DryStoneGarden

We’ve recently been enjoying several kinds of honey we bought from Bee Chama Honey, who had a booth at the flower and garden show. They keep bees in New Mexico, but they have varieties from California and the Northwest as well, and sampling their stuff was one of the best reasons for going to the garden show this year. It’s impressive how distinctive each honey is.

Last year, Meadow Foam (currently blooming in our garden) was my favorite. This year I liked Oak the best and Anita liked Desert Wildflower, so we got both. I’d never even thought of oak as a source for honey, but it’s delicious. We also got Buckwheat, which is more like medicine (with a recent study claiming that it is more effective than over-the-counter cough syrups), than something culinary. It’s glutinous and dark and rather undelicious. I like it well enough straight or in tea, but I tried spreading it on toast and it was like doing that with Nyquil. I don’t know which type of buckwheat it’s from, but it’s serious stuff.

The varietal honey scene is pretty separate from the agribusiness beekeeping that focuses on pollination instead of honey and produces overly-sweet clover honey as almost an afterthought and now gets a lot of press for the decline of its honeybees. I can’t decide if I find sudden hive collapse disorder really interesting or just over-hyped. I once saw a quote from a crusty old beekeeper who said that sudden hive collapse disorder used to just be called “bad beekeeping”–stress out and overwork your bees, he said, and they will get sick and die, end of story–but when you do a little reading you find that a lot of very experienced, very conscientious beekeepers have been affected. It does seem, though, like the kind of problem that seems to develop whenever agriculture creates a big monoculture or becomes too dependent on a single species. They seem to keep forgetting that nature favors diversity.

Native bees are now the new thing in pollination, especially in Europe, and an appreciation for them might be one of the end results of hive collapse disorder. It makes sense: instead of renting bees from a beekeeper, farmers can get native bees to do the work for a lot of crops just by following good organic practices. The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service is promoting native bees for sustainable agricultural practices and claims that they are already doing much of the pollination anyways. Pollinator Paradise has good info, including the amazing statistic that a single shaggy fuzzyfoot bee (love the name) can pollinate 337,000 flowers during its lifetime. Vancouver is now acting on this type of info with a new program to distribute “bee condos” to homeowners to increase the native mason bee population in the city; DIY gardeners who don’t live in Vancouver can make their own condos by drilling some 5/16″ holes in a block of wood. 

California Native Bee Garden in Berkeley will be on the Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour on May 3. It’s not really laid out like a garden–it’s for research, after all–but if you want to see a really thick concentration of bees and native wildflowers, it’s the place to go.

Tags: bees, honey

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 8:46 pm and is filed under california natives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.