The Not-So-Secret Life of Bees

Elizabeth is one of my closest friends and Maggie’s godmother. She’s also the author of a wonderful food blog called Coppertop Kitchen. She educates her readers about food, cooking, and she makes a mean maple walnut cake. Go and check out her blog, you won’t be sorry you did! I asked her to share with us today about honeybees and her post is, as always, fascinating and delicious. Thanks, Elizabeth!

********************************************

Hello there, Fumbling Toward Grace readers! I am so pleased to be posting over here today! Sarah is such an awesome writer, wife, mother, and one of my dearest friends, and I was so excited when she asked me to do a guest post about bees!

You heard me: bees. Last summer, I found this adorable little book (Plan Bee, by Susan Brackney) about bees on the discount rack at a bookstore, read it, and have since fallen in love with them! Bees (apis mellifera, or honey bees) are seriously fascinating little creatures. In addition to providing us with delicious honey and beeswax for candles and beauty products, they also pollinate 80 percent of the world’s plants, including a third of the food we consume! Farmers often pay beekeepers to ship their bees in to pollinate crops.

Did you know?

Each hive contains a community of 60,000 – 100,000 bees.

Bees gather pollen 1 tiny grain at a time, storing it in their “leg baskets”

Girl bees do all the work. The boy bees’ (drones) only task is to mate with the queen.

The queen bee’s only job is to lay eggs, and she lays between 1500 – 2000 eggs daily in the spring.

It takes 4 pounds of nectar to make 1 pound of honey, and the type of nectar affects the color and flavor of the honey.

To let other bees know about a particularly rich nectar spot, a honeybee will do a dance, which shows other bees where the bounty can be found in relation to the sun.

Only about 1 of every 1000 people is actually allergic to bee stings; swelling and soreness are just normal bodily reactions to bee venom.

You may have heard in the news recently that honeybees are dying out. While nobody really knows the cause for this, there are several theories, including pesticide poisoning, parasites or viruses, drought, migratory stress, and apiary overcrowding. The most interesting theory I’ve heard blames the low nutritional value of the crops they’re pollinating. Some studies have suggested that the widespread agricultural use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers has oversimplified and damaged the soil to the extent that food crops grown in chemically treated soils are less nutritionally rich than their organically grown counterparts. Soil is a complex, living thing. When we pummel it with chemicals year after year, the plants grown in it lack minerals and micronutrients essential for human beings, and apparently, for bees.

What can you do to help? For starters, look around your yard. Do you have a variety of plants that flower throughout the growing season? By planting different species that blossom in spring, summer, and fall, you can provide constant forage for local honeybees. Reduce the amount of pesticides you use in your yard or garden. Support companies that support bee research and breeding programs. And buy Haagen-Dazs ice cream! That’s right! Since Haagen-Dazs relies on bees for the all-natural fruits that flavor their delicious ice creams, they have decided to ensure their survival by raising money and awareness! You can visit their bee-saving website at www.helpthehoneybees.com.

Remember Pooh, the adorable little honey-loving bear so beloved of generations of children? What I want to know is… how did he manage to get honey from what looked like a wasps’ nest? Here’s what most honeybee hives look like:

In apiaries or backyards:

and in the wild:

Pop Quiz: Bee ID

The following pictures are of a honeybee, bumblebee, wasp, and yellowjacket. Can you tell them apart?

A

B

C

D

Answers: A: Yellowjacket. B: Honeybee! C: Wasp. D: Bumblebee.

Yellowjackets and wasps (hornets) look like soldiers, and they are much more aggressive than other bees. Bumblebees are big and round and furry, and lazily float from flower to flower like they’ve got all day. Honeybees busily fly from bloom to bloom, collecting their precious cargo, and they will only sting if they feel threatened. They have much better things to do than to sting you (especially since once they’ve stung… they die).

Honey is an amazingly versatile ingredient for cooking. It can be used in salad dressings, sauces, and marinades, stirred into drinks and used to sweeten and flavor baked goods. My mom used to give me a tablespoon in the morning if I had a big test at school; she claimed it was brain food.

This recipe is perfect for spring and summer, with such a fresh, floral taste from the honey and lavender. It would be great for breakfast, or afternoon tea, or with a dollop of whipped cream for dessert. Enjoy!

Lavender-Honey Tea Cakes

1 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened

1/3 cup honey

1/3 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/3 cup yogurt

1/2 cup almond meal (can be found at high-end grocery stores and health food stores)

1 tablespoon dried lavender flowers

Preheat oven to 350⁰F. Spray a non-stick mini bundt muffin pan (or a regular muffin pan, or a standard loaf pan) with cooking spray (if it’s not non-stick, grease and flour). In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric stand mixer, cream the butter until light and fluffy. Add the honey and sugar and beat well to combine. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition until incorporated. Add vanilla and stir. Add half of the flour mixture, stirring until just combined. Add yogurt, stir, and then remaining flour, and stir again. Stir in almond meal and lavender flowers. Pour batter into prepared pan.

For small cakes, bake 15-17 minutes, until cake springs back to the touch and a cake tester comes out clean. I didn’t try a loaf, but I assume that, like any other quick bread, it would bake about 45-50 minutes. Test for doneness the same way: insert a tester in the center. If it comes out clean, it’s done. Cool in the pan for a few minutes, and then remove from pan and cool completely on wire racks. Serve with honey-sweetened whipped cream, or drizzled with a honey-lemon glaze. Makes 12 mini Bundt cakes or one loaf.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you learned a little something, and that the next time you spoon a little honey onto a warm biscuit or into a cup of tea, you think about the tiny, fascinating creatures who gave it to you!