We can fawn over flowers as much as we like but they
will never return our affection. To be brutally frank, they don’t care about
us. All those tourists pouring out of buses in Namaqualand with cameras poised,
the royal entourage touring the Chelsea flower show, the botanists who dedicate
their lives to classifying them – from aspidistras to zinnias, the plant world doesn’t
give a fig.
The seductive colours, the amazing shapes, the
clouds of fragrance – none of it is intended to charm humans. Shakespeare wrote poems about them and it all
went right over their heads. Prince Charles talks to flowers, but then he also
wants to be reincarnated as a tampon, so perhaps we shouldn’t take him too
seriously.
Flowers are in a relationship with bees, and there’s
nothing we can do to change that. Bees are their equivalent of making love, and
frankly the aerial transfer of pollen is a far less clumsy way of going about
it than the contrived and highly improbable method favoured in the supposedly
more evolved animal kingdom.
Flowers won’t accept any old bee landing on their
stamens and pistils. They have to be virgins. Which all worker bees are, having taken a
solemn vow of celibacy at birth. Only the queen bee is allowed to consort with
the male drones, and she stays in the hive, attended by her courtiers, regally sipping
honey.
Which brings us to the point – why have honey producers allowed olive oil salesmen
and Richard Branson to hijack virginity as a marketing concept? If anything in
the kitchen is virginal, surely it is honey made by creatures whose little
hearts are entirely unsullied by lust. “Sweet virgin honey” as an advertising
slogan is a no-brainer. And if the bees make honey from the nectar of fever
tree flowers, that would legitimately make it hot virgin honey. Impalas have
horns, so honey made from impala lilies would be … the possibilities are
endless.
At least the
honey industry has cottoned on to the cultivar thing, labeling the product
“citrus” or “fynbos” or “acacia”, or, in the good old days before all the blue
gums were slaughtered, “eucalyptus”. But producers have been slow to realize
that honey can not only be labeled as badger-friendly, but as free range as
well.
It’s true that bees have been known to kill people. This
usually happens only in cases of extreme
provocation, such as when an attempt is made to raid their precious pantry. Which
adds a frisson of vicarious peril to the enjoyment of honey: someone had to
risk his or her life so you could nonchalantly smear it on your toast or
dissolve it in your rooibos.
But it seems churlish of the notoriously paranoid Americans
to issue a blanket condemnation of our cute bugs as “African killer bees”. Bees from this part of the world happen to be
a little more defensive than theirs, but just because they come from the
continent that they do, they are unjustly stereotyped as vicious blood-crazed
thugs.
On the contrary, they are a wholly admirable
species, the uncomplaining Chinese sweat-shop labour of the insect world,
industrious, dedicated and selfless; also a bit miraculous, if you think about
the way they suck in nectar, churn it around in their bellies, and regurgitate it
as something eminently edible.
Without them, humans would have been deprived of
one of their most important endearments and countless romances would have ended
in tears as a consequence. Many of us
owe our very existence to the fact that our parents were able to call each
other “honey” at the critical moment. “Oh saccharine, hold me tight,” doesn’t
really have the same ring, does it.
They may have a tendency to sting, but these noble
nectar-gatherers changed the course of world history. Would anyone have bothered
to trek with Moses from Egypt, on foot through the desert and across the Red
Sea, to the country now known as Israel, if they had merely been promised “the land of milk and sugar”?
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