Show Me the Honey

by Dave Doroghy

  The first time I made a batch of sugar water, I was so anxious to feed the girls I didn’t let the mixture cool down. I placed the jar of almost-boiled sugar water in the hive. When I went to check the next morning, a dozen bees lay dead next to the Mason jar, their proboscises scorched. Everyone is familiar with those novelty paper noisemakers you get on New Year’s Eve—the kind that unroll for seven or eight inches and toot when you blow into them. That is what a bee’s sensitive and paper-thin proboscis is like. When the bee is at rest, it is retracted. When she is feeding or drinking, it unfurls into a long tube she uses like a straw. Feeding your bees piping-hot sugar water will burn their proboscises off their tiny triangular heads quicker than you can say “Happy New Year.” The girls and I learned the hard way to let the water cool in the fridge, requiring the same patience I had to learn as a kid when my mother was making a tasty bowl of Jell-O.

  Once I mastered the art of almost boiling the mixture and had a good cooling method, there were still problems. Half the time, the little holes in the Mason jar lid clogged up with sugar, preventing the flow. I experimented with bigger holes, but that adjustment sometimes resulted in excess pools of sugar water on the hive floor. The bees accidently bathed in the pools while gorging themselves. The sugar stuck to their wings and legs and dried into a solidified white encrustation. The next time I opened my hive, I found sugar-coated, mummified bees. Hmm, possibly a new item I could consider marketing, since I was striking out in the honey production department. All kidding aside, my sloppy, careless bee-feeding techniques and the resulting carnage were disconcerting. At least the girls died happy and full of sweetness.

  It took me months of trial and error to get the temperature of the sugar water just right before removing it from the stove, to get the proper mixture and thickness of sugar and water, and to make perfect-sized holes in the Mason jar lids. The recipe had only two ingredients and was simple to remember, yet, despite its simplicity, I still managed to screw it up. As they say, mistakes are what learning is all about.

  To continue the learning process and increase my tally of mistakes, I experimented with other feeding techniques and bee dishes. One bee delicacy is called fondant. It is the basic ingredient of many candies, as well as icings for cakes. It’s basically a massive soft candy that sits in the hive satiating the bees’ daily winter need for sweets. A simple recipe from one of my bee how-to books got me off to a good start. But as I have learned in life and in beekeeping, nothing is simple.

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  Fondant

  400 mL water

  6 tsp lemon juice

  250 mL sugar

  Mix the water and lemon juice in a pot, and bring to a simmer on the stove. Slowly add in the sugar, stirring frequently to dissolve. Once the sugar is completely dissolved, heat all of the ingredients on medium high to 234 °F on a candy thermometer. Set the mixture aside while it cools down to about 200 °F. Using a mixer or your hands, taking care not to burn yourself by perhaps donning some rubber gloves, work the concoction until it achieves a smooth, dough-like consistency. Place the fondant into lightly oiled moulds. Tin pie plates work well.

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  I always get teaspoons and tablespoons mixed up, and something tells me the exact amount of lemon juice is probably quite important, which may be why my first batch of fondant never made it to a solid state. Down the sink it went. It wasn’t really my fault. Whoever named two totally different measurements of volume after spoons both beginning with the letter t wasn’t really thinking. Why not call them large spoon and small spoon?

  For my second batch of fondant, I remembered the teaspoon is the smaller one. With that minor correction, the process looked and felt more promising. I poured the gooey liquid into one of the nine tinfoil pie plates I had bought from the dollar store. When the concoction hadn’t hardened after 20 minutes, I put it in the fridge. When it didn’t jell after an hour in the fridge, I decided to leave it on the countertop at room temperature overnight.

  I woke in the morning and crawled down the 12-foot ladder that leads from my bedroom to the main floor where my kitchen is and discovered the fondant was still not solid. I tentatively touched the surface. It felt super sticky, just like the rolls of flypaper I hang in my living room in the summertime to trap houseflies. Had I created another “meal of death” like the boiling-hot sugar water? The fondant was so sticky I feared that if one of the girls were to touch it, she would be glued there for eternity. I pictured several bees gathered around the fondant, stuck like kids who dare to touch their tongues to a cold metal flagpole. I paused. Even I was not stupid enough to serve them this dud fondant. I decided to store it for a few more days to see if it would eventually harden. After three days, I threw it away.

  One of my how-to books had a recipe for something called bee tea. The recipe was far more complicated than any dish I had ever prepared for my friends at dinner parties at the float home. I chuckled when I saw the recipe called not for sugar but for honey. Forget it. Since I had taken over its care, my hive had yielded little to no honey, and the bees weren’t getting any of it back. As if that weren’t enough, the recipe also strongly suggested using fresh spring water, as opposed to good old water from the faucet. I wasn’t sure if the Fraser River could pass for a spring and in the end decided to give up on the whole dumb bee tea idea. It was all a bit too hippy-dippy for me. If tap water was good enough for me, then why wasn’t it good enough for my bees? I laughed out loud at the recipe and wondered if I had made a mistake and the tea wasn’t for me.

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  Bee Tea

  3 cups spring water

  ½ tsp chamomile

  ½ tsp echinacea

  ½ tsp peppermint

  ½ tsp stinging nettle

  ½ tsp yarrow

  ¼ tsp hyssop

  ¼ tsp lemon balm

  ¼ tsp sage

  ¼ tsp thyme

  Pinch rue

  3 cups cold tap water

  1 cup honey

  Bring 3 cups of spring water to a boil in a pot. Then take off the stove and add all of the herbs. Steep 10 minutes before straining through a small colander or cheesecloth. Add 3 cups cold water and cool until lukewarm. Add 1 cup of real honey. Stir well.

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  What a crazy recipe. I lost my Birkenstock sandals in the ’70s, and my tie-dyed T-shirts don’t fit anymore. I decided I didn’t have the right clothes to make this specialty gourmet bee beverage.

  The truth of it is, living alone I don’t really like cooking for myself, let alone for 50,000 bees. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it might be easiest to pick up a six-pack of Coke at Safeway, pop the top, and place it upside down in the hive. But that would be sacrilege.

  Consuming more honey and less sugar reaps big health benefits and improves quality of life, for both bees and people. Eating honey has been shown to help people lose weight, as well as reduce body fat and metabolic stress. Honey is also a great fuel for exercise and can improve sleep. Introducing honey into one’s daily diet yields dozens of other health benefits. In many ways it is the perfect food.

  I suspect that before reading this, you had never really cared about a bee’s seasonal diet; however, now that you understand the relationship between processed sugar and beekeeping, you may be a bit pickier about the honey you consume. Relax—if you are buying your honey from a local small producer, you’re probably okay. By the time the long cold winter, a time when bees do not produce honey, is over, the bees have ingested the sugar and are back out there collecting spring nectar, which will turn into summer’s honey. The honey you buy from hobby apiarists is hopefully a melody of nectar from thousands of plants and flowers distilled into nature’s perfect food.

  The process of introducing sugar to single hives, although not in tune with Mother Nature, is a stopgap measure to bring the hive through the winter. Be aware, though, that commercial honey, available in many large supermarket chains, may not be as good for you as you may think. To accelerate yield,
some of the large commercial honey producers—I am talking about producers with thousands of hives—put big barrels of sugar water out in the fields where they keep their hives in spring and summer. For bees in these commercial hives, it doesn’t matter how well the nectar is flowing or how many plants are blooming, because the drive-through sugar shack is open 24-7. The big sugar producer in Western Canada is a company called Rogers. There is a joke among local hobby beekeepers that if you feed your bees too much sugar water, you’ll harvest Rogers Honey.

  When it comes to large-scale commercial honey production, it gets worse. Honey from massive bee farms—with or without the unnatural white-sugar infusion—is often watered down and reconstituted into a hodgepodge of cheaper, less savoury ingredients that act as extenders. Some commercial honey is actually honey-flavoured cornstarch or rice syrup from China. Read the labels carefully. If the contents on the jar have words with five or six syllables, or if you see “high-fructose” anything, take a pass. We derive an inordinate, unhealthy amount of sugar just eating our regular North American processed foods. So when you buy honey, hold out for the real deal. Bee-ware!

  Almost every countryside or urban community has a weekend farmers’ market. These markets are often in interesting historic parts of town or in the parking lots of community halls. Though numbers of the common western honeybee, Apis mellifera, are dwindling and scientists are hustling to determine why, this bee inhabits every corner of North America, and beekeeping is increasingly popular, in part, to offset the losses of wild bees. Thus, it would be difficult to find one of these markets that didn’t have a local apiarist sitting at an eight-foot-long folding table with a neatly stacked pyramid of jars of 100 percent natural honey for sale. The jars of golden nectar may cost a bit more than the supermarket variety, but know that your local apiarist is trying to make an honest buck selling you the super-healthy bounty of a well-loved hive.

  Remember, as the old Coca-Cola slogan didn’t say: Honey—It’s the real thing.

  Conventional Wisdom

  On the big weekend of the British Columbia Honey Producers’ Association’s annual general meeting, conference, and trade show, the weather blew in windy and wet with 60-mile-per-hour winds that tossed the float home around like a cork in a flushing toilet bowl. Trees on the riverbanks toppled into the choppy current. The tempest overturned garbage cans and blue recycling bins. It even knocked out the electric power at the hotel where bee enthusiasts gathered for their long-awaited two-day event. It was brutal. The massive Pacific Ocean can create extremely fast-moving, volatile westerly winds when high-and low-pressure atmospheric pockets battle it out hundreds of miles from British Columbia’s shore. These high-speed winds then rage upon the unprotected, open river estuary where I moor my float home and roar through the nearby metropolis of Vancouver. What I can’t figure out is how a bee that weighs about one-tenth of a gram can possibly navigate her way through such a powerful gale. It must have been the storm’s cold, blustery winds that led one of my honeybees to seek refuge inside my white Volkswagen camper van, which I happened to be driving to the bee convention that October morning.

  With the same Harry Houdini skills the bees used to invade my bee suit, this girl likely found a small opening in the van’s sunroof. Or maybe she infiltrated the van’s cavernous metal frame by travelling up through the muffler, into the engine compartment, and through the air-conditioning vents until she finally ended up in the sheltered safety of the passenger compartment. All I know is the night before the convention there was no bee inside the van, and all the doors were securely locked with the power windows tightly rolled up. Who knows how she got there, but on that wet and miserable morning after Jeannie and I gathered up the to-go coffee mugs we had filled to the brim, our notebooks, and her 30-pound dog, Tres, and carried them all up the precariously swaying dock ramp to my van, I was shocked to see a bee lying motionless on my grey vinyl dashboard. I chuckled. How ironic was this? Never before had a bee entered my van, and now, on the morning we were going to the provincial bee convention, one lay dead in plain view of the driver’s seat. I had half a minute to inspect the corpse while I waited for Jeannie to take Tres for a pee before the long ride into town. When Jeannie returned, and she and the dog had settled into the passenger seat, I pointed to the bee carcass. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t dead. Crank the heat up and let’s see what happens.”

  We sat in the van with the engine running to get some heat while I fiddled with my portable GPS, trying to enter in the coordinates of the hotel, whereupon I discovered it was broken. Uh-oh. When the temperature inside the van finally reached a comfortable level, we began the 15-mile drive to the hotel near Vancouver. The temperature inside the van had risen another five degrees by the time we trekked a few miles down suburban roads and up the on-ramp to the freeway, and this is when we noticed that the ailing bee’s lifeblood had started flowing again. At the bee’s first slight signs of movement, Jeannie, a natural nurturer, jumped into action, taking the crucial next step to fully revive her.

  We carry an emergency jar of honey in both our vehicles at all times. Hey, doesn’t everybody? We like to have it handy for when we go to coffee shops and want to use our own sweetener. An emergency honey jar also happens to be useful for providing a boost to anemic stray bugs. My jar was stashed in the storage compartment of the passenger door among some maps and an old plastic ice scraper. Quicker than you could say “glucose,” Jeannie had extracted the container, opened the lid, smeared some honey on her index finger, and rubbed it on the dash an inch in front of our frozen insect refugee. It worked like a charm. The lethargic bee smelled the sweetness and slowly advanced her small sickly body. As I drove, Jeannie watched the bee unfold her proboscis, rolling it out into the honey to replenish her depleted system with some of the same golden, life-sustaining syrup that we had stolen from her hive. It was just what she needed, because after a few more miles the bee appeared revived. By that time it was so damn hot in the van that I was sweating. When I complained, Jeannie insisted I leave the heat vents cranked to further aid the bee’s recovery.

  I skilfully navigated my mobile sauna through heavy, wet weekend traffic, my windshield wipers beating a staccato tempo on double speed and the little bee on the dash cheering me on, but we fell more and more behind schedule. Although I was glad the errant bee had lived, I was still puzzled over how she got there in the first place, and, more importantly, I pondered the philosophical question of why she was there. I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. Was she a messenger sent by the rest of the bees in the hive? Perhaps she knew it was time for me to learn new apiary techniques and deepen my understanding of what bees need to survive. Was she there to escort me to the convention to ensure I smartened up?

  My hive was clearly in rough shape and its future was bleak. Every time I went out to inspect the hive, it had fewer and fewer bees buzzing around the entrance. I’d seen squadrons of wasps attack it, observed hundreds of dead mites on the bottom board, and discovered dozens of dead bees at its doorstep. Not to mention the numerous bees I had accidentally killed while trying to feed and protect them. If I didn’t do something soon, my once award-winning hive—the hive that had won second-best-tasting honey at this same convention two years prior—would become a ghost town of three empty wooden boxes.

  The terrible state of my hive had embarrassed and concerned me for most of the summer. I hoped the fall apiarists’ convention, which cost 300 bucks for each of us to attend, would kick-start me into gear and help me to help my hive turn the corner. Let’s face it—I was a beekeeping dud, and I felt guilty. It’s one thing to feel bad, but I knew the little bee on the dashboard had to live inside my disastrous hive and endure much worse.

  Every day, hundreds of her sisters were dying because of my ineptness. Grim Reaper wasps in yellow-and-black cloaks routinely patrolled the helpless colony, ruthlessly tearing her sister bees to shreds, munching through their heads and legs with chainsaw-like man
dibles. The bee on my dash had to live in a real-life beerated horror movie. On top of that, she had to wake up every morning inside the equivalent of a dirty apartment with a bare pantry. The hive was full of mites, dead bee body parts, and slimy diseases like nosema, which shows up along with the seasonal wet weather and coats the inside of my hives with brown bee diarrhea. To top it off, neither of the two queen bees I had introduced to the hive that summer had taken. The first one had probably fled the sloppy slum hive, and the second one had a weak, erratic egg-laying pattern. Fessing up to the whole truth of my beekeeper shortcomings, I was away on bike trips so often toward the end of that summer and during the fall that I never did treat the bees for mites regularly or even feed them properly. Heck, I still failed to measure the ratio of water to sugar accurately when I did feed them. In light of this sorry state of affairs and my delinquencies as a beekeeper, the convention couldn’t have come at a better time, and maybe the bee on the dashboard was like the Saint Christopher of insects, sent from above to safely deliver me to the great benevolent source of beekeeping knowledge.

  Driving in the pouring rain through Richmond, we were finally in the vicinity of the hotel, albeit 20 minutes behind schedule. Without my trusty GPS, I was unsure which road to take next. Heading west on Westminster Highway, I knew I had to turn right at some point soon. I said to Jeannie, “As this little bee is coming to life, I wonder if she knows where we need to go … maybe she can tell me where to turn … maybe she’ll waggle dance us to the hotel.” A few blocks after my comment, the little bee miraculously reoriented her torso on the dash 90 degrees to the right. I kid you not—she made a definitive “right turn” gesture just before Number Two Road, which was exactly where I needed to turn right to get to the convention. Divine insect intervention.