The Seattle Times ran a series of five articles by Andrew Schneider this past week on honey laundering, a topic I blogged about some time ago. The articles are a good read, he manages to bring a bit of James Bond flair to the business:

Seven cars with darkened windows barreled east toward the Cascades, whizzing past this Snohomish County hamlet's smattering of shops and eateries.

The sedans and sport utility vehicles stirred up dust as they rolled into the parking lot of Pure Foods Inc., a Washington honey producer.

Out popped a dozen people in dark windbreakers identifying them as feds -- agents from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some raced to the loading docks. Others hurried through the front door. All were armed.

The gist of it is that Chinese honey producers are apparently no safer than Chinese dairies, using antibiotics and pesticides that are banned for use in foods in the U.S. and adulterating their honey with corn syrup, cane syrup and water.

To get around tariffs and rightly skeptical American consumers, the Chinese honey is shipped to Vietnam, Russia, Thailand and the Grand Bahamas (the Grand Bahamas?!), where they are relabeled as Vietnamese, Russian, etc. and shipped to the United States (a practice known as "transshipping"). American companies such as Sue Bee, Silver Bow and Pure Foods that import and distribute the honey seem, at best, willfully ignorant of the practice.

The articles go on to note that even honey labeled "natural" and "organic" isn't necessarily, as there are few federal standards on what makes honey "organic". Plus, given that bees will forage for miles, it's virtually impossible to ensure that a given hives bees don't come into contact with chemicals somewhere in their travels.

So what's a honey loving consumer to do? I'll tell you what to do!

Buy Local Honey!

It makes sense for dozens of reasons. First, if you want to be sure that the honey wasn't adulterated with antibiotics and pesticides in China before being shipped in a supertanker by way of Russia, buy it from a guy with beeswax under his nails in a farmer's market. Beekeepers working the farmer's market are not in it for the money, believe me. There are way easier ways to make a living. If you're in Seattle, go to the Ballard Sunday market. It's the best.

But there's more to buying local than avoiding contaminants. Think about the carbon footprint. What does it take to ship honey from deep in the interior of China to Russia and then to the United States? How much oil is consumed as those cargo ships chug across oceans? When I deliver honey, I deliver it by foot to friends (and occasionally by bicycle).

But there's something special about local honey, more so than any other food product.

Honey that was produced from flowers in the environment in which you live is better for you by helping you build up immunities to allergies from local pollens. It doesn't do you a spit of good to get immunities to Chinese pollens or Californian pollens if you're sneezing in Snohomish.

OK, soapbox moment over. As you were.

(Photo credits: Customs agent by Meryl Schenker / P-I and Local Honey by Melissa_Thinkspace)

Jeff forwarded me an article from Mad Science that claims that bees on cocaine are "more altruistic" than their straight edge counterparts. The evidence: bees riding the rails perform the waggle dance (which shows the other bees where the honey source is) more often than sober bees.

Ummm...so bees on coke dance more than straight bees? And that's altruism? I guess ecstasy promotes more aggression because it makes people wrap their arms around other people.

Mad science indeed.

Michelle and I are proud to introduce Zevin Rolihlahla Schwartz, born Nov 16th, 2008 at 10:22 pm, 6 lbs even, 20 inches long. Happy, healthy, wise beyond his hours.

Z'ev means "wolf" in Hebrew, which is where we found his first name. Rolihlahla was Nelson Mandela's given name (he was named "Nelson" by his schoolteachers, who forbade African names). It means "treeshaker" or "bender of branches" in Xhusa.

Or, as Nelson tells it, "troublemaker".

My middle name is "Luther King" (my father marched at Selma), and that has been a big influence on my life. It was something to live up to, a challenge to make right and strong decisions. Any time I considered the low road, I felt it would dishonor Dr. King's memory if I did.

I hope Zevin feels the same.

More photos...

Almost forgot to mention: after I'd jarred some honey on Sunday, I figured it was time to do something with all those green tomatoes that failed to ripen over Seattle's weird 2008 summer. I remember from growing up in Connecticut that my mother always made pickled tomatoes with her greenies and they were total heaven, so I rang her up for the recipe. Here's it is:

Into each sterilized quart jar, put:

• 1 clove garlic
• 6 peppercorns
• 1 clove
• 1 flower of dill
• Tightly packed green tomatoes

Boil the following and then pour over the top:

• 2 quarts white or cider vinegar
• 1 quart water
• 1 cup coarse (Kosher) salt

I used cider vinegar, as I'm a believer that it has health benefits.

After that, let it sit for a week in a cool, dark place, after which point, eat. I'll let you know how it turns out.

I began jarring some of this year's honey harvest today, partially in anticipation of the upcoming holidays, and partially to make good on a barter deal I've made with a local restaurant, Sutra. They specialize in local, organic ingredients. What with my hives being less than a mile from Sutra, you can't get much more local than Hive Mind Honey. When I explained that bees travel a mile or more to collect food, so any of their customers that live in the neighborhood will likely have nectar and pollen from their own gardens in the honey, their delight lit the room.

Sutra's menu changes daily, offering a prix fixe format with several options for each course, so they can perfectly accomodate (and, I hope, feature) a small batch of locally produced golden yumminess.

Right across the street from Sutra is Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream, also specializing in organic, locally-sourced ingredients for their amazing and unique flavors (e.g., Balsamic Strawberry, Honey Lavender). Molly said she was willing to barter, but asked how much 10 gallons would be.

I guess when producing lots of ice cream, you need lots of ingredients, but 10 gallons is 2/3 of my yearly harvest, and, if I were to trade for it, it would be somewhere around $300 - $500 worth of ice cream, which would be a burden on my belly, to say the least. So I'm still noodling on that one.

It was interesting to see the contrast between this year's honey and last year's. They both have a strong, spicy taste to them, but check out the difference in color (that's 2008 on the left and 2007 on the right). Same place, different weather, different flowers, I reckon.

No, this isn't an ethnic slur, I'm talking about the other kind of laundering, like money laundering.

Mike and I were chatting about feeding the bees sugar syrup over winter and how long to feed them in sugar syrup into the spring, when he mentioned something a bit surprising. The beginning beekeeping books typically recommend that you feed sugar syrup to the bees "until they stop taking it." For me, this sometimes meant clear into July (although this past year, I got lazy pretty much right off the bat and didn't feed them anything past the first gallon to get them established).

What that does, though, is give you honey that's basically transformed sugar, rather than real nectar honey. Obvious, if you think about it. It surprised me to learn that that's part of the reason that Chinese honey is so cheap: they'll feed them buckets of sugar all the way through the season, so that the "clover" honey they sell is little more then lightly flavored, bee-processed sugar syrup.

Well, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a little bit of Google is even worse. Try Googling Chinese Honey, and your first two articles are:

• Test on Chinese and blended honey show further illegal drug residue: 10 of 16 samples of Chinese honey in this study showed traces of an antibiotic, chloramphenicol, that has been linked to aplastic anaemia and cancer.
• Honey Laundering reported from China through Australia into the U.S.: "Death threats and a mystery car brake failure followed after a senior figure in the Australian honey industry attempted to expose a racket involving Chinese honey being relabeled and shipped to the United States."

"Oh, that's not a problem, though, because I don't buy Chinese honey," you may be thinking? Well, it turns out that China accounts for over 40% of the world's supply of honey and growing!

As if you didn't have reason enough already, I implore you: buy local honey!

I headed up to Everett to pick up my extracted frames from Mike Doleshell on Sunday. My six full supers turned out 174 lbs of honey, just shy of 15 gallons: a fine, fine harvest, if I do say so m'self. (More info on the harvest process back here).

Mike was a bit late for our meeting, as he's in the midst of his own harvest, and apparently fell off the side of his truck in the process of doing some loading. If his frequent winces and grimaces were anything to go by, he did himself a fair bit more damage than he wanted to let on. Thanks, Mike and heal!

Good egg that he is, though, he sat with me and answered all my questions, and the bits of wisdom so gathered, I'll pass along:

Mite Control
It's too late for me to add formic acid to control for mites. Formic acid is the stuff that ants produce, so considered safe and "organic". Problem is, it's heat dependent because it's meant to evaporate into a gas, which is the way it works its magic on the mites. Sounds like I should have done that in late August / September, right after the harvest but before the cold set in.

He also related that a friend of his in North Carolina had good success with substituting his entire bottom board with a piece of 1/2" hardware cloth stretched between a wooden rectangle. That means nothing solid on the bottom at all, just set the screened board on something over the ground and you're good. I see the logic: the mites fall of the bees all the way to the ground and thus don't make it back into the hive, but was surprised that having that big an opening for breeze to get in (the entire bottom board) would be OK.

I guess the bees just huddle for warmth and it doesn't bother them (although you may not want to try this in Canada or northern Maine).

Nosema
At first he thought I had a bad case of Nosema, from the stains on my frames, but when we established that I just didn't scrape them from last year, he felt better about it. Not sure yet whether I'll treat with that, as I really, really don't like the idea of adding chemicals to the hive. If I do, it's mixed in with sugar syrup and fed to them 2 tsp to a gallon.

Overwinter Supplies
I was unsure how much honey to leave in the hives over winter. Mike says rule of thumb is a full super / brood chamber's worth. I left about half a super in each, so I figure I'll have to feed them some sugar mid-winter sometime. I'll check in on them around December / January and see how their stores are lasting.

Free Bees
Want a free hive of bees. A lady he knows wants to get rid of them. You can pick 'em up, they're ready to go. Contact me and I'll pass along her info.

I just spoke with Mike Doleshell, who's taking care of extracting the honey from my hives for me. He says that I was right about having a good season, looks like we'll fill 3 5 lbs buckets!

He also said that he was surprised at how light my honey was, especially compared to another beekeeper's in my area. It sounds like with the weird weather we had in the Pacific Northwest this year, the blackberry season was shorter than usual, so the bees spent more times in the grasses, which can lead to a darker, and sometimes not as tasty, honey. Mine, though, sound like they found the right stuff.

Must be all those beautiful flowers and vegetables my neighbors have been growing.