Vahe H Apelian
Of Bees
Yesterday I posted a 25 seconds long clip of bees on flower in our yard. Those bees on those flowers validated the concern I had. Last year, I realized that the zucchini plants I had in our backyard were flowering attractively but I was not getting zucchini. It occurred to me that the flowers were remaining barren and were not being pollinated because I was not seeing bees in our yard. It also occurred to me that our yards are becoming killing fields for insects including bees of course, because of the insecticide that are sprayed to keep the all-American suburban pride and joy, the lush carpet green yards. I came with a compromise. There will not be any spraying in our backyard, which will remain natural with crab grass, dandelions and all. This year I had a good crop of butternut squash from the few plants I had in our backyard. The sight of those bees validated my concern that indeed, the suburban green front yards are killing fields for the insects as well as the bees and that we can attract bees if we stop spraying insecticides on our yards.
I quote from Wikipedia: In the course of her lifetime, a worker bee produces 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey. To make one pound of honey, worker bees in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers. In a single collecting trip, a worker will visit between 50 and 100 flowers. During the active season, THE LIFETIME OF A WORKER IS FIVE TO SIX WEEKS. Over wintering worker bees may, however, live for four to six months.
Whatever their life span, worker bees confine themselves to one task, working without pause.
Of honey
My cousin Ara Apelian MD, had the following response: “Be aware of fake “honey” on the store shelf. We happened to have a small jar 4 oz of real genuine honey that tasted like real honey. I wanted to compare the taste to a store bought one next to it in our pantry, I was totally shocked: the store honey tasted nasty, plastic or some weird bad sweetness. I then tried to read the ingredients, nowhere did it say honey, except the large print label (Canadian products). The listed ingredients were 100% “ sugar” … “ similar to sugar in honey”… “ end of quote!!”
My response to Ara was: “to be honest, I do not think that there is natural pure honey on the market. I mean to say the natural, pure honey that is taken from the hive. The issue is to what extent and with what it is being adulterated.”
The statement I made was not drawn out of a hat, so to speak. I have reasons to stand by my statement and that reason is my childhood experiences with two beehives my paternal grandparents and my paternal uncle had at the time in Keurkune, Kessab.
The beehives were in that patch of land where Stepan Apelian, years later, had his house erected, at the foot hill of the keurkune’s hill – sarp -, next to Pasha’s famed pouvgeni tree. That patch of land was barren and could not be used as an orchard because not much of soil that had remained over the years because of erosion. But there was a partition wall that may have been erected at one time, when the land was usable. On that partition wall my uncle had two bee hives.
One summer my uncle Joseph asked me to accompany him to get honey from the beehives. He secured a pine tree log, lit it when we got close to the beehive and blew the smoke from the burning wood onto the hives and harvested honeycomb full of honey the bees had made and asked me to eat from it. Of course, he had kept most of the honey it its waxy honeycomb in the hive to sustain the bee colony. That day my uncle harvested a large cupful honey or maybe two. Naturally the honey was in its natural wax beehives. I have not tasted such honey ever since. Naturally it was made from the wild flowers in Keurkune.
That experience has remained etched in my memory. There is no way that the bees can make such natural honey in the natural beeswax honeycombs the bees make, in large quantitaties to flood the market. The beehives my uncle had were elongated wooden boxes where at one time, he had placed a queen bee with her entourage. Nowadays, beehives are sophisticated engineered structures, way different to what my uncle had. All sorts of things are done to help bees produce more honey and I cannot rule out that the honey that is collected is not further adulterated.
The very term natural, organic are nowadays legal terms and do not necessarily mean what we understood what natural is, basically not man made.
Of Olive Oil
It is not farfetched to claim that olive oil is the first oil mankind harvested from nature. I quote from Wikipedia, “Olives have also been found in Egyptian tombs from 2,000 years BC. The earliest surviving olive oil amphorae date to 3,500 BC, though the production of olive oil is assumed to have started before 4,000 BC. By 3,000 BC in Crete, the olive was widely cultivated and a highly prized commodity.”
The only way olive oil could have been harvested in antiquity was by pressing olive and the process had remained unchanged for a long time.
But I am not sure I can claim the same nowadays although I read on bottles of extra virgin olive oil, that it is not only obtained by “cold press”, and that is collected from its “first pass”. Which leads me to conclude that nowadays there are other ways to produce olive oil.
Much like the “natural” honey being sold in the grocery stores, I doubt that the olive oil sold is obtained the way olive oil was obtained at one time in Keurkune, Kessab. It is from the late Kourken Bedirian that I learned that the Kessabtsis call newly pressed fresh olive oil, “tsenoun”.
Those who are interested to know how the real natural, cold press, first pass olive oil was obtained may read the blog I wrote years ago by pressing the following link:
Yes indeed, natural pure honey and real cold press, first pass - tsenoun - olive oil are things of the past and are not things on the grocery shelves.
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