25/04/2026
LITERARY | To Bee
What does it really take to be something?
People often assume that becoming a journalist requires an inborn talent. They say we needed a gift for understanding and using words effectively. Some say we must possess an instinct for truth. While others say we are required to have a full voice to speak the truth from the very beginning.
But like the bee, journalists are told they are not meant to fly. According to outdated beliefs, bees are aerodynamically incapable of flight. This idea came from the 1930s when physicists used the equation of a fixed-wing aircraft on a bee. It is the same equation they use on planes. When the math was applied to bees, the numbers didn’t work. So people concluded that bees were aerodynamically impossible. Yet they fly anyway. Not because nature permits them to, but because they know to themselves what they are really capable of.
The problem wasn’t the bee.
It was the wrong physics.
Maybe, what hinders your skills as a journalist is not yourself.
You might just be in the wrong hive, with the wrong mindset.
Journalism is not innate, nor the passion to write. It is forged through time, collected from different flowers. A journalist learns to fly through failing. My staffers could justify that they often miss deadlines, get their articles rejected, and have relentless revisions. But that's what made our wings grow. Every journalist who can “fly” today once doubted their wings.
The perks of being a journalist is not the fame, but the ability to pollinate ideas.
"Uy angas naman ni Frank, may dala palaging camera."
"Ang pogi talaga ng mga journalist kapag naka-uniform, nakaka-temp pindutin yung PRESS nila sa likod."
Remember that we are not being paid for this. Yet we still accept the weight, because we chose to bear it. It simply means that we love what we are doing—carrying truth from one mind to another, like bees carrying pollen and nectar. We give voice to stories that would otherwise remain unheard. Just like bees sustaining ecosystems through quiet labor.
But every hive has a queen.
The queen bee, in this metaphor, represents the very obstacles that hinder a journalist’s growth. The queen can take different forms—lack of manageable time, lack of freedom to express, and oftentimes, lack of mentorship. Many student–journalists chooses to silence their abilities, because their supposed mentor failed their supposed task. Instead of nurturing young writers, they clip wings. They turn the young's passion for journalism into a burden. In a space meant to train truth-seekers, authority sometimes becomes a barrier rather than a guide.
Yet even then, the bee flies.
Journalists learn not because the conditions are perfect, but because our need to tell the truth is stronger than the forces trying to suppress it. We learn to survive without guidance, and to trust our own. In doing so, we prove that journalism is all about purpose.
To BEE a journalist is to write despite obstacles, and to fly despite being told you were never meant to.
