I have always known honeybees to be gentle creatures. Working at Honey Gardens during high school I was around them often and never had a bad experience. Even when a bee stung me, I knew that she was sacrificing her life to give me her healing medicine. Last semester, Fall 2008, I studied in Ecuador for three months with Round River Conservation Studies. I had the opportunity to learn a little about how beekeeping is done in Ecuador during my time there.
Part of the time, our group stayed in a house just outside the city of Cuenca. Our neighbor, Anna Lucia, had a hive of honeybees in the backyard. We were fortunate enough to be able to eat the honey from her bees, straight from the hive! It tasted distinctly different from raw honey here. I can’t explain how it tasted, but I would attribute the difference to the fact that the bees simply are feeding on different plants in Ecuador from the ones our bees here feed on. When I needed time alone or wanted an excuse to take a breather outside I would go sit near the hive and watch the bees, breathing their vibrant energy in and out. I wanted to ask Anna Lucia more about her small-scale operation, but she hardly spoke any English and my Spanish skills are less than perfect. Without words, we connected on the simple acknowledgement of our mutual love for bees.
After I finished the Round River program, I spent a week volunteering on a small organic farm called Sacred Sueños. One night over a dinner of veggie stew and fresh fruit salad, Yves Zehnder, the founder of the farm (and native English speaker), mentioned that he kept bees. I immediately began telling him about my history with bees and how much I loved them. We talked about our experiences and I asked question after question about beekeeping in the rural Ecuadorian Andes. He told me that the bees he was keeping were African bees, rather than the European species we have here in the US. He explained how African bees are much more aggressive than European bees and people have to be much more cautious around them.
I learned that African bees will take over other beehives by learning the “secret dance” of the other hive and sending one of their own into the new hive with a queen-to-be larva and killing the resident queen. The worker from the African beehive puts the larva in with the other larva of the new hive and before long the population has an African queen and becomes infiltrated with African bees and is ultimately taken over. African bees produce less honey than European bees and are generally more difficult to keep because of their aggressive nature. While at Sacred Sueños, Yves and I put on the bee suits and checked one of the hives. I was the designated smoker. One bee got into Yves’ mask and stung him on the lip, but none got through my suit! Yves has bees for two main reasons: to produce wax for candles and honey for human consumption on the farm and to help pollinate the many fruits and veggies he grows.
If not for my love for bees that begun at Honey Gardens, I would not have had these experiences that deepened my overall experience studying in Ecuador. Spending time with bees was a fun and educational aspect of my experience that I’ll never forget.
Beth Kershner http://www.sacredsuenos.com/who.html
The benefits of Nature for children with ADD / ADHD
File this one under the “let’s spend grant money to research the obvious” category: it seems that walking for about 20 minutes in a park, surrounded by trees and Nature, is as effective as Ritalin for managing some of the symptoms commonly classified under the “attention deficit” umbrella.
Researchers recruited 15 boys and 2 girls and walked them for 20 minutes in one of three settings, on different days: an urban park, a residential neighborhood, and a downtown area. Those who walked in the park showed significant, powerful improvements in their ability to concentrate and perform after their walk. The others did not. While these results may seem obvious to us, we can at least gain some measure of comfort in knowing that the mainstream medical community feels like “doses of nature might serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible new tool in the tool kit for managing ADHD symptoms” as Dr. Andrea Taylor, head researcher for the study, wisely commented.
Now, I might feel that a walk in the Vermont woods, as they turn from green to fiery red, might give an even better experience to nurture biophilia, provide renewal and inspiration, and calm a scattered mind. But even a manicured park can do the trick! So finding time to spend outside, away from television, houses, and buildings, is a good idea for our kids. And “nature deficit disorder” might soon be recognized as a legitimate concern. Imagine that…
from the blog of Guido Masé RH(AHG), clinical herbalist, herbal educator, and garden steward specializing in holistic Western herbalism From his organic farm in Montpelier, Vermont, herbal extracts, massage oils and healing salves are offered www.grianherbs.com
Thank you for your support of the bees, plant medicine, and those that work in agriculture.
Propolis’ antimicrobial activity: what’s new? “Propolis is a hive product that bees manufacture from balsamic resins actively secreted by plants on leaf buds and barks. It is widely acknowledged to exert antimicrobial activity against a wide range of microorganisms (bacteria, fungi and viruses), but also exerts anti-inflammatory, anaesthetic, healing, vasoprotective, antioxidant, antitumoral, antiulcer, and hepatoprotective activities. This paper (in Italian) reviews the antimicrobial properties of propolis, focusing on respiratory pathogens. These characteristics make propolis a valid option for therapy of upper respiratory tract infections.” by De Vecchi E, Drago L, Laboratorio Microbiologia, Universita di Milano, Italy
The TV special on raw honey with Meriwether Hardie, Honey Gardens has been re-scheduled to Saturday April 11 @ 6:30 PM, on the Food Network cable & satellite. Please check your local listing to confirm exact time and date.
beverage makin’ joy ~ recipes for honey based natural sodas & honey wine/mead