Three years shy of a century ago, Utah Gov. George Dern announced his hope that Utah could adopt a simplified flag featuring a large beehive. Today on Utah Flag Day, March 9, his dream comes true.

The new Utah flag features a beehive, our state emblem, that is eight times larger than the same symbol on the state’s historic flag. If our old flag shows the quiet dignity of a garden beehive, the new flag proclaims the symbol from the tops of Utah’s snowy mountains. If the old flag’s intricate details are best appreciated in the staid elegance of the state capitol’s gold room, the new flag’s details are obvious from a mile away.

On Utah’s historic state flag, the beehive has flowers and buzzing bees and the state motto “industry” hovering above it. To simplify a flag, you must focus on what is most essential and eliminate the rest. For Utah, it means a basic beehive. And the simpler the flag, the more power it has as a symbol.

Dern said he wanted to have a Utah flag that would be popular and flown everywhere like Texas’s state flag. He knew, even in 1927, that there was a problem in having a complicated seal on a flag. Now, 113 years after Utah’s first state flag was adopted, Utah’s historic flag has not achieved popular usage like other states that have simple flags. Is this because Texans, Coloradans or Arizonans love their state more than Utahns? Oh my heck, no! It’s just a fact that simplified flags are more popular than complex state seals on flags. It’s absurd that you see more Colorado and California flag T-shirts worn in Utah than Utah flags.

Dern said he did not want to do away with the Historical State Flag, but wanted the simplified beehive flag as an “alternate flag.” This is the “Dern good” solution followed in our new flag law. Both the historic and new flags are fully state flags. The new flag will fill the gap in usage and popularity that the older flag has not and never will fill. It will be used exponentially more than the older flag. Even if you eliminate the new flag, history proves that the historic flag will never rise to the same amount of popularity as a simplified flag can. But both flags will continue to act in the areas where they excel: the historic flag in ceremonial uses and classrooms where people can see its details, and the new flag on flagpoles, backpacks, stickers and other fun places.

But make no mistake. Utah’s new flag law gives us two new flags. One is, of course, the new state flag.The other is a new version of the historic state flag based on Utah’s first color flag adopted in 1913 and rendered in the style of the historic flag designed in 2011 that is used throughout state government. The state seal that is on that flag is not going away.

Ultimately, the important thing is not the symbol itself, but what the symbol stands for. The beehive’s essential meaning is something that the controversies that arose during the adoption of the new flag have obscured.

On Arizona’s flag, a big copper star stands for the state’s copper industry. Colorado’s flag has a large “C” that stands for the first letter of the state’s name. Utah’s beehive, however, stands for something much more meaningful: working hard together.

The beehive is about a community unifying and respecting each other as we strive to do great things. Both beehive flags, the historic and the new, are about this unity.

The beehive reminds us of the religious refugees of 1847 who fled a nation that had forgotten how to love others who are different. Those pioneers rallied around the beehive as a symbol of pulling together for faith and survival.

The symbol brings to mind the expansion of the beehive as Utah grew into statehood in 1896 and beyond. All Utahns are part of the hive. It reminds us to reach out to others.

The two beehive flags will work together to remind us to work together. The beehive reminds us that to love someone or something, you do not have to hate someone or something else. As Mark Twain once said of Utahns and the beehive, it fits like a glove. Gov. Dern would be proud.

Michael De Groote attended every public meeting on the adoption of the new Utah state flag and created the new rendering of the Utah historic state flag. He is the co-author of “Visions of Freedom: Wilford Woodruff and the Signers of the Declaration of Independence” and a former journalist for the Deseret News.