Bees, please

It's sort of hard for me to get my brain cranking and motivated to tackle the day on Mondays sometimes, and today is one. Lucky for me I finished a good book yesterday -- one I found at the Kingsport library and soon could be yours for the borrowing -- The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus. I found a passage yesterday that I thought I'd share here:

" ... Here's why, lest we forget: Honey is the distilled nectar of blooming flowers. It is collected by bees, lots and lots of bees. To make a pound of it, the 50,000 or 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective fifty-five thousand miles and visit more than two million flowers. A hive can collect more than thirty pounds in a single day when the stars align and the nectar gushes. One worker bee will visit fifty to one hundred flowers on each trip from the hive, in the process collecting and dispersing pollen from flower to flower, allowing the plants it touches to reproduce. In that sense, bees carry the future from tree to tree, and honey is the reward for their labors, nectar distilled by desire and duty into something more."

Happy day!