The Tastes of Honey: From oranges to sage, different blossoms leave their mark on final product

Ardith Eggman, of Tulare County, recently took time out from tending his bee colonies and selling their honey at the Alemany and Heart of the City farmers markets in San Francisco to fight for the lives of San Luis Obispo County’s wild bees. His efforts paid off. "We were the only ones there to stand up for the bees," he recalls of the climactic meeting of the San Luis Obispo County board of supervisors where he and his brother, also a beekeeper who sells at farmers markets, testified against a new bee ordinance, which the board proceeded to vote down that day.

The Eggmans winter their bee colonies in the sage- and buckwheat-swathed coastal hills of San Luis Obispo County. They are therefore registered with the county and got notice of the proposed ordinance, which apparently didn’t elicit much of a reaction from anyone else.

Tucked in among sections defining the circumstances under which bees roaming through residential areas can be declared a public nuisance was a provision that alarmed the Eggmans. It called for the extermination of all feral bee colonies that were the subject of a complaint, and it prohibited beekeepers from collecting swarms found in the wild.

Rusty Hall, the deputy county agricultural commissioner who drafted the ordinance, defends the feral bee proposal as a reasonable, proactive safeguard against the encroachment of Africanized bees, the so-called "killer" variety, that have recently arrived in Southern California. Africanized bees are by definition feral, says Hall. There are very few European honeybees left in the wild. They have been decimated by the Varroa jacobsoni mite, which isn’t as debilitating to fast-moving Africanized bees. Add to those observations the fact that the European and Africanized bees can’t be distinguished on the spot, and it simply made sense to kill all reported feral bees rather than wait for someone to get stung to death, officials in the agricultural commissioner’s office reasoned reasoned. If that were to happen, the first thing the ag commissioner would hear is, "You knew they were coming. Why didn’t you do anything?"

As the Eggmans saw it, the decimation of the good kind of wild honeybees by the Varroa mite is a compelling reason to save the few that are left. So they went to work to rally opposition to the ordinance.

They called up the American Bee Association and got the group to send a letter criticizing the proposal. They contacted Eric Mussen, an apiculturalist with the entomology department at the University of California in Davis, to do so, as well.

The Eggmans also researched other county laws. They learned that San Diego County has what Ardith Eggman praises as an "excellent" bee ordinance that balances public safety with the well-being of bees. San Diego is on the front line of the defense against Africanized bees, 44 swarms of which have been found in California to date, most in next-door Imperial County. The San Diego ordinance requires authorities to make a positive genetic I.D. of the bees before calling in the exterminators.

The Eggmans’ campaign against the San Luis Obispo ordinance culminated in the board meeting in February. They were the only bee people on hand. Apparently, they made an impact.

A local TV station headlined its coverage of the vote against the ordinance on the news that evening with a teaser: "Beekeepers tell county to buzz off."

Ardith Eggman describes the exchange of views about feral bees in more conciliatory terms. "He was very nice," Eggman says of Hall. "He didn’t mean to do what he was about to do. He responded to what we said."

Dennis Knowles, of the agricultural commissioner’s office, says the beekeepers "went overboard" in their reaction to the feral bee provision. It hardly ever would have come into play, bee swarms are so rare these days. Most of the European bees that are found in the wild have escaped from captivity and are living out their last days before the mites do them in.

As many as 90 percent of all wild bees in the United States have been killed by mites, Mussen said. Much of the carnage has occurred in just the last two years. Even those who aren’t bee fanciers have reason to be concerned. After all, bees pollinate about one third of all food plants, according to Gary Nabhan, an agricultural ecologist and director of science at the Arizona-Sonora Museum.

Backyard gardeners have been among the first to feel the effects. Production of backyard fruit, zucchini, cucumbers and other crops has reportedly fallen off in the absence of the workhorse of pollinators, and people are beginning to notice. Eggman said a letter recently published in the local paper in Porterville asked the question that has become increasingly common: where are the bees?

Smaller farmers who have depended on wild bees to pollinate their crops, particularly east of the Mississippi River, are also feeling the effects of the population crash, Mussen says.

Commercial operations of any size won’t be much affected. They have always relied on millions of domesticated bee colonies, which can be treated with antibiotics to protect them from the mites and can be trucked into the orchards when the trees are in bloom.

Bees get trucked in from across the West each spring to help pollinate the massive expanse of fruit and nut orchards in California’s Central Valley. It takes about 900,000 hives just to pollinate the 400,000 acres of almonds in the state.

The Tastes of Honey

The honey that the bees produce from their work on almonds isn’t worth eating, Eggman says. It’s bitter, just like green almonds.

But the bloom phase of any one crop doesn’t last long – often just four to six weeks. If the bees are strong, they’ll put up a load of honey in that time, which will carry distinctive undertones of flavor from the particular crop. The honey can be removed from the hives before the bees get trucked to their next assignment.

Honey produced by bees during tours of duty among oranges is sought out by discriminating consumers. But Eggman says the honey that the bees produce during their winter repasts on coastal wildflowers is among the best. In the lower elevations, sage is a favorite of the bees. The pungent herb’s nectar yields a highly prized flavor of honey. (The foothills in Los Angeles County are about the best sage lands on earth, Eggman says.) A little higher up in the hills, wild buckwheat blooms through the winter. The product of the bees’ feasts on it turns up in farmers markets as buckwheat honey.