Bees indeed deserve our love and admiration. My sister is a small yet ardent beekeeper and she can go on and on about the miracles and sublime beauties of bees. Each beehive is a small social microcosm, each beehive has a personality and interacts with outside world and other creatures. Bees can sense people’s attitudes and emotions. A stressed and angry beekeeper leads to stressed and angry beehives, and a happy and calm keeper makes happy and calm bees and as result, also more of the sweet, amber, glowing honey.
Bees indeed deserve our admiration and love, not only because of the sweetness of their honey but for their role across nature as pollinators. Bees are essential for about 70% of our food and for the pollination of all wild plants and trees. Especially in this function bees are in desperate need of every fan and supporter. They need and deserve our love and protection as their numbers have been in catastrophic decline in recent years.
This rapid decline among bees has been shared by butterflies and other pollinators - haven’t you noticed that there are fewer butterflies than there used to be? Among the bees it was called a sudden colony collapse and experts were scratching their heads. It is not a mystery any longer. There are many contributing factors, but the root cause seems to be new agro-business technologies called systemic pesticides (called Neonicotinoid) and GMO plants which produce pesticides themselves.
These systemic pesticides you cannot wash off of the surfaces of your vegetables. These pesticides are permeating plants like water permeates a wet sponge. They are in the roots, leaves, stalks and fruits to protect them from nibbling insects. But they are also in the flowers, nectar and even in dewdrops on the leaves. Systemic pesticides are now used even in the flowers we buy from florists and in plants from garden centers!
Agro-industrialists and federal regulators (speaking from within the agro-industialists large and deep pockets) are all loudly swearing that all of this is absolutely harmless for humans. If you wish, you can trust them, but it is clearly not harmless for the bees and butterflies. When you go shopping, consider buying Organic and Non-GMO food and ask your florist about flowers and plants without systemic pesticides. Bees indeed deserve our love, admiration, protection and care. Be bee loving!
All this was prompted when I researched the biblical image of bees and honey for this coming Sunday. This Sunday is called Ascension Sunday and it is about Jesus’ departure to heaven 40 days after Easter. We will interconnect this mythic metaphor with a another image of the sweet and deep image of Divine Apiary.
(By the way, have you noticed that in English, we do not “own” bees, we “keep” them as their stewards and protectors).
Bees indeed deserve our admiration and love, not only because of the sweetness of their honey but for their role across nature as pollinators. Bees are essential for about 70% of our food and for the pollination of all wild plants and trees. Especially in this function bees are in desperate need of every fan and supporter. They need and deserve our love and protection as their numbers have been in catastrophic decline in recent years.
This rapid decline among bees has been shared by butterflies and other pollinators - haven’t you noticed that there are fewer butterflies than there used to be? Among the bees it was called a sudden colony collapse and experts were scratching their heads. It is not a mystery any longer. There are many contributing factors, but the root cause seems to be new agro-business technologies called systemic pesticides (called Neonicotinoid) and GMO plants which produce pesticides themselves.
These systemic pesticides you cannot wash off of the surfaces of your vegetables. These pesticides are permeating plants like water permeates a wet sponge. They are in the roots, leaves, stalks and fruits to protect them from nibbling insects. But they are also in the flowers, nectar and even in dewdrops on the leaves. Systemic pesticides are now used even in the flowers we buy from florists and in plants from garden centers!
All this was prompted when I researched the biblical image of bees and honey for this coming Sunday. This Sunday is called Ascension Sunday and it is about Jesus’ departure to heaven 40 days after Easter. We will interconnect this mythic metaphor with a another image of the sweet and deep image of Divine Apiary.
(By the way, have you noticed that in English, we do not “own” bees, we “keep” them as their stewards and protectors).
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