Nectar

Over 5 million insects are known in the world. In fact, we don’t know exactly how many species of insects there are. Of that number, more than 20,000 species are bees. One of them gives us honey, the so-called Honey bee. Bees are social insects. Everything we could know about teams can be learned from these hardworking bugs. They work in a team, organized through a meaningful hierarchy. Bees live in hives, within hexagonal cells made of beeswax. In these cells, they keep their brood and keep their food. They are completely self-sustaining ☞ the whole cycle from shelter, reproduction, through nutrition, and healing is carried out flawlessly from minute to minute. One of the products of bees is propolis, which is medicative and serves for disinfection, as an antibiotic, antifungal, and hygiene agent in hives.

Bees are organized by colonies, bee communities, and hives. Each hive has its queen, queen bee as well as about 100 drone bees (“male” bees), and between 20 and 80 thousand worker bees. The queen lays about 2,000 eggs a day, which become larvae and pupae and soon new worker bees so the colony would remain productive and healthy. The larvae are feeding on honey, pollen, or nectar. Whether a bee will become a queen bee, depends on what they feed them. If she is fed on nectar, she will grow bigger, stronger and can become a queen.

The bees orient themselves unmistakably. When they find flowers to pollinate, they return to their colony and through a dance (Waggle dance) they give their friends precise instructions on how far the flower field is, in which direction, and how many flowers are waiting for them when they reach the meadow. They do all this according to the scheme in which the direction of the dance is in consonance with the direction of the desired meadow, and they manage to show that by orienting themselves based on the position of the sun (as if they have a small compass built into their tiny body). Every kilometer of distance to the meadow is described by an additional second of dancing. A by-product of bee survival is pollination. With their mere survival, bees pollinate 80% of flower crops and are thus directly responsible for a third of all the food we consume.

Bees work for themselves, but also for the whole world. Their by-product is also honey. Honey is considered to be the only food that contains everything that a person needs for survival: vitamins, minerals, water, and enzymes (biocatalysts). They are the only known insect that produces a human-edible (and beneficial) product. These valuable little beings have existed for 50 million years, they are on the planet far longer than our human ancestors. During its lifetime, that one little bee does a lot of good for itself, for its friends in the hive, for each of us, and for the whole world. Yet again, during its entire life, it collects only 1/12 teaspoon of honey. Bees need to fly 3 orbits around the planet to collect only one jar of honey.

The best of them feeds on nectar. It has always eaten the best food. According to the legend, the great Zeus – the god of gods, was also fed with nectar in order to become wise and strong. It turns out that what we bring into ourselves is a guarantee of realizing our potential. Queens and gods eat well, best.

With what we feed our body? What do we feed our mind? What do we feed our soul?

In his text “The Information Diet”, Angus Hervey draws an interesting parallel between food and information. In short, he says that just as we excessively consume unhealthy food, we also consume junk information. One burger from time to time is not a problem, nor is chips, or a delicious donut. The problem is that our diet becomes, to a great extent, unhealthy, and this is exactly the same kind of “food” our brain consumes. Horror video clips, ignominy, sensationalist themes and theses, nonsense, unverified information, naked, nasty, disgusting, festering, brutal, insultingly ridiculous; cynicism, cheap entertainment; violence, short news taken from various sources; baits, chains, padlocks for the soul luring from every place you look and it is no wonder that we are all threatened by a heart failure – the muscular and the spiritual.

With what you feed your body? What do you feed your mind? What do you feed your soul?

For a soul, body is the same (thing) as the suit is for a body. – Dragana Djermanovic

Angus also gives advice on how to replace intellectual junk with nectar and start a life worthy of the opportunity we were given. Here are some of his tips, which I have substantially revised. The essence remains the same, but please look at its original text.

Your “Diet Information Menu” should include the following:

1. Philosophy – proteins for the mind. Philosophy is the science of all sciences and one of the most important intellectual disciplines that I had the pleasure to deal with. It stimulates the mind, opens doors and windows into the unknown, confuses, refreshes, massages cerebral gyri, and nourishes synapses. The directions, ideas, and questions that wise people have been asking for centuries are the basis of a healthy information diet. When you perceive questions about identity, existence, purpose and meaning, morality and democracy, beauty and metaphysics, from a philosophical perspective, you will feel a rush of raw mental power that can break the chains you have imposed on yourself or that others impose on you, since long time ago. We will deal with this discipline seriously through the pages of this site. Philosophy is not just a love for wisdom, but self-love in its purest form.
2. Books – whole worlds, lives, all the situations you can imagine and happiness and sufferings that could happen to you, someone wrote all this somewhere for himself, for his loved ones and the whole world. Books are the sanctity of progress, and bookstores and libraries are silent sanctuaries of civilization that lost their voice because we lost our appetite for progress. There is no person who does not like to read, just as there is no person who cannot love or be loved. All you have to do is find the right one – a person and a book. If you think you don’t like reading, it’s only because you haven’t found the right book. Life is worth looking for the right person and the right books that will give meaning to our existence. Sweeten up with at least one book every two months. In addition to everything I do, I read one book a week. How, which, and how I remember all that, will be the topic of many texts in the future.
3. Newsletters – these packets of healthy mental food are all around us. Some wonderful worker bees gather the best during the week, to make nectar of information from videos, analysis, research, and interesting ideas and thoughts, and then they deliver it to your door for free! Free delivery of premium snacks for our wonderful brain! How many newsletters are you subscribed to? Why not read what you want, when you have been dragging yourself for so long into everything you don’t want, and what others send you to Viber, messengers and through dozens of other doors that close the pores of your mental development.
4. Podcasts – audio recordings that we have no excuse not to consume because we are constantly driving somewhere, waiting for something and we have too much idle time. Ideas that unravel the possibilities in the background can be found in native and all other languages, as well as audiobooks.
5. Special publications – subscribe to magazines, weeklies, specialized and interesting magazines. There are several reasons for that – first of all, we complain about how poor and miserable the media scene is, and how there are no independent journalists or investigative journalism. How much do we support them so they could be independent? How much do we buy those same newspapers in which Don Quixote-like characters of the present time work, for which our subscription is of key importance to raise their heads from the mud of pressure and ominous poverty? We read their sites, listen to their interviews, and secretly applaud them. What do they have from all this!? They investigate for months, pushing their heads into the jaws of evil, dark topics and characters; they are ridiculed by many, frightened, amused by one detail that changes everything instead of being hooked on vulgarity like most. They choose their life and profession to be harder but more meaningful, and we eat information junk. Subscribe to some, and so give many a chance to read about ideas that can truly change something. We all have that much. Nectar is worthy and worth paying for. Garbage remains garbage even when it is free.

Plus bonus advice ☞ Get social networks off your menu – in those places insignificant persons feed you with nonsense, shallow ideas, and dubious attitudes. We cannot breathe from those would-be scholars and others’ opinions, and therefore we cannot think with our own heads. Choose an hour when you will check your networks and the time you will dedicate to it. Choose themes and characters whose ideas you want to see and remove those who have not treated your mind and your life with anything nutritious for all these years. All the garbage finds its way through the net(work)s, but also some healthy things. There are too few healthy things to stand out. Let’s remove the darnel so that we can see the beautiful scenes of ideas and thoughts that ennoble and awaken.

We learned so little from biology or mythology. We are bad students, that’s how we eat, too. No wonder great ideas and great people are an endangered species, undesirable and malnourished.

Zeus was lucky to be chosen and fed nectar. 19,999 bees do not receive nectar, only the lucky one does – the queen of the entire colony feeds on nectar and carries everything on her shoulders. We, truly blessed people, can treat ourselves to nectar every day, which will not only make us stronger but also calmer, happier, and better. Well, maybe we don’t all have money for chia, quinoa, salmon, and coconut oil. However, we all have the opportunity to feed our minds healthy and thus live worthy of the opportunities given to us.

How many times a week do you feed on nectar, and how many times on junk? Don’t forget that queens and gods eat healthy ;)