Tuesday, November 24, 2009
KXAN Reporting on the Honey Harvest!
Be sure to watch KXAN tonight at 5pm. They're sending out a camera crew this morning to film us taking a few supers off the hives. More to come!
As promised, I've posted some pics from this past weekend at the Farmer's Market.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Why We Need Bees and More People Becoming Organic Beekeepers
Makenna Goodman: Your book, Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture, offers up a program of natural beehive management, and an alternative to conventional chemical-based approaches. So -- why organic beekeeping?
Ross Conrad: History has shown us that the industrialized "economy of scale" approach does not work when applied to agriculture because we are dealing with living biological systems, not an inert assembly line food production system where the economy of scale approach can be applied across the board. One of the biggest issues is the large number of chemical contaminants that are being found in beeswax and pollen, often at very high concentrations. Toxic chemical contamination has been implicated in Colony Collapse and the reality is that there is no effective regulation of chemicals in Western society. Let me tell you why:
When the EPA was created in 1970 and sanctioned with the task of regulating chemicals, all the chemicals that were already used in commerce up to that time were grandfathered in. Additionally, since the EPA is given very limited personnel and financial resources, the agency ends up relying on the chemical manufacturers for the majority of the scientific data that is used to evaluate the safety of the regulated toxins…a serious conflict of interest. When chemicals are evaluated for toxicity, they are studied in isolation. Little thought is given to the chemical's break down products which can prove to be more toxic and longer lasting than the original chemical itself, such as in the case of Imidacloprid Olefin, which is produced as the neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid degrades. Once in use and released into the environment, chemicals, and their breakdown products, will combine with other chemicals already in the environment to form new compounds. The synergistic effects of some of these combinations have proven themselves to be hundreds of times more toxic than either compound on its own.
Recent research into endocrine-disrupting chemicals (the kind often used as pesticides), reveals that the timing of exposure combines with the amount of exposure to produce a chemical's effect. Thus, a certain dose might be very toxic to an organism in its developmental stage, while not having any obvious detrimental affects on the organism once it has matures, or vice-verse. To make matters worse, in some cases low doses of a chemical can be more damaging than higher doses. These new understandings of chemical toxicity have proven wrong Paracelsus's 450-year-old maxim, "The dose makes the poison." Today we know that often the timing can make the poison and that sometimes less is actually worse.
Add to this the many studies that now show that a cocktail of "insignificant" doses of several chemicals each acting on their own can combine to have significant results. In other words, exposure to very low concentrations of several chemicals at the same time can cause biological effects that none of the chemicals would have on their own. Thus when an living organism is exposed to a mixture of chemicals, every component contributes to the overall effect, no matter how minute their concentration. The only sane answer to our ignorance in the use of these toxic compounds is to stop using these chemicals, not only in our hives, but in our everyday lives. Thus, organic beekeeping came into being in just the last 20 years as a response to the fact that chemical use in bee hives has became the common way to try to control Varroa mites. Organic beekeeping is not only possible, but necessary.
MG: What are the biggest obstacles faced by organic beekeepers today?
RC: The biggest challenge beekeepers face today is the same challenge facing all of Western industrial civilization…
In his 1980 book, Overshoot, William Catton, Jr. states, "Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential." This statement refers to the problem of cumulative impacts where actions that are harmless or tolerable at the individual level can degrade the planets life support systems if thousands or millions of people do them. One person fertilizing their lawn near Chesapeake Bay for example makes no significant impact, but when thousands do it the bay becomes degraded and Blue Crab populations decline precipitously.
When it comes to chemicals the current regulatory approach to controlling pollution does not deal with global pollution. The main focus has instead been on the maximally exposed individual. In the United States, we conduct risk assessments (used when conducting "cost-benefit" analyses) to evaluate the risk to a hypothetical "maximally exposed" individual. If the threat to that individual (or honey bee) is found to fall within acceptable limits, then regulation does not occur and these so-called acceptable amounts of contamination are allowed to be released forever after. Then another risk assessment and cost benefit analysis gives the go-ahead to another acceptable release or use of a different toxic substance or harmful activity. Then another and another. What we have not started to look at until recently is the total impact of all these acceptable risks. Our society has assumed that it could tolerate unlimited small amounts of harm as a byproduct of economic growth. It is only when a particular activity is demonstrated to fail to provide a net benefit to society that most of our property and environmental laws are permitted to interfere with economic activity.
Biochemist and lawyer, Joseph H. Guth, legal director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, has analyzed this situation and offered solutions in several scholarly papers one of which was published in the Barry Law Review, titled "Cumulative Impacts: Death-Knell for Cost-Benefit Analysis In Environmental Decisions." In this paper Guth points out that our laws only forbid damage when the perceived benefits are not considered to outweigh the cost or destruction to the environment or human health. The law also puts the burden of proof that an activity is creating more harm than good on the injured party, or the government. If the victim (or the government) can not meet the burden of proof, then the damaging action is allowed to continue by default. This burden of proof transforms doubt, and missing scientific information into a barrier to legal protection for the environment (and honey bees). The default presumption is that the benefits of economic activity always outweigh the costs unless a specific cost-benefit analysis (often based upon incomplete or faulty research conducted by those that stand to profit) can show otherwise.
According to Joe Guth, "These laws do not permit regulators broadly to take account of what is happening to the world around them. They embed regulators in a decision-making structure that may seem scientific but in fact is profoundly unscientific because it prevents them from responding to the ever more detailed findings by the world scientific community that we are overshooting the Earth's ecological capacities. Rooted in the assumption that ecological overshoot does not occur, our current statutes are incapable of containing the cumulative scale of ecological damage… It is an approach that has become outdated because it is based on assumptions that are no longer valid."
Guth sums up by stating, "To maintain a functioning biosphere in which humans can prosper, the law must turn its attention to the problem of cumulative impacts. The law will have to abandon its use of cost-benefit analysis to justify individual environmental impacts and instead adopt the goal of maintaining the functioning ecological systems that we are so dependent upon."
In Section II of his "Cumulative Impacts" paper, Joe Guth states that "Our legal system already harbors examples of decision-making structures that establish a principle of standard of environmental quality or human health and do not rely on cost-benefit balancing." and that these examples "show that such legal principles or standards can enable the legal system to contain the growth of cumulative impacts." The cumulative impacts of our culture are destroying the life support systems of the planet and the bees are simply acting as the proverbial "canary in the coal mine." As a result we don't have an environmental problem that we can "solve" we have a situation we must learn to adjust to. The actions that needed to be taken to rectify our predicament should have been taken years ago. At this point the damage is done. The only real question left is whether our actions today are going to result in our great grandchildren living a difficult life in a crippled world that is a shadow of the world we live in today, or are we going to inflict damage that is so devastating that we will have created a total catastrophe for future generations?
MG: Describe briefly beekeeping as a business. How much energy do you focus on honey production?
RC: Honey production is not the focus of my beekeeping business at all. The focus is on caring for the honey bees and keeping the colonies as healthy and vibrant as possible. This means primarily reducing stress on the bees. In fact the only consistent observation that has been made of hives suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is that the bees in infected colonies are always suffering from stress that has caused the bee's immune systems to collapse. While there are numerous stresses that the bees must deal with that we cannot directly control (see below), there are numerous other stresses on the hive that we do have control over. Such stressors include reducing chemical contaminants in the hive, eliminating the presence of antibiotics in the hive, making sure that the bees are fed a healthy diet of honey and pollen from a wide variety of plants and that the hives have access to clean uncontaminated water. When the bees health needs are taken care of, a honey harvest tends to be the natural result.
MG: Let's say I'm an aspiring small-scale farmer, or beginning life on a homestead, or merely thinking of expanding my urban garden. Why should I keep bees, in terms of honey production, and their pollination benefits, etc?
RC: The biggest benefit honey bees provide is pollination. Pollination fees are what is keeping the beekeeping industry alive today. Honey is really a byproduct of pollination. Why should anybody keep bees? As suggested above, the life support systems of our planet are collapsing. The forests are disappearing, desert regions are growing, the climate is shifting so that some areas are getting dryer, other areas are getting wetter, some areas are getting colder, other areas are getting warmer, and our oceans are collapsing with large dead zones, acidification, giant "islands" of floating plastic debris, collapsing fisheries, and ocean animals that are dying in greater numbers every day from cancer. My observation is that it is our industrial civilization that is, if not the actual cause of all this destruction, it is certainly contributing to the devastation. As a member of this society then, I am partly responsible and part of the problem. This is a wonderful thing, for if I am part of the problem, then I have the responsibility and am empowered to be part of the solution.
One of the greatest lessons we learn from the honey bee is in observing how they go about making their "living" here on earth. As they go about their business collecting pollen, nectar, propolis and water (everything they need to survive) they do not harm or kill anything in the process. Unless they feel threatened and are forced to defend themselves, not so much as a leaf on a plant is harmed. In the process of taking what they need to survive they in turn give back more than they take and make the world a better place through the pollination the plants. This gift of pollination ensures that the plants can thrive and reproduce in vast numbers which produces a large variety of seeds, nuts, berries, fruits and vegetable in all shapes and sizes, which in turn ensures an abundance of food for all the rest of the insects, animals and people on the planet. This is the ultimate lesson that the bees teach us and challenge us to accomplish: How to live our life in a way that by taking what we need from the world around us we leave the world better than we found it.
Each one of us who takes care of the honey bees and makes sure that there is adequate habitat and flowering plants for the native pollinators in our regions, is indirectly through the good work of these pollinators, making the world a better place for all of creation. This is the kind of healing our beautiful blue-green planet needs desperately at this time in history.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Photos from the Beekeeping Class
Thanks to Addie Broyles,writer for the Austin American-Statesman, we have some wonderful photos of the beekeeping class that took place November 14. If you're considering taking the class, see below to get an idea for what it is all about.
I always start classes with a brief discussion of types of bees, the bee life cycle, the parts of the hive, and the types of honey to be found in central Texas.
We then suit up!
Next, we go out to the teaching hive and light the torch. Many students are surprised to learn we have to use a torch to get the smoker going. Raw cotton wads and cedar don't light easily!
We work down, super by super (super is the name for the upper sections of the bee box), frame by frame, checking the status of the hive.
In the uppermost part of the hive the bees were depositing new honey, which will be dried out and capped over the coming days and weeks.
This Praying Mantis was just hanging out near the hive. I've seen her and her friends there before many times, but never knew why. A few minutes into the lesson she was knawing on a bee. I never knew prior to seeing it that PM's eat bees.
This visit to the hives left me with one major impression...how healthy my bees are! Watching my girls I felt they were wiggling their fat abdomens just to make the other bugs jealous!
Just as I was contemplating the beauty and health of the hive, I smell a foul odor which indicated to me that alarm pheremones had been "set off." In any case, the bees decided to come out to fight!
Despite a few angry bees, and a hungry praying mantis, we finally found what we were looking for. From deep in the hive we pulled beautiful, tangy, and wonderfully delicious honey! Students each took home a little. Now that's a great souvenir!
Killer Bees May be Among the Most Feared of All Insects - But They Ain't Too Smart.
November 18, 2009 5:18 PM
Killer Bees: Nasty Sting, Not So Smart
Ewen Callaway, Reporter
A new study has compared the wits of Africanized killer honey bees with those of a more docile European breed.
Killer bees - which result from a cross between African honey bees and a Brazilian variety in the 1950s - have spread from Central American into the southern United States. Increased intelligence had been suggested as one reason for this expansion.
Apparently not.
A team led by Margaret Couvillon at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, tested the abilities of both kinds of bee to associate a whiff of jasmine with a sugar reward.
"Surprisingly, we found that fewer Africanized honeybees learn to associate an odor with a reward. Additionally, fewer Africanized honeybees remembered the association a day later," the team write.
When researchers gave bees a second whiff, about half of European honeybees stuck out their tonguelike proboscises as soon as the odor wafted by again, anticipating another drop of sugar water. The bees acted like Pavlov's dogs, drooling at the sound of a bell they associate with food, Couvillon says.
"Only about half as many killer bees picked up the association after a single trial, the researchers found," Science News reports.
Foraging style could explain this difference. European honey bees tend travel vast distances in search of flowery meals and they revisit sites. A keen memory and an ability to learn quickly would benefit this strategy. Killer bees, on the other hand, don't wander far from their hives and they often visit new flowers, so learning might not be as important, Couvillon's team speculates.
"Perhaps learning has a cost," Couvillon says. "If it were cost-free, wouldn't we all be getting smarter?"
Killer Bees: Nasty Sting, Not So Smart
Ewen Callaway, Reporter
A new study has compared the wits of Africanized killer honey bees with those of a more docile European breed.
Killer bees - which result from a cross between African honey bees and a Brazilian variety in the 1950s - have spread from Central American into the southern United States. Increased intelligence had been suggested as one reason for this expansion.
Apparently not.
A team led by Margaret Couvillon at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, tested the abilities of both kinds of bee to associate a whiff of jasmine with a sugar reward.
"Surprisingly, we found that fewer Africanized honeybees learn to associate an odor with a reward. Additionally, fewer Africanized honeybees remembered the association a day later," the team write.
When researchers gave bees a second whiff, about half of European honeybees stuck out their tonguelike proboscises as soon as the odor wafted by again, anticipating another drop of sugar water. The bees acted like Pavlov's dogs, drooling at the sound of a bell they associate with food, Couvillon says.
"Only about half as many killer bees picked up the association after a single trial, the researchers found," Science News reports.
Foraging style could explain this difference. European honey bees tend travel vast distances in search of flowery meals and they revisit sites. A keen memory and an ability to learn quickly would benefit this strategy. Killer bees, on the other hand, don't wander far from their hives and they often visit new flowers, so learning might not be as important, Couvillon's team speculates.
"Perhaps learning has a cost," Couvillon says. "If it were cost-free, wouldn't we all be getting smarter?"
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Austin Chronicle Story About Round Rock Honey from Summer 09
HOME: JUNE 12, 2009: FOOD
text size
A Taste of Honey
From out of the mouths of bees ...
BY WAYNE ALAN BRENNER
Photo by John Anderson
This is how it happens:
A little furry winged marauder of an insect goes buzzing from her home, rapes a flower, sucks out the nectar, gets pollen all up in her leg hairs, flies back to the communal hive, and commences throwing up into her mouth. She performs this regurgitation several times, working the fluid back and forth between mouth and innards until, finally, the xanthic stream is ready to be disgorged into a six-sided wax cell for some lucky little larva to feast upon. Or, perhaps, lucky you.
Honey. Bit o' honey, taste of honey, milk and honey, the golden treasure that flows, most familiarly these days, from little jars of bear-shaped plastic and into your tea, onto your toast, over a stack of steaming hotcakes like circular paradise turning your morning into a better reason to stay awake.
Honey production has been going on for a long, long time. Bees, or beelike proto insects, have been around since the Silurian period – approximately 450 million years ago. While our favorite stinging bugs were busily complicating plant life on this ball of mud, the first Darwin-fish had yet to poke its head from the primordial ooze, and humans, always late to the party, wouldn't start forming their credit-card debt and historic neighborhood associations for millennia.
There's a cave painting in Spain that shows early humans gathering honey – about 10,000 years ago. The ancient Greeks loved the stuff, and so did the Romans; the ancient Egyptians, when they weren't using honey to embalm their honored dead, ate it by the bowlful. After being ecumenically pimped by the Christian church for centuries throughout Europe and beyond, after being celebrated by Chaucer and Shakespeare and untold numbers of starry-eyed scribblers, honey made its way, in the hives and holds of conquerors, to the New World. (Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" captured this invasion in verse, name-checking the honeybee specifically.) The indigenous people knew something wicked their way came when bees invariably preceded the approaching palefaced human swarm: Hello, honey, someone's home.
Photo by John Anderson
Those bees from the Old World were some variety of what scientists and beekeepers know as Apis mellifera. They're arthropods, insects of the class Hymenoptera, a remarkably social creature whose society is not only matriarchal but almost exclusively female. The honey that they make is, after bee-gut enzymes have finished their cunning molecular prestidigitation, a mixture of fructose (in the neighborhood of 40%) and glucose (around 30%) and other carbohydrates, with minor traces of vitamins and minerals, plus the faint whiff and flavor of whatever flowers the nectar was gathered from.
From Colonies to Collapse
The art of beekeeping, long a mainstay of monks and monarchs, was brought from a relatively difficult and haphazard activity to its modern level of practicality by American apiarist Lorenzo Langstroth's invention, patented in 1852, of hives that incorporate moveable honeycomb frames. It turns out that bees, like other societies, need a certain amount of space in which to happily do their thing; observant and clever Langstroth referred to this as "bee space" and reckoned the necessary dimensions for maximum joy and much honey. Around this same time, several thousand people in economically dismal and bureaucratically repressive Germany were needing a different space in which to happily do their thing, and so they moved to the New World – many of them to Texas. Among these immigrants was a beekeeper named Wilhelm Bruckish, who came to ground in New Braunfels and did much to spread apiculture throughout our section of the Lone Star State way back then. And, later, still others exercised their honey-happy skills and enthusiasm to lead us past William Butler Yeats' bee-loud glade to where we are today.
And today, according to reports from the National Honey Board, there's greater demand for domestic honey than in previous years. There are numerous brands of blended varieties of the sweet goo; there are fancy monoflorals, in which the bees take their nectar from clover exclusively or from orange blossoms or yaupon holly and so on; there's organic honey and honey that's been whipped into a more spreadable sort of froth. Unfortunately, there's also a two-year drought to make the industry less certain of flourishing. And there's something called Colony Collapse Disorder.
That's an especially scary thing, that last, as bees are the chief pollinators of plants – which we need to survive, of course, whether we're eating those plants or the animals that eat them first. No pollination, no plants; no plants, ultimately starvation. And entire colonies of bees are going kaput (at an alarming rate) for reasons unknown and mysterious, if you believe the media hype. Well, not so mysterious, really, as they are vague.
"It's a condition – it's more than one specific thing," says Austin's Carol Malcolm, leader of the Capitol Area Honey Bee Stewards until they disbanded in 2004. "It could be a virus or a bacteria or whatever. It's seen in situations where bees are stressed – meaning, bees that are transported for pollination. Or huge, corporate bee operations. Because you can watch a single hive, and the minute there's something wrong with the queen, you can get a new queen in. Or, in most parts of the country, the time when the queen starts laying eggs in the spring and the time when the flowers start blooming, that may be out of sync. So the queen will start laying, and the bees will eat any provisioned honey, and you've got to be careful and make sure that they have sufficient food. And if they don't, you have to feed them. In big operations, they just aren't able to, you know, coddle a particular hive that may need extra food or whatever. So I think that what we're seeing with Colony Collapse Disorder could be a lot of things. It could be a pathogen; it could be some environmental influences as well."
"The big thing recently was varroa mites," says Larry Butler of Austin's Boggy Creek Farm. Butler sells a distinctive yaupon-based honey gathered from bees on his family's land up in Gause, Texas. "Bees can get tracheal mites and varroa mites," he explains. "And the varroa mite has the same incubation period that a bee does, so when the queen lays her eggs, the mites will lay their eggs in the cell at the same time. And when the bee hatches, so does the mite, and the mite starts sucking on the bee. And they come out all deformed or dead, and pretty soon, the hive's wiped out. Some people use some kind of antibiotics, others use some kind of smoke that will kill the mites but not the bees, but there's been a lot of trouble with those mites. But that's not the entire cause of the colony collapse thing. It could certainly be pesticide. I've heard that it's everything from cell phones and cell-phone towers to a new pesticide that's on the market, but I don't really know. But these guys get out there in their airplanes in the morning and start spraying, face it, they're gonna kill a lot of bees, you know? And the bees that don't die until they get back to the hive, well, they're gonna kill what's in the hive. One good thing about being organic, you're not spraying a bunch of pesticides that's gonna be killing your bees."
Larry Butler and yaupon honey from Boggy Creek Farm
Photo by John Anderson
Wait, cell phones? Malcolm doesn't buy that. "That was a study that was done in France, and it was misinterpreted and misquoted," she says. "I don't believe that it's cell-phone towers."
As noted, CCD doesn't often affect smaller, noncommercial beekeepers. "It's more of a problem among large corporate concerns," says Konrad Bouffard of Round Rock Honey (which is no minor operation itself and about which you can read more in this article's sweet sidebar, "A Man, a Plan, and Some Bees"). "At least when they aren't able to devote enough time and effort to caring for their hives."
"It's caused by a lot of different things," affirms Good Flow Honey Co.'s Tom Crofut. "Mites certainly don't help out any. That knocks down the bees so they can't control the viruses that are already there. Just like with human beings: If your immune system tanks, all sorts of bad things can happen to you. And you have thousands of bees crowded together in a small area, so if there's a problem, well, it gets passed around."
Local Buzz
Good Flow, whose better-known fresh-juice operation was recently shuttered due to federal regulations, has been in the honey business since 1975. And, regardless of CCD and droughts and somewhat Byzantine U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, it's doing well. "Way back in the mid-Seventies, I sold my honey to food co-ops – Woody Hills and Wheatsville – and then to the Good Food stores. And then I ran out of honey, so I started buying honey from other beekeepers, because we sell more honey than we can produce; it's awfully popular at the moment. Americans are faddists; it might be wheatgrass this year and omega-3 next year and whatever after that – because we're all looking for the silver bullet, the superfood. And our honey's popular because it's got a small carbon footprint, it's produced locally, it's healthful to the consumer. And it's kind of neat to watch bees working flowers in your garden or whatever. You know – pollinating them. Bees serve a purpose. The whole thing's just generally a nice trip."
Boggy Creek Farm's yaupon honey is another successful part of this generally nice trip. "Some of the honeys that are touted, like clover honey, they're the ones that have all the fame and glory," says Butler. "But once I started selling the yaupon here, people were saying, 'My God, that's good honey!' It's unpasteurized, and other than having a screen under it, to get out the cappings from the frames and dead bees, things like that – once we get that strained out, it goes right into a bucket, and then we repack it to sell. People love it in their coffee, and I know that Olivia and Wink, the restaurants, they do a lot of different things with it. They use it to sweeten some of their stuff, some kind of reduced balsamic vinegar with yaupon honey." He smiles at the thought of it, wrinkles creasing the weathered skin around his eyes. "I've got a barrel coming, a 55-gallon drum, and that's a lot of honey," he says. "It'll probably last me the year, but when we put it out for sale next Saturday, I'll bet we go through two cases of it right there."
So the future's as bright as a bee's behind?
"Man, if we ever lose all our bees, we're in trouble," says Butler. "Bees are a real win-win, multifunctional insect, and we need to keep that viable. We need the pollination. I know that, supposedly, in the government's stimulus package, there was gonna be money for bees. And a lot of the – I won't say Republicans – a lot of conservative people weren't happy with that. I had one guy remark: 'They wanna spend $5 million on bees – on bee research! How's that gonna help the economy?' And I said: 'Well, how 'bout if there isn't any food? What's that gonna do to the economy?'"
Food for thought, there. And, for dessert, perhaps something made with honey? Or drizzled with honey, with that natural sweetener that has served as nourishment and delight for pharaohs and kings and paupers and priests, with liquid gold robbed from, as Sleater-Kinney put it in "One Beat," the perfect hexagon of the honeycomb.
text size
A Taste of Honey
From out of the mouths of bees ...
BY WAYNE ALAN BRENNER
Photo by John Anderson
This is how it happens:
A little furry winged marauder of an insect goes buzzing from her home, rapes a flower, sucks out the nectar, gets pollen all up in her leg hairs, flies back to the communal hive, and commences throwing up into her mouth. She performs this regurgitation several times, working the fluid back and forth between mouth and innards until, finally, the xanthic stream is ready to be disgorged into a six-sided wax cell for some lucky little larva to feast upon. Or, perhaps, lucky you.
Honey. Bit o' honey, taste of honey, milk and honey, the golden treasure that flows, most familiarly these days, from little jars of bear-shaped plastic and into your tea, onto your toast, over a stack of steaming hotcakes like circular paradise turning your morning into a better reason to stay awake.
Honey production has been going on for a long, long time. Bees, or beelike proto insects, have been around since the Silurian period – approximately 450 million years ago. While our favorite stinging bugs were busily complicating plant life on this ball of mud, the first Darwin-fish had yet to poke its head from the primordial ooze, and humans, always late to the party, wouldn't start forming their credit-card debt and historic neighborhood associations for millennia.
There's a cave painting in Spain that shows early humans gathering honey – about 10,000 years ago. The ancient Greeks loved the stuff, and so did the Romans; the ancient Egyptians, when they weren't using honey to embalm their honored dead, ate it by the bowlful. After being ecumenically pimped by the Christian church for centuries throughout Europe and beyond, after being celebrated by Chaucer and Shakespeare and untold numbers of starry-eyed scribblers, honey made its way, in the hives and holds of conquerors, to the New World. (Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" captured this invasion in verse, name-checking the honeybee specifically.) The indigenous people knew something wicked their way came when bees invariably preceded the approaching palefaced human swarm: Hello, honey, someone's home.
Photo by John Anderson
Those bees from the Old World were some variety of what scientists and beekeepers know as Apis mellifera. They're arthropods, insects of the class Hymenoptera, a remarkably social creature whose society is not only matriarchal but almost exclusively female. The honey that they make is, after bee-gut enzymes have finished their cunning molecular prestidigitation, a mixture of fructose (in the neighborhood of 40%) and glucose (around 30%) and other carbohydrates, with minor traces of vitamins and minerals, plus the faint whiff and flavor of whatever flowers the nectar was gathered from.
From Colonies to Collapse
The art of beekeeping, long a mainstay of monks and monarchs, was brought from a relatively difficult and haphazard activity to its modern level of practicality by American apiarist Lorenzo Langstroth's invention, patented in 1852, of hives that incorporate moveable honeycomb frames. It turns out that bees, like other societies, need a certain amount of space in which to happily do their thing; observant and clever Langstroth referred to this as "bee space" and reckoned the necessary dimensions for maximum joy and much honey. Around this same time, several thousand people in economically dismal and bureaucratically repressive Germany were needing a different space in which to happily do their thing, and so they moved to the New World – many of them to Texas. Among these immigrants was a beekeeper named Wilhelm Bruckish, who came to ground in New Braunfels and did much to spread apiculture throughout our section of the Lone Star State way back then. And, later, still others exercised their honey-happy skills and enthusiasm to lead us past William Butler Yeats' bee-loud glade to where we are today.
And today, according to reports from the National Honey Board, there's greater demand for domestic honey than in previous years. There are numerous brands of blended varieties of the sweet goo; there are fancy monoflorals, in which the bees take their nectar from clover exclusively or from orange blossoms or yaupon holly and so on; there's organic honey and honey that's been whipped into a more spreadable sort of froth. Unfortunately, there's also a two-year drought to make the industry less certain of flourishing. And there's something called Colony Collapse Disorder.
That's an especially scary thing, that last, as bees are the chief pollinators of plants – which we need to survive, of course, whether we're eating those plants or the animals that eat them first. No pollination, no plants; no plants, ultimately starvation. And entire colonies of bees are going kaput (at an alarming rate) for reasons unknown and mysterious, if you believe the media hype. Well, not so mysterious, really, as they are vague.
"It's a condition – it's more than one specific thing," says Austin's Carol Malcolm, leader of the Capitol Area Honey Bee Stewards until they disbanded in 2004. "It could be a virus or a bacteria or whatever. It's seen in situations where bees are stressed – meaning, bees that are transported for pollination. Or huge, corporate bee operations. Because you can watch a single hive, and the minute there's something wrong with the queen, you can get a new queen in. Or, in most parts of the country, the time when the queen starts laying eggs in the spring and the time when the flowers start blooming, that may be out of sync. So the queen will start laying, and the bees will eat any provisioned honey, and you've got to be careful and make sure that they have sufficient food. And if they don't, you have to feed them. In big operations, they just aren't able to, you know, coddle a particular hive that may need extra food or whatever. So I think that what we're seeing with Colony Collapse Disorder could be a lot of things. It could be a pathogen; it could be some environmental influences as well."
"The big thing recently was varroa mites," says Larry Butler of Austin's Boggy Creek Farm. Butler sells a distinctive yaupon-based honey gathered from bees on his family's land up in Gause, Texas. "Bees can get tracheal mites and varroa mites," he explains. "And the varroa mite has the same incubation period that a bee does, so when the queen lays her eggs, the mites will lay their eggs in the cell at the same time. And when the bee hatches, so does the mite, and the mite starts sucking on the bee. And they come out all deformed or dead, and pretty soon, the hive's wiped out. Some people use some kind of antibiotics, others use some kind of smoke that will kill the mites but not the bees, but there's been a lot of trouble with those mites. But that's not the entire cause of the colony collapse thing. It could certainly be pesticide. I've heard that it's everything from cell phones and cell-phone towers to a new pesticide that's on the market, but I don't really know. But these guys get out there in their airplanes in the morning and start spraying, face it, they're gonna kill a lot of bees, you know? And the bees that don't die until they get back to the hive, well, they're gonna kill what's in the hive. One good thing about being organic, you're not spraying a bunch of pesticides that's gonna be killing your bees."
Larry Butler and yaupon honey from Boggy Creek Farm
Photo by John Anderson
Wait, cell phones? Malcolm doesn't buy that. "That was a study that was done in France, and it was misinterpreted and misquoted," she says. "I don't believe that it's cell-phone towers."
As noted, CCD doesn't often affect smaller, noncommercial beekeepers. "It's more of a problem among large corporate concerns," says Konrad Bouffard of Round Rock Honey (which is no minor operation itself and about which you can read more in this article's sweet sidebar, "A Man, a Plan, and Some Bees"). "At least when they aren't able to devote enough time and effort to caring for their hives."
"It's caused by a lot of different things," affirms Good Flow Honey Co.'s Tom Crofut. "Mites certainly don't help out any. That knocks down the bees so they can't control the viruses that are already there. Just like with human beings: If your immune system tanks, all sorts of bad things can happen to you. And you have thousands of bees crowded together in a small area, so if there's a problem, well, it gets passed around."
Local Buzz
Good Flow, whose better-known fresh-juice operation was recently shuttered due to federal regulations, has been in the honey business since 1975. And, regardless of CCD and droughts and somewhat Byzantine U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, it's doing well. "Way back in the mid-Seventies, I sold my honey to food co-ops – Woody Hills and Wheatsville – and then to the Good Food stores. And then I ran out of honey, so I started buying honey from other beekeepers, because we sell more honey than we can produce; it's awfully popular at the moment. Americans are faddists; it might be wheatgrass this year and omega-3 next year and whatever after that – because we're all looking for the silver bullet, the superfood. And our honey's popular because it's got a small carbon footprint, it's produced locally, it's healthful to the consumer. And it's kind of neat to watch bees working flowers in your garden or whatever. You know – pollinating them. Bees serve a purpose. The whole thing's just generally a nice trip."
Boggy Creek Farm's yaupon honey is another successful part of this generally nice trip. "Some of the honeys that are touted, like clover honey, they're the ones that have all the fame and glory," says Butler. "But once I started selling the yaupon here, people were saying, 'My God, that's good honey!' It's unpasteurized, and other than having a screen under it, to get out the cappings from the frames and dead bees, things like that – once we get that strained out, it goes right into a bucket, and then we repack it to sell. People love it in their coffee, and I know that Olivia and Wink, the restaurants, they do a lot of different things with it. They use it to sweeten some of their stuff, some kind of reduced balsamic vinegar with yaupon honey." He smiles at the thought of it, wrinkles creasing the weathered skin around his eyes. "I've got a barrel coming, a 55-gallon drum, and that's a lot of honey," he says. "It'll probably last me the year, but when we put it out for sale next Saturday, I'll bet we go through two cases of it right there."
So the future's as bright as a bee's behind?
"Man, if we ever lose all our bees, we're in trouble," says Butler. "Bees are a real win-win, multifunctional insect, and we need to keep that viable. We need the pollination. I know that, supposedly, in the government's stimulus package, there was gonna be money for bees. And a lot of the – I won't say Republicans – a lot of conservative people weren't happy with that. I had one guy remark: 'They wanna spend $5 million on bees – on bee research! How's that gonna help the economy?' And I said: 'Well, how 'bout if there isn't any food? What's that gonna do to the economy?'"
Food for thought, there. And, for dessert, perhaps something made with honey? Or drizzled with honey, with that natural sweetener that has served as nourishment and delight for pharaohs and kings and paupers and priests, with liquid gold robbed from, as Sleater-Kinney put it in "One Beat," the perfect hexagon of the honeycomb.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Famous Beekeepers from History
This falls into the category of “Did you know?” Find below a list compiled by Apitrak of…FAMOUS PERSONS FROM HISTORY WHO KEPT BEES
Aristotle
This Greek beekeeper and scientist used simple hives with wooden strip top-bars. Some of his observations about bees were pretty clever, others were dead wrong.
Ben Franklin
With everything from bi-focals, lightning, and the US Constitution in his realm of interests, it is not surprising he is mentioned by Thomas Wildman as a patron for Wildman's 1768 Treatise on the Management of Bees.
Bill Dennison
This former Mayor of Toronto and beekeeper had bees before his election- keeping them in the heart of the city. Whenever there was an angry swarm, the police would call His Majesty the Mayor. He would get his smoker and go fetch the bees - not every city of 3 million can claim such hands-on care from an elected official!!
Bishop William Skylstad
Amateur radio enthusiast, beekeeper, fisherman - and now (since 2004) president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Brigham Young
A very famous American beekeeper... His interest in bees led to Utah being called the 'Beehive State' and having skep hives as emblems.
Democritus
This famous ancient (lived to be 109) Greek apicultural researcher, beekeeper and philosopher taught that new bees could be made from rotting oxen - the King Bee, he figured out, came from decaying bull brains.
Fred Hale, Sr.
Before he died at age 113, in November, 2004, Fred Hale was the oldest (documented) man in the world. An easy-going Maine beekeeper and gardener, he was driving a car at age 107 and shoveling snow at age 112.
Harlan J. Smith, Ph.D.
This Texan beekeeper was director of McDonald Observatory since 1963 and has attained worldwide recognition as an astronomer, researcher and administrator of one of the world's finest observatories and in his work with NASA.
Henry Fonda
The star of 96 films, this hobby beekeeper gave away honey in jars that he labeled Henry's Honey. When he was a youngster, he'd earned the Eagle Scout badge for beekeeping.
John Eels
A controversy resulting from an experimental apiary in Newbury, Massachusettes, in 1645 (just 20 years after the Mayflower) surrounded Mr. John Eels. He was put in charge of the village bees and quickly became North America's very first pauper, requiring financial assistance from the town in order to survive. (Let that be a forewarning to any potential beekeeper: a beekeeper was the first welfare case in the USA.)
JS Harbison
One of the first beekeepers in California. Harbison arrived from Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, about 1850 and brought bees from the east, through Panama, and up to southern California. His greatest claim to fame was the biggest crop of honey in the world (1868) and his subsequent shipment of train car loads of comb honey from California to Chicago and New York.
Karl Kehrle
Better known as Brother Adam. The Benedictine monk (Buckfast Abbey, England) developed the famous Buckfast Bee, and became the leader of a short-lived beekeeping cult movement.
Karl von Frisch
Translated the bee's dance into German and won the Nobel Prize for this and related animal beehavior studies.
Le Quy Quynh
A military strategist and medical healer, Le Quy Quynh resides in Ho Chi Minh City(Saigon), Vietnam. He is well known and respected in Vietnam as a "Hero of the Revolution" for leading forces from the North first against the French, then against the US. He served as Adjutant to General Giiap, and as defense minister in Ho Chi Minh's first post-war cabinet. However, his real claim to fame is his 50 years as a beekeeper and his research, cultivation and medical treatment using bees and bee products. He is famous in Vietnam for his healing techniques -many of his patients are victims of severe war related injuries - he has worked wonders on their wounds. He is interested in exchanging information with others - through his American grandson.
Leon Tolstoy
This Russian author was a beekeeper. His wife, Sonja, talked about him "crouching in front of his hives, net over his head." And she wrote in her diary, "The apiary has become the centre of the world for him now, and everybody has to be interested exclusively in Bees!" Tolstoy mentions beekeeping twice in War and Peace (it's a long book, you'd expect beekeeping to come up, wouldn't you?) Tolstoy describes the evacuation of Moscow: "Moscow was empty. It was deserted as a dying, queenless hive is deserted." Read more on bees and beekeeping from War and Peace.
Lord BadenPowell
Founder of the Boy Scouts in England. This beekeeper, once when producing honey for showing, mistakenly allowed it to overheat and the honey became dark. He showed it anyway and due to his prestige this created a fashion for dark honey in England for many years.
Maria von Trapp
Yes, after the family escaped Austria, the little nun and governess from the Sound of Music kept bees on her Vermont farm.
Martha Stewart
The cute-as-a-button harbinger of American Style has been a model, a stockbroker, and a beekeeper for over twenty-five years! The avid gardener realized a long time ago that keeping bees is a good thing. If you are unfamiliar with this fascinating character, crawl out from under your rock and jump to Martha Stewart Living!
Peter Fonda
Actor, activist, was named Beekeeper of the Year by the Florida State Beekeeping Association for deftly portraying Ulee in Ulee's Gold,and for his contributions to beekeeping.
Raymond Poincare
This beekeeper was president of France during the Great War. He took time out by tending his beehives behind the Presidential Palace.
Sherlock Holmes
This great detective retired to a simple life of puttering around with bees. As a beekeeper, he continued to demonstrate his problem-solving expertise.
Sir Edmund Hillary
A commercial beekeeper (he and his brother owned 1200 hives) from New Zealand, along with Tenzing Norgay, first scaled Mount Everest, in May, 1953.
Sylvia Plath
American poet (for something really depressing, try (The Bee Meeting) and author, 1932 - 1962, inspired largely by her father, Otto Plath, and his beekeeping. She lived a tragic, prolific, short life. Her biography is on Great American Poets: Plath.
Thomas Edison
We don't know if Tom himself was a beekeeper, but his estate in Fort Myers, Florida, continues to keep bees in the fashion that Edisonmay have had them when he was producing beeswax for use in his scientific experiments.
Thomas Jefferson
He was the third American president, but he had a lot of interests outside politics. He was an avid beekeeper. Thomas Jefferson, in his nature book Notes on Virginia, wrote this about how the honey bee came to North America: "The honeybee is not a native of our country. Marcgrave, indeed, mentions a species of honeybee in Brazil. But this has no sting, and is therefore different from the one we have, which resembles perfectly that of Europe. The Indians concur with us in the tradition that it was brought from Europe, but when and by whom we know not. The bees have generally extended themselves into the country a little in advance of the settlers. The Indians, therefore, called them the white man's fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlement of the whites."
Vicente Fox
The ex president of Mexico says that they used bee stings as a test for bravery on the family ranch when he was a youngster.
Viktor Yushchenko
The leader of the democracy (orange) movement and president of the Ukraineis an avid beekeeper.
Aristotle
This Greek beekeeper and scientist used simple hives with wooden strip top-bars. Some of his observations about bees were pretty clever, others were dead wrong.
Ben Franklin
With everything from bi-focals, lightning, and the US Constitution in his realm of interests, it is not surprising he is mentioned by Thomas Wildman as a patron for Wildman's 1768 Treatise on the Management of Bees.
Bill Dennison
This former Mayor of Toronto and beekeeper had bees before his election- keeping them in the heart of the city. Whenever there was an angry swarm, the police would call His Majesty the Mayor. He would get his smoker and go fetch the bees - not every city of 3 million can claim such hands-on care from an elected official!!
Bishop William Skylstad
Amateur radio enthusiast, beekeeper, fisherman - and now (since 2004) president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Brigham Young
A very famous American beekeeper... His interest in bees led to Utah being called the 'Beehive State' and having skep hives as emblems.
Democritus
This famous ancient (lived to be 109) Greek apicultural researcher, beekeeper and philosopher taught that new bees could be made from rotting oxen - the King Bee, he figured out, came from decaying bull brains.
Fred Hale, Sr.
Before he died at age 113, in November, 2004, Fred Hale was the oldest (documented) man in the world. An easy-going Maine beekeeper and gardener, he was driving a car at age 107 and shoveling snow at age 112.
Harlan J. Smith, Ph.D.
This Texan beekeeper was director of McDonald Observatory since 1963 and has attained worldwide recognition as an astronomer, researcher and administrator of one of the world's finest observatories and in his work with NASA.
Henry Fonda
The star of 96 films, this hobby beekeeper gave away honey in jars that he labeled Henry's Honey. When he was a youngster, he'd earned the Eagle Scout badge for beekeeping.
John Eels
A controversy resulting from an experimental apiary in Newbury, Massachusettes, in 1645 (just 20 years after the Mayflower) surrounded Mr. John Eels. He was put in charge of the village bees and quickly became North America's very first pauper, requiring financial assistance from the town in order to survive. (Let that be a forewarning to any potential beekeeper: a beekeeper was the first welfare case in the USA.)
JS Harbison
One of the first beekeepers in California. Harbison arrived from Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, about 1850 and brought bees from the east, through Panama, and up to southern California. His greatest claim to fame was the biggest crop of honey in the world (1868) and his subsequent shipment of train car loads of comb honey from California to Chicago and New York.
Karl Kehrle
Better known as Brother Adam. The Benedictine monk (Buckfast Abbey, England) developed the famous Buckfast Bee, and became the leader of a short-lived beekeeping cult movement.
Karl von Frisch
Translated the bee's dance into German and won the Nobel Prize for this and related animal beehavior studies.
Le Quy Quynh
A military strategist and medical healer, Le Quy Quynh resides in Ho Chi Minh City(Saigon), Vietnam. He is well known and respected in Vietnam as a "Hero of the Revolution" for leading forces from the North first against the French, then against the US. He served as Adjutant to General Giiap, and as defense minister in Ho Chi Minh's first post-war cabinet. However, his real claim to fame is his 50 years as a beekeeper and his research, cultivation and medical treatment using bees and bee products. He is famous in Vietnam for his healing techniques -many of his patients are victims of severe war related injuries - he has worked wonders on their wounds. He is interested in exchanging information with others - through his American grandson.
Leon Tolstoy
This Russian author was a beekeeper. His wife, Sonja, talked about him "crouching in front of his hives, net over his head." And she wrote in her diary, "The apiary has become the centre of the world for him now, and everybody has to be interested exclusively in Bees!" Tolstoy mentions beekeeping twice in War and Peace (it's a long book, you'd expect beekeeping to come up, wouldn't you?) Tolstoy describes the evacuation of Moscow: "Moscow was empty. It was deserted as a dying, queenless hive is deserted." Read more on bees and beekeeping from War and Peace.
Lord BadenPowell
Founder of the Boy Scouts in England. This beekeeper, once when producing honey for showing, mistakenly allowed it to overheat and the honey became dark. He showed it anyway and due to his prestige this created a fashion for dark honey in England for many years.
Maria von Trapp
Yes, after the family escaped Austria, the little nun and governess from the Sound of Music kept bees on her Vermont farm.
Martha Stewart
The cute-as-a-button harbinger of American Style has been a model, a stockbroker, and a beekeeper for over twenty-five years! The avid gardener realized a long time ago that keeping bees is a good thing. If you are unfamiliar with this fascinating character, crawl out from under your rock and jump to Martha Stewart Living!
Peter Fonda
Actor, activist, was named Beekeeper of the Year by the Florida State Beekeeping Association for deftly portraying Ulee in Ulee's Gold,and for his contributions to beekeeping.
Raymond Poincare
This beekeeper was president of France during the Great War. He took time out by tending his beehives behind the Presidential Palace.
Sherlock Holmes
This great detective retired to a simple life of puttering around with bees. As a beekeeper, he continued to demonstrate his problem-solving expertise.
Sir Edmund Hillary
A commercial beekeeper (he and his brother owned 1200 hives) from New Zealand, along with Tenzing Norgay, first scaled Mount Everest, in May, 1953.
Sylvia Plath
American poet (for something really depressing, try (The Bee Meeting) and author, 1932 - 1962, inspired largely by her father, Otto Plath, and his beekeeping. She lived a tragic, prolific, short life. Her biography is on Great American Poets: Plath.
Thomas Edison
We don't know if Tom himself was a beekeeper, but his estate in Fort Myers, Florida, continues to keep bees in the fashion that Edisonmay have had them when he was producing beeswax for use in his scientific experiments.
Thomas Jefferson
He was the third American president, but he had a lot of interests outside politics. He was an avid beekeeper. Thomas Jefferson, in his nature book Notes on Virginia, wrote this about how the honey bee came to North America: "The honeybee is not a native of our country. Marcgrave, indeed, mentions a species of honeybee in Brazil. But this has no sting, and is therefore different from the one we have, which resembles perfectly that of Europe. The Indians concur with us in the tradition that it was brought from Europe, but when and by whom we know not. The bees have generally extended themselves into the country a little in advance of the settlers. The Indians, therefore, called them the white man's fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlement of the whites."
Vicente Fox
The ex president of Mexico says that they used bee stings as a test for bravery on the family ranch when he was a youngster.
Viktor Yushchenko
The leader of the democracy (orange) movement and president of the Ukraineis an avid beekeeper.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
White House Honey Harvest
A Bountiful Buzz
By Elisabeth Goodridge A new type of visitor came to the National Mall this year, flitting past monuments and museums in favor of trees, flowers and plants. But this wasn’t just some horticultural tour; no, this was work. Each day they were abuzz, gathering and pollinating before returning home to modest quarters with tremendous security near Lafayette Park.
Meet the White House honeybee.
Numbering more than 65,000 at one point, the bees produced a bumper crop of honey this year, the first time honey has ever been made on White House grounds. The hive, located on the South Lawn, is a key part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s organic kitchen garden project.
Audio Slide Show
The Sweet Smell of Honey
Basswood and cherry trees helped create a unique taste for White House honey.That access to the National Mall is one reason. “It’s just an abundance of blooms,” Mr. Brandts said, noting the local flowers, plants and trees were ripe with bee-attracting nectar. “The Ellipse and monument grounds are just a great source of clover. It’s like having a huge pasture.”
A White House carpenter for the past 25 years, Mr. Brandts started beekeeping in the backyard of his Maryland home three years ago.
The natural honey his hives produced drew the attention of White House chefs, who introduced him to Sam Kass, the Chicago chef who followed the Obamas from their hometown to the White House. Mr. Kass wondered whether beehives could be part of the White House garden.
Doug Mills/The New York Times Mr. Brandts secured the hive with straps one afternoon this summer. For one, the beehive sits in the flight path of Marine One, President Obama’s helicopter. “We don’t worry about just the lid blowing off, we worry about the hive blowing over,” Mr. Brandts said.
Mr. Brandts lent the White House bee swarms from his own backyard, setting up the new hive in late March. The bees –which travel as far as three miles from the hive– started bringing in nectar in April.
“These bees on the South Grounds are such sweet bees,” Mr. Brandts said. “I don’t know if it’s because they are down there by themselves or they are just the best bees.”
In June, Mr. Brandts collected 42 pounds of honey in the first extraction. (Since he uses a handheld smoker to placate the bees, he alerts the Secret Service beforehand.) At first, the bees produced a mild, delicately flavored honey lightly tan in color. The Mall’s cherry trees, which bloomed in early April, provided some nectar for that first batch. Clover, black locust and basswood could also be detected. As the summer progressed, the honey’s color darkened, with the fifth and final extraction revealing honey almost chestnut in color.
“We really only got two pounds of that, it’s a rarity,” Mr. Brandts said, noting that one flower on the grounds could have had an influence. “The whole fountain had red salvia planted around it, and it was always covered with bees. I suspect it was from that.”
Doug Mills/The New York Times To extract the honey, Mr. Brandts first had to carve off the beeswax cover.As for the abundance of honey, the White House has kept some for both the residence and for official events. During a Halloween party hosted by the White House on Saturday night, trick-or-treaters received a honey-sweetened shortbread cookie. And at Latin American concert last month, the menu included desserts made with honey.
In addition, spouses of world leaders received special jars of the honey as one of the gifts from Mrs. Obama at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh earlier this fall. Miriam’s Kitchen, a local food bank which serves meals to the homeless, has received honey along with produce from the garden.
“It doesn’t take a lot to make a difference,” said Steve Badt, kitchen operations director at Miriam’s Kitchen, where they have made fruit smoothies finished with a drizzle of White House honey. “Each blenderful gets a tablespoon or so. It’s a nice little touch, just like tea.”
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