Technocrat

Where Honeybees are Thriving

zogger
Sat Oct 04 19:52:00 -0700 2008
Science.
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Around the world honeybees have been in decline, and it has been a cause for concern because of their importance to the food chain. One area though, they are thriving, and it is a place one might not think of as a honeybee haven-in the heart of a major city. There are over three hundred successful honeybee colonies set up in metro Paris, and the beekeepers there say it is from two reason, fresh flowers are abundant and are changed frequently, and they don't use much of any pesticides.

The success of a three-year-old French program to encourage beekeeping in cities, the largest such project in the world, is sparking hope of a revival among their country cousins. Global agriculture, valued at (Euro)153 billion, or $214 billion, relies on pollination by bees, according to the French National Institute of Agricultural Research, or INRA. ed.z.: glad to see they are doing good *someplace*. And I think the "low or no pesticide" deal has a lot to do with it. Hopefully this will garner closer attention to that situation.

Where Honeybees are Thriving
Thomas Lord
Sun Oct 05 13:10:05 -0700 2008
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Interesting.

You might recall that I was lamenting the visible collapse of the colonies that used to haunt the yard in my previous apartment. They did not recover but, on the other hand, before we moved from there we started seeing visits from what I'm fairly sure is the colony of a keeper a couple of blocks away. Berkeley is generally low on pesticides and very high on gardened flowers.

The other day at a local non-profit table that sells left-overs from the farmer's market to fund a local food security gardening NPO I bought some "urban honey" from a company that on one page of the phone book offers bee removal services and on the other page sells honey, wax, skin products, etc.

I hope it keeps up. While "ordinary" sugar is still pretty cheap I don't think it tastes like food for most purposes and anyway I really don't like having to get something as basic as sweetener from such a convoluted, energy-intensive supply chain -- so in the kitchen I've lately been trying to figure out how to use honey as my main sweetener for just about everything I use sweetener for. It comes with its own strong flavors which can easily over-dominate a dish but can also add nice background notes if you avoid using too much. It's absolutely horrible in coffee, imo, although I usually don't like sweetener stronger than milk in coffee anyway. The distinctive non-sweet flavors of honey both clash with and highlight the natural bitterness of coffee making for a pretty harsh combination.

A lot of popular uses of sweeteners call for way, way too much. It's used as such a blunt instrument and if you eat too much of it you feel sick so, we're all crazy that way. Starches produce a subtle sweetness of their own when you eat them and lots of foods have culinarily significant yet low levels of sweetness all on their own: you can do a lot just by highlighting intrinsic sweetness with aromatics like cinnamon, nutmeg, mint, etc.

Good honey seems to me to have two key virtues beyond just it's "green-ness" when purchased from sustainable local providers: It has some bitter notes (e.g., the one's that ruin coffee) and so you can't sweeten with it without balancing that with some bitter -- it's like a "buffered solution" in that sense. And it has aromatic floral notes that help highlight sweetness and so you don't need to add as many sugars. I really like the stuff. It's tasty and a lesson in flavor balancing all rolled into one.

(Tonight's "Sunday dinner": some farmed catfish very lightly battered and fried served in a spicy-hot sweet-and-sour sauce (made with honey) and some snow peas with some nut meat of some sort (haven't decided between almonds and walnuts) with a kind of tame savory-sweet sauce. Probably simply with ordinary short-grain white rice rather than a whole grain but, in the long run, I think I want to learn better how to build up flavors that can stand up to a whole-grain rice substrate.)

-t

Where Honeybees are Thriving
Charles E Hill
Sun Oct 05 15:09:07 -0700 2008
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If you know any Mormons, just ask one for honey recipes.  They're gaga over honey and beekeeping, and have a ton of info and recipes that they'd be happy to share.

Where Honeybees are Thriving
Thomas Lord
Sun Oct 05 15:48:06 -0700 2008
 manage

I'm afraid they'll insist on telling me "ghost stories".

-t

 

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