Honey Bee

Photo by Jay Ramod on Unsplash

How do you measure value or worth? I recently discovered, when a strange insect chose my window curtain to nest, that the honeybee is not the only bee on the block. Unlike the honey-bee, which lives in a colony, we also have solitary bees. The value we attach to the honeybee is mainly for its product, honey.  This is the bee’s own food that bees need to feed their young. We literally rob them of their food. You could say this about our relationship with most animals and insects.

We do this to bees with little concern for their greater value, mainly out of ignorance. This greater value they share with the solitary bee – pollination. Without pollination human life on planet earth, as we know it, would cease to exist. Why do we need solitary bees, I thought, if honey bees also pollinate along with making their food, honey? It turns out there is a wide range of pollinators in nature, including butterflies and solitary bees. Is the group more valuable than the solitary, though?

People

This got me thinking about the similarity between bees and people. We also exist either in groups or as solitary individuals. Is there something, in nature’s story of these two very different systems, that we can learn? Which one is more valuable? Is it the group or colony? Is it the solitary individual or solitary bee? Or is that the wrong question? How is a value measured and should we be measuring value? The answer may be that we need balance because all have value.

Solitary Bee

An article by ‘Friends of the Earth’ shows this value perfectly. It asserts that certain characteristics make some insects more suitable to pollinate some plants, as in the solitary Red mason bee. It is one hundred and twenty times more efficient at pollinating apple blossoms than the honeybee. Having the right bee to pollinate also improves the quality of the crop regarding nutritional value and shelf-life. Another thing to consider is that bumblebees and solitary bees feed on different parts of the strawberry flower, producing bigger, juicier, and more evenly shaped strawberries. My mind boggles at the intricate genius of nature! Nature has a plan, and it is definitely not accidental. A sobering thought on the monetary value of bees is a statistic that the use of other pollinators, usually human, would cost the UK at least 1.8 billion pounds a year – and bees do it for nothing!

Pandemic

During this time in history, the year 2020 should teach us the harsh lesson that nature will always take care of the earth. This will happen, whether or not we like it. We should use this time of slowing down to reflect on how to make changes. When the world comes out of this current forced human hibernation because of the Corona Virus pandemic, we have to change just to survive. Nature and bees, in particular, have a great deal to teach us.

Lessons

One valuable lesson is that there is a purpose for both the solitary and the group, whether bees or people. What one cannot do, the other can. Working together for a common purpose seems to be something insects know better than people. We also desperately need to learn that bees are more valuable to us than their honey. Not only do we in our mindless greed force the bee to produce more honey than it should, but we also destroy their habitat with the removal of hundreds of acres of natural plants for farming. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

Solitary Outlier

Another lesson to learn from nature is for the group to appreciate the value of the solitary outlier. Reject him as a non-conformist and we all lose. What are the apples and strawberries in society that we must preserve? Are they perhaps appreciation, compassion, sharing, loving my neighbors and accepting their differences, and taking care of the planet? Are there individuals out there that we never heed when they warn us that the group and the solitary must work together to save humanity and the planet? No one succeeds alone, and so too must the loner and the group learn to value the other enough to work together, not apart.

May love and harmony prevail.

Lynda Rogle ©

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