, these types of flowers came to be known as “passion flowers” and ultimately led to the scientific grouping under the Latin name “Passiflora,” aka passionflower.
4.) This passion of Jesus, His suffering and death on the cross, revealed the ultimate passion in the universe: God’s love. As Jesus himself said, recorded in the Gospel of John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17). The One who made this flower that provides for the bees, the bees that provide for this flower, and everything else that has been made, has also provided a rescue plan to bring us back to where we have always belonged, with God, trusting Him, being provided for by Him, for all eternity. All any one of us has to do to sip this nectar, this “living water” as Jesus described it (John 4:10-14), is to declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). In this way only, God has provided for the greatest need of all humanity, to be brought back into harmony with God as it was meant to be from the beginning, before we all rebelled against Him to have our own ways. We just need to drink that nectar, and “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13)
More Resources
Want to learn a little more about purple passionflower, carpenter bees, or Jesus? 
Here are a few more resources to explore.
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- I’m going to start with Jesus here, since “Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3) and that means He made those awesome passionflowers and bees. There are many, many resources available to learn more about Jesus (including the historical accounts of his life in the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), but a couple of additional books that are good to start with are The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How it Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between by Gregory Koukl, and Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. These are great explorations of the world we live in and how Jesus ties it all together.
- The Spring Island Trust in South Carolina has a nice little video on the purple passionflower and its parts, insects that use passionflowers as a host plant, and the fruit it produces. The Spring Island Trust is also one of the organizations behind a favorite show of mine, Coastal Kingdom, which has all sorts of great nature information for you to absorb. You can check out the passionflower video here.
- Carpenter bees are considered a nuisance by some, because they like to tunnel into wood structures to build their nests. This article from the University of Maryland Extension has a summary of how to deal with carpenter bees and a great infographic on the lifecycle of a carpenter bee: https://marylandgrows.umd.edu/2022/10/10/the-good-and-the-bad-of-carpenter-bees-can-we-get-along/
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.
