Poison sumac, R. vernix, grows along the eastern coast and in boggy places throughout the southeast, not in this part of the country. However, people have had such bad experiences with the maddeningly itchy rash it causes they are wary of any plant with “sumac” as part of its name. Earlier in the season, bees here do work another member of the same genus—R. toxicodendron, poison ivy, which causes a similar rash. But the honey that bees make from it does not harm human beings. In fact, there is only one plant in this country from which bees produce honey generally poisonous to people. It is the mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), the evergreen shrub that frosts eastern mountains with its white flowers in the springtime. Mountain laurel contains a poison called andromedotoxin and its effect has long been known. Writing in an 1875 issue of Gleanings in Bee Culture, a surgeon who had been with the Confederate army wrote:
Wherever the Mountain Laurel grows the bees are very fond of it.… It is dangerous for any one unable to detect the taste to eat the honey. It has a highly poisonous effect, being an extremely distressing narcotic.… During the war I had many opportunities of witnessing its effects and on one occasion, personal experience gave me the right to say that I knew something about it.… Some time after eating a queerish sensation of tingling all over, indistinct vision, caused by dilation of the pupils, with an empty dizzy feeling about the head and a horrible nausea which would not relieve itself by vomiting.… The first case or two that I saw were entirely overpowered by it, and their appearance was exactly as if they were dead drunk.… The enervation of all the voluntary muscles was completely destroyed. The usual remedies for narcotics partially restored them in a few hours, but the effects did not completely wear off for two or three days.…
There are, to be sure, variations in what triggers an allergic response in people, and green, or unripe, honey from a variety of plants (yellow jasmine and rhododendron, for example) can cause reaction in susceptible humans. In other parts of the world, there are other poisonous honeys. Xenophon describes soldiers in his army who were driven mad by eating honey. Strabo and Pliny wrote similarly of a honey called “goat’s death,” which modern writers believe to be made from Rhododendron ponticum, a little-cultivated species. There are also intriguing reports of a Brazilian plant, Serjonia lethalis, which produces a honey so poisonous that Indians used it for tipping their arrows and killing fish.
But in this country only mountain laurel gives nectar that humans in general should avoid. Bees are not so lucky. There are a number of plant nectars that can poison them. The most important ones in this country are California buckeye (Aesculus californica); black nightshade (Solanum nigrum); death camas (Zygadenus venenosus); dodder (Cuscuta spp.); leatherwood (Cyrilla racemiflora); locoweeds (Astragalus spp.); mountain laurel (Kamia latifolia); seaside arrowgrass (Triglochin maritima); whorled milkweed (Asclepias subverticillata); and western false hellebore (Veratrum californicum). The symptoms of plant poisoning in bees are similar, in some respects, to those of insecticide poisoning: bees may die in heaps outside their hives. But there are other symptoms as well. Newly emerged bees may have crumpled wings, or fail to shed the last pupal case from the abdomen. California buckeye poisoning causes bees to become black and shiny from loss of hair and may make them tremble. Affected queens produce eggs that do not hatch or larvae that die soon after hatching. The queens may also become incapable of laying or may lay only drone eggs. In cases of plant poisoning reported from Florida and Georgia, larvae in the cells turn blue.
I know all this at second hand, for I have never seen a case of plant poisoning in my hives, and my bees work no plants that produce honey hurtful to human beings. In a month or so, however, if droughty weather continues and absolutely nothing else is in bloom, the bees may be forced to gather nectar from bitterweed—Helenium amarum tenuifolum—which grows in pastures here as well as in much of the eastern half of the country. Another common name for bitterweed is sneezeweed. The crushed flowerheads have been used for snuff, which causes violent sneezing. Dairy cows grazing on the drooping rayed yellow flowerheads give bitter milk, and bees produce distasteful honey from its nectar. One year, I had a few combs of it in my harvest. The honey was beautiful to see—thick and creamy yellow, rather buttery in appearance—but it tasted like soap. To bees, it is as good as any other, and so I gave it back to them. Bitterweed is usually not a problem, because it is a meager nectar source and bees will not gather it if they can find anything else in bloom, even lawn plantain, Plantago lanceolata. (“Your bees must be starvin’,” lamented a friend in town. “Why, they was workin’ them little bitty stems in the lawn. Poor things. Just stems!”) But I do not like to risk mingling bitterweed honey with the better-flavored honey from blackberries, clover, persimmons and sumac, so I always harvest my crop before the bitterweed blooms widely.
The fact that bees, in some few cases, make honey that is distasteful or even poisonous to humans points up a fact overlooked by those who do not live on familiar terms with “different bloods,” as C. S. Lewis calls them. Although living organisms are alike in that we are all animate bundles of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus, we do things very differently. Insects and humans live very different lives, make different demands on the world and respond to it differently. Most people find honey tasty, but I am astounded when people call honey, a dense carbohydrate that is an excellent heat-producing fuel for bees, a “health food.” I am astonished by the miraculous claims made for pollen, a high-protein food for young bees, in the human diet. I am amazed to see the high prices humans will pay for royal jelly, which is needed to transform a worker bee larva into a queen bee.
“Bugs is bugs,” wrote Peter Eicher of Jackson Heights, New York, in response to an article I wrote about insects for Time.
Amen, Mr. Eicher. Amen.
And for those who think otherwise I should like to recommend a delightful story by Roald Dahl, “Royal Jelly.” In it the beekeeper-hero eats royal jelly and grows a covering of fine golden hairs.
The sun has been rising fiery red each morning for weeks now, and shining fiercely on dried-out fields. The temperature reaches a hundred degrees or even more by midday, and doesn’t drop below it until the sun sets again.
Water willow
It is so hot I don’t feel like doing much in the middle of the day, and fortunately I don’t need to. I have done everything I can to help the bees, and from now on until the honey harvest they are on their own. I have been spending the hot part of the day down at the river, where the water is still cool. Sometimes I take an inner tube and float from one river-access road to another—it makes me feel very entrepreneurial to see my bees along the river hard at work on the water-willow flowers, while I am playing in the stream. The water-willow leaves do look uncommonly willowlike, but Justica americana (the genus name honors James Justice, a Scottish gardener) is not a willow at all, but an acanthus. It is a low-growing, water’s-edge plant of such modest habit that it usually goes unnoticed, even though it is one of the commonest plants there. Had it not been for the bees, I probably would never have had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of water willow. The flowers, which bloom from late May until October, are a good source of nectar; each one consists of a three-quarter-inch tube that opens into a notched upper and a three-lobed lower lip. They are a beautiful shade of lavender, and resemble tiny orchids. I keep pointing them out to friends when we float. Even those who have been on the river for years are seldom familiar with the flowers. I am grateful to the bees for showing me water willow, and I wonder what other beauties I fail to see for lack of suitable guides to point them out.
I have been thinking lately about how much I miss when I am as busy as I have been over the last months, because now, during the summer slack time, I have become the observer of several dramas. I am sure there are others I have never had time to see. Over the past few weeks, for instance, I have been watching a baby cowbird grow up in an indigo bunting nest out in back of the honey house. I first discovered
the gangly cowbird two weeks ago, when he had already grown too demanding for the male indigo bunting who was trying to keep the noisy changeling in food. A female cowbird had, as they often do, pushed out the indigo bunting’s eggs from the nest in which his mate had laid them, and laid her own eggs there. I had not been aware of it until I noticed an odd pairing of birds. A female goldfinch had teamed up with the male indigo bunting to help satisfy the greedy cowbird youngster. The baby bird is doing nicely now, thank you, but his nurses are being worn to a frazzle by his needs. I’ve been checking on the odd household every day. The female indigo bunting is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she gave up when her partner insisted on raising a cowbird.
Then last week, while I was having my morning coffee, I discovered another bit of excitement on the woodpile behind the cabin. I am cutting firewood in earnest now; I spend a few hours each morning out in the woodlot with my chainsaw before the day gets hot, and I have been stacking the wood in back of the cabin. There, against the wood I had first cut, a spider had spun her web and laid eggs, which I had never noticed. Last week there were spiderlings as thick as Stardust on the web.
They were so small, not even the size of a pinhead, that they must have just hatched. There were hundreds of them tumbling over one another in the web. I went back into the cabin for a magnifying glass, so that I could look at them more closely, but they were so tiny and I am such a poor arachnologist that I could not decide what kind they were—and their mother, who might have been easier to identify, was nowhere to be seen. During the day I checked on them several times. I could see them wandering out over the woodpile, but they must have returned at dark because the next morning I found them bunched again on the web, which was beginning to show signs of wear. There were not as many of them as on the previous day; some must have died during their initial exploration of the world. Or perhaps they found other places to congregate. The second afternoon, when I came back from the river, I found them all spread across the woodpile again. The following morning I found a cluster of perhaps half the original number on the torn web; by the time I had cut a truckload of wood and brought it back to stack they were gone. Had they been eaten? Were they foraging beyond the woodpile? In the evening a rain shower, welcome to humans, blew in from the southeast. At dawn just a few spiderlings were huddling on the web, which was badly ripped. Had the others drowned? I never saw them again. Those few disappeared during the day, and the next morning there were no spider babies to be seen anywhere. Perhaps they molted and moved on. The few scraps of web that remained fluttered in the light breeze.
Last evening, after it had cooled off a little, I walked back to the beehives by the woodlot. There are twelve hives there, their combined work force amounting to approximately 720,000 bees; every one of them must have been fanning nectar to evaporate moisture last night, because the hum of wings sounded like some immense machine in operation. My honey factory was in full operation. I held my hand in front of several of the entrances and ventilation holes, and could feel the moisture-laden air being pushed from the hives. For fifteen years now I have worked on such familiar terms with the bees that when I see them down at the river, or listen to them at night, I know exactly what they are doing. I now can understand them a bit, though not nearly as much as I thought I did the first year I worked with them. They have forced me to realize that my senses and powers of observation are very limited.
My city friends know well enough what I do here during the bee season; it may seem strange work to them, but it is indisputably work; what I do during the slack times is harder for them to figure out: “organizing my ignorance” is perhaps as good a description as any.
One of my projects during this midsummer pause in the beework has been trying to sort out the St.-John’s-worts. Some of the species within this family Hypericaceae are maddeningly similar. They are to be found all over the eastern half of the country and in the northwest, too, and most have clusters of bright yellow blossoms that make them look like small sunflowers. Specimens of several of the species grow down by the river, and there I can puzzle over them in between cooling dips; others grow in upland pastures, where farmers consider them a nuisance, because, although stock rarely graze on them, when they do they can cause skin irritation and loss of condition “especially [to] white animals,” a sober U.S. Department of Agriculture guide to common weeds tells me. Why white animals, I wonder? That sounds irrational, magical. Can the U.S. government be less than reasonable?
St.-John’s-wort is a plant to which a good deal of folklore still clings. One of the reasons it is such a nuisance to farmers today is that their predecessors, valuing it for magical reasons, encouraged it to grow and planted it around their houses. In this country it is a naturalized immigrant, not a native, but it crossed the ocean with the reputation of being a prized herbal remedy and a specific against “phantastical spirits.”
European peasants hung it in their windows on St. John’s (Midsummer) Eve to avert both the evil eye and spells cast by the spirits of darkness. Its Italian name is “devil chaser.” When gathered on a Friday, it was said to keep off devils and lightning, but it had to be treated with respect. In some places it was believed that if a person were to step on the plant in the dark of night, a phantom horse would rise from the roots and sweep him up on his back, then gallop away until dawn. The dew that fell on the plant the night before St. John’s Day was held to be efficacious in preserving the eyes from disease, and the entire plant was collected, dipped in oil and made into a balm for wounds. As I own no white animals, I am glad that superstition has preserved the plant and helped it spread. I like the St.-John’s-worts, which are pretty plants. The shrubby St. Johns-wort, Hypericum spathulatum in particular, with its compact masses of golden flowers, is handsome enough for a cultivated flower bed.
T. wonders about honey, and says there ought to be something about it in this book. Perhaps a recipe, too.
The nectar of flowers is over eighty percent water, and the sugars in the nectar are complex. To make honey, the bees must evaporate the water and invert the sugars—change them from complex to simple. The bees suck the nectar up through their long tongues and store it in a sac called a honey stomach. When this is full, they fly back to their hives and transfer the nectar to the young house bees, who spread it, drop by drop, throughout the honeycombs in the hives. One bee would have to fly the equivalent of three orbits around the earth in her foraging flights (using one ounce of honey as fuel for each orbit) in order to produce a single pound of honey. In the process of collecting nectar, storing it in their bodies and transferring it to the house bees, the bees add enzymes to the nectar. These break down the complex sugars into simple ones, chiefly dextrose, levulose and sucrose.
The water in the nectar evaporates slowly from the droplets spread out through the hive, but the bees speed up the process by fanning with their wings to create currents of air from the hive entrance at the bottom to the ventilation hole at the top.
When most of the water is removed from the nectar, the bees cap each cell of finished honey with snow-white wax that is secreted in flakes from their wax glands. This finished honey has a very low moisture content, less than nineteen percent, as dry as parched corn, dryer than air. This makes honey hygroscopic: because it can pull moisture from the atmosphere, it must be stored in tightly sealed containers once it is extracted. It is the reason why baked goods made with honey stay moist and do not dry out the way they do when sugar is used.
Dr. Johnathan White, who has worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a honey specialist, gives the following percentage characteristics of an average domestic honey:
Component
Average
Moisture
17.2
Levulose
38.2
Dextrose
31.3
Sucrose
1.3
Maltose
7.3
Higher sugars
1.5
Total acid
/> .57
Ash
.169
Nitrogen
.041
The exact composition of honey would vary from the above chart because plant nectars vary. Different nectars also determine the color of honey, its flavor and the speed with which it crystallizes. For example, bees working buckwheat flowers produce a dark, strong-flavored honey; those working clover make a mild white honey. The blackberry blossoms my bees were working in May are the source of a light-colored, fruity-tasting honey, while the reddish honey with a deep, rich flavor comes from the sumac they were working during the summer. Bees work the best nectar source within a two-mile radius of their hive; in most places, a variety of flowers are in bloom at the same time, so that their honey generally contains a mixture of plant nectars. Honey that is labeled “clover,” “orange blossom” or “tupelo” usually contains honey from other flowers as well.
There are other animals who like honey in addition to bees. Ants, cockroaches and wasps get into beehives to eat it when they can. So do pigs, bears or any other animals with a sweet tooth. Humans are the most skillful at taking the honey from the bees—and they like to spread it on hot biscuits. Honey can replace an equal amount of sugar in many recipes, but other liquid ingredients must be proportionately reduced. When baking with honey, oven temperatures should be lowered by about twenty-five degrees to prevent overbrowning.
The other evening I was reading through a stack of 1920s agricultural magazines I had found in an abandoned cabin up the road. They were the only things left after vandals had stripped the place of its windows and doorknobs, but they made pleasant reading, and I didn’t need the doorknobs. In the February 1924 Better Farming, a delightful and instructive periodical, I came across the following:
Busy Bee Helps Motorist—The Rural Engineering Department and office of the extension specialist in agriculture of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University have been conducting some tests with commercial sweets as anti-freeze mixtures for automobile radiators.
A Book of Bees Page 14