Honey – divine nectar , edible bee love and sacred food

I fell in love with the taste of honey as a young girl, and especially loved creamed honey on toast – or comb honey eaten right off of the spoon. Chewing the beeswax for an hour longer was a bonus from this special treat. Taking a moment to savor the vision of golden syrup as it dripped from the hexagonal cells was another aspect of my wonderful memories of comb honey.

And…

I still go off of my “let’s eat carefully of this precious nectar diet” when there is a chance to eat biscuits dripping with golden nectar!

The wonderful & best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, “The Secret Life of Bees” unfolds in a sentimental, honey-glazed land that vaguely resembles South Carolina in 1964. The movie is almost as good as the book – for describing the inner life of its complex characters…I cried all the way through!

There is a scene in the movie – “The Secret Life of Bees” – when Lily smashes several jars of honey in her anger at her lack of mother-love. This abundance of wasted honey really brings home how powerful that loss must have been – for her to destroy the life work of her beloved bees. (One worker bee actually makes

only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.)

But – that is not the point of this brief post…I merely wanted to remind my readers that honey is precious – so precious that it takes a honey bee (Apis mellifera) 154 trips, carrying tiny amounts of nectar from the flower to the hive, just to make one teaspoon of honey. The days of cooking with an entire cup of honey are long gone in my life…as a natural food devotee in the 1970’s I ate more than my share of this divine nectar. So I hope that we all begin to offer greater respect for the trials of the honey bee in these times of CCD – let’s eat honey wisely, offer our blessings to the bee, and begin to keep hives locally! That will develop better genetic strains of bee that may weather this time of collapse, which I believe mirrors the overall environmental stress of our current Planet -wide crisis.

Honey has been used as a medicine and a sacred food since before the ancient Egyptians began to keep hives.

So – hey – Let’s get back to a sense of the sacred with all of our foods, and especially those which are truly precious and rare, hard to get and involve the sacrifices of our fellow species.

Blessed Bee.