What do the plants teach us?

Plants are an endless source of wisdom. They are my most patient as well as most persistent teachers.

99% of all living organisms on this planet are plants! That number always astounds me, and I am reminded of our most basic relationship with the plant world. Our constant exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide ensures our survival on this planet. Outside the honey house now everything is a brilliant green, the color associated with our heart chakra. When this chakra is open, we are able to give and receive the gifts of love, gratitude and appreciation. It is interesting as well that out of the four elements (earth, air, fire & water), the one that corresponds with the heart chakra is air or breath. When out in nature among the plants, I am reminded that our breath and our hearts are intimately connected, as we are to the plant world. This helps me remember to slow down, have patience, and open my heart.

A well known and respected herbalist once told me that when she visits clients for a consultation, the first thing she does is take a walk around the property on which they live to see what plants are growing. And amazingly enough, nine times out ten these plants are exactly what the client needs. One of my overall examples of a teaching plant is the dandelion. Dandelions persistence is remarkable. No matter how much effort people put into trying to eradicate this little yellow flowers from their lawns and gardens, the dandelion pops up everywhere, in cities and suburbs, between flower beds and between sidewalk cracks. Dandelion perseveres. As well as being a tremendous source of nectar for the honey bee, this flower has extremely important medicinal use in our modern culture. Dandelion is one of the most effective detoxifying herbs we have, assisting our livers in processing the overwhelming levels of pollution and toxins that surround us everyday. The flower essence of dandelion has specific uses as well for people today; this is for those people constantly on the go, helping people slow down, release tension and find balance in their lives.

honey bee gathering nectar & pollen
from black raspberry flower,
New Haven, Vermont June 2, 2007
photo by Ann D. Watson, copyright 2007

Dandelion is not unique. The healing gifts of so many plants are amazing and endless. I was reading recently about a process called Phytoremediation, which according to the Wikipedia dictionary is the ability of plants to de-pollute contaminated soils, water or air by “containing, degrading or eliminating metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives, crude oil and its derivatives, from the mediums that contain them.” I find this information fascinating. I am reminded again how amazing giving plants are to the planet itself, and I am inspired to give what I can back to her as well. I also realize that for those of us who are making efforts to live more sustainably and trying to help bring the earth back into balance; we are not alone, the whole plant world is here supporting us. The quote from Chief Seattle “Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself’” echoes in my mind, remind me that plants inherently live in a cohesive balance with all of life; it is time for us to do the same.

honey bee gathering nectar & pollen
from chive flower, New Haven, Vermont June 1, 2007
photo by Ann D. Watson, copyright 2007

Recently at our father’s service, I read some lines from Deuteronomy 32:13:

He nourished him with honey from the rock ….

In the early days, bees made their homes in rocky places, and sometimes the honey would ooze out when the rocks got hot. Out of the hard times, we are given sweetness.

I recall the 22 hour drives from Georgia to the north a few years ago when Tom was my driving partner, driving the bees though the night to keep them cool and living. His encouragement for many years will always be so clearly felt.

We hope you are having a good summer and appreciate your support of the bees and plants.

a profile in courage, Paul Cappy

December 2006
a profile in courage, Paul Cappy

It is always an honor to be around a person of courage.

Paul Cappy-Last Resort bee yard,
Monkton, Vermont

This week I spent three days with Paul Cappy as we gathered some of our colonies of honey bees in eight yards around and in Chittenden and Addison Country, Vermont; he is taking over the stewardship of these bees, bringing them to Florida for the winter to make an increase in the number of colonies and then back to Lake Ontario, New York for the pollination of apples in the Spring.

Paul has been with the bees for 48 years and started pollinating when he was 16 years old. Over these years he has managed his own commercial operation, inspected thousands of bee hives for the Department of Agriculture in New York, and been a faithful advocate for the honey bee.

Bravery is required to run a commercial bee operation in these times, and anyone like Paul who is willing to make the commitment, work the long hours and expose themselves to the risk of losing a large percent of their bees each season and fluctuations in the crop, deserves our deepest respect.

Paul lifts beehives onto the truck, to go on the road to Florida.

Farmers like Paul are some of the unsung heroes who support the operation and prosperity of our country. It is hard to understand the level of work required until you work with along side him.

This week, we gathered bees in the snow and wind, from early in the morning, until the evening when the light of the full moon allowed us to work. Nothing would stop Paul; when his truck and forklift would get stuck in the mud, I would pull him out with our truck. When the fields were too wet and the hills too step to get his truck in to the bees, he would carry them ¼ mile on his forklift to get them to our trucks, hour after hour. If they were not taken to Florida for the milder winter and early spring, when hives are split to increase the numbers and make up for losses, many of these colonies would pass on.

As Paul is a savior of the bees, he is typical of the men and women across this continent who are committed to honey bees. With almost 40% of we eat dependent on pollination by insects, much of this by honey bees, our food supply depends on these farmers taking care of the beautiful insects. Honey bees are the “canary in the coal mine”; their populations are crashing this winter because the water and air are not clean anymore. In the bees' weakened state, mites and viruses move in to decimate our honey bees.

The truth is that the average age of beekeepers is increasing. With fewer young people going into the field these days, less honey is being produced in North America. Correspondingly, there is more contaminated, dead honey from overseas filling the shelves of your market.

Thank you for supporting the beekeepers in the United States and Canada who take care of the bees and support their continued existence in our communities. If you have the patience and some of the courage of Paul Cappy, consider mentoring with a beekeeper and supporting these divine creatures. The bees are a gift and you will receive great satisfaction and health benefits by passing on this old culture.

Friday, Dec. 15, 6 pm: Beekeeping in Nigeria & Ghana- Free Slide Show & Talk by Apiculturist Keith Morris, Honey Gardens Apiaries at the new honey house, 2777 VT Route 7, Ferrisburgh, Based on Keith’s recent experience with FarmServe Africa, learn about alternative beekeeping techniques, “top-bar hives,” the role of bees in their native habitat, and ways these West African communities are developing mutually beneficial partnerships with this amazing insect. Our honey house is on the West/Lake Champlain side of VT Route 7, about a mile north of Vergennes and ½ hour south of Burlington, the old Marvins Carvins property.

honeybees in traditional communities, Ghana, Africa

November 2006

honeybees in traditional communities, Ghana, Africa

a field report from Keith Morris, part 1 of 2

Sankpala is a small rural village outside Tamale, in the Sahel (Sub-Saharan scrublands) of Northern Ghana. This community beekeeping collective and I made a beeswax based shea butter-ginger healing salve and a ginger-cayenne-raw honey home cough remedy. They may begin to produce salves for market.

Throughout this past summer I’ve had the honor of working in West Africa as a volunteer apiculture specialist with FarmServe Africa. I met with small family farmers, youth groups, a variety of co-ops, women’s collectives, ‘resettlement communities’, university students and professors, as well as agricultural specialists and extension agents in Nigeria and Ghana, all excited about the power of the honeybee and its medicines.

The art of beekeeping is anything but new to Africa, the original home of the honeybee. As long as people and these creatures have coexisted, there have been ‘honey hunters’, and legends and rituals surrounding this magical insect. The world’s first master beekeepers were the Egyptians, who saw honey as tears of the sun god Ra, and moved hives up and down the Nile on rafts to pollinate crops. Kings and queens were prepared for the journey to the afterlife with giant pots of raw honey, and their bodies were mummified with secret recipes made with the antibiotic and preservative properties of propolis.

A wild hive in the Botanical Gardens, East Legon, Ghana. Note how propolized the hole in the tree is. This is not only a testament to this hives great age, but also protects the opening in the tree from infection and termites. Yet another mutually beneficial relationship by the bees!!

In Africa today, the legacies of missionaries and colonialism as well as contemporary corruption and destructive economic development continue to erode agricultural traditions, especially traditions of healing with plants and products of the beehive. The intention of apicultural training programs are primarily economic: to create additional income to alleviate poverty, and to diversify and add value to farms’ products; but the benefits of a partnership between people and these insects are far greater in scope.

The vast majority of people in Africa have little or no access to formalized healthcare, yet are still subject to a dominant cultural perspective that their traditional means of healing are ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’. This has resulted in a tremendous loss of knowledge about medicinal plants and their uses, and a perceived dependence on manufactured ‘medicines’. As I came to realize the magnitude of this loss, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my community of growers and herbalists at home, and appreciated further the importance of the mission of Honey Gardens. I found new esteem for those who are working to preserve traditions and learn more about healing plants, and these people became some of my greatest allies and teachers in Ghana and Nigeria.

Honey, beeswax, and propolis extracts are ideal mediums for many of the vast diversity of medicinal plants in West Africa; they preserve them and make them more palatable, protect and disinfect wounds, and offer their own important healing and nutritive benefits.

By bringing the beehive directly into the agricultural landscape, we bring in one of nature’s greatest teachers about cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships; the makers of the world’s only imperishable food; greater pollination for crops and higher germination rates in saved seeds; wax for light, preserving wood, batik, and healing salves; the potent and diverse nutrients of pollen and larvae; and the powerful medicine of propolis. These things not only offer potential for an endless variety of products to be made for sale, but most importantly, provide people the increased ability to generate medicines and healing practices for their own communities.

"If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable." Murray Bookchin (1921-2006)

seeing interdependence of nature and people

harvest 2006 newsletter

seeing interdependence of nature and people

The gathering of elderberries will continue for several weeks as the luscious umbels of purple berries ripen at a different pace throughout the fields.

Frederique Keller harvesting elderberries, Hinesburg

Walking through the plants we can see that the deer have been here and left their mark. There are chunks missing from leaves on one side of the land.

After growing for three years, these elderberry are able to weather the grazing of the deer. Now that they are seven feet tall, there is a natural pruning taking place each season. The deer jump over the fence wires, no longer electrified as the charger and battery have been taken to a bee yard along a bear highway where it is needed.

When the elderberry are younger, being a meal to a deer means a passing in life. Now there is a balance in nature here, a dynamic equilibrium of the wild.

a purple umbel of elderberry, ready for harvest,
for plant medicine, jam, wine, or a coloring agent

We see the interdependence of nature and people everyday. This web is delicate, and yet it is so strong. There is enough here to feed the 4 legged deer and the 2 legged people. In the flexibility of life, all are provided for, all is interdependent.

thank you for your interest in and support of plant medicine,

raising queen bees from survivors in organic beekeeping

summer 2006

raising queen bees from survivors in organic beekeeping

Each of these waxy peanut-shaped cells contains a queen bee that within the hour are placed within a small, four frame mini-hive called a nucleus. After another day a virgin queen will emerge and in another 2 weeks she will be fully mated and laying eggs, the bees collecting nectar and pollen, and the hive well on its way to building up for a long cold winter dormant period.

These queens were raised from our survivor stock, as we have, for the past two winters lost around 60% of the colonies. The hives that are left have the vigor, winter hardiness, and timely buildup onto northern floral sources, not to mention having survived living with mites.

Last year we began to raise our own queens as we saw the promise and success in the work of other northern beekeepers Kirk Webster, Anicet Desrochers, and Mike Palmer.

Through the work of these dedicated beekeepers we have come to an invaluable understanding the value and potential inherent in each apiary. One of our goals at Honey Gardens Apiaries is to gravitate towards raising the kind of bees that can tolerate the mites without chemical treatments. This is by no means a search for the silver bullet but a whole system approach that Kirk Webster and others’ work has inspired here. First, by interrupting the brood cycle of the hive the mite cycle is also interrupted, reducing mite populations and giving the bees a slight advantage. The new queen imparts a vigor and enthusiasm to the hive which seems to have a negative effect on the mites. Secondly, the colonies that survive the winter build up with tremendous energy in the spring and can be used to replace the honey producing colonies that succumbed to the mites. Thirdly, by continuing to remove and split failing colonies we will improve the overall productivity, survivability and sustainability of the apiary. Lastly, by splitting a failing hive in the summer, we are renewing the valuable resource of the bees and the brood and increasing the potential of the apiary as a whole. Our bottom line here is not honey production, though we do want to cover our expenses, our heart is to raise bees to survive, to thrive here in our bioregion, to learn what these bees need in our increasingly stressful world.

We can no longer afford to harvest without thanksgiving. It is time to return the love, admiration, and understanding to the world beyond ourselves. These little queen cells are a possible bridge to the great grandchildren that we will never know that they may also hear the hum of a hive, to see the magic of a burning candle, to marvel at bees sipping at flowers, to be in awe of a swarm in flight, to be close to the oneness of the hive.

“we are not human beings having a spiritual experience rather we are spiritual beings having a human experience” ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

gathering plant medicine from the land

Last week I traveled up north to the Champlain Islands with Charlotte and Macky to gather purple loosestrife. This herb offers its healing gifts in the Propolis Spray. It is styptic (helps stop bleeding), antibiotic, and astringent (contracts tissues, draws out infection). This spray is used to help heal wounds and sore throats, as well as to heal and strengthen the gums. Purple loosestrife can also be used internally to control diarrhea and heavy periods. This is generally done with a decoction of the dried flowers.

a field of purple loosestrife in Grand Isle County, Vermont

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) has a complicated past, as it was brought over from Eurasia in the 1800’s, both inadvertently and as a landscape plant. It has since spread though waterways and marshlands, and is now considered an invasive and noxious weed. It tends to crowd out native plants such as cattails, sedges and bulrushes, decreasing forage and habitat for wildlife. On the other hand, honey bees and other pollinating insects gather tons of nectar each summer from the flowers. They have come to rely upon on it in dry years as it blooms well in the marshlands even then. Since 1995 Vermont state agencies have been releasing several European insects to control the spread of this plant.

As far as we know, we have the only permit in the state of Vermont to harvest purple loosestrife. We choose to appreciate the gifts it has to offer, rather than to fight against it. And although we certainly do not encourage the spread of this plant, we do feel a bit of loss as it disappears from our area, and we must travel further to find it for use as medicine.

There are a number of species that have been introduced to this area, not to mention honey bees (brought from Europe in the early 1600’s), which have been beneficial in many ways. A wise local community herbalist recently spoke about how the native people of Vermont, the Abenaki, took on dandelion and burdock as their staple foods. These are two highly nutritious, yet non-native species that could be used to our healthful benefit, not just seen as a nuisance in the lawn or pasture.

Another wise woman shared with me that the flower essence of the purple loosestrife is used to help us fulfill our greatest potential. We hope that the plants and their stewards may all achieve this goal.

The first fruits of the new crop of honey are now in the honey house. For over 2,000 years the first fruits have always carried a spirit of thankfulness and gratitude. The beginning of the new crop is a very special light honey we savor these gifts that spring from the land and appreciate your support of our bees and their work.

our best crop

our best crop

There are defining moments in life that you always remember, a passage in a relationship that is a poignant reminder of a special time.

This month our daughter Meriwether became comfortable with the bees and is now a beekeeper.

Meriwether, Todd, the Barrows bee yard,
West Ferrisburgh, Vermont

In what could be the hardest week of the year, we needed help in the field. The strong colonies have to be split to make new hives. If they are not, they will swarm and not make any honey. The increase makes up for the winter losses and brings new mite-resistant queens into the operation that are essential to organic beekeeping. Small hives, called nucs, are made to receive the queens, all with the orchestration that requires the precision of placement within hours of arriving. With the ongoing weeks of a rainy season, we had to bring carts of equipment through many a long field, where the trucks could not go. The bears never let us forget that they are around. We clean up around them as electric fences are rebuilt for the new season. It was exhausting. She was a trooper, never a single complaint.

Last year I realized Meriwether was on her way when she took off honey with Sam for the day and remarked later that the stings she had received were good for her. Eighteen years of hearing the mantra around Dad had been successful. I was happy that most stings were on a place where a sledding accident/ice hockey had been stressful to her knees. The bees go to where they are needed. The healing in bee venom therapy continues after thousands of years.

Honey bees are gentle. They get a bad rap because of their aggressive cousins, wasps and hornets. Learning to become comfortable with them at this time is more important than the details of management. By the end of the week, Meriwether was taking colonies with 40,000 bees apart, looking for queens and queen cells, moving colonies around to new positions in the bee yards, and identifying the strength and condition of each bee hive.

Meriwether, August 1993, Charlotte, Vermont

Free will is so important. This is a time when she wanted to help. There will always be honey around for family. Now she was ready to learn how to take care of her own bees, make her own honey, share the skills and pass them on to her own family, pollinate the neighborhood.Meriwether has become a gentle warrior for the Earth, now sent to China for two weeks to meet with other 19 year olds from around the world to prepare to be a leader for the near future, talking about the environment, peace, agriculture, poverty. Our hope is with this generation. May they do better than we have.

If it takes a village to raise a child, thank you all very much.

beverage makin’ joy !

beverage makin’ joy !

Jason, moving the bees. Spring 2006

Historically, sodas and other thirst quenching drinks were prepared at home and had nutritional value. The ingredients were wild crafted and the results produced a beverage that was refreshing and also gave a boost to the system. Root beer, Jamaican style ginger ale, switchel, beet kvass, and kombucha tea have tonic effects on the body system. These drinks were a way of bringing health into the home. Not magical elixirs, these beverages were more supplemental in their medicinal value. Today, chances are any soda or refreshing beverage on the market has been completely stripped of any of the health tonic qualities that originally inspired the flavors of the drink. We can help take our health back into our hands by preparing home made beverages from fresh ingredients.

When we make sodas and other beverages we are directly connected to the actual ingredients and the particular flavors they impart. We see that in order to access the medicinal properties of yellow dock root or dandelion root in our root beer, we must mask the astringent bitterness with sassafras root bark and honey. To offset the bite of freshly grated ginger for ginger ale it is necessary to add some citrus juice and honey. The flavors are powerful and there is nothing artificial about them. Nature provides the nutrition and through sodas we can access it.

Lee with a toast of honey ginger ale as he bottles
the first of the new crop of orange blossom honey,
the first crop of the season.

When making sodas, the flavor intensity of the ingredients and honey sweetness can be tailored to the individual. Thirst-quenching beverages need not be overly sweet. Tart, sour or bitter flavors can be just as satisfying. In our country, few flavor choices exist for people outside of overly sweet or salty. Most of these foods are dead. Bring life to your family and friends! Put burdock root back into your root beer, use beets from your garden in your beet kvass and let yeast and bacteria work together to give kombucha tea that satisfying sour taste with a subtle sweetness.

Making healthy beverages in the form of soda pop and other drinks is easy and fun. It is possible to create fresh beverages full of health promoting microorganisms with tastes that hint of sweetness, but also of other tones like sour or tart or bitter tastes that are wonderful and that most people aren’t as familiar with.