I need honey raw for my French bulldog allergies

This is for you grammarians out there. I need your help.

Let it Bee received this email:
The subject line: I need honey raw for my French bulldog allergies

The text: Empty.

What would you do?

Initially I assumed the sender needed raw honey for his/her French bulldog, who suffered from allergies.


CSB said no, I had misread it, that it was the sender who was allergic to his/her French bulldog.

But that seemed strange, because why would you have a French bulldog if you are allergic to French bulldogs? (English bulldogs are another fish altogether.)

Or, if the bulldog is allergic, how can you tell?

Do bulldogs even like honey? Or miel as we say in Paris?

The most wonderful (sparkling, luminous, head-scratching) art I have seen of late is a floor covered with sifted hazelnut pollen at MOMA, in the Marron Atrium – that big open space where I have also seen Marina Abramovic stare at someone for hours on end (she stared for hours, I did not), and also a collection of a Chinese woman’s hoarded objects that included every used toothpaste tube she ever had.
Since CSB built our observation hive, I have become far more intrigued by, and intimate with, pollen than I ever could have imagined. Every spring the bees start bringing it home in their pollen baskets, and packing the nutritious grains into their honeycomb. Because we have such a variety of plants here, we get to see a wide range of pollen, in colors that go from carnelian red to orange orange to sunflower yellow. For a brief time when the scilla take over a patch of lawn, they bring in blue pollen. But never very much blue pollen, never enough for the atrium at MOMA.

The pollen covering the floor at MOMA is hazelnut pollen, which the artist, Wolfgang Laib, collected personally on his property in Germany. Given that Laib is not a honeybee, and is not anatomically blessed with pollen baskets on his back legs, he has to collect the pollen manually, purposefully and laboriously. Accompanying the show is a video of Laib in Germany, with jars full of yellow pollen, sifting pollen through a cheesecloth, and collecting pollen from conifers. Sadly, the video does not show him collecting hazelnut pollen. Which is rather a shame.

When I described the show to my friend LB her nose started to twitch and her eyes started to tear up. “How many allergy attacks were there?” she asked. It had never occurred to me that this pollen field posed a public health threat. “With all that pollen flying around?”
“It wasn’t flying around,” I insisted. “It was just sitting there on the ground, glowing.”
“But with all those people breathing and walking around, it had to be agitated.”
This seems like it should be the case. But I was staring at this big square of pollen, and I did not see anything flying around. Not a single grain. LB suggested that the artist or the museum must have secured the pollen with some fixative. But I insisted that there was no fixative. And the more I consider it, I think the reason the pollen shimmered is that it was in fact moving just the tiniest bit.
Especially because it was hazelnut pollen, which is anemophilous. Most fruit trees bloom and then pollinate in the springtime, but not hazelnut trees. Their pollination occurs in the winter: wind carries the pollen from the male catkins to the female flowers, and there it rests until spring when the actual fertilization occurs.

We still don't know why there wasn't an epidemic of sneezing at MOMA last month. Yes, last month. I regret to say that as usual I saw this show at the last possible moment, and as of yesterday the show has closed. Wolgang will be sweeping up the pollen and funneling it into jars - a process that is sure to agitate the grains even more than your breath or mine - and then he will sell the jars to collectors, who will probably not feed it to their beehives.

YES WE CAN have urban bees

Above: Rooftop hives at undisclosed location translate to Let is Bee Local Honey.

One additional way Mayor Bloomberg could achieve his goal of an “environmentally sustainable 21st century city” at NO COST to the city would be to rescind the ban on honeybees (Apis melifera) in the five boroughs.
At no cost because beekeepers would be happy to set up hives on rooftops and in backyards. These bees would be happy to pollinate the one million trees that Bloomberg plans to plant in the next ten years, as well as all the existing trees and flowers. The bees would happily - and at no cost – collect nectar and pollen from the city’s greenery and produce local honey that would provide unique health benefits to all the residents of the city.
Given the current crisis in the honeybee population, and the much lamented disconnect so many urbanites have from the natural world, welcoming bees into the green pastures of NYC would signal a municipal willingness to be in the forefront of reclaiming that natural world for our urban population.

What with the rapturous response to the election of Obama, the US is now poised to regain some goodwill and credibility abroad. What better adjunct to that positive step than to align ourselves with the venerable tradition of urban beekeeping? In Paris there are beehives atop the roof of the Opera House producing over 200 pounds of honey annually; for highly inflated prices you can buy Opera honey in the gift shop downstairs and at Fauchon; the beekeeper cannot fulfill the demand. Elegant hotels keep rooftop hives to supply their guests with local honey. Beehives are a common sight in the city gardens of Berlin, where there are approximately 500 beekeepers. The Czech republic claims to have more than 50,000 beekeepers, which means that one of every 210 Czechs keeps bees; so naturally Prague is full of apiaries. In London you can find beehives atop the Bank of England, but not enough apparently, since – according to the Telegraph because of the honeybee shortage, England will run out of local honey before Christmas this year.

According to Jürgen Hans, chairman of Berlin's beekeepers' association, "Cities are ideally suited for bees.” And I concur. Advantages of urban apiaries include the lack of agricultural pesticides in the city, the warmer climate that translates to a longer collecting season for the bees, the variety of the flora, and the enormous health benefits of locally harvested honey for all those who suffer from seasonal allergies.
In fact, the economy would benefit from the diminution of sneezing, runny eyes, and congested sinuses in businesses all over the city. Because the bees collect nectar and pollen from the very plants that irritate the nasal passages and cause all that allergic misery, a teaspoon of local honey daily acts on the homeopathic principle of giving you a minute amount of that very allergen and hence immunizing your system. In the countryside people have known this for centuries and treat themselves with honey; why should not the residents of New York City have the same advantage?
With the election of Barack Obama, we have just witnessed a seismic shift in the American politic landscape and the fall of an enormous barrier. Removing honeybees from the listed of banned ‘wild animals’ in New York City would represent the fall of yet another barrier, one that separates American city dwellers from the wonders of the natural world and the flavors of homegrown honey.