The black locust tree is native to eastern and southeastern North America, but has spread throughout the United States and much of Canada. A member of the Fabaceae (pea family), the tree has nodules of nitrogen-fixing bacteria on its roots which make it an excellent species for re-vegetating poor or damaged soils. In addition, its tolerance for low pH has made the tree useful for strip-mine reclamation sites.

Black locust grows quickly and averages 40-70 feet tall at maturity. It is often planted as a source of firewood, not only because of its fast growth but because the wood burns very hot. Although the tree does not tolerate shade or extreme cold, it grows well in a variety of moisture, fertility, and slope conditions.

Although it is considered a major honey plant in the eastern U.S., the black locust does not always produce a crop of honey. Nectar flow is very dependent on local weather conditions and some years the flowers yield little or no nectar at all. Some areas of the country report good crops once in every five years, but the frequency varies with the location.

Even when the flow is good, the flowering period is short. The flowers, which bloom in long, white racemes, open sometime between April and June for about ten days. During the rest of the year the trees are excellent habitat for invertebrates, birds, bats and other small mammals.

Nancy, a reader from Shady Grove Farm in Kentucky, has been enticing me with delectable descriptions of her current black locust flow. Below is a photo she sent of a tree in full bloom.

A final note: The black locust should not be confused with the honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos. Ironically, the honey locust produces very little—if any—honey. The tree was nicknamed “honey locust” because of the sweet pulp which was used for food by some of the North American tribes.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Black locust tree at Shady Grove Farm, Kentucky.

One thing I learned is that “heavy metals” is an ambiguous term and the list differs depending on who you talk to. For my purposes here, I’m referring to the toxic-to-human metals such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, manganese, mercury, and nickel.

First, the bad news

The bad news is that heavy metals do indeed enter plants from contaminated soils. The metals are picked up by the roots and distributed throughout the entire plant including the nectar and pollen. The amount of metal in the plant increases with the amount of metal in the soil. Also, in regions where there is a significant amount of lead in the air, it may land on the plant and adhere to the sticky surfaces of pollen.

Bees collect both the contaminated pollen and nectar and transport it back to the hive. In controlled experiments these heavy metals have shown up in pollen pellets, honey, beeswax, royal jelly, and in the bodies of the honey bees themselves.

Now, the good news

Most of the papers I read were written by researchers who were hoping to find a way to use honey bees—or their hive products—to monitor environmental health. The thought was that hives could be put on various patches of land and then the hive products could be analyzed to give us a picture of the amount of soil contamination in that area.

What they found was that hives on severely contaminated soil did not show significantly different levels of heavy metal accumulation from those hives on clean soil. ­The researchers concluded that these findings were due to the way honey bees forage. Honey bees will easily forage within a three-mile radius and, in times of nectar dearth, may extend that to five miles. The bees also sample the flowers of many different plant species, each of which have different rates of heavy metal assimilation.

Consider this little chart. If we take a circle with a one-mile radius, square the radius (1 x 1 = 1) and multiply it by 3.14 (pi) we get the area in square miles (3.14). Now we take that number and multiply it 640 (the number of acres in a square mile) and you get 2011 acres. So a chart of acres covered by foraging bees looks like this:

This means that even if your bees are sitting on a contamination hot spot, your honey is probably not going to have significantly more heavy metal contamination than most other honey. Only a very small proportion of the total harvest will come from the area immediately adjacent to the hives.

Of course the numbers will vary—the larger the contaminated area, the higher the chance of accumulation. But, as you can see, even if the contamination site is 100 acres, that is only about 5% of a one-mile foraging radius and 1.25% of a two-mile radius.

Of the papers I read, none of them found honey samples with dangerous levels of toxic metals. A few had fairly high levels of iron, but not at a level considered harmful to human health, especially in view of how much honey we actually eat.

Now whether there is enough heavy metal accumulation in individual bees to affect their health is an entirely different question. Some of the papers suggest that the metals accumulate in various parts of the bee body and may adversely affect things like organ function, but I’ll take up that topic on another day.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Honey granulates when the nectar is high in glucose and low in fructose. The more fructose the nectar contains, the less likely the honey is to granulate. I wondered if tree nectar naturally has more fructose. So I decided to informally research this claim to see how true it is.

What I found is kind of a mess. Nearly everyone agrees on the granulation rate of certain species. For example, many folks assert that honey from tupelo, black locust, gallberry, black sage, sourwood, avocado, and heather hardly ever granulates. This is true. On the other hand, honey from aster, clover, oilseed rape, alfalfa, cotton, blueberry, mangrove, and star thistle granulates quickly.

Most on the “never granulates” list are trees, and most on the “quick to granulate” list are not. But the gray areas are immense. I would say gallberry, black sage, and heather are shrubs—not exactly trees. But so are blueberry and cranberry. A mangrove can be a tree or a shrub. So although trees and shrubs seem to have many characteristics in common, nectar composition is not one of them.

Even more confusing: I found raspberry, cranberry, blackberry, sunflower, and fireweed on both “quick to granulate” and “slow to granulate” lists. The different experience by different people is probably the result of the nectar being mixed with other nectars in their local area—something which can give the honey very different characteristics. A pure sample would probably result in a different experience. For example, given it is in the aster family, I would imagine that pure sunflower honey would be very quick to granulate.

Others on the “slow to granulate” list were yellow box (bush), borage (herb), milkweed (herb) and grape (woody vine). On the “quick to granulate” list were orange blossom (tree), dandelion (herb), mesquite (shrub ), apple (tree), blue curl (evergreen herb), and rosemary (woody perennial). My own non-granulating honey comes mostly from maple, bitter cherry, cascara, American holly, salal, snowberry, and blackberry—which are trees, shrubs, and woody vines.

It’s hard to conclude much from this brief summary, but I would say that if your honey comes chiefly from trees you have a better chance of getting slow-to-granulate honey than if it comes mostly from annuals, herbaceous perennials, or vines. But once again, nature has proven she doesn’t believe in absolutes.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Tupelo trees in Arkansas. Flickr photo by Linda Tanner.

To get carrot honey you have to find a seed grower—a farmer who grows carrots for the express purpose of harvesting their seeds at the end of the plant’s second year of life. And what better place to find a seed farmer than in Oregon?

Oregon is famous for seed production. The Willamette Valley produces most of the grass seed grown in the United States, as well as seeds for many vegetables and herbs. Other parts of Oregon also grow seed, and the carrot honey I tasted came from Madras, an agricultural community in central Oregon. I’m told that carrot seed is not grown in the Willamette Valley because the crop tends to out-cross freely with wild carrot (Queen Anne’s Lace), a plant that is plentiful in that local area.

Although carrots are readily pollinated by wild insects including bees, wasps, and various flies, vast acreages of carrot flowers need the help of honey bees or mason bees to get a reliable seed set. The bonus for the beekeeper is a crop of rare honey.

Carrot honey has a dark amber color with an aroma reminiscent of chocolate. The taste is strong with a bite to it—a sharp spike in an otherwise earthy, caramel flavor. I also detected a “grassy” aftertaste, not quite like foraging on a meadow, but something close to that. This honey would be intriguing in any recipe where you want the taste of the honey to shine through. It would also complement a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing. But even if you prefer your honey straight up, don’t miss this one; it is a different experience and a must-try for your life list.

Since I was tasting while writing, I’m now seriously stuck to the keyboard—a sweet occupational hazard. While I clean up this mess you should consider giving carrot honey a try. My sample came from Flying Bee Ranch in Salem, Oregon.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite.com

The wild carrot is closely related to the cultivated one. Photo by Vera Buhl.

But somehow I never lost the secret shopper mentality, and every time I order some bee-related product, I strip the HBS signature from my name and use an alternate e-mail address. I like to see what the service and products are really like. Fun, huh?

Well, one day before Christmas I was in the mood for an obscure varietal honey. I clicked around until I stumbled on the Flying Bee Ranch in Salem, Oregon—an apiary with a wondrous assortment of varietal honeys. Since my home is already inundated with honey, I had to select carefully. But omg such decisions! There was meadowfoam, lavender, pumpkin, carrot blossom, white sage, fireweed, and baby’s breath among others.

Since my degree in agronomic crops came from OSU, I am familiar with the Willamette Valley and the astonishing assortment of seeds and vegetables grown there. There’s a special place in my heart for the Valley, so I went ahead and placed an order.

Flying Bee Ranch does not have a secure website, so you place your order by e-mail and they reply and finalize the order amount, shipping costs, and payment method. This is typical for small establishments, but what was not typical was the speed of their reply. Not only was it fast, but everything cost less than their already reasonable listings—including the postage. They explained that the postage was less due to my close proximity to them, still, they could have easily collected the whole thing and I would not have known the difference.

They sent me a delivery confirmation and the package arrived exactly when they said it would. That’s just the beginning. The package was clearly addressed, perfectly wrapped, and even the labels were glued on straight. (I can tell these people take good care of their bees because they are meticulous about the details.) Inside the box, along with the honey, I found a hand-written thank-you note, a little medallion that reads, “Have a honey of a day,” and a free sample of 14 honey stix. I was just blown away.

In a later post I will write about the honey and the Willamette Valley. In the meantime, treat yourself to a rare varietal from these people. I notice some varieties are sold out for now, but many are still available. And then there’s always next season and the possibility of parsnip honey—something else to add to my wishlist!

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite.com

Willamette Valley View. Flickr photo by Don Hankins.

• Honey is 17-18% water. This affects the measurements of both the sweetener and the liquid portions of a recipe.

• To most of us honey tastes sweeter than sugar. This will affect the flavor in positive or negative ways.

• Honey sometimes has strong flavors that can result in a good or not so good product.

• Honey is more acidic than sugar, a property that may affect how the other ingredients react with each other.

• Honey tends to burn easier than table sugar, so the heat must be lowered and, perhaps, the baking time increased.

• Some recipes depend on the rough edges of granulated sugar to cut through fat molecules and create air pockets. As the King Arthur Flour site explains it, “[Creaming is] where sugar and fat are beaten together to form and capture air bubbles, bubbles that form when the edges of sugar crystals cut into fat molecules to make an air pocket.” Since there are no rough edges in honey, you may get baked goods that are lifeless and dense.

• Honey is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs moisture from the atmosphere. This makes some baked products moist, but it can make others mushy.

When I went in search of conversions, I found many sites that recommend using ¾ cup of honey for every cup of granulated sugar. However, no one seems to agree on how much to reduce the liquid. The recommendations were all over the map—anywhere from 2 tablespoons to ¼ cup (4 tablespoons) per cup of honey used.

I like to think of it this way: honey is 17-18% water (let’s say 17.5%). If that is true I should decrease the amount of liquid by 16 x 0.175 tablespoons or 2.8 tablespoons or 8.4 teaspoons for every cup of honey I use. That’s the easy part. The rest is iffy. For example, a cup of granulated sugar weighs about 7.1 ounces and a cup of honey weighs about 12 ounces. If you remove 17.5 % of the weight (due to water) the dry honey weighs 9.9 ounces, which is still a lot more than the 7.1-ounce cup of sugar. Because honey packs differently than granulated sugar, these ingredients should be calculated by weight not volume when you are doing conversions.

Some bakers add ½ teaspoon of baking soda for every cup of honey to neutralize some of the acidity and to help with leavening since there are no sharp sugar edges. Some bakers reduce the oven temperature by 25°F when baking to prevent over-browning. Then again, some bakers recommend forgetting the conversions and looking for recipes that were written with honey in mind—an idea that makes eminently good sense to me.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

As varietal honeys began to take their place in gourmet kitchens around the world, more and more began to be labeled with their terroir. For example, the label on a bottle of cat claw honey (Acacia greggii) may read something like, “produced in the poor, dry soils along southern Arizona’s desert arroyos.” Presumably the cat claw grown along an Arizona desert arroyo (a dry creek bed or wash) will produce a slightly different flavor of nectar than the cat claw grown, say, along a California desert arroyo.

The physical characteristics of a growing area may include the climate, rainfall pattern, soil type, topography, and geology. The soil is particularly important because each local soil contains different minerals, retains different amounts of moisture, has a different pH, and supports different microorganisms. All of these characteristics affect the plant communities–the type and number of plants that will grow in the immediate area–as well as the flavors of those plants. The surrounding community of plants can greatly affect the taste of honey, depending on how much of their nectar makes its way into the varietal honey.

All of this helps to explain why one jar of honey can taste very different from another, even when it’s derived from the same species of flower. It’s one of many factors that give varietal honeys their charm, and one of the reasons they command a higher price than blended honeys of multiple origin.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Like many invasive species, tamarisk was originally brought to this country as an ornamental plant. A deciduous shrub or small tree, it grows from 5 to 30 feet tall, and can form dense monotypic thickets. The pale pink to white flowers bloom from spring until fall, thereby adding color to a landscape that may seem barren in the dry depths of summer.

The genus Tamarix belongs to the family Tamaricaceae. The entire family, which consists of several genera, is native to Eurasia and Africa. The problematic species of Tamarix have several characteristics that have allowed them to spread along the drainages of the Colorado River, the Rio Grande, and into areas of the Grand Canyon. Since its introduction in about 1805, the genus Tarmarix has invaded roughly two million acres in the U.S.

The deep roots of the tamarisk tap into water tables far below the surface, allowing the plant to thrive in dry desert climates. Conversely, these same roots anchor the plant so firmly it can withstand flooding of up to 70 days. And as the nickname “saltcedar” suggests, it is extremely tolerant to salty soils—a characteristic that allows it to out-compete native species such as cottonwood and willow, especially along stream banks. In addition, tamarisks absorb large amounts of water, diverting moisture from the more shallow-rooted natives.

But to beekeepers the tamarisk is a miracle, providing vast acreages of forage during times when nothing else is available. The small flowers are reliant on insect pollinators and so produce copious nectar and pollen to attract them. In the past tamarisk honey was considered primarily “bee feed”—honey to be left on the hive for overwintering the colonies. But the plight of honey bees across the globe has rekindled a curiosity in varietal honeys—including tamarisk.

Several weeks ago I decided I had to try a sample, especially after I saw pictures and read the description. Being a fan of dark honeys—the darker, the better—I knew I would like it. I was not disappointed. I purchased the honey from Grandpa’s Gourmet Honey in Alamosa, Colorado and it arrived looking as dark and stormy as buckwheat honey and smelling nearly the same.

The tasting notes that arrived with the bottle promised “aromas of dark beer, molasses, soy sauce, hickory and pine.” What I tasted was slightly different—malt and molasses topped with overtones of horehound and citrus—and not excessively sweet. It had a lingering, smoky, slightly bitter aftertaste—not unpleasant but different from other honeys I’ve sampled.

Grandpa’s Gourmet suggests pairing it with a strong cheese, such as blue, and I’m sure that will be perfect. In the meantime I’m still at the eat-it-with-a spoon phase and savoring every moment. And after I get past the tamarisk-and-cheese phase, I will move on to this beguiling recipe I found on the Backyard Bee Hive Blog: Tamarisk Honey Crème Brûlée. Sounds like yum.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Tamarisk in bloom at Grapevine, Arizona. Flickr photo by cogdogblog.

I know nothing about Canadian food laws, but here in the states you can make all kinds of statements on your label. Certain words are practically meaningless, including “pure” and “natural” and “healthy”–which is some kind of perverted synonym for “healthful.” As far as I know, we have no numbers, as in “No. 1” but you can claim it on your label. We do have grades A, B, C but they are seldom used.

The word “local” is probably the same, after all, what is local? Who defines it? Who monitors it? Remember that you can buy boxes and boxes of labels from your handy bee supply catalog that claim all these things and more, and then you just stick them anywhere you want.

Again referring to the states, “white” is a color description that is defined by the USDA and refers to honey that is virtually clear. North Americans like light-colored foods and actually pay more for white honey than darker honeys. In my opinion, that is the chief source of the bland problem.

Light-colored foods generally have fewer “optional extras” in them—and this is especially true of honey. A dark honey is packed with vitamins, nutrients, antioxidants, phytochemicals, minerals, and random particles that cause it to explode with flavor. As the honeys get lighter they become sweeter and less flavorful. The same can be said for maple syrup: the darker Grade B stuff is definitely more flavorful than the more expensive Grade A. Brown sugar is more flavorful that white sugar. Dark bread is tastier than white bread.

In his post Phillip doesn’t say what the honey container was made from, but most things stored in plastic eventually taste like plastic. Plastic is made from petroleum and a bunch of chemicals, many of which eventually leave the product and end up in your food or water or air. Things that are warm or highly acidic seem to accelerate this problem, so if you put warm honey in a plastic container, it’s eventually going to taste like plastic. No contest.

Warming honey drives off some of the flavor compounds and destroys others. Filtering removes the bits and pieces of stuff—including wax and pollen—that gives honey its nuanced flavors. And then there’s mixing. The most prized honeys in the world are varietals, and even though they contain more than one type of nectar, they taste like the predominant nectar. Once you start mixing everything together, those unique tastes are lost or disguised. Even if you are not producing varietal honey from your own hives, your honey has a signature taste based on the available forage. Mix that with twenty other sources of honey and the magic is lost.

McDonald’s and many of the other fast food giants made it big by producing flavors that were 100% re-producible. They want people to feel secure that wherever they buy their next Big Mac it will taste just like the last one. The big honey packers do this as well. The average consumer wants his honey to taste just like the last honey—bland and sweet–and by heating, filtering, mixing, and plasticizing, the packers can make it happen. And from what I learned yesterday, you can even throw in some diatomaceous earth and remove all the pollen. Somehow, I can’t imagine the process does much to enhance the flavor.

So that’s my answer to the first question. Now, Phillip, about the glue . . .

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com