Word: nectar
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Most honeybee workers live no more than 40 days. They spend it collecting pollen and nectar, repairing the hive and acting as the slaves of their mother, the queen...
...break for them. A new queen is about to hatch, so the old queen tells all her trusty workers they're moving out. They get to gorge themselves on honey for a couple hours instead of flying three miles to find the best clover available for nectar. Then they fly off to a convenient tree and just sit there while a few unlucky bees try to find a new place to set up housekeeping...
...pursuit of happiness more lustily. An Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like Whitman, his fellow rhapsodist of Brooklyn, he sang only of himself -- in that great American form, the comic-romantic monologue -- but found in the self everything he needed: "If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without." Celebration, not cerebration...
...attempt to prove his point, Siegel presents exhaustive evidence of the quest for intoxication throughout history and throughout the animal kingdom. In many cases, humans and animals have shared the same drugs. Hawkmoths, for example, fly erratically after drinking the nectar of datura flowers. The Aztecs used the same plant as a pain-killer, and British soldiers in Jamestown who made a salad of its leaves became intoxicated for eleven days...
...monarchs migrate remains a mystery. Of the three to five generations that hatch every year, only the last goes south. Gorging on nectar, monarchs fly up to 100 miles a day. One explanation for the spectacular mass movement is that when the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated from North America, the butterflies expanded their range northward to exploit new food supplies, and then began migrating to survive the winter. How the butterflies find their winter hideouts is a conundrum as well. An intriguing theory suggests that, like certain species of birds, the monarchs may respond to the earth...