Honey

Honey is the most glistening & sparkly golden natural wonder. Nature has bestowed awesomeness to this saccharine feasting treasure.

Honey is energetic.

Honey heals burns.

Honey cures infection.

Honey fights bacteria.

Have a teaspoon of honey every day and you will be great!

Honeycomb

Honey bees construct their complex nest which is a hexagonal honeycomb, the beehive in rock crannies, tree openings, & building tops, etc. From a honey bee’s perspective, its purpose of life is to work, work & work for its whole life for the endurance and nourishment for its home. The honey comb is so powerfully constructed & forcefully protected that a layman cannot dare touch that for honey. Only specialized beekeepers can take the precious possession of honey bees i.e. honey. The beekeepers need specific equipment to steal their life’s treasure, honey.

Honeybees

The honeybees are well-organized & coordinated family. In one honeycomb, there is one queen (reproducing female), thousands of workers (female), and few hundred drones (male).

Queen: Every beehive has a single queen. Her job is but reproduction. Queen lays more than a million eggs during her life. The queen lives for up to 5 years. The workers attend & feed queen and prepare next queen.

Workers: Workers are more than 98% in the beehive. Workers build the honeycomb with beeswax, forage nectar, store honey, store pollen, store water, ensure airflow in the hive, rear the offspring, clean the cells so that queen can lay eggs, feed royal jelly to the queen larvae, guard the hive and have sting for defense of their hive.

Drones: Then drones usually keep flying near the hive, make loud noises & inseminate the queen. Soon after inseminating a drone gets dead. The drones do not even have sting for his or beehive’s defense.

Lessons learnt from Honeybees

Nonstop struggle: In six weeks which is life span of a worker honey bee, it works every fraction of the second for the progress its colony. Every worker has its own predefined task that it fulfills no matter what! No vacations, no downtime!

Yeah we need vacations! Do we work harder than honeybees?

Live for the colony, die for the colony: Upon alert, the guard bees among the workers release a chemical to alarm rest of the bees, show dance signals, follow, harass and then finally can sting the intruder. The sting gets detached from the honeybee and it delivers venom to the victim. The honeybee however, dies soon after stinging.

Loses life to save the colony!

Life’s work is but for others: Honeybees don’t rest, work continuously, & give in their lives to protect the honey with its amazing benefits. To ensure their own endurance as the honey bees suck the flower nectar and collect pollen, they are also part of the great pollination. The life on earth largely depends upon the pollination by honeybees. Without their partake for pollination, flowers wont bloom, crops would not exist, wildlife will be at risk, then finally humans’ life will be affected.

We humans, we live for our luxuries, our attires, our wealth, our status!

We Homo sapiens

We think we are marvelous, we think world keeps going because we are practicing amazing stuff on the surface of the planet? The truth is we are the most dependent species on our planet. We rely on the sun, on the moon, on the oceans, on the wildlife, on flora & fauna, on the insects and on what not!

It’s time we understand the purpose of us being created and act in echo with that purpose.

Because, the world is revolving fast to its appointed time!

References:

S. J. Cunard & M. D. Breed, “Post-Stinging Behavior of Worker Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae)”, Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Vol. 91 (2), 754-757, 1998. (WWW)

L. Bortolotti & C. Costa, “Chemical Communication in the Honey Bee Society”, Neurobiology of Chemical Communication (Ed.), Taylor & Francis, 2014. (WWW)

Roger Schürch, Francis L. W. Ratnieks, Elizabeth E. W. Samuelson, & Margaret J. Couvillon, “Dancing to her own beat: honey bee foragers communicate via individually calibrated waggle dances”, Journal of Experimental Biology, Vol. 219, 1287-1289, 2016. (WWW)