Winnie the Pooh was onto something. He loved honey but was too busy eating it (and getting into mischief) to recognize the miraculous masters of honey making-bees.

Bees produce honey by mixing the nectar of flowers with their own bee enzymes. They digest the nectar and regurgitate it-essentially making "bee barf," for lack of a better phrase.

Honey bees are fascinating creatures. A colony generally includes one queen (the fertile female), several thousand drones (fertile males) and a vast population of worker bees (sterile females). The Queen bee begins life as a regular larva; however, she is fed only royal jelly and that distinguishes her from the other larvae, which are fed honey and pollen.

Drones hatch from unfertilized eggs and the Queen and worker bees hatch from fertilized eggs. A young worker bee's first job is to clean the hive and feed the larvae, but as a worker bee grows older her responsibilities change until eventually she flies and becomes a forager. Worker bees communicate through a flying dance that uses patterns to tell the next forager where to find pollen.

Essentially, the bee moves pollen from the anther of one flower to the stigma of another flower. An anther is the male part of a flower that has pollen grains on it. A stigma is the female part of a flower that receives the pollen. When a bee gets pollen from a flower, the pollen sticks to the bee.  The bee then flies to a different flower and the pollen falls onto the stigma.

In the process of creating honey, bees pollinate the food we rely on for survival. Bees are major contributors to the pollination of plants worldwide and are essential to our very existence. Without bees we, and Winnie the Pooh, would not be here.


Sarah Dobec is a certified nutritional practitioner in private practice in Toronto. She aspires to restore clients' health through whole foods and a focus on the mind, body and spirit. Sarah is also an educator, speaker and organic farmer. www.1appleaday.ca or (416) 371-3471

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