The next jar is pine tree and wildflowers. “Wow!” I blurt. “I—I feel this tingling on my tongue.”
Characteristically, what separates Greek honey from the others is the addition of pine. “It’s by the extracts of an insect that lives on the pine trees,” Lina clarifies. “And this insect lives only in Greece and Turkey.” Bees forage from the similar extract that comprises shellac. The scale insect involved (Marchalina hellenica) produces a sweet substance from pine trees that is found in 60 percent of the honey from those two countries.
The last one we try is 100 percent thyme. It’s aromatic. You can instantly smell the herb. “For this he transfers hives to little uninhabited islands.” And when I taste it, I go gaga. My eyes widen. Such a rarity is this taste that not even UC Davis’s “Flavor Wheel”1 lists thyme as a foraging source. So here’s what thoughts run through my head: Tilt-A-Whirl carnival lights. A spring fountain. Sap-coated balloons. Bee blood. Leaves. Herbs, herbs, herbs.
As I’m clearly unable to put the deliciousness into words, Yannis leaves me with two jars: one thyme and the much-fabled anama, aka reiki—a mana force of heather as thick as a giant’s earwax and as tasty as nature’s finest candy. Before Lina and I depart, we sit in his courtyard drinking a strong, clear pomace brandy derived from wine grape extracts called tsipouro. Mosquitoes keep attacking me, and the two laugh at my reactions.
“You have sweet blood, we say,” Lina smiles.
I take another sip, gesturing toward Yannis. “It’s all the honey I’ve been eating.”
When Lina and I drive back to the town square in Christos Raches, we pass by a number of locals she knows (as well as a man walking a goat). We stop and she gets out of the car and talks with them. The communal friendliness is expected in an island population of 10,000 or so—there isn’t much room for enemies. The intimacy is furthered by the large number of festivals, like the summer solstice festival in June. Flower wreaths will be burned, and as custom dictates, men and women will jump over the fire pit, which saves them from bad omens, as bouzouki guitars are rapidly strummed and townsfolk link arm and arm in a growing concentric spiral of dance.
In the afternoon, my friendly guide and translator Lina Tsingerlioti and I hike up a hill of switchbacks to meet our other famed beekeeper, Giorgos Stenos.
We reach the gate of his base of operations—a rundown building that aspired to be an auto shop—and enter. Inside, the what-do-you-need accoutrement of products ranges from rice satchels and fax machines to screws and bolts or dish soap and binders. Half of the store is organized, but the other half contains clutter from what looks like an episode of Hoarders. Lina calls out for the guru, her voice bouncing off the concrete walls, muddied tile, and paint chips. He appears from a back room. I shake his hand. His skin is a tan leather satchel, sun-creased and tough.
This is Giorgos Stenos. At 84, his laugh comes through like a crackly wheeze over radio static. He stands with the vigor of a teenager. I thank the Ikarian master for taking time to speak with me.
“No,” he says, via Lina, “I’ve had bees for 66 years, and for that reason I know a lot of things. I like to transfer my knowledge to people since not many want to do this.” When I ask how many hives he keeps, he says that like the French, it is bad luck to say. But the ballpark figure is 100. “How old are you?”
“Thirty,” I tell him.
“Triánta,” says Lina. He has a granddaughter a little older than me, he says, noting I’m old enough to be his grandson. Giorgos took up beekeeping in the 1940s after reading an article. “I decided then that I wanted to deal with these animals because all the others do harm somehow. But the bees only do good.” Nurturing became second nature to him, especially as Ikaria suffered during World War II. “There was no food,” he says. “The island became isolated because of the invaders taking the boats. Even if you had a bag of gold, you couldn’t find lentils.” At age 10 he took care of his siblings. “People had to cultivate to survive.”
He was the first beekeeper in his family. By now he’s trained over 50 pupils, although he’s still learning himself. “After 60 years, I keep having surprises,” he says. “Because I’m self-educated, I had to be very observant. And no matter how many years you are beekeeping, we will never really understand the way they behave and their instincts. The bees were here for millions of years before humans. They survived without my help or your help,” he says, pointing, “or her help. We can try to understand what they want, but we could never really control them.” He sits back in a chair at his desk, a rugged metal beast you’d see at NASA circa 1960. “Love bees as they were your mother or child or yourself. If you love something, you take care of it … What [humans] can offer is to move bees to hot places with food.”
Before Giorgos can give me a jar of honey, he says there will be a test. “Not to anybody,” he says, wagging his finger about it. “First I have to examine the person. I have special equipment from France,” he says, ribbing me.
“And what is he looking for?” I ask.
“No, no,” he holds up a hand. “Only the doctor says, and it’s a secret.” Like me, he laughs at his own jokes. “One of the basic things I’m looking at is how much the honey is boiling your blood,” he continues. “To see how much you need. Because if you take too much, you might have problems.” Needless to say, I’m enamored of my boisterous host. He directs Lina and me to a room with two 40-kilogram vats out of which he pours fat globules of honey into jars. We bring them back to his desk with plastic spoons. Lina grabs paper towels and wipes part of the clutter off his desk: spilled honey, stained appointment books, and an ash-filled plastic cup and papers dog-piled over office supplies. We taste the honey: Granulized sugar. Molasses. Heather flowers. Vanilla soup topped with maple syrup.
“I’m kind of falling in love with this one,” I tell him. The glint grows brighter in his eyes as he slaps his thigh, laughing. I ask the guru about who he plans to pass the torch to. Embers of that fire, his “wealth” he says, have been given to the pupils all this time. “He says you can come after 30 years to discuss it with him,” Lina says, offering me the job position.
“And you have passed this little examination,” she continues. “Giorgos,” she says, explaining the old man before me, “feels honored that his parents gave him this power to love people.” In a way this “life sap” is also an expression of love. “You have to be careful, now, with the honey I gave you,” Giorgos addresses me via Lina. “How you eat it, with whom, and what girl you eat it with.”
With that we shake hands, and Lina takes a photo of Giorgos and me. Occasionally I’ll pause on it when scrolling through my iPhone. Giorgos reminds me of my grandfather, a man named Claude Surur, who before passing away fueled the flames of my grade-school curiosity. Something that’s never left me.
It’s true the world can be lonesome. But sometimes you lift your head, or travel halfway across the world, and there’s somebody there. Sometimes you talk to them. Sometimes you just share a moment. And the moment is well worth all of it.
As Lina calls her dog, Cinnamon, Giorgos walks me outside his general store to a small patch of mountain flat where his hives are stirring. Blue paint peels off the individual boxes. He points to the bees, the exchange between the two of us nonverbal. At the hive entrance some workers edge their way in and out of the colony. And Giorgos Stenos looks on admiringly, as though watching his daughters depart to achieve great things.
When I return to Atsachas, I’m greeted by Eugenia in our established rapport. “Colorado,” she says, “what would you like to eat?” As she makes the “Greek lasagna,” pastitsio, I sit in the courtyard. Her son Teo, the future beekeeper, welcomes me at the table—“Yasou, David”—bringing an empty glass for the strong Ikarian wine Giorgos gave me as a parting gift. His own vintage, kept in a plastic olive oil bottle. The glass is small, so I compromise with many pours that come out in a translucent red. The evening dark silences the cicadas’ electric hums as the stars flicker above, leaving only the
chatter of sporadic conversations from surrounding diners and the ebb and flow and break of the seawater against the cliff and beach below.
I think about this change stalking me since the outset of this journey. This realization about our relationship with these micro lever-pullers of the planet. They are the imperative hem in our life fabric. For this reason, our relationship demands pause and observance. For those who allow this break in the barrier, the tumbling of some wall, you can see what I see. Just stop midhike and watch and wait. You could see them at work. Crafting. And in a way I find it oddly comforting.
So I drink the wine, smoke Backwood cigars, and smear fresh tzatziki on bread. The air is thick, the humidity clinging, and the bugs are out. Hard-shelled ticks drop into my curly hair from the thatched-roof patio; crickets sing; beetles buzz across the ocean cruise line lights hovering in the distance; ants and cockroaches race at my feet; flies perch on my plate; flapping moths and suspended spiders obscure my vision; and the endless high-pitched squeals of mosquitoes kamikaze my ears. The bugs around me celebrate. I am bitten again and again and again. And I drink this powerful cup.
Notes
One
1 Rewind back to Elizabethan times, and the word is tied to ghosts, as evidenced in Hamlet, “With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life.” It’s also been spelled various ways: the fourteenth-century bugge and then a similar German spin bögge—root for the night specter bogeyman (after all, Tim Burton’s Oogie Boogie was made of insects). But why the word was married to insects is hearsay, though some speculate the spook-infested sleeplessness caused by bedbugs in the 1620s.
2 But really quick: Insect orders, from which other subcategories stem, have Greek roots. Beetles belong to Coleoptera; broken down you have koleos and pteron, which together mean “sheathed wing.” Diptera—flies, mosquitoes, etc.—translates essentially into twice-winged. Because of their scaled wings, butterflies and moths belong to Lepidoptera. Key word for “scales”? Lepis.
3 Known as the father of American entomology, Thomas Say gathered insects on coast-to-coast excursions in the early 1800s, describing 1,575 new species and amassing one “holy grail” of a collection. But after his death, the beloved cabinet fell into the hands of Harvard College librarian T. W. Harris in 1836. When Harris finally got around to cataloging the insects after leaving them in his barn for an entire year, he was shocked to find it did “not contain one half of the species which [Say] has described.” The other half rested in the intestinal tracks of moth larvae, beetles, and mites. Submit this mishap to the Annals of Bonehead Moves.
4 No joke. Eighteenth-century Dutch lawyer (and insect hobbyist) Pieter Lyonet published a 600-page book with 18 engraved plates that details the anatomy … of one bug! Using dissection tools circa 1762, he painstakingly illustrated goat moth larva muscles, which totaled 1,647—three times the amount of a human. Microcosm indeed.
5 Next on the Food Network.
6 A similar book published posthumously in 1634 was written by none other than physician Thomas Muffet—the man from whom the children’s poem “Little Miss Muffet” originates.
7 Dung beetles (which can carry 1,140 times their body weight) base their navigation on the Milky Way. Biologist Marie Dacke of Lund University tested beetles’ compass orientation skill in a planetarium, fitting tiny hats over their dorsal eyes as they hauled dung. Their routes with an obstructed, moonless starry sky were chaotic, whereas an exposed Milky Way garnered straight-ish lines … Balls of shit tend to roll unevenly.
8 Maria Sibylla Merian—whose face once appeared on the 500 deutschmark note—was a seventeenth-century artist whose exquisite illustrations of insect life were used to classify new species. Her works were republished into 19 editions by 1771; her illustrations, writes science historian Londa Schiebinger, are “a standard fixture in drawing rooms and natural history libraries.” While in New York, I spent time with her famous Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium at the American Museum of Natural History. The book creaked open like an old Spanish galleon, and I was seriously tempted to cat-burglar out of the museum with it.
9 If this sounds like real-life Pokémon, it is. Satoshi Tajiri, the game’s creator, modeled the addictive Game Boy RPG from his childhood insect hobby. Even nineteenth-century entomology superstar William Spence wrote: “In the minds of most men … an entomologist is synonymous with everything futile and childish.”
10 The tradition of namesake insects is still practiced. How else would we get the Scaptia beyonceae—a golden, bootylicious horse fly honoring Beyoncé? Or for that matter, there’s the duly “bandy-legged” Charlie Chaplin fly (Campsicnemus charliechaplini), the yoked Arnold Schwarzenegger beetle (Agra schwarzeneggeri), and the heavily mustachioed Frank Zappa spider (Pachygnatha zappa). For those wanting to create and name a bug of their own, there’s the Twitter bot @MothGenerator. Tweet a name, word, etc., and an algorithm spits out a unique, digital moth.
11 Harrison G. Dyar was a class-A prick. But further digging by Pamela Henson and Marc Epstein debunked the Dyaria origins about the “irascible curmudgeon,” though the adulterous, unsmiling, “acerbic” grump certainly deserved it. Worthy of note: his secret second family; insulting adversaries alive or dead; “fiery exchanges with colleagues” to the point where they stole his specimen out of spite. The list goes on for this significant yet “tragic figure.” But his banker “friend” did name a moth genus Dyaria.
12 Toxic vapors of the compound are the same ones you huff in a wooden trunk of moth-balled clothes. The fumigant keeping dermestid beetles and other collection nibblers at bay was proven to be carcinogenic by a group of Japanese researchers in 2005. Lab rats inhaling it for two years showed an increase of liver tumors. For what it’s worth, paradichlorobenzene is also the main ingredient in scented urinal cakes.
13 In Florence—birthplace of Carlo Collodi, creator of Jiminy Cricket—toward the end of Easter, children can be seen carrying wicker baskets of pet crickets during Festa del Grillo. The insect’s charm may go back to the ancient days of Pompeii. While pets were often collected on Monte Cantagrilli, that is, “Singing Cricket Mountain,” today many kids opt for cricket toys.
Two
1 That’s not to say solitary insects lack design sense. Case in point: as described in a This Is Colossal article, the bagworm moth larva construct twisting, pyramid-like “log cabins” to house them during metamorphosis; and the caged orbs of sticks crafted by erebid moths.
2 British naturalist Joseph Bank hitched a ride with Captain Cook to Australia in 1768 and was the first to describe such weaver ant hemming. “Their management was most curious,” he wrote in his journal. “They bend down four leaves broader than a man’s hand and place them in such direction as they choose, in doing of which a much larger force is necessary than these animals seem capable of.” Weaver ants grew more impressive as ant experts honed their observation skills. Like any good contractor, leaf measurements are taken in two-tenths-of-a-second intervals with antennal taps, working the surface like a blind man’s white cane.
3 The approximate weight of 1.1 million average-sized ants.
4 E. O. Wilson demonstrated the potency of the ant pheromone by dipping a birchwood applicator stick into the gut extract and writing his name on a table. People were astonished as the ants filled each letter. Newly discovered chemical codes enabled British artist Ollie Palmer to choreograph his “Ant Ballet” in 2012. Using synthetic pheromones from the University College London Organic Chemistry section and a robotic arm swiveling on a table, he traced patterns for Argentine ants. They readily followed; however, the performance lacked ballet pirouettes.
5 To this point, in 1886 Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel clipped the antennae off four individual ants—each from different species—and was astonished to see how amicable they were with one another.
6 Cast material varies with soil texture: sandy, silty, clay-like. But the ant-enamored man behind AntHillArt.com prefers using molten aluminum on live or abandoned fire ant colonies (an invasive species imported by ship in the 1930s). Dug up, the beautiful yet semicontroversial result is mounted on a wood stand and flipped upside down; assembled, it resembles a chromium coral reef.
7 John Lubbock’s 1876 artificial ant nest is still a charming invention. Comprised of soil between two round glass plates, the widely popular apparatus led to early theories on trail-making and communication. This, of course, coming from the same man who two years later got ants drunk and noted their reaction—for science. “The sober ants seemed somewhat puzzled at finding their intoxicated fellow creatures in such a disgraceful condition, [so they] took them up, and carried them about for a time in a somewhat aimless manner.” Lesson: friends don’t let friends crawl drunk.
8 Other ways ACO has proven its worth include (but are not limited to): DNA sequencing, digital image processing, wind farm production, drug discovery, bicycle assembly lines, and the knapsack problem—a resource allocation issue that might expedite the SUV load time before that next family vacation.
9 Biologists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland tagged carpenter ant workers with RFID barcode sensors and reaped massive datasets. Tracking their tasks with an overhead camera and computer, the on-screen graphics of their intricate world take the form of an erratic Etch A Sketch. Underneath it all, researchers recorded 9.1 million interactions between individuals over a 41-day period, finding that ants shift careers as they get older, going from nurses to foragers later in life.
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