Weekly 101 (4/20/11)

I have no internet at home right now (it went up in smoke), so please bear with my lame update.

For those of you who may have missed it on my calendar page, there is a showing of Vanishing of the Bees happening Thursday the 21st (tomorrow)at 6PM, sponsored by Whole Foods!

Vanishing of the Bees

http://www.vanishingbees.com/events/?event_id=191

Hosted as part of the Whole Foods 'Do Something Reel' Film Festival

Time : Thursday, April 21 2011 6.00 PM to 12.00 AM
Venue:City Cinemas Village East
Address
181-189 2nd Avenue
& East 12th St
New York, NY. 10012

Tickets are $13
For more information contact 212-529-6799
http://www.villageeastcinema.com
http://www.dosomethingreel.com/.

After the film, there will be a panel discussion and Q&A featuring YOURS TRULY, Jim Fischer from the NYC Beekeeping Group, my beekeeping apprentice and Slow Foods International Biodiversity Wizard Emily Vaughn, and other cool like-minded folks! Exciting!


Also exciting, I am going to be giving two short talks on beekeeping in the city at the Brooklyn Children's Museum on Friday the 22nd as part of their Earth Day Celebration!

Celebrate Earth: Busy City Bees

11:30 and 1.30, for ages 4 and up

Farming is the last thing most people think happens in NYC, but bee farmers help keep all community and window gardens full of fruits and veggies. Find out why bees are so important and what it is like raising bees in the city.

If you stop by, they'll be showing a short film and I'll be answering questions starting at 11.30AM and 1.30PM!

I'm going to have cool props and a cooler assistant (Emily!)

Admission to the museum is only $7.50. The chance to see NYC's largest snake is worth that price alone! It's shedding! So cool!


For those of you that have missed the latest crop of Beekeeping 101 courses offered in the city this spring, Meg Paska is teaching a late session of her excellent "Rooftop Beekeeping 101" course at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn, starting May 1st.

Beekeeping isn’t just for farmers anymore! Learn the ins-and-outs of keeping bees in an urban environment. Maintaining an apiary is easier than you think. All one needs is a relatively accessible rooftop with a lot of sun, 15 minutes a week and tolerance for the occasional sting. With some patience, you can harvest your own distinctive, local honey and contribute to the pollination of your community’s flora!

In spite of what you might think, Honeybees thrive in urban areas like New York City. With an abundance of flowering trees and weeds, pollinators have their pick of as much nectar and pollen as any country bee might. In addition, they don’t come into contact with pesticides like rural bees do, so colonies tend to be healthier.

In this class you will learn about honeybee anatomy and behavior, hive function and construction, neighborly relations, urban beekeeping pros and cons, disease and pests, legality and safety and much more. You will leave this class with enough understanding and confidence to start your own colony in the Spring.

It'll be too late to start a colony for 2010, but that doesn't mean you can't start getting ready for 2011! The class is $80 for 3rdWard members and $100 for non-members. Spaces are limited and Meg is a great beekeeper to learn from, so snag a spot WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

Sign up at www.3rdWard.com.


Finally, the NYC Beekeeping Group was kind enough to remind me that they have an upcoming seminar on solitary bees on Wednesday, April 20th! If you aren't ready (or interested) in keeping honeybees, hosting a solitary bee nest is an absolutely fantastic way to help support native pollinators with minimum fuss!

Bee Lovers !

Sign up now at the Solitaries Program (form link) to be included in the Bee Lovers's Solitary Bees program this year. You'll receive a nest with bees ready to hatch, and two seminars: an Introduction presented on [April 20th], and a Fall Lab Seminar where you'll check the health of your nest and discover what other pollinators may have laid there. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR BEES SATURDAY APRIL 16th AT THE HABANA EARTHDAY EVENT (12-5)

We're collecting $25 per unit to defray costs. All funds are used to support exclusively charitable and public purposes. Please bring payment, check or cash (checks preferred) when you pick up your bees.

$25 is a small price to pay for the satisfaction of helping to maintain a healthy and diverse population of pollinators!

Remember to RSVP at their website, www.NYCBeekeeping.com.

Honey! It's Complicated!

Have you ever gone to the store and seen a shelf of fifty different kinds of honey and wondered to yourself, "Why is there so much damn honey?"

I'll tell you why.

Honey is complicated.

There are almost as many varieties of monofloral honey as there are varieties of flowers, and so many more than that if you take into account the infinitely variable mixtures that we call “wildflower” honey. Last Sunday, I brought my modest collection of ten different varietals of honey over to my friend Martina's backyard farm for a casual honey tasting. Fueled by honey-sweetened cocktails and homemade dill butter, and joined by Patrick Tobin, we tasted each variety in turn.

So what exactly makes buckwheat honey so different from, say, orange honey?

It’s important to note that all nectar-based honeys, regardless of variety, are created in the same basic manner. A forager bee collects nectar from blooming plants, accumulating as much as seventy milligrams (85% of the body weight of an average bee!) from up to 1500 individual flowers per trip. Once back in the hive the forager passes its nectar load to a house bee, which will begin to “ripen” the nectar into honey. The house bee adds enzymes, bacteria, and yeasts, which start to break down and reassemble the natural sugars contained in the nectar into a variety of new compounds. As these reactions take place, the house bee starts to reduce the water content of the nectar, from a starting concentration of between 40% and 95%. It does this by forcing a droplet of the digesting nectar onto its proboscis, stretching it out to increase the surface area of the liquid and fanning its wings to evaporate the water. By doing this, and continually adding more and more nectar, the water content may be reduced to around 17%. At this point, the house bee will store the finished honey in a cell and coat it with a thin layer of fresh wax in order to preserve it.

Tim: This is really interesting honey!
Martina: This is a really interesting drink!

The simple answer to the question of why there are so many kinds of honey is obvious. Honey is generally categorized according to the flower or nectar source it was made from, and that source determines the characteristics of the end product. Buckwheat honey comes from hives surrounded by fields of blooming buckwheat. Orange blossom honey comes from hives placed in citrus orchards. The bees gather nectar from a single source simply because there is nothing else around (oh boy, monoculture!), and it's that singular nectar source or mix of sources that determines the specific aroma, flavor, and color of a honey. Buckwheat honey is buckwheat honey, whether it comes from Pennsylvania or Canada.

The real answer is, of course, a lot more complicated. The average honey is made up of:

17.2% water
38.4% fructose
30.3% glucose
1.3% sucrose
7.3% maltose
1.4% oligosaccharides
1.1% acids
0.17% ash (minerals)
PLUS enzymes, proteins, vitamins, bacteria, yeasts, and pollen.

These, of course, are approximate values, and can vary hugely from honey to honey.

Honey, as you might expect, is about 95% percent sugar of one kind or another (by dry weight). The ratio of fructose to glucose is different from honey to honey and can make a huge different in the perceived sweetness and other qualities of the honey, such as texture and the rate of crystallization. The 1.4% percent average of oligosaccharides may consist of any mixture of complex sugars such as isomaltose, nigerose, turanose, maltulose, kojibiose, αβ-trehalose, gentiobiose, laminaribiose, maltotriose, 1-kestose, panose, isomaltosyl glucose, erlose, isomaltosyltriose, theanderose, centose, isopanose, isomaltosyltetraose, isomaltosylpentaose, and raffinose (to name a few), all of which make some small contribution to the overall taste, depth, and subtlety of the whole. Most of those complex sugars aren't found in the original nectar, but are actually formed during the ripening process via the actions of the enzymes, acids, and symbiotic microorganisms that are added to the nectar in the bee's gut.

Argh, snake, it's a snake! Of buckwheat, buckwheat, buckwheat honey.

People are always surprised when I tell them that honey is quite acidic, but with an average pH of 3.9, most honey is as acidic as diluted table vinegar and contains almost 10 different acids! Gluconic acid, which is the most common and accounts for most of the acidity of honey, is made by the bee-excreted enzyme glucose oxidase and some of the naturally occurring bacteria that exists in the hive. Think of the acid in honey as a flavor enhancer, like salt in baking. You don't (or at least shouldn't) taste it in the end product, but without it the result would be flat, lifeless, and boring.

That's all the easy stuff. Minerals are where it starts to get a little bit harder to explain, but I'll give it a shot. The concentration of minerals in a honey is highly correlated to its color. Dark honeys tend to contain much higher amounts of minerals, particularly potassium, sodium, magnesium, iron, manganese, chlorine, sulfur, and silicon. Unfortunately, not a huge amount of research has been done into the causes of honey coloration, but the current best guess is that it's a mix of many different factors such as the ratio of sugars, the caramelization of those sugars by the natural acid content of honey, and the mineral content.

This sure is a tasty tableau.

The enzymes, proteins, vitamins, microorganisms, and pollen are what's left over, and probably worth a post all their own. The short answer is that honey is chock full of naturally bee-produced enzymes, symbiotic bacteria, yeasts, and protozoa that live within the bee's digestive system and contribute to the ripening process, and small amounts of vitamins and proteins leached from pollen accidentally mixed in during the production process.

Finally, we're left with the golden question.

Why is honey so good?

I have no clue, and frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Honey is indefinable.

Honey is amazing.

Honey is magic.


Check out Patrick Tobin's take on the honey tasting and see some more pictures at his blog: www.patrickftobin.com

Martina is planning on posting her impression of the honey tasting as well. It's not up yet, but check out her sweet urban farming blog in the meantime: www.farmtina.com

The Mystery of the Red Honey, Part 3

So into the mail the samples went, off to a state food lab by way of Paul Cappy, the state apiculturalist. Paul has been extremely helpful in figuring out our problems and always managed to find the silver lining. The first time I mentioned the possibility that the source of the contamination was the maraschino cherry factory, he immediately suggested that we mix the stuff into our Manhattans. He may have overestimated how many Manhattans I can consume safely, but at a time when everyone involved was tired and worried about the health of our bees, his unwavering view of the upside cheered us up. He also shared many stories about other beekeepers who had experienced similar problems—I had heard some of them before, but had always taken them to be the stuff of legends.

I guess I know better now.

In order of distance from the factory.  Samples taken from hives closest to the factory on the left.
Image Copyright BoroughBees.com, 2010

Eventually, the results came back. Positive for red #40, the food-safe dye (FD&C Red 40) used to colour cherries at the factory. The proverbial last nail in the coffin, but as I've mentioned, we were already pretty positive that the factory was the source. With that last scrap of evidence in hand, we drafted a letter and made moves to contact Mr. Mondella, the owner of the factory. Things got complicated before we could deliver it.

The Mystery of the Red Honey, Part Two

So . . .

Ethylene glycol. Nasty stuff. The kind of stuff you don't want in your honey, let alone your hives. Obviously, this suggestion caused a bit of consternation and I quickly got in touch with Cerise Mayo and Gita N., both of whom maintain hives at the Added Value Red Hook farm, as well as Ian Marvy, the director of Added Value. We started a huge e-mail chain of ideas, theories and suggestions, but eventually decided that the best and only course of action was to meet in person to take a look at the affected hives and take samples to send to the state food lab. We met on Labor Day.

I arrived at the farm prepared for the worst. I had already seen the pictures of the red "honey" on Facebook, but they didn't do it justice. Bright red, practically fluorescent bees flying into the hive, completely unaware of the alarm they were inciting just doing their thing. I should probably clarify that the bees themselves weren't (and still aren't) red. The dye is no more incorporated into their bodies than the red food dye we eat in so many foods is integrated into ours. It's just along for the ride. When a bee finds a source of food, it will fill itself to bursting. Its crop, or honey stomach, distends drastically until it takes up almost half of its abdomen, and since its exoskeleton is partially translucent, you can see whatever it’s carrying. In this case, the bees had found something bright red, and there was a lot of it. Hundreds, thousands of bees were coming in heavy, packed tight with neon goop. Like David mentioned in the New York Times article, it was pretty beautiful.

After we made our introductions and got over watching the bees, we set to work. Once the smoker was lit, we surrounded the strongest hive and cracked it open. We could immediately see that something was not quite right.

Take a closer look.
Image Copyright BoroughBees.com, 2010

The Mystery of the Red Honey

Bloody Bees....
Image Copyright 2010, BoroughBees.com

I've gotten a few e-mails from friends and readers forwarding the recent article in the New York Times covering the outbreak of red “honey” in Red Hook, so firstly, THANK YOU to everyone who sent it to me. It's a very well-written article and it delves into the pressing issues of gentrification and the social friction it creates.

Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities—acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen . . .

And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking suspicious. . . . Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

Follow the link to the full NYT Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.htm

While gentrification and the clashes between local businesses, old residents, and newcomers to neighborhoods are fascinating, as a beekeeper, I've been much more curious about the beekeeping aspects of this story since it first came to my attention several months ago.

A lot of people have a very pastoral view of bees: flying from flower to flower slowly, sedately, looking for food, dancing their way toward a hive full of honey happily donated to our kitchens and tables. The reality is frantic, a constant struggle for survival against a legion of enemies. Honeybees are desperately productive, and the old saying “busy as a bee” takes on new meaning when you consider that most bees die in the field, full of food and nectar, expending the last of their energy on One. Last. Load.

In the News: CCD Research

Quite a number of you have sent me the recent New York Times article on the discovery of the cause of colony collapse disorder or CCD. Firstly, thanks to everyone who thought to send it in; I try to keep up on the news, but there is quite a bit of it. By sharing any beekeeping related tidbits you run across you not only help me keep up, but let me know what kind of things you are interested in.

I like that. I’d also like to share my interpretation of the paper and the reaction that followed.

So, as seems to be the norm in the news, the story has come across a little differently than it was originally intended. The title of the NYT article says it all: Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. While I understand their enthusiasm, the actual research article on PLoS ONE makes no such claim. Rather, their research points to the combination of Nosema ceranae and an Invertebrate Iridescent Virus (IIV) as the proverbial straw that broke the camels back, NOT the exclusive causative agent of CCD.

In their relative small scale study (41 colonies) they found a statistically significant correlation between colonies suffering from CCD and a co-infection by nosema ceranae and IIV. The combination of both N. ceranae and IIV type 6 was detected in 100% of the collapsed or failing colonies in a small scale study done in 2006. Similarly, follow up studies on an observation hive undergoing collapse in 2007 and 9 colonies in Florida in 2008 showed that the combination was present in all colonies that collapsed.

Even with such a small sample size, such a strong connection is hard to ignore, but there is a fly (bee?) in the ointment for anyone who would like to believe that they found the one true cause of CCD.

Genius Beekeepers and Weekend Recap

First and foremost, I'd like to thank everyone who came out to the New New York Green Street Festival and stopped by my table, especially those people from my Beekeeping 101 class! A few of you actually had time to stay and help field questions for a while; I was both impressed with (and proud of) how many questions you were able to answer (and so well!) after a single class. Hopefully that means I'm doing something right!

It was a busy day and the traffic was constant (as were the questions), so if I missed yours, email me! I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible (and maybe share the answer with everyone else.) In fact, I was so busy answering bee questions that I didn't get a single picture of the observation hive or my table! If you took any, would you please share them with me? I'd love to put them up here on my blog for everyone to see!

On another note, it is a widely accepted fact that beekeepers are above average in both intelligence and looks. The MacArthur Foundation recently confirmed at least the former by awarding Marla Spivak a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as the 'genius' grant for her work developing the 'Minnesota Hygienic' Italian Hybrid bee.

Read more about it here and be sure to watch the video: Marla Spivak @ The MacArthur Foundation