I decided to start making kombucha again and to try some of Katz’s other recipes, too. Since I didn’t know anyone with a SCOBY they could share with me, I sent $25 via PayPal to a Web site that sells a little plastic test tube filled with a bit of SCOBY floating in liquid. I added it to a gallon of tea-steeped sugar water, and in a couple of weeks, a large SCOBY was covering the tea. (I since learned that I could have just bought a bottle of kombucha for a few bucks from the market and used that as a starter.) Jane, my younger daughter, enjoys helping me prepare a batch of kombucha, though she can’t stand the taste (which is just as well, as I only want consenting adults who’ve been apprised of the risks to be drinking it anyway). Carla likes the taste as much as I do, especially since I discovered that it comes out fizzier, more tart, and less sweet when it’s been brewing for a month, which Katz and others recommend, not just a week, as I’d been doing back in 1995. Together, Carla and I go through a gallon in about three days. That means that, to supply our needs, I keep nine gallons brewing in the pantry closet and one gallon in the refrigerator for drinking. When we finish the batch in the refrigerator, I grab the oldest one from the closet and start a new batch. Making kombucha has become a twice-weekly part of our lives.
With my kombucha routine in full swing, I turned my efforts to yogurt and sauerkraut. Our family now goes through a gallon of kraut and more than five gallons of yogurt every month. Hardly a day goes by that I’m not in the kitchen making a batch of one of these three foods, which I never get tired of eating. All three are incredibly simple to make, and the ingredients are very cheap compared to what we’d pay for the finished products in a supermarket.
It costs me fifty cents to make a gallon of kombucha; in the store, a pint bottle costs $3, which means a gallon costs $24. I make sixteen eight-ounce jars of yogurt a week, which costs $6 total; the supermarket charges at least $16 for the same number of eight-ounce containers. Sauerkraut requires nothing more than noniodized salt (iodine prevents fermentation) and cabbage, which I buy for $1 a head at the farmers’ market. Three heads make a gallon, so my sauerkraut costs seventy-five cents a quart. If you buy nonpasteurized sauerkraut at a supermarket, you’ll pay about $6 a quart, and even then it will have been cooked at a temperature of about 140 degrees to kill off most of the bacteria (otherwise the sauerkraut juice could seep through the seal between the jar and the lid).
But even if I wasn’t saving money, I’d still make these foods myself. That way, I am able to adjust the flavors to suit our tastes by adjusting the fermentation time or tweaking the ingredients. And, most important, I enjoy doing it.
My success with kombucha, yogurt, and sauerkraut has emboldened me to try more of the recipes in Wild Fermentation. Miso is next on my list. To make it, I need to get some koji, rice that has Aspergillus oryzae spores growing on the grains. It takes a year or more for the koji and soybeans to turn into miso, but I’ve learned that slowing down is part of the joy of being a DIYer. I’m willing to wait.
8
KEEPING BEES
“I have established mystic contact with the spiritual core of apiculture, and now anything is possible.”
—CHARLES MARTIN SIMON, ORIGINATOR OF BACKWARDS BEEKEEPING
In 2008 I noticed that fewer bees were buzzing around my yard. Later, I found my fruit tree harvest to be much smaller than in previous years. The problem doesn’t just exist in my backyard. There’s a massive bee die-off going on all over the United States, and while speculation abounds (is it mites? microbial pathogens? pesticides? genetically modified crops? air pollution? pathogens? cell phone radiation?), no one really knows for certain the causes of what has been called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD. It’s likely that CCD is caused by a number of these factors. In September 2009 a New York Times blog ran an article in which several bee experts offered their ideas on the subject. One, Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, concluded, “It looks like the pieces of the colony collapse disorder puzzle are starting to fit together. And we can stop arguing about who was right: The virus camp, the fungus camp, the pesticide camp, the varroa mite camp, or the nutrition camp. It turns out everybody was right. (Well, everybody except the cell-phone and microwave-tower camps.)”
CCD is a big deal to beekeepers, since the big money in beekeeping isn’t honey but in mobile pollination services. Every February, bees are transported to the Central Valley in California to pollinate blossoms on a half-million acres of almond trees. If almond growers depended on natural pollinators like wild insects and bats, they could expect about 40 pounds of almonds per acre; with colonies of bees for hire, they can increase the yield to a whopping 2,400 pounds per acre. When almond blossom season is over, the mobile beekeepers, some of whom own tens of thousands of hives, load the hives onto semi trailers and ship them to other parts of California to pollinate other crops. In the summer, the beekeepers truck the bees north, where they make honey from alfalfa and clover nectar.
The pollination business has been hit hard by colony collapse disorder. There were 5 million managed bee colonies in 1940; today there are 2.5 million.
I decided to start keeping bees, both to pollinate my trees and vegetable garden and to provide wax and honey. It would be useful and fun, I thought, and I’d be doing my part to reverse the losses of CCD.
When I told my friend Kevin Kelly, a writer and beekeeper in Pacifica, California, he smiled in approval. He knew I was already raising chickens.
“You can read everything that’s interesting about chickens in one night,” Kevin warned. “But you can read about bees every night for the rest of your life.”
One reason bees are so interesting is that, like people, bees are social animals that lead structured, complex, and orderly lives. Another reason is that bees are mysterious creatures, performing their alchemical magic in the darkness of their hives. I’d never given a lot of thought to how bees actually made honey. I figured it involved nectar, but beyond that, I had no idea how they did it. One night over dinner, I polled everyone in the family. I guessed that bees stuffed pollen and nectar into the cells of their hives and then squirted some kind of glandular secretion into the cells, kicking off a reaction to convert it into honey. Here’s what the others said:
Sarina: “They take it out of the combs.”
Jane: “The bees break the pollen. Honey is inside.”
Carla: “They breathe in pollen and mix it with some chemicals in their body to make honey.”
We were all wrong. Our ideas about how bees make honey reminded me of children’s drawings that depict carrots growing in farmers’ fields orange-end up.
Honey comes from nectar, not pollen. Nectar, which is mainly sucrose and water, is produced by plants as an incentive for bees to pollinate. Field bees use long, tubular tongues to suck the nectar out of flowers, clovers, dandelions, and tree blossoms. It is stored in a second stomach, which can hold about seventy milligrams, or 150 flowers’ worth, of nectar. That’s quite a load for a bee to carry, since a bee weighs about that much itself.
Once a field bee gets back to the hive with a full tank, it offers the nectar to a house bee, which sucks the nectar out of the field bee’s mouth and then chews it, all the while mixing it with an enzyme called invertase, which breaks down the nectar’s sucrose into glucose and fructose. The house bee also adds another enzyme, called glucose oxidase, which goes to work on some of the glucose, turning it into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, both of which make the honey resistant to microbial and fungal contamination. After half an hour of mixing, the house bee deposits the liquid into a cell of the honeycomb, and other worker bees fan their wings to cause some of the water to evaporate. When the liquid becomes viscous enough, they cap off the open cell with wax, and there the freshly made honey stays until the bees get hungry. A bee colony, which can consist of as many as eighty thousand bees, might eat two hundred pounds of honey each year.
I started reading up on beekeeping.
The books all warned not to capture and use wild bees, because they were germ-laden and nasty-tempered and wouldn’t produce nearly as much honey as commercial honeybees. But in early January 2009, before I placed my order for bees-by-mail, Eric Thomason from Ramshackle Solid told me that he’d joined a club called the Backwards Beekeepers. He invited me to come along to the next meeting.
“WHO WANTS TO FIGHT AFTER A TURKEY DINNER?”
On a sunny Sunday morning, I drove up a ridiculously narrow street in Silver Lake, arriving at a house perched on the side of a hill. Eric was just arriving in his pickup. Together, we walked through the gate, past a swimming pool, and into a backyard overlooking the HOLLYWOOD sign and the Griffith Observatory.
A German shepherd barked crazily as we arrived but quickly calmed down. (For the rest of the morning the dog, Tiger, nuzzled his wet nose into my trouser legs and pushed his snout under my arm in an attempt to get me to pet him.) A few people were sitting on lawn furniture. Eric and I shook hands with the homeowner—an architect named Leonardo—and a couple of other club members. The founder of the club, Kirk, was there, too. He wore a Birkenstock gimme cap, a green T-shirt, and old blue jeans hoisted up with suspenders. With his wire-frame glasses and gray walrus mustache, he looked like a younger Wilford Brimley.
As more members trickled in, I sat on a fraying wicker chair and listened to Kirk talk about bees. He has a rough but pleasant down-home accent and a colorful way with words that makes everything he says a delight to listen to. One of the club members asked him about the best place to order bees from.
“Don’t buy ’em,” he said. “The bees you buy commercially are sick; they’re fucked up because they feed ’em chemicals and corn syrup and all kinds of shit. It’s just like tenting a house for termites with you being stuck inside the house.”
This was surprising to me. “I read that wild bees were too mean to use,” I said.
“If you’ve got mean bees,” Kirk said, “you get rid of the queen. The bees will make a new queen.” (The queen is the only female bee in a colony that is able to reproduce.) He also warned me against buying queens by mail. Before shipping, queen bees are anesthetized with carbon monoxide gas, their wings are clipped, and they’re artificially inseminated, a process that’s contrary to the let-bees-be-bees philosophy of backwards beekeeping.
Another newbie pointed to Kirk’s bee smoker, which looked like a little teakettle hooked up to an accordion, and asked him why beekeepers pumped smoke on bees when they were opening the hive boxes.
“The smoke makes them eat honey,” he said. They assume their home is on fire, and so they gorge on honey to store up energy in case they have to escape. It has the desirable side effect of making them drowsy. “It’s like you eating a bunch of turkey. Who wants to fight after a turkey dinner?”
Kirk quickly caught on that a number of us at this meeting knew next to nothing about bees, and what little we did know was in complete opposition to the tenets of Backwards Beekeeping. “We’re totally ass-backwards to everyone else,” Kirk explained. “That’s why it works. Bees are the interface Mother Nature put in to make life work. The reason bees are the way they are is because that’s what works.” The idea of backwards beekeeping is to do as little as possible to interfere with the natural behavior of bees, and, as Kirk says, “just smile at ’em when you come out and see ’em.”
The late Charles Martin Simon originated the backwards-beekeeping philosophy. In 2001 Simon, owner of a stinging-insect removal business in Santa Cruz, California, with more than four decades of beekeeping experience, issued his tenth “Principles of Beekeeping Backwards,” a manifesto for people who wanted to try a more natural style of beekeeping: Our apicultural forefathers, those great men who defined the principles of modern beekeeping, Langstroth, Dadants, Root . . . why were they so extravagantly successful? The answer is simple: because they didn’t know what they were doing. They made it up, as it were, as they went along. That is the creative principle, and that is the way it works. Once the standards have been set and carved in stone, the pictures and diagrams and procedures etched into the books, we have then models to live up to, and we can’t do it. Everything that comes after primary is secondary, or less. It will never be the same. For us to succeed, we have to become primary. We have to view beekeeping with entirely new eyes, just as our great pioneers did.
This reminded me of what Sandor Ellix Katz wrote in his book Wild Fermentation, waving aside beer- and winemaking books that instruct the amateur brewer or winemaker to follow rigorous rules about “chemical sterilization, exacting temperature controls, and controlled cultures.” (See chapter 7 for more on Katz’s advice to “reject the cult of expertise.”)
As Charles Martin Simon once did, Kirk earns a living removing wild bee colonies that have infested fences, trees, and chimneys. But instead of killing the bees, as many pest-control companies do, Kirk saves the bees and resells them to people like me who want to keep them.
Kirk’s been keeping bees since 1970, when he ordered a hive through Montgomery Ward. Someone asked him if it was legal to keep bees in Los Angeles. He replied, “I don’t know what the laws are, but it could be you aren’t supposed to have them.” (I’ve since learned that urban beekeepers don’t want to know the regulations for beekeeping for fear of finding out that they are violating one ordinance or another. I’m following suit.)
Another person asked Kirk about mites, the bane of the modern beekeeper. Mites (members of the Acarina order like another well-loved eight-legged creature, the tick) are pinhead-sized parasites that make a living by attaching their jaws to larger animals and drinking their blood. Several kinds of mites are parasitic on bees. The most infamous is the rust-colored varroa mite, which attaches itself to adult bees as well as to larvae and pupae. As many as a dozen mites at a time will latch onto one bee.
And the problem seems to be getting worse. According to researchers at Ohio State University, bee mites have “all but decimated the casual beekeeper and feral (wild) bees in North America.”
Mites can wreak havoc on a colony by weakening the immune system of adult bees and by spreading a virus that causes wing deformities in undeveloped bees. The mites also hamper the ability of worker bees to make glucose oxidase, the enzyme that preserves honey. Without the enzyme, the honey becomes contaminated with bacteria, which poisons the bees. A mite infestation can lay waste to an otherwise healthy bee colony in a couple of weeks.
Varroa mites (the scientific name is Varroa destructor) have become a worldwide problem. Thought to have originated in Russia, they spread through Europe and were first discovered infesting U.S. bees in 1987 in Wisconsin and Florida. A year later, the mites had spread to ten other states.
As you might expect, the first line of defense against bee mites has been chemical pesticides. And, as you might expect, after a couple of years of good results, mites have evolved to resist these chemicals.
“Bees have to live with mites, because they are in the environment,” Kirk told us. Mites of all kinds are everywhere, and we’ll never get rid of them. Tiny (and harmless) face mites are living in the hair follicles in your facial skin right now as you read this, eating sebaceous secretions and dead skin cells.
Instead of poisoning mites, the backwards way of controlling the parasites is to make patties out of vegetable shortening and sugar and feed them to the bees. The grease gets on their bodies, making it hard for mites to recognize the bees as suitable hosts.
After we watched a video of Kirk dismantling a fence to get at a wild-bee colony whose long, droopy hives looked like gray gym socks filled with sand, he passed around a pad of paper. “Everyone who wants bees, write down your e-mail and phone number. We’ll call you soon and give you some bees.”
A couple of days later, he sent an e-mail to everyone in the club that read: OK Beekeepers.
To all club members with bees. Spring is starting to really go now. Your bees are probably bringing in pollen and making honey. Just check them once a week and ma
ke sure they have room to expand. If you have any questions call me. Now, all the new Beekeepers who are on the list for bees, make sure you’ve got your equipment ready. The swarms, and calls for bee removal, will be picking up soon. Be ready. For the new guys with any questions about starter strips you can call me. I also posted some pictures here on the club page. Kirk
I wasn’t ready. I had no equipment, so I needed to get it fast. Thankfully, Amy Seidenwurm, who founded the club along with Kirk and her husband, Russell Bates, posted a list of equipment to buy: FOR THE HIVE:
Top board
Bottom board
2 hive boxes (medium boxes are easier to move around than large ones)
20 frames (make sure they are the size to fit the boxes)
Hive tool
The cheapest smoker you can find (they all work the same)
YOUR GEAR:
Some kind of veil/hat getup
Gloves
YOU MAY ALSO WANT:
Made by Hand Page 16
