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4 hours ago
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I was first introduced to bees when I was invited to visit a neighbour’s apiary one April afternoon, 20 years ago. Like most people, I was terrified of stinging insects, but I was fond of the honey they produced, which I would drizzle into my tea to soothe a scratchy throat.
An invitation to meet honeybees was unusual. At the time, I was a freelance designer and illustrator, and spent my days working from my tiny red cottage in rural Connecticut. Occasionally, I took day trips into New York City to meet with clients and a few times each year travelled to China to oversee manufacturing of giftware for a small import company
The setting could not have been more seductive: an apiary resting in a fragrant field of wildflowers, the warm sun hugging my shoulders and the aroma of beeswax permeating the air. My neighbour smoked the entrance of the hive, then lifted the cover, revealing thousands of honeybees. He explained that the smoke calms the bees and it also makes them move, so we could inspect the hive. I stood at the opened hive, mesmerised at how hundreds of bees were going about their business and ignoring our presence.
As the bees began to buzz around our heads in a kind of calm chaos, he removed a frame of honey with his bare hands and told me stories about the activities inside the beehive. There was the queen bee, with her ability to lay thousands of eggs in a single day and live well beyond her children. The female workers, who performed every duty inside and outside the hive: caring for the young, producing beeswax, foraging for nectar, making honey. Last, the male drone bees, who do not have a stinger and never make honey but are necessary for mating until they die in the act. I had never imagined that the life of a honeybee could be so intriguing and dramatic, similar to a fairytale opera.
The frame was comprised of hexagonal beeswax cells sticky with honey, and the bees wasted no time sipping it up. We also took turns poking our fingers into the honeycomb to taste the honey, which delivered a flavour so rich and sublime that I had no words to describe it. It was nothing like the store-bought honey in the plastic squeezy bottles from my childhood; honey that was perpetually crystallised in the most unappetising way, prompting us to throw it out and settle for dry granules of white sugar.
With my first taste of real honey, my mind began spinning with thoughts of raising bees and becoming a beekeeper. I was ready to take a chance and explore something completely new. What began as a hobby turned into my life’s second act, one that would open my eyes to the natural world.
When it was time to order my beehive and equipment, my neighbour referred me to a local supply company. I needed a protective veil, a hive tool, a smoker and gloves.
The day my new hive arrived by truck, I ran outside to greet the driver. Back then, bees were ordered by mail and when they arrived at the post office I received a call from a terrified clerk firmly requesting that I retrieve my box of bees immediately. On the drive back home, with the box of buzzing bees in the back seat of my car, I imagined getting stopped and how I would explain to the officer that I was a beekeeper. With the help of my neighbour, I hived my new colony of bees, receiving only a few stings. He told me how honeybees are curious creatures that like to crawl into the nooks and crannies of our clothing, and they did just that.
My cottage was surrounded by a large piece of land and an unkempt garden which was a perfect home for my bees. Friends and family thought I had lost my mind. I joined the local beekeeping club, and it was comforting to meet like-minded people who loved their bees. I remember once telling my younger sister that I was going to a bee meeting over the weekend. She made me chuckle when she asked if I took my bees with me.
I delighted in spending time watching my bees fly in and out of the hive entrance. On nice days I sat nearby and ate my lunch with them. Their presence gave me a sense of peace. As I spent more time outside, I became enchanted by the beauty of what I had once thought of as weeds along the roadside but which I knew now were fragrant flowers for bees. I became obsessed with the daily weather forecast and the rhythm of the seasonal blooms, which determined when and what my bees would forage on.
But it was ultimately the fact that honeybees pollinate hundreds of crops around the world that provide fruits, vegetables, legumes, seeds and nuts for humans and wildlife that amazed me. Pollination is the act of bees moving pollen from the anther (male part) of a flower to the stigma (female part) of a flower to fertilise it, so it can proceed to fruit. How did I live almost half of my life being afraid of bees and never realising how essential their pollination service is to the global food chain? I was a passionate eater and cook, but honeybee pollination was something I had never fully understood and had taken for granted.
Like many beekeepers, I planted an edible garden for my bees to pollinate and provide me with food. Along the way I learned which plants were pollinator-friendly – which produced nectar and which produced pollen. The first flowers I planted were sunflowers, then cucumbers and a variety of herbs: lavender, parsley and basil.
It wasn’t until my second year of beekeeping that my bees produced a few frames of honey to harvest. I was flabbergasted to learn that a bee makes a mere one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime; honey is rare and precious, truly liquid gold. I learned there were thousands of different flowers around the world that bees collect nectar from to make honey and that each imparts unique sensory characteristics to the honey produced. The colour, aroma and flavour will change season to season and year to year, paralleling wine in terms of how the region, the climate and the soil affects the final product. These environmental variables are known in French as terroir. Terroir epitomises the true meaning of seasonal and local food, the capturing of the flavours of a region at a specific moment in time. Essentially, terroir is why every drop of honey is unique and a feast for the senses.
My budding hobby slowly became a business, mostly because I had to recoup the money I was spending each year. I felt that in order to be competitive in the market, I needed to learn as much about honey as possible. But, to my shock, I found there was very little honey literacy, or even interest in it – until I stumbled upon the Italian Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey and their honey sommelier courses. At a festival in Tuscany, I sat in on a honey talk where they described each sample of honey like a fine wine, using words such as woody, aromatic, floral and even animal. Instantly, I knew I had stumbled upon the answers about honey I was looking for, and enrolled in the next course in 2013. Eventually, I became the first US citizen to become a member of the register.
This experience sparked my passion for honey literacy: I felt it was crucial to educate the public and my fellow beekeepers about the wonders and complexity of honey, and so I established the American Honey Tasting Society. It is an unfortunate reality that the many types of honey and their glorious flavours are still largely unknown to most. It is long overdue that honey takes its rightful place at the culinary table alongside wine, olive oil, cheese, chocolate and tea, and I have dedicated my life as a honey sommelier to elevating honey to the status of a noble food.
