Image created by me using DALL. E3
My first knowledge about Bees came from primary school during the days of Elementary science when we were thought about pollination.
As young as I was then, I could remember being fascinated and intrigued by studying about bees being excellent pollinators.
I was also quite fascinated that as simple as their activities tend to be, transporting pollen from the anthers to the stigma of plants, the result is very crucial to human survival and existence as it constitutes a gigantic chunk of our food source.
My next knowledge of bees stems from my usage of honey. You know things like natural creation such as honey fascinate me, I always wondered how bees come about producing such sweet liquid, so I asked around and the answer I got wasn't at all satisfying to me.
They kept saying honey is a by product of the bee's feaces. While I did not believe them, I couldn't really verify the authenticity of honey source as there was nothing like the internet way back.
Later on, I was able to know that honey is not bees feaces but an accumulation of deposited nectar. This discovery was made with the introduction of the internet to my country.
Some time last year, I went to pay my farmer friend a visit. As I was leaving, he gave me a bottle of honey. I thought he bought them in large quantities from a bee farmer, imagine my shock when he said he farmed the bees and produced the honey himself.
I got curious because I never knew he had a bee farm. Then he told me it was an accidental production.
I asked him to explain, and he gave me the interesting tale.
He said he was at the fruit section of his farm one day when he started hearing buzzing sounds, on tracing the sound, he saw some insects hovering round the pineapples, on getting a closer look, he saw they were bees.
Immediately, he put one and two together, if there are bees and then there are pineapples plus flowers around, most definitely the result should be honey.
That was how he started making the farm area/environment suitable and safe for the bees. Before you know it, they started multiplying and created a hive and then their honey combs started growing.
My friend's honey is the best use I have ever had. It's even more appealing to me as it doesn't have that strong honey smell, and it's quite sweet too than the honey I have used in the past.
At first, I thought maybe he was trying to play a fast one by passing caramelized sugar as honey, but then he explained to me that the result of a honey is greatly dependent on the source of nectar.
In his case, the bees were not as exposed to wild fruits and flowers.
Thus, they make do with what they have in his farm. While I could verify the authenticity of his claim because truly the honey did have a distinct pineapple flavor, I still wasn't convinced.
Infact it was the more reason I thought my friend was trying to be funny passing off pineapple flavored caramelized sugar as honey.
This made me to just abandon the honey in my cupboard and not consume it. But the day I got fire burn from cooking, I resolved to using the honey as that has always been my go-to therapy for burns.
One way I use to ascertain the originality of honey is how it starts my healing process without injury and heals my burns without leaving a scar.
With my friend's honey, it dissolves the burn pain in few seconds, and then leave me feeling relieved.
Since bees contribute the lion share of food production in the natural order of things and the honey they produce also cost quite a fortune too, I like to look at bees as essentials in terms of food production and finance. Hence the need to preserve their existence.
Like my farmer friend, we can help preserve bee life by cultivating more pollinator friendly plants such as blackberry, citrus, bee balm, echinacea, snapdragon, hostas, etc.
Several wildflowers like California poppies and evening primrose would do, since bees have excellent color vision and are attracted to bright colored flowers.
More so, we should avoid the use of pesticides and herbicides in our natural habitat and resolve to less poisonous alternatives like mineral oil, jojoba oil, cinnamon, a mixture of spiced based organic product such as mint, clove, thyme, and rosemary.
The good thing with this natural alternatives is that they do not kill beneficial bugs, just the harmful ones.
Natural products such as these are what my farmer friend use in his farm, that's why the bees got attracted to it in the first place.
I love how organized the bee system works, everyone knows their role and abide by it. Nobody is multi tasking or trying to take up roles of the other.
From the Queen who reproduces to multiply the colony, to the female bees who work to provide food and shelter, then to the males whose primary and only responsibility is to mate with the Queen, each form the distinct order of thing in the hive.
I think humans need to learn orderliness from the bees. I do not know if it's because we are evolving specie but everytime we see the human specie of both the male and female gender evolving to something that is hard to comprehend.
Like the bees, other animals still share an orderly manner of doing things. They seem to be more compose than we humans are and I feel that if we learn to follow the natural order of things like the animals do, we would have less problem in the society.
Above is my response to the Mayinleo prompt for day 20. You can participate here