Bees are good for nature and for yourself!

How important bees are shown by Albert Einstein's statement, he knew that if there were no bees, no spraying could take place, and therefore no bloesum would be fertilized, and no fruits would grow, and no fruit would result in no food for humans and animals!
So important is the bee in the entire large ecosystem.
Bees are traditionally kept by people for their honey and their wax.
In general, keeping bees requires a substantial investment in materials and knowledge, but on the other hand it requires relatively little time.

The wonderful world of bees

We do not think about it, after all we are standing still in so few things, but the world of bees is a wonderful world! The way that bees collect life, honey and pollen, their meaning in nature - all equally fascinating. Everything that the human donates, also appears to be of great importance to our health.

People keep bees since time immemorial. While it is nowadays mainly done by beekeepers who do this as a hobby, keeping bees was almost inseparable from farming. A farmer often also kept one or more bee colonies because the bees provide valuable services for the pollination of fruit crops. Of course, the wind also causes pollination, but the yield of crops pollinated by bees is considerably higher. Even longer ago, at the time of Charlemagne, the keeping of bees was mainly practiced by monks. They used the beeswax to make candles.

The life of a bee population

A colony of people forms a strong social unit consisting of a queen, workers and drones. Within this trinity each has its function: the queen takes care of the offspring. She is fertilized by the male bees, the drones. After fertilization they no longer function and when the summer is over and the honey becomes scarcer, the drones are chased away by the workers. The workers are infertile female bees who, as the name says, do a lot of work. They collect the nectar from the flowers that are digested by the bee into honey, they also collect pollen and pollen.

The working life of the worker starts immediately after she has crawled out of the cell. In many of those hexagonal cells the queen has laid her eggs. After three days, every egg crawls a larva, which is fed by the workers. Six days later the larva pupates. The cell is closed by the workers with a lid of beeswax. Twenty-one days after the egg is laid, this lid is gnawed away by the: the tiny larva has turned into a worker bee with head, bust and abdomen, six legs and four wings.

The worker bee immediately starts cleaning the cells and a few days later also with the processing of the nectar. Yet a few days later she takes care of and nourishes the young larvae, all that day in and day out, almost without a rest period. When the worker is three weeks old, she flies out for the first time and collects nectar and pollen. This happens from early morning until late evening. Back in the beehive or cupboard she takes care of the honey, to fly out again the next morning at the first sunlight. After a few weeks the worker is at the end of her life. Her wings are often literally worn out and on her last day she does not return to her people anymore.

The drones are born from unfertilized eggs. Once the drones are there, the worker bees who have wintered together with the queen make large hexagonal cells in which the queen lays fertilized eggs. The larvae that result from this are fed with royal jelly, consisting of nectar and pollen that have been processed by the workers. From these eggs the new queen is born, who announces herself a few days before her birth with a peeping sound. The next day the old queen bee flies away, followed by a part of her bee population. They are looking for a new home. For example, a bee population can split because in the roughly halved bee population that remains, several queens will emerge within a few days and each time the oldest queen, with half of the remaining people, flies out in search of a new home. That is where the construction of the combs starts immediately. A week or three later, the new queen makes her 'bridal flight', in the afternoon she flies to a place where the drones have gathered. She flies as high as she can, to the sun, she is a solar animal. The drones haunt her, the fastest can mate with the queen. When the fertilized queen returns, she stays in the house and about two to three weeks later she starts laying the eggs, about 1000 a day so that the people quickly grow to a community of 40,000 to 70,000 workers.

Honey

In the Netherlands, a bee colony annually donates about 30 kilos of honey. Bees make the honey from the nectar they gather on the flowers. The bee collects the nectar in its honey bladder, certain substances are added and the conversion process begins. When the bee comes into her home, the nectar is deposited in the cells of the comb and then further processed by other bees. The bees cause the nectar to thicken and under the influence of the enzymes from the honey bladder, the honey is created.
If the sugar content of the honey is high enough (> 85%), the honey will no longer spoil and the cells will be sealed by the workers with a washing lid. For example, the honey is almost indefinitely sustainable and available at times when the bees need it. The taste and the smell of honey are determined by the aromatic substances in the plants. There are different types, such as heather honey, linden honey, rapeseed honey and so on.

Traditionally, honey has been considered a precious commodity by man, and rightly so. For a drop of honey, the bees have collected the nectar from hundreds of flowers. Already the Greek physician and philosopher Hippocrates (ca 400 BC) related honey to a long life. Rudolf Steiner also pointed out the special properties of honey (the Dutch translation of his lectures on bees is unfortunately sold out), and of the bees in general. He sketched miraculous similarities between the organism formed by a bee population and the essence of man. Forces that live in a bee population, such as those expressed in the construction of the hexagonal cells in the comb, find their parallel in the human body.

Honey, said Rudolf Steiner, promotes the building of our physical body. "Honey carries the power that can give shape to man, which gives firmness." (The bees, p.26) For the elderly it is usually good to use some honey daily. In young children it is better to be sparing with honey and the first seven, eight months of life one should give them no honey at all. Children with rickets can, from a month or nine, benefit from a daily small dose of honey, dissolved in not too hot milk (it is better not to make the honey warmer than 37 ° C). At a young age: honey in moderation and dissolved in milk, in the old age some more and for example pure, so honey can feed a person for a lifetime.

The special properties of honey are also found in the use of honey as a means to treat wounds, also in conventional medicine. Already thousands of years ago it was used by Greeks, Romans, Germans and Egyptians.

The other 'gifts' of the bee also appear to be beneficial to humans. See the report about the research on the use of bee venom in multiple sclerosis. In anthroposophic medicine, bee poison has been used in different ways for decades, for example in complaints such as gout, rheumatism, multiple sclerosis and heart problems. Pollen is used in asthma or allergic diseases, but also in prostate complaints. Propolis consists of juices and resins of trees and plants that are collected and processed by the bees and which they then use to rub the inside of the hive to protect themselves against bacterial infections. Propolis is recommended for stomach ulcers and is also used as an ointment for the care of the skin. From royal jelly it is known that it can bring man into a light euphoria. It is used for depressive disorders, smoking cessation etc. It is not wise to experiment with all this at random. Pollen, propolis and royal jelly are known to sometimes provoke allergic reactions, not everyone tolerates these drugs.

The gifts of the contributing bear the special power that is also expressed in the life of a bee population. They are forces that we must deal with cautiously.

This article was written by Patricia Bunge and appeared in Antroposana, volume 1, no. 3, July 2005

Consulted:

The bees, Rudolf Steiner, Zeist 1982



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