The Importance of Diversity

If you had to choose one, and only one, thing to eat for the rest of your life what would it be? At first, the answer to this question may come easily: just pick your favorite food. Can you imagine eating your favorite food all the time for the rest of your life? That doesn’t sound so bad. No hard decisions, no need to avoid unwanted meals, but just you and your favorite food every single day. Wait a second, every single day?  At every single meal?! For the rest of your life?!? Okay, I take it back, maybe that does sound pretty bad.

We all have that favorite food that we love, but there are few of us who would choose to eat it, and nothing else, for the rest of our lives. Not only would consuming one type of food be disgusting and repetitive, but it would also prevent us from gaining the nutritional benefits that come with a balanced diet. When it comes to food, the more diversity the better. A diverse diet ensures that one is getting enough vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats necessary to living a healthy life. This is true for all humans, and it is also true for all bees.

Bees use pollen and nectar from flowers to feed themselves and the hive. Nectar provides bees with carbohydrates, while pollen is a source of proteins and fats. The worker bees eat these plant parts while they are at the flower, but they also bring them back to the hive to make the three foods crucial to bee life: honey, bee bread, and royal jelly. Honey, which we all know and love, is the distilled nectar stored in the hive to feed the queen, drones, and young worker bees and sustain the hive during seasons when food sources are unavailable. Beebread is stored pollen that provides bees with proteins, lipids, nitrogen, and amino acids. Lastly, royal jelly is the substance made by young worker bees to feed hungry larvae. The combination of these three types of food keeps a healthy hive buzzing.  (Buchmann)

While the three food sources provide bees with the basics, it is important that they do not all come from the same type of flower. Like us, bees need to eat a balanced diet. And since they only consume nectar, pollen, and honey, this diversity needs to come from the original feeding source—the flower. Getting food from different kinds of flowers provides bees with lots of nutritional values leading to benefits like enhanced immune systems. Bees only visit one type of flower for an extended period of time (allowing for pollination of each species!), but the type of plant shifts throughout a season. For example, a colony may take nectar only from Dandelions in early spring and then transition to Goldenrods later in the season. This feeding mechanism not only ensures that multiple types of plants are pollinated, but also guarantees that bees receive benefits from a range of pollens and nectars. Each plant species’ pollen is composed of a unique composition of proteins and amino acids. By using pollen that comes from different plants, the bees are rewarded with a multitude of amino acids and proteins thus contributing the vitality of the entire colony.

One of the problems our current ecosystems face is a decline of biodiversity. As our natural environments shrink and our meadows and forests are converted into mono-crops, many species, especially bees, face a shortage of food and nutrients. Bees can still obtain food from a limited amount of plant species, but it is probably not the healthiest way for hives to do so. Instead of living in environments filled with many different plant species, bees used for commercial honey production are now trucked from mono-crop to mono-crop with an expectation to pollinate entire fields and provide us with enough honey for human consumption. For example, a single hive may move from pollinating a peach orchard in Vermont to an almond grove in California within a matter of a couple weeks. This not only limits the types of flowers bees can visit during nectar collecting seasons, but also puts an incredible amount of stress on colonies. This is a lot to ask of bees, and we are experiencing the consequences of it through problems like Colony Collapse Disorder.

While bees play an essential role in pollinating our crops, it is unwise for us to simply see bees as tools rather than as a species. When we think of Honey Bees as tools to pollinate, we forget that they are living creatures with needs of their own. By doing so, we fail to remember that like us, bees need a diet composed of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates from a wide range of plant sources to ensure that they are getting enough nutrients and health benefits to sustain their colonies. If we want to rely on bees to pollinate our crops, we need to do so in a way that is best suited for the bees. With the way our population is growing and our current food system is set up, it may be unreasonable to provide a way for all bees to live the best possible lives, but we can try our best to form ideal environments for many more bee colonies than we do now. Over thirty percent of the world’s hives collapse on an annual basis. If we continue to treat bees the way that we do this number will most likely increase.

There are many ways that we can help bees, but one of the most important things that we can do is reestablish the ecosystems that bees rely on to survive. This means we need to protect our meadows, forests, and poly-culture farms. Even a simple act such as planting a small pot of wildflowers in an outdoor window box provides bees with a healthy feeding source. We can save the world’s bee colonies, but we can only do so if we give them a place to live. This is where we need to start.

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind.New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

We’re eating honey that isn’t actually honey?

Ever think that the honey you see in most grocery stores isn’t actually honey? Probably not because, well, why would you? The bottle this mysterious substance is in claims that it’s honey. It smells like honey, looks like honey, and tastes (somewhat) like honey, but we now know that it’s not. After a series of tests ran by the World Health Organization, results have proven that over three-fourths of honey sold in American grocery stores is not normal honey, but instead a pollen-less substance that could be dangerous to our health and even fatal. While researchers are unsure as to why most honey in grocery stores shows no sign of pollen, many believe that it is because the honey is either actually diluted by other sugars, or ultra-filtered to cover up a deeper problem. If you are interested in learning more about the consequences of consuming this kind of honey, please check out the article below published in Food Safety News.

Food Safety News: Contaminated Honey

Support Local Bee Keepers! A Short Film on Eugene Woller.

As consumers, one of the most important ways that we can support bee populations is by supporting bee keepers. Bee keepers are passionate about bees and our environment in ways unlike anybody else. There are so many amazing bee keepers around the world, all with a unique story, that need our help. In addition to purchasing local honey, you can support bee keepers by just getting to know more about them! Below is a link to a short film made by Heather Swan and Sara Randle that shares the story of Eugene Woller, a bee keeper from Wisconsin:

Eugene Woller's Story

Also, be sure to check out his bee keeping website:

Gentle Breeze Honey

(...And I can testify that the honey he and his family produce is absolutely delicious!)

A story from Thailand: Bees and Elephants

In ancient myths across the globe, bees have not only made an appearance as friends of man, but also to other species. The following story comes from Thailand and describes the relationship between bees and elephants. While this story is clearly a tale, is does give some insights as to how cultures may have figured out how to take honey by smoking out the colonies, a main method of bee keeping today. In order to calm bees down, bee keepers lightly blow smoke onto the hive which stuns the bees in a relatively harmless way for a short period of time thus allowing the bee keepers to take honey. I will post at another point about bee keeping methods, but for now enjoy the story!


In ancient times, elephants did not have the long trunks they do today and bees did not live in nests in hollow trees. Instead, the built their nests on branches in the open air. One year the rains were extremely meager and the land became dangerously dry. The elephants found it increasingly difficult to find enough leaves to feed on. The bees were also having trouble collecting the nectar and pollen they needed, as all the flowers were dying. Finally, as dry as tinder, the forest caught fire. The elephants tried to outrun the danger, but the lumbering creatures soon grew tired as the flames spread unchecked. When they called for help, the bees offered to lead them to safety in return for free transport. The elephants opened their mouths, and the bees flew inside to escape the hot air and choking smoke. They settled in the elephants' short snouts and from there directed their companions to a nearby lake. The elephants waded into the middle of the lake and stayed there until the fire had spent itself. 


It was now time to leave the lake and resume their hunt for food, but the bees had become accustomed to the cool, dark interior of the elephant's snouts and began building their hives there. The elephants bellowed and trumpeted in rage and began to exhale mightily in order to evict their unwanted lodgers. After several hours of trumpeting and exhaling, their snouts had stretched into full-sized trunks, but the bees remained stubbornly inside. The elephants finally decided that since the bees had flown inside their snouts to escape the smoke, smoke would be the best way to get them out. So they walked into the still- smoldering ashes of the fire, inhaled deeply, and held the smoke in their mouths and trunks until the bees had fled. 


Then they returned to the lake to drink and cleanse their palates. Thanks to their new, improved appendages, they could reach the water without having to stoop. The evicted bees, having become very comfortable building their hives in cool, dark places, searched for something similar and found that the next best thing to an elephants' trunk was the hollow trunk of a tree. This is why an elephant's trunk was the hollow trunk of a tree. This is why an elephant's nose and the body of a tree are called trunks, and why bees who live in hollow trees are called phung phrong or "elephant's mouth bees." - Found in Stephen Buchmann's book, Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind.

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

Saving Trees can Help the Bees!

Bees around the world are currently facing the problem of habitat decline. Bees, like many other pollinators, need to live in a habitat rich with plant diversity to ensure high rates of survival. With increasing rates of urbanization, forest degradation, and mono-crop agriculture, levels of plant diversity are shrinking on a global scale, leaving many colonies without a habitat. One of the ways that we can protect bees is by restoring and conserving the very places that they live. We can do this by preserving wildlife areas like forests. In addition to providing bees with more areas to live, conservation areas can also improve our own economies. In Central America, efforts to preserve forests surrounding coffee farms have caused crop yields to rise tremendously. Protecting forests gives bees a place to live thus allowing them to pollinate coffee-plant flowers. Increased pollination around coffee farms in Costa Rica lead to 20% greater crop yields and an average 7% increase in annual farm incomes (Chivian, 105). That being said, we should strive to protect forests around the world for the sake of bee colonies, levels of plant diversity, and farming economies.

Cited Sources:

Chivian, Eric, and Aaron Bernstein. Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

The Basics of Honey as an Antibiotic

Antibiotic is one of those words that has a scary ring to it. When we hear the word antibiotic, we often shrink away from the subject, believing that antibiotics are extremely complicated substances that require excessive research and knowledge to understand. When we think antibiotics, we imagine man-made medicines in packaged bottles and pills that come from laboratories and factories. All in all, we know that antibiotics are effective at managing disease and dangerous if consumed at too high or little levels; but the rest, well, we kind of just don’t talk about. This view that antibiotics are things that we cannot understand needs to stop because we can understand them and should for the sake of everyone’s health.

An antibiotic is simply a substance that kills, resists, or slows down the growth of bacteria. Bacteria are single celled organisms that exist pretty much everywhere in the world. We all have bacteria in our bodies and most of it is harmless or beneficial including the bacteria, gut flora, which lives in our colons. Some bacteria, however, is dangerous to humans and can cause infectious diseases like Cholera. We create antibiotics in order to prevent the spread of these harmful types of bacterium. Currently, our technology has allowed us to create many synthetic antibiotics and we are using them more than we ever have in the past. Synthetic antibiotics are good in a sense that they are very effective in managing disease, but terrifying due to the fact that they can cause the formation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and lead to an even more harmful disease. While we know that this can occur, we still continue to excessively use them on ourselves, and our food sources.

There are bacteria that we should use synthetic antibiotics to fight like extreme diseases such as Syphilis, but there are also bacteria that we can fight using much more natural practices like in the case of a skin or wound infection. Honey, believe it or not, is a completely natural, effective, and safe antibiotic. Like I said before, an antibiotic is simply something that kills bacterium; and this is exactly what honey does. Honey, thanks to the relationship between flowers and bees, is mainly composed of sugar. As a result, honey is a highly concentrated substance made up of about 80% sugar and 20% water (Buchmann, 208). Most bacterium, on the other hand, are made up of single cells mainly composed of water. So, when honey is put on a cut containing lots of infectious bacteria, it often kills the bacteria through a process called osmosis. Osmosis occurs when two mediums (ie. two different cells) with differing concentrations come in contact. As a rule of nature, osmotic pressure causes the flow of a solvent to move through a semi-permeable membrane into a highly concentrated solution in order to even out the differing concentrations. In the case of honey and bacteria, this means that the water within the bacteria cells actually moves through the cell walls in order to dilute the highly concentrated honey. Without water, the bacterium shrivel up and die.  It is in this way that honey is a very effective antibiotic.

Many scientists have realized the benefits as honey as an antibiotic and researches have begun to use honey in medical products such as bandages and antiseptics. Why use a synthetic and expensive chemicals when you can simply use honey? So, next time you get a cut try reaching for that little honey filled bear on your counter instead of the Neosporin. Might sound odd, but I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

In case my description of osmosis was a little unclear, here is a diagram to help you out:

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

Looking for a dessert recipe? Try Honey Lemon Squares!

After reading Stephen Buchmann's book An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind, I was delighted to find a series of recipes that featured honey as a main ingredient. The first one I tried to make was Honey Lemon Squares. I will start posting recipes, but for now thought you might enjoy making this fun and delicious dessert!

Honey Lemon Squares

You'll need:


-1/2 cup of butter
-1/4 cup of confectioners' sugar
-1 cup plus 1 table spoon of flour, divided
-3/4 cup of HONEY (yay!)
-1/2 cup of of lemon zest
-3 eggs
-1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

Step 1:


In a medium bowl, cream the butter sugar until light and fluffy. Add 1 cup flour and mix until combined. Press the mixture evenly into the bottom of a 9-inch-square pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes, or until lightly browned.

Step 2:


Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients until thoroughly blended. Pour over the baked crust and bake all together for 20 minutes more, until the filling has set. Cool in the pan and cut into squares and serve.

Enjoy!!

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

You can thank the bees for your Honey Moon

Ever wonder why that sweet little post wedding trip is called a Honey Moon? I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense. Honey because you get to spend time with your favorite honey and moon because you, um, travel somewhere new? Not exactly. The term Honey Moon actually originated among the Druidic Celt people during the time of the Vikings. Like many other ancient civilizations, these Celts used honey to make honey wine, or mead. Honey was generally harvested during the month of May, which was referred to as the Honey Month in the lunar calendar. In addition to harvesting honey, the Honey Month was a time for couples to be married. Celtic tradition mandated that all marriages occur on May Day, or the first of the Honey Month. Afterwards, newlyweds were allowed to flee to a secluded place for the rest of the month in order to get to know each other, enjoy one another’s company, and drink lots and lots of mead. Apparently, the tradition stuck around because it is the Celtic Tradition of marriage during the Honey Month of the lunar calendar that leaves us with the name “Honey Moon”.




Cited Sources:
Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

Bees of Ancient Times: the Story of the San

Bees have long since been a part of our story telling history. Even before we could comprehend the science of pollination, humans understood that bees provided the world with a lot more than just delicious honey. Ancient societies across the globe all had the feeling that bees were involved with the construction of the earth, humankind, and other animals. While every culture has a different story about honeybees, help from bees seems to be an underlying theme in our most ancient myths. Many of these stories are very interesting; and from time to time, I will post a story passed down from an ancient civilization that explains the creation of bees and their importance in the world. I hope you enjoy them!

The first story comes from one of our oldest civilizations, the San people of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. The San people had a series of stories about how the world came to be. To the San, the bee represented an animal of tremendous wisdom and even a messenger of God. According to San myth, the bee played a huge role in the creation of humans and actually sacrificed himself for us. Here is the story:

San descendent, South Africa. -Lizzie Needham

A long, long time ago, Mantis asked Bee to carry him across the dark, turbulent waters of a flood-swollen river. Bee, known for his wisdom and reliability, agreed and told Mantis to climb onto his back. Buffeted by fierce, cold winds, Bee soon grew weary and searched for solid ground on which to deposit his burden. But the stormy waters seemed to stretch all the way to the farthest horizon. Exhausted and weighed down by the much larger Mantis, Bee sank closer and closer to the lapping waves. But just as he was about to go under, he spied a great white flower, half open and floating on the water, awaiting the sun's first warming rays. Marshaling his remaining strength, Bee struggled towards the flower, laid Mantis down in its very heart and planted within Mantis the seed of the first human being. Then, his task complete, poor Bee died. Later, when the sun had risen in the sky and warmed the white flower, Mantis awoke, and as he did so, the first San was born from the seed implanted by Bee. -Found in Stephan Buchmann's book, Letters from the Hive.



Sun set in the Richtersveld, South Africa, home of the San people. -Lizzie Needham



Cited Sources:
Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print.

Movie Review: Queen of the Sun

Looking for a great documentary about bees? Look no further! Queen of the Sun, directed by Taggart Siegel, is a wonderfully done film about bees, beekeepers, and the threats both currently face. Siegel interviews a whole host of bee keepers from across the globe and a series of experts including Michael Pollan and Dr. Vandana Shiva about what we need to do to save our pollinators. In addition to being interesting and aesthetically beautiful, the film is extremely informative and gives thorough explanations as to how monoculture cropping, plant genetic modification, and industry stresses are harming our bees. This documentary is not one you want to miss and I highly recommend watching it.

Check out the trailer and enjoy!

Queen of the Sun Trailer