Beeing bees

So Sunday being a beautiful autumnal day and not snowing, and it being the putative day of rest, and also being the feast of the remarkable and remarkably weird Blessed Christina of Stommeln*, CSB and I went to Wave Hill to see Hive Culture.
To be honest, CSB did not initially see the point of going to an art exhibit about bees when we have so many bees right here. He softened a little when faced with this lovely bee wallpaper, not that he gave much thought to actually wallpapering the powder room with it (my idea). **
Nor did he think flowers sculpted from beeswax were the best use of beeswax, but I thought they were lovely in a cloying Victorian kind of way.

But our favorite by far was a video of a young woman dressed in a white sheath uncannily like a straitjacket who turns herself as a bee. This transformation includes spitting into an array of hexagonal jars while flapping her arms, and wending her way through a maze-like pattern of piled up fleece balls (pollen), moving them from pile to pile. It is true that I have, by popular demand, been known to perform the waggle dance, but this young woman took the concept and ran with it.
Why didn’t I think of this?

*Christina (1242-1312) lived in a village near Cologne in the 14th century. Clearly she was precocious, or something. At the age of 10 she announced that she was engaged to Jesus, and then she ran away to the convent where she experienced many hallucinations, including Satan disguised at St Bartholomew urging her to commit suicide. In her twenties she became friendly with a Dominican called Father Peter, and he was lucky enough to witness her being tossed around the room, pierced and stabbed, all by an invisible satanic presence. It is thanks to his excellent note-taking that we know the gruesome details of Christina’s holiness; Butler’s Live of the Saints is more squeamish: “But the manifestation of which Father Peter gives the most careful and detailed account was of so repulsive a nature that no particulars can of it can be given here.” Since Butler does feel comfortable relating how Christina found herself buried in a mud pit on one occasion and had hot stones attached to her body by Satan on another, I am afraid that for someone like me to read something like that is an invitation to imagine all sorts of kinky and disgusting torments.

**(Bee Wallpaper by Rob Keller, 2007) It wasn't until I got home and really stared at the bee wallpaper on the brochure that I realized what felt uncanny about it: my late, ex-husband, the late-lamented Jeff,being obsessive about many things, went through a period of obsessively digitally multiplying photographic images to produce patterns similar to this bee wallpaper. Being vociferously anti-Catholic, one of his stranger images featured a stained glass Jesus Christ kaleidoscopically repeated. It was very colorful.

Your beeswax, my beeswax

It’s the age-old question: what do we do with all that beeswax?
All summer long the bees have collected nectar and stored it inside their honeycomb and fanned the nectar until it achieved the perfect consistency. All summer long they sealed the honeycomb with newly masticated wax, the purest wax of all, which we call capping wax.

Then we came along and sliced off the capping wax and inserted the honey frames into the extractor and spun it around until centrifugal force threw out the stored honey. We bottled the honey and used it to sweeten our tea, coffee, ice cream, pancakes, acorn squash, salad dressing, ham glaze, gingerbread and fish pudding.

And what about the wax?

If you were a monk – even if you are a monk – you made candles. Monks appreciated that the wax burning so splendidly in their splendid cathedrals and intimate chapels was made solely by virgins. No queens and no drones helped in creating that wax.

If you lived in the 19th century and had smallpox scars you used beeswax to fill in the pits, and then stayed away from fires that would melt away your face.

If you are Roxanne Quimby you take Burt’s leftover wax and start concocting every kind of personal care product from pregnant belly moisturizer to toothpastes, and then you sell Burt’s Bees to Clorox for huge sums of money* and buy up as much land as you can in the state of Maine in order to preserve it.

If you are Let it Bee Honey, that is me, you stand at the stove and discover the wonders of chemistry. Emulsification can be fun.
Following various recipes and then experimenting, I’ve been making creams and lotions and balms. It is not clear what differentiates a cream from a lotion from a balm; the truth is that I apply the labels somewhat arbitrarily.
Then, of course, I had to name the creams and lotions and balms. Early one morning in the semi-darkness before the Palisades turn pink - when I do my best thinking - I had an inspiration: I would name every batch for a different female saint.
I have been enamored with medieval names for a long time now, and having neglected to call either of my children Ethelreda or Fulgentius, I could now name creams to my hearts content. I could not wait to tell CSB of this stroke of marketing genius.
His enthusiasm was flatter than old ginger ale. Naming beauty products for long dead female saints, especially blind or headless ones, struck him as a very bad idea.
So we compromised: I didn’t put Saint in front of their names.

My first success (by which I mean, it emulsified properly, did not separate, smells delicious and soothes) was Walburga’s Face Cream. After a holy life, Saint Walburga died in 777 or 779. Her body was interred in a rocky niche in Eichstätt and after a while it began to ooze sweet smelling therapeutic oil. Let it Bee’s Walburga’s Face Cream is made with Vitamin E and essence of honeysuckle.

Mechtilde‘s Myrrh Balm is named for Mechtilde of Magdeburg a medieval mystic and the author of The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Her vivid images of Hell may have influenced Dante’s Inferno, but we can’t be sure. My dear friend Gill brought me the myrrh extract from Italy; I like to think this balm is especially suited to the Christmas season.

Cunnegunda was married to Henry II of Bavaria; when envious gossips falsely accused her of adultery, she proved her innocence by walking unscathed over burning coals. Crème de Cunnegonda had hints of smoky resin.

Ulphia (of Super Strong Hand Cream, version #1) lived in Amiens in the 8th century. She built herself a hermitage for prayer in the middle of a swamp, and then when the croaking of the frogs kept her awake at nights, she silenced them. To this day, the frogs of Amiens are very quiet.

Tecla is said to be the first female Christian martyr. She is also said to be entirely fictional. Her face cream is made with trace bits of propolis, a remarkable resinous mixture gathered by the bees and used to seal up the hive. When suspended in alcohol or mixed with honey it is effective against sore throats, burns, dental plaque and tumors.

Gwenfredi is Welsh for Winifred who was decapitated by a rejected suitor. Her Uncle Bueno (also a saint) reattached her head so that Gwenfredi could become a nun, and later, a patron saint of payroll clerks. For obvious reasons, her name graces the newest version of our Super Strong Hand Cream, made with lanolin and extolled by sculptors and welders.

Poor Odilia of Alsace was born blind and her disappointed parents gave her away to a peasant family. Then at the age of 12 she entered the convent and her sight was miraculously restored by the touch of Saint Erhard. I would never claim that Odilia of Alsace Eye Cream will restore your vision, but pure beeswax and essence of jasmine will soothe your tired eyelids.

*$925,000,000 which is so close to a billion we could just say: a billion.

**Cream photographs by Colin Cooke. (gratitude)

The Spermaceti Beeswax dichotomy

Just now I am reading and enjoying Philip Hoare’s The Whale, though at times I am not entirely sure why since much of the book recounts Moby Dick and I have read Moby Dick several (twice, actually) times and love it immensely. (And if you doubt that feel free to read my very amusing story, No, I am not a Loose-Fish and Neither are You, in the Southwest Review, Vol. 91, #3, 2006, which is likewise full of Moby Dickian lore)) On the other hand, yet another aspect of my deficient education is that I never read Moby Dick in school or college, and so I was unacquainted with 20th century literary theory that explains that when the whalers take the foreskin of the whale’s penis and turn it into a “cassock” we need to understand that “cassock” turned inside out becomes “ass/cock” and hence alludes to homosexual activity amongst the whalers. I could never have figured that out on my own.

I have been equally interested to learn about the process of making candles from the whale, since it was the advent of industrial whaling in the 17th century that caused pure-burning whale oil to supplant beeswax candles as the light giver of choice.
Whale oil candles burn cleaner, purer and brighter. So I am told. And as for the difficulty of extraction, I suppose it is a matter of whether you would rather take your chances with 60,000 “virgin daughters of toil” (as Maeterlinck calls them) or a leviathan of the deep.
The complex process of making spermaceti candles came to America with Jacob Rodriguez Rivera, a Sephardic Jew originally from a Marrano family in Seville, Spain. He arrived in Newport in 1748 and upon arriving in America, Jacob and his family reclaimed their Jewish identity and were founding members of the Touro Synagogue, the oldest in the US (and a building frequently visited – and discoursed upon - by my mother when giving her justly-famous architectural history tours).
First you have to find and harpoon the whale. Spermaceti – up to three tons of it - comes from the head cavity of a sperm whale. With the head of the whale either alongside the ship or on deck, the whalers would remove the spermaceti with buckets passed through a hole in the head casing. This was then loaded into barrels. Back in port, in the bustling whale towns of New Bedford, Nantucket and Hudson, New York the spermaceti was heated up in huge wooden kettles to evaporate the water and remove the impurities. The result was loaded into woolen sacks that could be squeezed in a wooden press – I perform a similar process with yogurt and cheesecloth in my kitchen – and the spermaceti trickled out. As with the first press of olive oil which is considered to be the most virgin of all (Extra virgin – an odd concept if examined too closely) this first pressing is called “winter-strained” sperm oil and is the most prized.
In one of the many ways in which they differ from whales, honeybees can produce wax without first being killed. In the second stage of the worker bee’s short life (a mere 5 weeks), the wax glands on the ventral side of her abdomen come into maturity so that she can secrete the wax she will use to build the honeycomb. When she is using the wax she transfers it from her abdomen to her mouth for masticating into a pliable construction material.
Before the 19th century invention of movable frame hives by the Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth, allowing beekeepers to extract honey without destroying the honeycomb, all the honeycomb was removed from the hive along with the honey. But I assume that the ancients processed the wax more less as I do it in my kitchen: I heat up the capping wax with a little bit of water, skim off dead bug bits, pollen and other debris, and strain it into an empty milk container. Once it has solidified, I repeat the process and strain it through cheesecloth into another milk container. (Orange juice works equally well.)
According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, beeswax candles were the preferred illumination in Christian churches because the wax was produced by virgins. It goes on to say that the virgin worker’s beeswax represents “in a most appropriate way the flesh of Jesus Christ born of a virgin mother.” [Seriously.]
All over Europe, monasteries kept their own beehives, producing honey for sweetness and wax for holy light, all thanks to those virgins.
In its purest form, beeswax is ivory in color, but as the bees re-use the honeycomb for pollen it can darken in color, making it less appropriate for liturgical purposes. Along came Piscator Langstroth, uncle to the aforementioned Lorenzo. Early in the 19th century he developed a method for bleaching the beeswax so that it was even more desirable for use in church. He kept his method a secret and grew rich from it; biographers suggest that this impressed his young nephew and motivated him to take up beekeeping,imagining it to be a lucrative venture.
When as children we played with candle stubs my mother collected - we dripped wax onto our hands to create lumpy waxen multi-colored gloves, a favorite but rarely allowed pleasure - I don't think we ever thought about the bees who had worked so diligently exuding the wax from their mirror glands, masticating it and then creating the geometrically perfect honeycombs, and I am sure we didn't think about their virginity. We should have. It might have made the strange enterprise more entertaining, but maybe not.

How royal can we be?

So I’ve been thinking about Royal Jelly. CSB was melting wax last night in the double boiler. I’d just had a margarita and a half at Tomatillo’s so wasn’t being trusted with hot & potentially scorching materials. So he stirred the hot wax with a chopstick and I got the remote. By lovely coincidence there was a show on one of the PBS stations about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and all the myriad threats facing honeybees in this world. The usual dire prognostications about pollination and what happens when you don’t have bees to pollinate; e.g. in the pear growing region of China all the honeybees have died off so humans have to HAND POLLINATE every single pear on every single pear tree. This is profoundly tedious and frankly would make me reconsider pears. Bees are so much better at it, and they don’t make alarming television specials.

Additionally, there was footage of vats of Royal Jelly being poured into other vats. This is what riveted me. About 90% of the world’s Royal Jelly comes from China, and when you realize how it is made & harvested, you will understand why this could only happen in China. Worker bees secrete royal jelly from the hypopharyngeal glands in their heads to nourish the larvae. All the bees will get royal jelly for the first 3 days of their lives, but the Queen Bee will be fed exclusively royal jelly during her larval stage. So it is one thing for honeybees to secrete droplets of this white gelatinous substance to feed their fellow bees; it is another story completely for humans to decide that if royal jelly makes a Queen Bee, think what it will do for my aging skin. Then the keepers must convince an entire hive that they are feeding all Queens all the time. Bees of course know this is not how things are meant to be in the hive. Then you have to extract – by hand – minute quantities of this white stuff from the heads of the nurse bees. That is why the footage of huge vats of Royal Jelly blows my mind. There may be 60,000 bees in a hive at its peak, but there are billions of people in China.

I never think about Royal Jelly without thinking about Roald Dahl’s story of that name. If you only know Roald Dahl as a writer of children’s stories, think again. His stories for adults are brilliant and weird and disturbing. His creepy ability to unnerve the reader is unparalleled. As I write this I am also (sort of) fondling my copy of The Roald Dahl Omnibus, which I bought at the Strand Bookstore many years ago for $7.99. Given that there are 29 stories in the collection that comes to a little more than 27 cents a story, which has got to be one of the best values anywhere. In “Royal Jelly”, Albert Taylor, a somewhat obsessive beekeeper (we don’t know anyone of that ilk personally), aware of the remarkable function of royal jelly in the creation of a Queen Bee, decides to feed his infant daughter royal jelly. I will say no more.

This morning I finished melting the wax from our recent extraction and now there is a fine layer of pure beeswax coating every surface in our kitchen.
There is a shallow frame with honey and brood in the bathtub downstairs. Even CSB says he has no idea how it got there.

Another burning question solved

You know that tube of chapstick or lip balm you have in your back pocket? I bet you have often wondered how it is made. I imagine you have spent many hours wondering about the simple 15-step process that goes into creating this handy item that is often the only thing that stands between you and bloody chapped lips and a truly rotten day.
I have decided to relieve you of that wonder, and explain.

How to make a .15 ounce stick of lip balm:

1. You have to keep bees, because bees make the wax which is an essential ingredient in lip balm. Keeping bees is simple. It involves making the hives and supers, ensuring they have a good sources of pollen and nectar, either preventing or capturing swarms, making sure the Queen is laying brood properly, dealing with all the various pests that bother bees, including (but not limited to) Varroa mites, trachea mites, mice, yellow jackets, robber bees and bears, adding or removing honey supers as needed and curtseying to the Queen.
2. When the time comes in mid summer, you have to extract the honey from the honey supers. With a heated or serrated knife (it’s a personal choice) you remove the wax capping the bees put on the comb to seal in their honey.
3. Strain the chunks of wax capping to get as much honey as possible.
4. Then start the process of cleaning the beeswax. Boil down the wax, with a little water, and then pour it through cheesecloth to strain out all the dead bee bits, pollen and other assorted items not considered desirable in a tube of lip balm. Repeat. Lest you think this process can only be done once, let me disabuse you of the notion.
5. Once you have strained the wax twice if not 3 times, boil it down one more time and then pour it into an empty milk or orange container (the squared waxy ones). Not through the little hole! Remove the top first. In a few hours the wax will have hardened and you can peel off the container. There will be water and guck in the bottom. Discard this. You now have a squared chunk of pure beeswax with which to make your lip balm.
6. Acquire small plastic tubes and tops into which you will pour the chapstick when it is ready.
7. Clean an empty coffee tin and make a pouring spout. This is will function as the top of your double boiler. Place the coffee tin in a pot of water.
8. Take 1 ounce of beeswax. To accomplish this I use a chisel and a hammer; with these delicate instruments I nick pieces of beeswax off my hardened chunk and then weigh them.
9. Add 2.5 ounces of sweet almond oil. I could tell you how to crush and extract almond oil from raw almonds, but I will not. Not this time.
10. Melt the wax and almond oil together in the coffee tin over boiling water. Add a small amount of raw honey and a few drops of essential oil. I like lavender or lemon. Honeysuckle has been deemed too ‘girlie’ by the resident critics.
11. Let the oil and wax cool down to about 120˚ before pouring it into the small plastic tubes, because if it is much hotter it will cause the tubes to shrink and then their tops will never stay properly shut.
12. Pour oil and wax into little white tubes, carefully. If you are already a brain surgeon, that is a good thing, because chances are you have steady hands. If you are not already a brain surgeon, you might consider medical school.
13. Let the lip balm harden inside the tube. Cap it.
14. Be grateful I am not going to explain the entire process of designing labels, getting labels printed, sticking them on so that they don’t overlap, and then safety sealing the lip balms.
15. Now you can sell each lip balm for the staggering price of $1.50, wholesale.
Now you know why I am referred to as the Beeswax Business Guru.

Bees and the infant Ambrose

Saint Ambrose –whose feast is today – is justifiably famous for many things: his eloquence, his suppression of the Arian heresy, his pedagogical friendship with Saint Augustine, and causing the imperious Emperor Theodosius to repent his sins (the massacre over 7000 persons), but these are the not the reasons I mention him today.
Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, Doctor of the Church, is the patron saint of beekeepers, bees and wax-workers.
According to legend the infant Ambrose, peacefully rocking in his cradle in Trier, Germany, was stung by a bee on the lip. He did not cry out; instead, he became one of the great orators of the age, known for his "honeyed speech”.
Another variation on the legend has it that a bee flew over and let fall a drop of honey onto the babe’s lips.
Both are fine stories, and while it is good to have friends in high places, any beekeeper knows how unlikely are both scenarios. In the first place, honeybees rarely sting unless threatened or defending the hive. In the second place, honeybees do not fly around carrying honey. They carry pollen and nectar to the hive and there, inside the perfect honeycomb cells, the honey is made.
Another variation on the legend has it that a swarm of bees alighted on the face of the infant Ambrose and left behind the honey of eloquence. This seems somewhat more feasible as swarming bees could be carrying honey and who know, maybe they thought this cradle would make a fine new hive?

The Day After

How did we celebrate the election of Obama?

First I went and told the bees. For reasons that are buried in the mists of time as well as patently obvious, beekeepers are highly superstitious and believe it is essential to tell the bees any good or bad news. Frankly, elections usually count as neither, but this time we made an exception. I mentioned that under new leadership, the EPA might even see its way to banning the insecticides and pesticides that are killing their fellow bees.


Midday found me at an assisted living facility up north where an octogenarian former member of the Ladies Literature Club now resides, and where a dozen us went to help her celebrate an important birthday. By tomorrow she will have forgotten our presence, but it was lovely to see her at that moment. Lunch was served and it was devoid of any spices or sharp edges. Our conversation ranged from a recent crime wave of stolen tires to Obama, from offspring in the Peace Corps to Obama, from aggressive swans and geese to Obama, from the correct word for a headscarf to Obama. We were of many different ages, backgrounds, and religions (though not race) and we were universally amazed and delighted by this sea-change. One septuagenarian mentioned that her mother had three children before she ever voted. I first assumed her mother was a child-bride. But no, it became clear: her mother had married in 1910, 10 years before the 19th amendment.
Several women mentioned the death of Obama’s grandmother and questioned when he would get to the funeral, and when he would have time to mourn her, and lamented that his moment of victory was tinged with this sorrow. They were deeply worried about this, and moved.
There was zero conversational opportunity for me to mention Saints Galation and Episteme and their bizarre and unconsummated marriage, or Saint Bertila, who as abbess ruled over Queens Hereswitha and Bathildis. (This is quite normally the case, hence this blog.)
Had I been quicker, I might have mentioned Saint Martin de Porres whose feast it was. Born in Peru in 1579, he was the son of a Spanish knight and a black Panamanian woman, and was known for his gentleness and generosity to the poor, as well as his concern for the black African slaves transported into Peru. He is the patron saint of social justice.


For dinner I made French onion soup (key are caramelized onions and port wine) to honor the United States’ presumptive rehabilitation within the international community.

The Death of a Hive

Some of you may remember our observation hive, last seen in these pages in its incarnation as a Coptic Cross. (More or less, see my mother’s comment for clarification.)

This week, the hive died. For a while we suspected something was amiss in the hive, as the population was declining precipitously. That is not unusual for this time of year when the queen has stopped laying and the bees are getting ready to hunker down for the winter. But it was disturbing to notice that the normally tidy (if they were my relatives, I would label them OCD) bees were not dispatching the dead bodies, but instead leaving them to lie & rot on their front porch, bleak intimations of mortality.

Because there are only four frames in the observation hive, they never get up to the numbers of a normal hive (60,000 at peak of the summer) nor do they store up honey for the winter. So as the nectar dried up we started feeding honey to the bees. (CSB devised an ingenious screened porch off their front porch that works quite well for pouring in honey, local of course.) But we think we made it too easy and that the hive was robbed. We saw a couple of deadly battles outside the window pierced by their entry hole, but the truth is, the observation hive was just too few and too weak to resist.
One day there were more dead bees piled up at the base of the hive than there were living bees despairingly walking across the honeycomb. And the next day there were none.

I know it’s Nature’s Way and all that, but it still terribly sad when a hive dies. It is a loss both singular and multiple. We think of each hive as a single functioning organism with a single intelligence and a single purpose; Rudolph Steiner wrote of the hive as analogous to a human brain. But it is impossible not to notice that there are thousands of individual bees in there. When I watch a bee balancing on the stamen of a cleome and collecting pollen, it is one bee I am watching. So I am mourning her. Many thousands of her.

Like the farmer in Breughel’s painting who plows his field undisturbed by Icarus plunging to his watery death because the wax in his feathery wings melted when he flew too close to the sun, and like the dogs in Auden’s poem going on with their doggy life, yesterday we slowly removed the honey supers from our rooftop hives.

While Wall Street was in a freefall, while Lehman Brothers disintegrated and AIG was being bailed out, while the Unemployment Bureau was offering re-training seminars to middle management analysts, while Bolivia is on the brink of Civil War and the Peace Corps has evacuated all 113 volunteers from the country (including CSB’s nephew - now about to travel the length of the Amazon by motorcycle), and while we learn from Morty Sobell (whose stepdaughter introduced my dear friend B to her current husband - but that's another story) that Julius Rosenberg really did sell secrets to the Russians and thus alter all our perceptions of the fifties, we were harvesting honey.

First CSB carefully pried apart the frames that were sealed with propolis (from the Greek pro-before and polis – city. Also called bee-glue). Then he removed each frame, shook off the bees and handed me the frame. I gently brushed off the remaining bees with our super soft bee brush, and placed each frame in a plastic bin we had acquired for just this project.
Repeat above forty times.

Since the hives are atop a four-story brownstone, and the roof is only accessible by four flights of stairs and then a steep ladder, CSB had constructed a pallet upon which he could lower the honey-laden frames (sealed inside the plastic bins so as not to drip honey all over the house) down the hatch to the bottom of the ladder. Then we carried them down all 4 flights. Each bin weighed about forty pounds (My very approximate and subjective guess. Heavier than a two year old.).

Once the honey is extracted and jarred, we will have a few pounds of wax to melt and clean and harden in old milk cartons, and it will be exactly the same as the wax Daedelus used to make the feather and wax wings for his son Icarus, for their ill-fated escape from the labyrinth at Knossos. (As we learned from Ovid in tenth grade Latin class.)