The Buzz on Local Honey

Written by Tara Leonard

Food

It’s a revelation, that first sweet taste of honey on my tongue. This is sage honey, translucent yellow with a hint of vanilla, conjuring images of sultry summer days and the thrum of sun-drunk bees floating from blossom to blossom.

I’m visiting Walls Honey Farm in Soquel and I arrived with some trepidation. Like many of us, I have a love/hate relationship with bees. Sure, these industrious insects pollinate flowers and give us mankind’s oldest sweetener, but a few painful stings have made me wary. Frankly I’ve never been a huge honey fan. But suddenly, with this drop of sunshine on my lips, I’m a convert. This is why the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used honey as a gift to their gods. I can’t wait for more. Happily, there are a number of beekeepers, or apiarists, in Santa Cruz County who provide a wonderful variety of honey and beeswax products for our enjoyment.

First, a brief honey refresher course. As we learned in elementary school, bees suck the nectar out of flowers to make honey. (Have you ever sipped the clear liquid from a honeysuckle? That’s nectar.) They store the nectar in their honey sacks and once full, return to the hive where they spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs. The bees fan the nectar with their tails to make the water evaporate and reduce it to thick syrup. Then, they seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax to protect the honey and store it until it is eaten or harvested by man. Beautifully choreographed, the entire process is a miracle of nature.

 “Beekeeping is all about trucking,” laughs Alayne Meeks of Meeks’ Honey in Aptos, crushing my bucolic fantasy. Alayne’s late husband David started Meeks’ Honey in 1971 and at the peak of production maintained six hundred hives. According to Meeks, the flavor of honey comes from the floral source itself. Honey made from sage nectar tastes different from honey made from alfalfa or mustard. A backyard garden can’t supply enough nectar to sustain a large beekeeping operation. Plus, most nectar-producing plants in Santa Cruz stop producing by the beginning of June. As a result, beekeepers need to pick up their hives and move them from location to location based on what’s blooming.

 “Beekeepers can begin making honey as early as November in coastal California because of eucalyptus,” Meeks explains. “In February and March they move inland to the almond groves. Then in April and May it’s apples, mustards, vetch, and sage. We were always looking for flowers that would yield nectar. We would go out and meet farmers, take some honey, and ask if they would like a load of bees. They were usually very gracious and we’d move three or four hundred hives to their location. How long you leave them depends on how long the bloom is.”

When David died in 1991, Alayne sold the hives but continues to package and market honey, working with local beekeepers such as Greg Walls, his son Jeff, and Jeff’s wife April.

“I won’t buy honey from a beekeeper whose quality I don’t know and trust,” Meeks says. “My job is to give you as pure a flavor as you can get. I want you to know what the clover really tastes like and that it’s different from the sage or the eucalyptus.”

 “Most people are used to eating store-bought honey,” April Walls explains. “Those are usually a blend of flavors. In fact, there’s a huge difference between flavors.”

As she talks, Jeff lines up half a dozen bottles of honey, each with a little plastic spoon on top. The first thing I notice is the spectrum of colors, from transparent to dark brown. I start with the sage honey and enjoy a moment of pure sensory pleasure. The honey is warm and creamy with herbal undertones that leave me sputtering for adjectives. I think about drizzling it on thick, chewy peasant bread or watching it melt into the buttery crevices of a warm popover. What wouldn’t taste better slathered with this amazing ambrosia?

Then it’s on to buckwheat, stronger, with a sharper edge and a rich amber color. The orange honey is also delicious, but I’m surprised that it doesn’t have a citrus flavor.

“Honey tastes like the smell of the flower,” April explains. “Not the taste of the fruit.” She recommends orange honey for making sweet, flaky baklava or soothing tea with lemon and honey.

According to Meeks, most people prefer light table-grade honeys for use in the home. A darker, heavier flavor is found in bakery-grade honeys. Sure enough, the auburn tarweed honey is so bitter that I recoil. Star thistle is milder, with hints of spice. These are just a few of the flavors the Walls family sells and, at the moment, many of their approximately 1000 hives are working a cherry orchard in Morgan Hill.

Anthony Tomasso and his wife Anna Keck-Tomasso of Aptos Apiaries take honey one step further, infusing their honey with herbs to provide both flavor and medicinal properties. Beekeepers for more than 30 years, they offer a variety of honey-based products designed to relieve allergies, colds and upper respiratory ailments. They also teach basic beekeeping classes for the public.

“We practice conscious beekeeping,” Keck-Tomasso explains. “Every step of the way we’re mindful of the bees’ relationship to nature and our relationship to the bees. We need to follow their lead.”

 “We know that bee products have medicinal properties,” Keck-Tomasso continues. “For instance propolis is a glue that bees derive from tree sap and use to create an antibiotic, antifungal glue that they put around the edge of the hive. Bees are alchemists and they take raw material and make it into something quite remarkable.”

            Another remarkable product is the beeswax these ingenious creatures use to cap and protect their honey. Local artisan Catherine Banghart of Bee Bright in Boony Doon uses the wax to make pure beeswax candles. Banghart gently cleans and filters the wax to preserve the quality of the fragrance endowed from the nectar. Then she hand pours and dips her candles. She adds steam-distilled essential oils to some of the candles for additional fragrance.

            Like Keck-Tomasso, Banghart finds beekeeping a philosophical enterprise saying, “My goal is to honor your home, the honeybee and the millions of flowers that provide the nectar that becomes the wax.”

            Beekeepers have had to stay philosophical throughout this rainy, cool spring.

 “It’s been a rough year so far,” Greg Walls admits, explaining that bees don’t like to go out in the cold. The unseasonable weather has also kept things from blooming, according to Meeks. “You worry whether the plants are secreting enough nectar. Plus, there’s a fear that it’s going to get hot suddenly. Then the plants will bloom quickly and go to seed. We depend on that prolonged blooming period to make appreciable quantities of honey.”

And what about my irrational fear of bees?

“In terms of a real threat level, live in terror of driving over Highway 17, not of bees!” says Banghart. “Without bees and pollinators, we would all be very hungry.”

With the sun finally shining and the lingering essence of honey on my tongue, I couldn’t agree more.

Honey Cooking Tips

-- from the National Honey Board

• Store honey at room temperature, not in the refrigerator. If honey crystallizes, place in warm water or microwave, stirring every 30 seconds, until crystals dissolve.

• For easier measuring, coat the measuring cup or spoon with cooking spray before adding honey.

• Honey is sweeter than table sugar, so you can use less in recipes. Begin by using honey for half the sugar called for and experiment.

•  When using honey as a substitute for sugar in baked goods: reduce the liquid in the recipe by ¼ cup for each cup of honey used; add ½ tsp baking soda for each cup of honey used; and reduce over temperature by 25º to prevent over-browning.

Honey Chicken Wings

½ cup honey

1/3 cup soy sauce

¼ cup chili sauce

1 tsp garlic salt

¼ tsp black pepper

8 drops red pepper sauce

3 lbs chicken wings or drumettes

Combine honey, soy sauce, chili sauce, garlic salt, pepper and red pepper sauce. Arrange chicken in a single layer in a 9x13-inch baking pan. Pour on the sauce and turn chicken to coat. Bake at 350ºF for one hour, turning occasionally. Cool slightly and serve. Makes 8 servings.

Asparagus with Honey Garlic Sauce

1 lb fresh asparagus

½ cup Dijon mustard

½ cup dark ale or beer

1/3 cup honey

1 clove garlic, minced

½ tsp crushed dried thyme leaves

½ tsp salt

Add asparagus to boiling, salted water and cook, covered, about 2 minutes or until barely tender. Drain. Combine mustard, ale, honey, garlic, thyme and salt; mix well. Pour over warm asparagus. Makes 4 servings.

Beehive Cookies

¼ cup honey

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups shredded coconut

1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

1 cup dates, chopped

2 Tbsp flour

Combine honey, egg and vanilla until well blended. Stir in coconut and walnuts. Coat dates with flour. Add to mixture. Drop by tablespoons onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 325ºF for 12 minutes or until slightly brown. Makes 2 dozen cookies.

Apricot Honey Bread

3 cups whole wheat flour

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

1 ¼ cups low-fat milk

1 cup honey

1 egg, slightly beaten

2 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 cup chopped dried apricots

½ cup sunflower seeds or chopped almonds

½ cup raisins

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Combine milk, honey, egg and oil in a separate bowl. Pour wet mixture over dry ingredients and stir until just moistened. Gently fold in apricots, seeds or nuts, and raisins. Pour into a greased 9x5x13 pan. Bake at 350ºF for 60 minutes or until wooden toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.

For these recipes and many more, visit the National  Honey Board at www.honey.com.

This article originally appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, May 2006.