Busy as a Bee

I attended a beekeeping class today at the Ecology Center. I could write for days about bees. Everything about bees is wondrous: their social structure, their crucial role in pollinating plants, the creation of the honeycomb, the complexity of the honey-making process....The Wrangler and I were enthralled when the apiarist described how bees select their hives. The scouts check out nearby "real estate" and report back to the colony. Each scout performs a dance that discloses the location of a potential site by conveying the angle of the sun's location, the distance, and direction. The bees buzz off to view the properties and then select the new hive via a democratic process.

Without veering off into Debbie Downer territory by lamenting colony collapse disorder, Africanized ("killer") honey bees (which descend from a colony of hybrid bees that were interbred by a biologist in the 1950s and accidentally released), bees feeding on nectar and pollen from genetically-modified or pesticide-laden plants, and the adverse consequences of interstate transportation of bees for commercial agricultural purposes, I will say only that we humans seem to be messing up things for the bees. Did you know that some commercial apiaries feed their honeybees a junk food diet of high fructose corn syrup instead of the nectar from flowers? The honey produced by these poor bees basically is reprocessed high fructose corn syrup.

En route to the beekeeping class, the Wrangler and I had discussed the medicinal aspects of lavender while mulling over my lavender farm plans. During the class, the apiarist briefly touched on the antibacterial and antiseptic properties of honey. I hadn't given much thought to the symbiosis of lavender and honey! From cultivation to purpose, they seem to be a perfect match...the bee's knees, if you will.

Like Bees to Honey

A few weeks ago my sister-in-law sent me an email asking what brand of honey we buy. "Your brother keeps talking about the honey he had when we visited you guys." This came as no surprise. I don't buy honey at the grocery store anymore. Ever since visiting a beekeeper and getting a taste of warm honey that was in the hive literally 30 minutes prior to my visit, I've found that store-bought honey has almost no flavor. Last week a food safety report claimed that the pollen frequently is filtered out of products that are labeled as "honey" and sold in conventional stores. The study found no pollen in 75 to 100% of the samples tested from various supermarket and convenience store chains.

Removing pollen from honey is a safety concern (without the pollen, there is no way to trace the source of the "honey"), but I'm convinced that this practice also affects the taste. I buy raw, unfiltered honey from local hives, and I can practically taste the flower blossoms in every spoonful. This stuff could inspire poetry.

Last night as the Wrangler poured honey on his peanut butter sandwich (I do feed the man, but he likes to snack on peanut butter sandwiches), he looked from the jar of honey to the jars of homemade beeswax candles on the counter and declared his love for bees. "I will be in charge of the hive, the honey, and the candles, if you'd like," he announced. I like bees and beeswax, but I'm not one to hoard farm chores.

"Bee my guest."

Homemade Is Where the Heart Is

I spent a couple hours today making beeswax candles using widemouth 8 oz canning jars as molds. Of all the crafty things I attempt, beeswax candle-making is probably my favorite because of the easy factor. The kitchen smells nice, mistakes can be melted away, and it doesn't take long to have a tangible, practical product. The only step I struggle with a little is chiseling the two-pound block of raw beeswax into smaller pieces for melting.

I ordered some kraft boxes for packaging sets of votives and tea lights that I'll make for gifts. I'm glad to see that the stigma once associated with homemade gifts is fading. When I receive a homemade gift from a busy friend, I almost want to cry because I know that she is giving me something extra special--the gift of her time. It takes so little effort to send a gift card, but setting aside precious time to create a gift means a lot. It doesn't have to be fancy or even that time-consuming. A box of homemade rice krispie bars could make someone's day!

Wouldn't it be cool if, instead of feeding the grotesque Black Friday shopping tradition (which, by the way, is now encroaching into Thanksgiving Day--Walmart is opening at 10PM on Thursday, which is beyond gross), we stayed at home and made things to give for the holidays? Instead of strapping on running shoes and pepper-spraying old ladies in the name of "big savings," we could relax and recover from the Thanksgiving festivities and maybe invite a couple good friends over for, I don't know, a knitting bee or something? I realize that my Anti-Black Friday manifesto makes me sound old-fashioned. I can hear the protests: "Stay home and knit instead of scoring a cheap iPad? Surely you jest." I really should have been born 100 years ago.

Let There Bee Light

What was in this giant box that arrived today all the way from the Brushy Mountain Bee Farm in North Carolina? None of your beeswax. Literally. It's my beeswax!

I was inspired to place an order after the Wrangler bought a small beeswax candle for $14.95 at Sprouts last week! I can make five candles that size from one pound of beeswax, which costs about $5.00. I'm no math wizard but even I could see that the $14.95 candle can be replicated for roughly a $1.00. Sure, there's the labor factor to consider but, especially when compared to most of the other crafty things I've attempted, making candles is a breeze.

And I'm sure the candles will come in handy during the next power outage.

Mind Your Own Beeswax

Today the Wrangler and I headed over to the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano for the beeswax candle-making class. The Ecology Center is in a bright, airy farmhouse built by Pony Express rider Joel Congdon in 1878. Five of us gathered in the pleasant farmhouse kitchen to learn how to melt and pour beeswax. Yes, it's as easy as it sounds. The beeswax from a local hive looks lovely and natural and smells like fresh, delicious honey. I couldn't help but feel ashamed of the unnatural and probably toxic sparkly and fake-scented candles I have around the house. Pouring votive and mason jar candles takes just seconds (and about an hour to dry), and dipping tapers is oddly therapeutic--like kneading bread. I can't believe I haven't been making my own candles. Well, that is going to change.

I remember my dad making candles by melting old candles in a coffee can. When I told him about the class tonight, he introduced me to another candle project--ice candles. Apparently, if you pour the wax over a cup of ice, it creates beautiful candles with lots of small holes.

The best thing about this activity is that if you somehow mess up or aren't happy with the candles, you can just re-melt the beeswax and try again.

Like Bees to Honey

As the Great Cheese Farm Tour 2010 drew to a close, the Wrangler and I agreed that it had been one heck of a trip. Who knew we'd fall in love with Vermont? We didn't even make it to Maine. I might have shed a tear or two of happiness while driving through the billboard-free Vermont countryside and commiting to memory the views of red, orange, and yellow hills. Yes, the trees had begun to change color.

I accomplished one major feat on this trip: I got the Wrangler excited about bees. Our visit with Jenna at Cold Antler Farm gave us the opportunity to process wool from her sheep and help harvest fresh honey. Okay, I'm using the word "help" a bit loosely here. I "helped" by carrying the matches for the smoker device that is used to chase the bees out of the hive, and the Wrangler "helped" by looking for the crowbar-like tool that extracts the plastic honey-filled frames from the hive. (The tool was under a bale of hay upon which a proud chicken had just laid an egg.) Jenna's hive has 30,000 bees, and she's been stung only once. She removed two frames (there are 10 total) from the hive, put them in a bucket, and brought them into the kitchen. She placed a colander in the bottom of a large bowl and scraped the honey from the frames with a brush. It oozed into the colander, which removed the wax and, well, bee particles.

Vermont currently is awash in goldenrod, and the honey is the exact color of the goldenrod blooms--which makes perfect sense. There is nothing as sweet as fresh honey. Except for maybe fresh maple syrup. I'll get into that later.

Bee-lieve It or Not

I'm headed to B-School. But we're not talking business school; we're talking bee school. Despite my suspicion that beekeepers are a little weird, I'm embarking on an adventure in apiculture.

I can't believe that I didn't think of this sooner. Beekeeping has many upsides:

1. It's good for gardening. Nothing grows without a little pollination.
2. It's sort of a rescue operation. Surely you've heard of colony collapse disorder. Not to be an alarmist, but supposedly all the bees are dying out worldwide, and soon we'll have no food supply due to lack of pollination. Or something like that. Minor details.
3. Beeswax candles.
4. And, of course, delicious honey.

I personally am a good fit for beekeeping. Curiously, I have no fear of bees or stings. I had only two reservations about making a beeline for beekeeping (sorry). The first was the outfit. For some reason I had it my head that beekeepers wear long black dresses and heavy black veils and creep through their gardens on foggy mornings looking lost and creaky. Thankfully, after a little research, I discovered that I had confused beekeepers with what likely are widows in scary movies. Beekeepers actually wear some kind of white get-up that looks like an astronaut suit. It's fairly benign.

My second reservation concerned the sheer number of bees that will be arriving (via U.S. Mail, nonetheless). A typical hive has 60,000 bees. While I'm unafraid of bees, I generally am grossed out by things in mass quantities. You know how one ladybug is cute? Well, 60 ladybugs are not cute (much less 60,000 ladybugs). But I must push past this quirk. I just have to think about all that honey.