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Tonight I attended a screening of Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?  This astonishing documentary explores both the problems and solutions in restoring our delicate balance with nature.  Bees are the ideal collaborators of life.  Their importance to humans, plants, and our ecosystem goes beyond biology and genetics.  It's evolutionary aesthetics.  What's beautiful to bees is also beautiful to humans: sunflowers, roses, cherry blossoms, etc.  Compare that, to say varieties of plants that are pollinated by flies: they smell like rotting meat.  This is no accident.  Bees have co-evolved with plants and flowers to bring us the most nutritious, sustaining and beautiful sources of food and beauty on the Earth.  Flowers learned the perfect combinations of colors and scents to attract the bees, and bees learned how to help plants migrate and fly in the air from their solitary roots in the ground.

One of the adorable subjects featured in the film, an elderly French biodynamic farmer, says that yogis make perfect beekepers because they understand that peace comes from balance and connection to nature.  After seeing Queen of the Sun, I am inspired to help make some local honey.  I found this description of the magical process linked from the film's website:

 "Each time a bee lands on a flower, pollen sticks to its fuzzy body. At the next flower, some of this pollen falls off, while still more attaches to the bee, and that is how plants are pollinated. When the honeybees return to the hive, they treat the nectar with enzymes and spread it throughout the wax cells of the honeycomb to thicken into honey. Beekeepers collect some of this honey, leaving behind enough to feed the hive. Considering that each worker bee will produce just a single drop of honey in her entire lifetime, the honey we spread on our toast in the morning is a truly precious food." (source: Yoga Journal - Yoga Food - Honey Love)

Related articles

• The hidden beauty of pollination (guardian.co.uk)
• 350.org (worldwright.wordpress.com)
• The Disappearance of the Honey Bee (foodservicewarehouse.com)