Honey

"The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey… and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it."
- Winnie the Pooh House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne

I guess you can say it was Winnie the Pooh who got me interested in honey. I used to watch that show whenever I got the chance, and still would if I knew what channel it was played on here. I tried to eat honey from a jar like Winnie did a few times, but after suffering from a severe toothache and a queasy stomach, I realized it was only meant for toast, not for tongue. As a Bi myself, albeit a different kind of "bee" (not to mention a "busy bee") honey is history to me as it was to the ancient Egyptians.

They say honey is the only food that doesn't spoil. Vegetables, meat, saltines, chips, and even hard candy will spoil over time, but honey will always remain the same. It will get stickier, and gooier, but it will still be edible, with the same smell and the same taste.

As I child, I never liked honey. I thought it was "yucky" since my dad always put it in yoghurt or oatmeal and I didn't like to eat any of those. Sugar was so hard to obtain when I was a baby, since my family was very large in China, so honey was our sweetener. Whenever I'd cry my grandmother would give me a little bit of honey to taste, sometimes with my milk, and I'd quiet down. I had no idea honey was the special product of bees. I didn't particularly like honey, since it gets stuck to your hands as you try to pour it out of the bottle. It was thick yellow slime that oozed onto my waffles with such a high viscosity and once it was out, it was out. There is no way that I'll ever learn how to pour honey neatly. It just becomes a pile of goo.

During my preteen years, I had a friend who had a severe allergy to peanut butter, so we would put honey on our toast instead. Rebecca also, ironically enough, was the one who got me interested in drinking tea – and put lots of honey in it since she wasn't a big fan of sugar. Ever since then, tea is not tea without honey and a slice of lemon, stirred and mixed into something that keeps you awake twice as long as coffee does and tastes infinitely better than the artificial sugars put into it.

That was all my knowledge of honey until I turned 13. I was wandering mindlessly in Sobeys (the Canadian equivalent to ShopRite) looking for vanilla extract for a baking project as my mother grocery shopped. As I slid past the honey section, I immediately stopped. Wait, there were more KINDS of honey? Not just regular mild honey? No – there was fruity honey, and herby, woodsy, spicy and aromatic. I was tempted to open a bottle and just smell it. For all I am not so fond of the taste, the scent of a flavour of honey sends my nose straight to heaven. Instead, as a respectful consumer, I begged my mother to buy about 8 different jars. (Actually, I didn't beg. I just put all the jars in the cart, but she caught me in time. I only got to pick two.)

At this point I now knew there was an infinite variety of honeys. Instead of calling it "bee poop," as I once did, I describe it more like gold in liquid form. Dad also says it's so much healthier than sugar, because it is a natural sweetener – it is pure and unprocessed and it is the only human food made by insects. Sure, we now have commercial honey that is only sweet and nothing else, but it loses its lack of richness behind the slime.

How could I blame Winnie the Pooh for going out of his way to get his honey? It is timeless, a carrier of history, whether it be my random experiences of it or "the food of the gods." It is a simple lover's calling of "Honey, be(e) mine," for the bee is Cupid's symbol, and every arrow tip is dipped in honey. Couples go on their "honeymoon" after their wedding. An older friend of mine sent me a jar of honey in her "just because" package, just because we are friends. From her to Rebecca to my parents, love comes in so many flavours, colours and appearances, and it is forever sweet and delicious. Not only that, it never spoils.

A/N: I wrote last year for a creative writing class... one of the few personal essays I actually liked. Honey is so sweet :)