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OH
HONEY
The Sweetness of Memories
By Claud Mann
Honey is a product of the honeybee. Today I know this
as fact. As a child I was, well… confused as to
its source. Like so many delighted kids throughout the
Western world, my first association with honey began
with Winnie the Pooh. Pooh Bear loved honey and spent
a disproportionate amount of time involved in various
honey-related activities. At my grandmother's house
I remember eating warm buttered crumpets slathered with
honey served from a bear-shaped crock while she fed
cantaloupe to Tai, her Manx.
When accompanying my father to Mr. Pappas' grocery
store, we forwent plain jars of honey and always chose
the little bear-shaped squeeze bottles. (In our family,
my father and I did most of the shopping-lengthy trips
made longer by his joy in conversing with anyone about
anything: little old ladies, Black Panthers, U.C. Berkeley
physicists and heavily accented Citröen mechanics
all received equal time and probing follow-up questions.)
Anyway, I'm still somewhat embarrassed to admit that
for a long time I just assumed that honey was somehow
produced by bears-I was a little fuzzy on the mechanics
of the process but all the evidence led to that conclusion.
Perhaps the associated danger made it all the sweeter.
It was in Miss Som's kindergarten class where I finally
learned the lowdown. She explained that after drinking
flower nectar, bees returned home and regurgitated a
partially digested goop that later became honey. I had
a general sense of what this meant, and mulled over
the issue as I unrolled my nap rug, finally deciding
that if one of my preferred foodstuffs had to be some
form of throw-up, far better bee than bear.
In the succeeding years, my admiration for honey has
grown in direct relation to more understanding of its
extraordinary properties. In Boy Scouts I learned that
honey is a well-established backcountry treatment for
bites, wounds, burns, and sore throats. (It's also worth
noting here that my Berkeley-based troop was one of
the first to offer merit badges in tie-dye and composting.)
Honey's broad-spectrum antibacterial, antimicrobial,
and antifungal properties have been officially confirmed
by the NIH and continue to be studied by researchers
worldwide. There is also vast anecdotal evidence that
a tablespoonful a day of locally produced honey can
dramatically lessen the symptoms of allergy sufferers.
Because locally produced honey is rich in the same pollen
profiles that trigger histamine response, the theory
is that ingesting those pollens regularly throughout
the year can provide desensitization during allergy
season. Hey, effective or not, at least you eat some
good honey. (Given that honey itself can't be patented
for obscene pharma-profit, don't expect a heck of a
lot of funding thrown at clinical studies of honey anytime
soon.)
As food and cooking occupied more of my time, honey's
abilities continued to astound me. I remember the day
a pastry chef friend explained that honey is hygroscopic-roughly
meaning that rather than evaporating, it magically pulls
moisture from the surrounding air. Because of this,
replacing a small amount of sugar with honey miraculously
keeps baked goods moist for an extraordinarily long
time. For more than a millennium honey has also been
recognized as a natural preservative-so incredibly effective
that Pope Sylvester II was embalmed with gallons of
the sticky stuff way back in 1003. (No word from the
Vatican on how he's holding up, or whether his sarcophagus
is in the shape of a bear).
| “I
had a general sense of what this meant, and mulled
over the issue as I unrolled my nap rug, finally
deciding that if one of my preferred foodstuffs
had to be some form of throw-up, far better bee
than bear.” |
Madame Honey can also be a fickle mistress. New parents
bombarded with baby books are usually shocked to read
that due to botulism danger, children under 1 year should
by no means ingest honey in any form. In adults and
children 2 and up, the intestinal tract is generally
mature enough to neutralize botulin spores before they
germinate and produce neurotoxins. On a more personally
painful note, I was once requested to leave the Renaissance
Pleasure Faire for "non-Renaissance" behavior
by an undercover sheriff in green tights. After sharing
a goatskin bag of mead with a troupe of Irish drummers,
it seemed a good idea to shake things up by beating
out a couple of meringues and cha-chas. When the inevitable
conga line formed, the guy who sold the big turkey legs
reported us to faire authorities. I had to ride the
bus home dressed as a jester. I blame the honey wine.
As gushing honey advocate it should seem predictable
that I might one day make the logical leap to apiculture.
When I finally did, it was less a leap and more of a
stumble. In the mid 1980s a good friend inherited a
rambling Coldwater Canyon estate. It had been owned
by his brother, an actor and restaurateur who had bought
it with earnings from his last big feature film, Kelly's
Hero's Perched on a hillside just below Mulholland Drive,
the house had been built in the '60s-a proud example
of General Electric's "House of the Future."
From what I could tell, the future seemed to involve
an assortment of appliances built directly into walls
and counters, plus a nonfunctional whole-house sound
system.
The hillside had already begun to reclaim the house
when I moved in with my buddy Michael, who worked with
me at a nearby restaurant. Michael was a redneck intellectual
from Norman, Oklahoma, pursuing a master's in Russian
literature at UCLA. His last name was Lovelady; his
father, Harley-Ray Lovelady, owned a chain of used car
lots in the panhandle. If you teased either one about
their last name, they beat you up. Our deal: free rent
in exchange for light construction, gardening, and anything
else necessary to ready the property for occupancy.
On the day we moved in we were warned to keep our eyes
open for rattlesnakes-the previous summer more than
a dozen had been spotted on the property. Oh, and they
were strangely large... It seemed that while they especially
enjoyed basking on the warm flagstones near the swimming
pool, some had found it more comfortable nesting in
the house itself. One especially hefty one, later given
the name Mama, had been seen drinking from the dog's
water bowl while the dog looked on happily. Did I mention
I really, really don't like snakes?
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As any good exterminator (and I suppose even some of
the bad ones) will tell you, the first step in successful
pest eradication involves depriving any unwanted guests
of shelter and food. After clearing endless acres of
brush and overgrowth around Casa Peligrosa, we began
focusing our attentions on the snakes' possible food
supply. It had been mentioned in passing that there
was an odd species of gargantuan field rat on the property.
We caught some with little effort (on our part-the rats
really offered quite a bit of effort) and discovered
that these so-called field rats were in fact incredibly
overgrown common brown rats. Our rat manual gave an
average weight of 12 to 13 ounces. These things were
tipping the scales at 20 to 30 ounces. For an old sci-fi
buff like me it was like The Land That Time Forgot,
a terrifying and enigmatic landscape of giant rats and
strangely large rattlers.
The mystery was short-lived. As the weather grew hotter
that summer, the swimming pool became unusable; what
had been a handful of bees loitering near the shallow
end multiplied overnight to what seemed like thousands.
With that kind of traffic it wasn't difficult to follow
them to an opening at the side of the house. I voted
for staying out of their way; that summer there had
been reports of Africanized bees slowly moving north
from Brazil. (As a card-carrying conspiracy theorist,
I was fairly sure they were being funded by the high
fructose corn syrup lobby to make HFCS look less dangerous
in comparison.) Rightly ignoring me, Michael explained
that by moving the hive, we would in turn rid ourselves
of an army of bloated rodents who undoubtedly viewed
the honeycombs within as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
He also speculated that our slow-moving, honey-filled
rats were likely the Kobe beef of the rattlesnake world.
If we disrupted this honey-fueled high-calorie life
cycle, the snakes, spoiled from a steady diet of Kobe
rat, would hopefully move on to greener pastures. The
topper: Once the bees were successfully transferred
to our own hives, we would have an endless and economic
supply of wild honey.
Because our total sum of bee-related wisdom consisted
of Walter Brennan's admonition in To Have and Have Not,
a fieldtrip was arranged to the nearest beekeepers'
supply to obtain advice and equipment. We walked out
with: two standard hives, hive stands, honey supers,
frames, foundation, hive tools, a bee brush, a smoker,
smoker fuel, and a copy of The Hive and the Honey Bee
by Dadent & Sons. There was only enough money left
for one full bee suit with a pair of long gloves and
bee hat with veil. The total hit, around $400. It seemed
like a lot of money, but then we did some figuring and
realized that we only needed to increase our personal
honey consumption to a kilo a day to break even in no
time.
We flipped to see who got the bee suit and I won, which
was just as well, because in my opinion it looked a
little better on me anyway. Michael wore some dark green
coveralls, a pith helmet with cheesecloth around his
head and rubber bands on his sleeves and pant legs.
(We later learned that wearing dark colors causes bees
to become ill tempered for some reason). A basement
wall was cut open and, as instructed by our book, we
began puffing smoke into the opening to calm the colony
down, thus making them easier to handle. Our objective
then would be to locate the queen and move her to our
waiting hive. The rest of the colony would want to follow
her. It was a simple plan.
Clearly, these bees hadn't read the same book. They
attacked en masse. Even in my full-body protection suit
it was unsettling to be covered head to toe by angry
bees. Thankfully, Michael wasn't one of those people
who gets all whiny and goes into anaphylactic shock
after being stung a couple (dozen) times, so the next
day we resuited and took another crack at the queen.
This time, using less smoke and more finesse we began
transferring the brood comb into our hive. When we finally
located the queen (she has a much larger abdomen than
the workers or drones and is usually surrounded by attendants),
we placed her inside and laid the queen excluder on
top.
Unbelievably, the rest of the colony followed her right
into the new palace. We moved the active hive near some
fruit trees and began excavation of dozens of older
abandoned hives beneath the house. In one we discovered
a rat, long dead, perfectly preserved in honey. In a
rare moment of good taste, we didn't name him Sylvester
II.
Months later, Michael and I ceremoniously sampled our
first taste of Coldwater Canyon eucalyptus honey. We
hadn't begun to master the correct technique to uncap
the comb cells, didn't have a fancy extraction centrifuge,
and ended up straining it through a nylon stocking (unused).
I can still taste it today. It was the finest jar of
$400 honey I've had before or since.
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