Today, April 22, is both the internationally-recognized Earth Day and my birthday! I'm 24 today, and I wanted to celebrate by sharing a few pictures that are mutually enjoyed by me and the earth, if we can anthropomorphize this little blue planet, and for this little example, I think we can.
Because what does the earth (and life on it) more good than bees? Yes, the picture above and the one below both feature a honeybee collecting pollen from a just-opened patch of crocuses.
If you zoom in you can even see the pollen on her hind legs! How cool is that ... These bees live in a hive that is on our property, and which is "kept" (in the sense that he is a beekeeper) by a local man. The bees come around our garden and the local fields and collect pollen, and then they go back to their hive and make honey and honeycomb with it. Later, in the fall, the beekeeper extracts the honey, and gives us some, so we end up eating some of the honey these bees made, which perhaps came from this very crocus!
Since that beekeeper is more of a hobbyist, most of the honey we eat comes from a Sydney beekeeper, and we buy it by the bucket. The cake I made for my birthday, which is an apple-walnut cake, calls for 3/4 of a cup of honey, and it came from fields in Coxheath, and if you go way back, it came from the millions of collections of pollen from bees just like this one.
And both me and Mama Nature think that's pretty damn cool. Happy Birthday to me! Happy Earth Day to the rest of you!
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