A Simple Method To Bee More Mindful Of Your Food This Holiday Season
The wonder of very tiny things
The Holiday Season is here and no matter what your holiday plans look like, there is probably a heavy dose of eating included the celebration. It’s so fun to step outside of the norm and enjoy some seasonal favorites and holiday treats.
But it is also a time of year when it’s easy to become disconnected from reality.
I have found a very simple way to help stay grounded and joyous over the holidays. It starts with this small mindfulness story that is rooted in gratitude. Bee present while you read this story.
How do bees make honey?
Honeybees are remarkable creatures.
Honeybees visit certain flowers and spread pollen from one flower to the next, which enables the visited flowers to reproduce and set seeds, thereby ensuring there will be more flowering plants in the coming years.
In return for the bees’ attention, these flowering plants produce sweet nectar that the bees eat and gather. When a honeybee has eaten all the nectar it can carry (in a special ‘honey stomach’), the bee returns to the hive in which it was born (its colony).
Back at the hive, the bee shares the nectar with other bees. As the nectar passes from one bee to another it gets transformed into honey. Eventually this honey is stored in honeycombs which keep the honey fresh and clean until it is needed for winter food by the colony.
Many honeybees are domesticated, which means their hives are in boxes used by bee-keepers to contain the bees and hold onto the honey. The honeycombs get removed and processed to make the golden honey we all know and love and buy in the store. The bee-keeper feeds the bees in the winter to make sure the colony will survive for the next season.
How much honey does one bee make?
Here’s where things get truly amazing.
One bee visits hundreds, sometimes thousands, of flowers in a single day.
According to the British Bee Journal (2015):
All the foraging honeybees are females.
Although a bee lives 4 or 5 weeks in summer, it only forages for nectar in the last one or two weeks of its life.
One bee can collect 0.05g (0.002 oz) of nectar on one trip by visiting hundreds of flowers. One bee can make 10 trips a day on average. That means one bee can collect 0.5 g (0.02 oz) of nectar a day.
But honey is a refined version of nectar. It takes on average 1.5 to 2.1 grams of nectar to make 1 gram of honey (and the bee also uses some of the nectar it gathers for energy to fly! And not every flight may be for gathering nectar - bees also need pollen and water for the colony too).
Even using the more conservative 2.1 grams of nectar to honey ratio means that a single bee collects just 0.24 grams (0.008 oz) of honey each day.
If this average bee collects nectar for just 7 days, then that works out to 1.6 grams (0.06 oz) of honey in its lifetime.
There are 7 grams of honey in 1 teaspoon. Doing this math means that one bee collects less than 1/4 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime (1.6 g by the bee/7 g in a teaspoon).
Now, if you google “how much honey does one bee produce in its lifetime” you’ll get the magic and consistent answer of 1/12 tsp.
I am not quibbling with the actual number here. As I mentioned my simple math doesn’t take things into account things like how much the bee itself needs just to live. But by showing you how these numbers get derived, I hope you can see that there are a LOT of assumptions and averages used to create what becomes “Google gospel” - or the page one answer which has been copied and pasted in place by the top 10 posts.
My point in walking you through this Bee Story is this:
One bee creates just the tiniest amount of honey that the colony (or bee-keeper) needs.
Its lifetime contribution is miniscule.
But that tiny bee does it anyway.
It takes the entire bee colony working together to create the honey needed to survive the winter, and live another year.
Quite literally all for one and one for all.
The Many Create The One
Single honeybees don’t survive in nature (but to be clear there are other kinds of solitary bees who do just fine).
Honeybees work tirelessly in their complex society to create food for the whole colony. The many work so the colony survives.
We are largely the same. While there are some individuals capable of surviving all on their own, overall we as humans depend on each other, and our now very complex modern society, to make sure there is food to eat.
When you spoon that honey into your tea, or onto pancakes, or eat it with nut butter and toast, think about how many hundreds of bees worked together to create that spoonful.
You will never look at honey the same way again.
And hopefully that awe will spill over to all the other foods on your holiday table.
Because while farmers may not be as glamorous as bees, they work 365 days a year to bring that food to your table.
Savor that next bite. -+
And know that without everyone working together, food disappears.
If you eat, then you need to care about where food comes from. And the grocery store is only the tip of the honey spoon.
Bee well this holiday season.
Bee grateful for every bite and sip.
And kiss a farmer under the mistletoe for good measure!
Happy holidays!
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