Beekeeping

[Christina]

Anybody here interested in actual beekeeping? The reason I kept getting recommended to read BEEK (as I mentioned in my intro) is because I have recently become interested in traditional beekeeping and the medicinal value and uses of raw honey.

The reasons are multifold: (1) I am interested in all things traditional related to food, nutrition, spirituality and medicine; bees and honey fall into all those categories. (2) I read the book "The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Re-Visioning the Insect-Human Connection" by Joanne Elizabeth Lauck. And then I read (3) "Queen Must Die and Other Affairs of Bees and Men" by William Longgood.

The "Queen Must Die" was a revelation to me. I have always had great trepidation about biting and stinging things, but that book, along with "The Voice of the Infinite" changed my perspective. Oh, I still duck bees, wasps, hornets, spiders, etc. But I have much more compassion for them, less knee-jerk fear, and I have seriously entertained the thought of keeping bees in a traditional way (very few beekeepers are traditional, Big Pharma and Mega Agra has invaded even that small corner of the world.)

I can fully understand why Holmes retired to keep bees and study along his own interests, although I do believe that my own reasons are much more Russellian ;-)

I would be very interested to hear if BEEK or anything else has ignited "Bee Fever" in anyone else.

Christina

[Christina]

Bees from NZ? Where are you? Christina

[spiston]

I actually have a friend who joined the Peace Corps and is currently in Paraguay employed as a beekeeper in order to help with local agriculture. Along with reading BEEK and listening to NPR's reporting about the necessity of bees and the unfortunate decimation of the bee population in North America of late I have totally caught the buzz. Sorry about that. Had to be done.

Yeah but I live in a crappy apartment in a city and currently have absolutely no way of becoming a beekeeper. One day (fist raised to the sky in a gesture of frustration and then, hope), one day...

Is it true, though, that eating local honey helps with allergies? I tried it but I don't really have a sweet tooth so it was hard to keep up a regimen.

[2maple]

Hi - My husband and I have kept bees for many years. He is the third generation of beekeepers in his family, and our daughters are the fourth...and well, I just got drwn in along the way.

Right now we have 4 hives, one of which just returned from a pollination holiday in friend's apple orchard. But as swarming season is right around the corner I suspect we'll end up with a few more before winter (swarms seem to love landing in our grape arbor or the apple tree behind our house and are easy to get.) This is a good thing because the unpredictable Maine spring is tough on bees and we'll typcally lose a colony or two in March...sigh.

I think the bees farmwifetwo mentioned are being imported from NZ because they are probably free from a lot of the diseases and mites that have been imported to the US from Eurpoe and other places in the last 20 years due to its insular nature. Disease management has become a critical componant of beekeeping in the last few years much more so than when we first started keeping bees. Its sad, but there are really no feral hives left.

Spiston - you would probably be surprised by the people who keep bees on a rooftop in urban areas...all you really need is an area in front of the hive that's clear for 20-40 feet for them to fly in/out...on a sunny day when they are really working it can look like a busy airport ...

Christina ...I love honey for no other reason than it tastes good! If it's medicinal well, there's one sweet thing that's actually good for me...yeah!!! and I love the way beeswax candles smell...I've gotten lazy and don't make the tapers any more...jar candles are way too easy :).

[Christina]

First off, please note that all I am about to say about honey applies to RAW honey ONLY and not to honey heated beyond the point that it would be in a sun-warmed hive.

Spiston asked (I still cannot figure out how to quote in this thing, so this way will have to do):
--> Is it true, though, that eating local honey helps with allergies? I tried it but I don't really have a sweet tooth so it was hard to keep up a regimen.

And the answer is, as with most things alternative medicine, “well, that depends......” I have seen it help and I have seen it fail.

I am certain it matters a lot if the bees are harvesting pollen from the plant(s) you personally are allergic to, of course, this depends a lot on hive placement, season of production of honey, etc. etc. For example, if you lived on a farm, kept bees and you had seasonal allergies in the summer, you could assume that whatever was bothering you appeared in the summer, so you could save some of the summer honey to eat the next spring in preparation for the annual onslaught of your allergies. You could think of it kind of like getting an allergy shot. The idea is that your body will find just a little of your allergy triggers in the honey and therefore your immune system will have a chance to develop strategies for coping with that substance(s).

That’s is a very conventional medicine way of looking at things. I personally believe there’s a lot conventional medicine misses; it wants one agent that works for all people who have a problem it diagnoses as the same “disease”. But there’s no such thing. There are always individual, constitutional differences between people, even if they are reacting to the “same” causative agent. In the example above, you can see how this might make “local” honey “work” for someone on one side of a village and not for someone on the other side of the village, and remember that example still completely ignores the differences in individual constitutions that might account for the “allergies”. OTOH if you know you are allergic to an agent that is endemic to your area (say ragweed) and you can get honey produced from that plant in the season it is in bloom, (so to be effective, your honey would have to be from at least last year) from some source in near geographical proximity to you (a few miles away) and if you begin using it at least several weeks before you would normally begin to have the problem, then you might have a good chance of seeing benefit. Obviously historically, people who had problems in their own little area, who also kept bees, and who used that honey for many purposes over the course of a year, could see benefit frequently enough for therapy to have gotten into the traditional medicine literature.

To my mind, more interesting uses of honey are in wound healing, as well as in severe and not so severe burns. Honey promotes development of healthy granulation tissue; is antiseptic, antifungal, has an acid ph that inhibits most microbes and is therefore an excellent preservative agent in addition to the medicinal qualities. Recent conventional medicine research indicates honey works better than anything conventional medicine has for major burns and for wounds that have been very stubborn to heal (like diabetic leg ulcers, etc.) Traditionally it has always been used for those purposes as well as cosmetic and culinary purposes, as a pill binder (take herbal powder and enough honey to make a stiff dough), as a moistener like in tea or an herbal decoction for a dry cough, and even as a weight balancer (it said to be able to both reduce fat and promote weight gain in underweight individuals.)

Honey made from certain plants can take on some of the qualities of those plants. So honey from beehives in a lavender patch would exhibit some of the therapeutic properties of the herb lavender. For the most cutting edge info on this just google “manuka honey”, because of the qualities of the manuka bush flowers, this honey has been able to act in place of antibiotics to treat antibiotic resistant diseases.

And that’s just a wee bit about the product of the bees. The bees themselves are very interesting. Humans have a relationship with bees that is not only global but predates written history. Many traditional peoples have myths about bees, from this we can know that humans have a deep relationship with bees that goes beyond the physical, certainly into the archetypal levels.

To relate this back to Russell and Holmes:
• Bees and honey are certainly themes in the bible, and as such I would think would be interesting and potentially useful to Russell.
• Honey is fairly easily available now and I would think even more so in Russell & Holmes’ time, therefore could come in useful for the various traumatic injuries they often seem to incur.
• Forensic science uses pollen, entomology (admittedly not often of bees but I can see where it could come up), from the qualities and constituents of honey one could place the source of honey if it ever came up in an investigation.
• Ok, so here’s the cool one for me: We already know that Holmes was interested in bee behaviour; I can certainly see how knowledge of bee behaviour could be extrapolated to shed light on human behaviour. But there’s another interesting level to consider: we also know that Holmes is often fairly prescient in his knowledge of the direction of the case; we know he has a long, deep interest in (therefore personal relationship and affinity with) bees. Carl Jung in some of his writings (c1952) indicated an archetypal connection between insects, particularly bees, and the sympathetic nervous system, the unconscious, and dreams. Perhaps, Holmes, through his (energetic? subconscious? archetypal?) connection with The Bee accesses the unconscious levels of his own mind and that of the Universe? ........ Ok, so perhaps it’s a stretch. But still interesting to chew on for one with a mystical bent such as I.

Christina

[Carlina]

Wow! I just learned so much for this thread!

All I keep are bones...I do watch chimpanzees...does that count?

Sociobiology, animal behaviour, and bees is interesting indeed. I must read up on evolutionary stable strategies and bees...I know data has been published in this regard and it would be traceable back to Holmes and some of his beliefs about human nature...

[wsmvgn]

One thing I've not been able to figure out was why Holmes needed two kinds of paint for the bees in the opening scene of Beekeeper. Seems like you'd only need that if you already had the answer to the question you were working on. Or maybe Holmes and Russell are smarter than I am.
Can any of you active beekeepers explain it? Thanks.

[jtb1951]

Thanks, Christina, for the mini-treatise! I guess I'm a knowledge geek, and it's wonderful to be able to learn something new every day. Thanks for sharing some of your expertise and interests!:)

John.

[vicki]

This (http://www.theses.ulaval.ca/2003/21026/ch02.html)is the closest thing I've been able to find on using paint on bees while studying their colonies. We need to get Christina and 2maple back over here to help us figure this one out, I think.

Christinaaaaa! 2maaaaaple!

[Tara]

Anybody here interested in actual beekeeping? The reason I kept getting recommended to read BEEK (as I mentioned in my intro) is because I have recently become interested in traditional beekeeping and the medicinal value and uses of raw honey.

The reasons are multifold: (1) I am interested in all things traditional related to food, nutrition, spirituality and medicine; bees and honey fall into all those categories. (2) I read the book "The Voice of the Infinite in the Small: Re-Visioning the Insect-Human Connection" by Joanne Elizabeth Lauck. And then I read (3) "Queen Must Die and Other Affairs of Bees and Men" by William Longgood.

The "Queen Must Die" was a revelation to me. I have always had great trepidation about biting and stinging things, but that book, along with "The Voice of the Infinite" changed my perspective. Oh, I still duck bees, wasps, hornets, spiders, etc. But I have much more compassion for them, less knee-jerk fear, and I have seriously entertained the thought of keeping bees in a traditional way (very few beekeepers are traditional, Big Pharma and Mega Agra has invaded even that small corner of the world.)

I can fully understand why Holmes retired to keep bees and study along his own interests, although I do believe that my own reasons are much more Russellian ;-)

I would be very interested to hear if BEEK or anything else has ignited "Bee Fever" in anyone else.

Christina

*waves arm in air wildly* I am!! I researched it last year, and emailed a company that sells bees in the US (I'm from Canada), but there's some kind of bee parasite thing going on, and they can't be shipped past the border. Varroa mites, maybe? Maybe they could be shipped now, but it's too late in the year.

I'm interested in all things traditional too. :) I'm not quite sure what you mean by traditional spirituality, though. I'm guessing you like herbs for medicine and cooking from scratch? (I like that, anyway.) I'm trying to cut down on sugar (it's poison :p ), so I'd like to use honey, and honey can get expensive if you use a lot.

I'll have to read those books you mentioned.

I used to be really scared of bees (I stepped on one when I was really little, got stung, and never got over it) , but now I love bees. I watched them this spring and it was awesome. (I even got my younger brother and sister to.) It's amazing how they all work together for the good of the hive. Humans could take a page from their book.
I still hate wasps and other stinging creatures :mad: (I like bumblebees though). I love spiders. :)

Yeah but I live in a crappy apartment in a city and currently have absolutely no way of becoming a beekeeper. One day (fist raised to the sky in a gesture of frustration and then, hope), one day...

I read an article on keeping bees in the city. I'll see if I can find it for you. Would you like to live on a farm someday?

I've heard that honey is really good for cuts and burns and whatnot. Apparently some ancient people (the Aztecs, perhaps?), were using it after brain surgery to prevent infections, and the patients were living. (I didn't even know people did brain surgery back then). I've also heard that honey never spoils.