Monday, February 16, 2009

Bee – hive – honey – money – tsunami

A single bee will visit 500 flowers to make one gram of honey, read a snippet on Animal Planet or some such channel. I started calculating and got to somewhere around 5000 when Appu finished his calculations and said about 1000 bees visiting 500,000 flowers to make one litre of honey.

And man, in a few minutes, smokes out the bees from their home and hearth, pilfer their food and render them homeless, not thinking for a moment of the solid effort that went into the making of that hive, the honey… nothing.

Imagine hovering in and out of flowers of all sizes and colours, draining out nectar from them, storing it, then moving on to the next one for days on end with a hope of collecting enough food to sustain them and their offspring, only to find that in a matter of a few minutes they are totally deprived.

Like an earthquake shattering lives all around, like a Tsunami wreaking havoc…

I’m glad I don’t like honey all that much. But the sight of two alcohol bottles in my kitchen, filled with honey instead of the original IMFL, has started to bother…

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I feel guilty now about the tiny jar of honey I threw out last month cos I thought it had gone bad. (Does honey go bad, btw?) Unfortunately, I have to buy litres of the gooey stuff now cos my daughter is on Ayurvedic medicine, and one of her tablets has to be made into a paste with honey.

Rohini said...

U shud watch the movie 'The Bee Story' (I think that is the name) to get rid of this guilt :D
And apparently, honey doesn't go bad. just store it where sunlight can hit it.