Script
Insects – they’re across the board disgusting, everybody knows it. From aphids to beetles, cockroaches to dragonflies, earwigs to fleas, green stink bugs (green stink bugs!) to horseflies (horseflies!), Io Moths to June bugs, Katydids to lacewings, maggots to nits to owl flies to pea weevils to quiblets to roaches to stink bugs to tsetse flies to unlined giant chafers to vine borers to water bugs to xylodromus to Yucatan Boll Weevils to Zorapterans. They are a menace, earth aliens and poo disseminators matched in awfulness only by underwater creature, many of which, not coincidentally, resemble insects. And at least with the underwater creatures you can avoid them by not infringing on their territory. Not so with the insect. They’re everywhere we are. So, why do we, as slightly less gross and more evolved creatures, not eradicate these wee freaks completely? What is protecting these mini-monsters of land and sky from the bitter sting of our noxious chemical wrath?
The answer? The Honey Bee – Mother Nature’s least disgusting anthropoidal daughter.
Fact (FACT! (deep voice)): The honey bee is beautiful. Its fuzzy black and gold stripes are a pleasure to behold, like a bespoke sweater on a lithe young Gordon Sumner.
Fact: The honey bee is clean. It does not, under any circumstance, eat or crawl on shit, be it human or dog or antelope or whatever. In fact, there are honeybees in the hive whose sole job is to tidy up, like a horde of tiny, lady Mr. Belvederes.
Fact: The honey bee is peace loving. It doesn’t want to sting you and will not unless you bumble into its dwelling like a massive, unannounced house guest, you buffoon! When you are stung by a bee – you can bet dollars to donuts it wasn’t of the honey variety and I would bet those same dollars to those same donuts that it was in fact a wasp. Perhaps you should learn some science before hurling wild accusations, buffoon!
Fact: A Honey bee society is overwhelmingly matriarchal, despite what the lazy writing of current day, too rich for his own good Jerry Seinfeld would have you believe. That is to say, run entirely by the ladies, that is to say, almost inherently better than what we’ve got going, though to be honest, I think we’ve got a low key matriarchy percolating ourselves.
Fact: Honey bees make honey. This is astounding. It’s like a cow making cheese. Sweet golden cheese.
Fact: The honey bee likes the same things we do. Bold colors, beautiful flowers, fruits, vegetables, honey, and the music of Neil Diamond, presumably.
We see elegantly simple eye to staggeringly complex multiple eye, us and honey bees, so it’s no surprise that our histories are so inextricably interwoven.
Allow me to start with an ancient anecdote; a series of cave drawings, actually. No more than a couple of crude doodles, when it comes right down to it, but they tell quite a story. They were discovered on the wall of the Altamira Cave in Spain and have been dated as far back as 25,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic era.
The story, depicted as I said, in some haphazard, but fairly impressive for the time, scribbles, goes like this:
The year was 22,984 BCE. Homo sapiens were king, having successfully completed history’s first genocide by wiping out those poor Neanderthal folks, whose only crime had been missing a couple of evolutionary adaptations. Survival and tool making were all the rage, and everyone was looking forward to the upcoming Solutrian period – just 984 years away - having grown bored to tears with their Chatelperronian tools. Like a recently divorced dad in his first solo apartment, these early-ish homo sapiens had a lot of time and space on their hands. There were only 30,000 people in Europe, after all. That comes to about 1,113.3 square feet per capita, which means that an Upper Paleolithic loner, like the previously mentioned recently divorced dad in his first solo apartment, could get up to a lot of horse feathers.
That’s why marriage is so swell. Aside from the love and companionship and building a life together – all great – you also get someone around to shame you into acting like a decent homo sapien.
Anyway, this particular Upper Paleolithic loner, Plorg the Lonely of 14th Hilltop was the moniker he answered to, was sitting on his haunches, having a good think. After general puttering about, sitting on ones haunches and having a good think was the most popular form of entertainment among folks at the time, especially loners.
So he was thinking. About survival, at first, which was very important to and difficult for these early people on account of they hadn’t invented many of the amenities we so take for granted today. Like the Zune, for instance, or HAM radios or really anything else outside of some vaguely tool shaped rocks and a pair of pants or a shirt here and there, though clothes hadn’t really caught on yet since these early people had yet to identify the shame lurking within themselves.
So he was thinking about survival, according to these barely legible chicken scratches on the walls of this cave, and his mind began to wander, as minds do, to food – and here’s where this early man becomes notable – his mind begins to stir with the beginnings of the concept of sweetness, which was not a taste sensation yet known to humans, but he imagined the idea of it, and he thought of his favorite color which was the color of the sun through the dust of the planes when a heard of _ passes hill 14, which is a kind of pale gold, and he conflates that with the idea of sweetness and then his mind, as minds also often do, drifts vaguely to sex, and he thinks of come and incorporates that into his previous idea and the whole of the idea becomes what we now know as honey. And then, since man is naturally a masochist, he imagines the difficulty of obtaining such a substance, unnecessarily, of course, since this is all in his own mind – he could just as easily imagine that it is bountiful and a pleasure to obtain – imagines that it would be protected by women – women who could hurt him – and he’s angry at the women because he’s dumb and not very self reflective and believes that anything that can hurt him is evil and doesn’t deserve nice things and he wants to take the sweet, sun colored come away from the evil women, and he stands up angrily and storms off to avenge this injustice, even though it only exists in his mind, and he stomps around for days like a lunatic, and, what do you know, on the fourth day he unthinkingly swats a honey bee hive, unaware of what it is, not with curiosity but with unthinking rage, and his arm is covered in bees and also the sweet, sun colored come of his imaginings, and they sting and he swats and it’s unclear to him or us if his imaginings were just a lucky guess or if he actually manifested this thing, and eventually all the bees have died and he is close to death from stings but also ecstatic from the rush of the honey that now drips down his chin, and another human happens to come along and is appalled by the swollen, lumpy man who is licking golden come from all over his own body but also writhing around in pain but the new human, who happens to be an artist, stops long enough to hear the man’s final words – this story, more or less – and to, hesitantly, at first, of course, but then with greater and greater gusto, eat the honey, and he goes back and records the tale via the previously mentioned barely decipherable cave scribblings.
And that’s how humans first encountered the honey bee, so far as we know. It is, of course, entirely possible and even likely that someone else encountered them before this and it just didn’t get written down.
When it comes to history, we’re like Ray Charles in B. Dalton’s Bookseller – the ghost of a blind man in a store that no longer exists.
There are, of course, tales of bees going back to the beginning of time from history’s schizophrenic aunt, religion. Religious kooks have a wacky story for just about everything.
The Kalahari’s San people, for instance, who are not, to my surprise, characters from Star Wars, believed that humans were sprung from the body of a mantis after a bee planted a seed inside of it.
But our next real world documentation of humanity’s interaction with bees comes from Georgia, the country. Some archeologists found some honey there.
Our next interesting real world documentation of this is ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians had a total boner for honey and honey bees. They used it for everything. They ate it by the fistful, used it to do gross sex stuff, rubbed it on rashes and bunions and sores they got from the gross sex stuff. You name it. It was, as far as they were concerned, a gift from the gods – a show of appreciation for all of the cool shit they were building.
King Tut was buried with the stuff so he would have a kind of house warming gift for all of the gods in wherever they lived – the location of the Egyptian gods was not conveniently specific, it didn’t have a fun name like heaven, which is probably why it died out – people crave specificity - when he got there. Fat load of good it did him, as we just it up and put it in a museum.
The Egyptians harvested their honey in much the same way as we do today, except that they used baskets because they were too dumb to think of wooden hives with removable slats.
On to Israel, where, according to the Bible, people were pretty sweet on honey as well. It’s mentioned 26 times in the good book. That’s 26 times more than they bothered to mention ----, for reference. Just get a load of this sexy Bible verse:Your lips, my bride, drip honey; Honey and milk are under your tongue, And the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.
Scandalous, sexy stuff.
Anyway, you get the idea. Folks love honey. Have always loved honey and by extension honey bees.
Most folks, anyway. Native Americans referred to bees as white man’s flies. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so hurtful about our bugs we’d’ve treated them better.
So, let’s take a look at honey – its creation and many uses – as everyone knows that a thing is only as good as a commercial output and bees are no exception.
Honey is a byproduct of bee bulimia – that is to say, bees collect delicious pollen and nectar come back to the hive, and vomit it up. Then they use bee magic to turn it into delicious golden sugar goop, which feeds their young. It’s a beautiful, disgusting, delicious process.
But let’s get to the important question – how does honey benefit us human beings? God didn’t create these gorgeous creatures to live autonomous lives for their own health and as an integral cog in the machinery of Earth’s finely tuned through evolution ecosystem, after all. He created them to keep us – their manic depressive overlords – flush with that gooey, sucratic elixir.
Honey or, as I like to call it, God’s Come, has many, many uses. You can eat it, of course, on toast or regular style bread, drizzled on fruit, as a sugar substitute, with your paws, over ice cream, in cereal, in graham crackers, in mustard, on buffalo wings or ham if you’re into the whole slaughter of innocent animals thing, in tea, or just by the spoonful, shameful and sticky, alone in your basement.
Why you could slather Apian Snack Food on just about anything.
But let’s talk about some of the lesser known, more practical and medicinal uses of honey.
First and most importantly, of course, you can just slap that goop right in your hair to create whichever beautiful hairstyle pops into your mind grapes. Image is everything, as Andre Agassi was once fond of saying and my father was fond of quoting to the detriment of just about everybody. And as an added bonus for the entomologists in the audience, it’s going to attract a lot of fascinating bugs to your head, which can be studied at your leisure.
Moving down to below your hair is, as everybody knows, your skin. The ol’ epidermis. Biggest organ in your body, they say, so you’re going to want to take care of it. And ain’t no better way to take care of it than to just absolutely drown that shit in bee batter. Rub it on pour it on, I don’t care, just stop what you’re doing and get some of that heavenly hive juice all over your hide.
Next up, your eyes. There is simply nothing more soothing to the persistent itch in your peepers caused by seasonal allergies – ironically the result of our friend the bee’s prodigious pollination – than a fat dollop of Nature’s Visine. Just let it slowwwwwly drip onto the offending eyeball and bask in the eventual relief. UUUUUUUUUUH, that’s goooooooood.
Onto your nose. Huff up a line of apian nose beers and you’ll be ready to get on the scene like a sex machine, a la sweaty, borderline nonsensical 80s era Mr. Entertainment himself, James Brown. And unlike the devil’s Red Bull powder, Comb Coke can be purchased in any supermarket! Just look for it on the shelf above the Peanut Butter.
Hows abouts them ears? Headed to a screamo or metal core concert? Of course you are. Well, those things get pretty loud and you’re not getting any younger – it must take you forever to squeeze into those skinny jeans, ya goof – so why don’t you protect the old earballs by jam packing them with buzz butter?
Mouth! There is simply no end to the number of beneficial ways to get that sweet sweet bee tea into your craw and no end to the positive outcomes when you do. You eat enough of that delicious comb sap and you’ll be happier, smarter, better smelling, healthy as Mr. Ed on a juice cleanse, and up to 54% more resplendent.
Listen, I could go on and on. Stretch marks, cancer, toe fungus, spousal distrust, penis itching, penal distrust, spousal itching, AIDS, feline aids, death, the dizzies, racism, alcoholism, gigantism, dementia, the heebie-jeebies, butter face, depression, sleepiness, nervousness, nightmares, daymares, Adult SIDS, menstrual cramps, charley horses, hiccups, psychopathy, sociopathy, Republicanism – honey can cure all of those things and more.
Thanks, Bees! You’ve truly earned the moniker “Nature’s Holistic Medicine Practitioners and Friend to Humans Everywhere”!