National Honey Bee Day was August 18
Our favorite bear, Winnie the Pooh, loves honey and honey is, of course, made by bees, so it’s only appropriate that we take time out of our day to honor the hard workers on National Honey Bee Day, which was August 18.
National Honey Bee Day was started by the Los Angeles-based non-profit HoneyLove, with the mission to protect honeybees and pay homage to beekeepers.
Pooh wants to protect the honeybees too because they provide our cuddly little tubby with his favorite snack. He even sings about the sweet and sticky substance in The Mini Adventures of Winnie The Pooh, a Disney television show that debuted on the Disney Channel in 2011. The lyrics go a little like this:
Everything is honey, everywhere I see
Everything is honey, and that’s quite alright with me
I’m a bear of little brain, I can’t explain
Why everything will be changing to
The favorite snack of Winnie the Pooh … can you?
If everything is honey, and I am what I eat I must be made of honey and life is very sweet!
If you really want to see Pooh’s love of honey, you should watch Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, an animated short based on the first two chapters of the book of the same name. The short was released with the adorable Disney feature The Ugly Dachshund.
The plot is a familiar one: the silly old bear, desperate for honey, tries to get it from a bee tree but can’t, so he heads over to Rabbit’s house. Here he eats all of Rabbit’s honey stash which only makes him a little fluffier. When he leaves Rabbit’s front door, he gets stuck. What happens next? Well, you’ll have to make some popcorn and call the kiddies in because you can watch it together and find out!
If you prefer you can get Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree as a book too that would be a great bedtime story.
Isn’t Pooh the perfect spokesbear for saving honey bees? In 2015, the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), who were proving that the bee colonies were declining 50 percent year over year, thought so and teamed up with Pooh illustrator Mark Burgess, to create Winnie-the-Pooh and the Missing Bees and a guide to saving the honeybees.
In Winnie the Pooh and the Missing Bees, Pooh and Piglet visit the honeybees after noticing an unghastly honey shortage in The Hundred Acre Wood. The point of the book is to help honeybees by listening to Pooh, who encourages children to bake with local honey, become beekeepers and help spread wildflowers so the bees can pollinate.
Visit http://honeylove.org/support/ to find out what else you can do help Pooh bear’s favorite insects.
Want to learn more about these insects? In 2011, Disneynature released Wings of Life, narrated by Meryl Streep, where you can learn more about butterflies and bees, bats and flowers The New York Times said this about the documentary, which was directed by Louis Schwartzberg by “it’s reality captured, through time-lapse and high-speed techniques: if not the most exciting moviegoing, it’s praiseworthy.”
I’m sure Pooh would agree.