You asked me if I was scared and I laughed and said no, definitely not. You took me by the hands and looked into my eyes and I could see the specks of gold and black in them like universes and feel the tiny hard bits of your fingers pressed into mine and it seemed as though I could fall into you, become you, as though you had opened yourself up to me and I had only to respond. I remember looking past you at the dusty green hills that blurred into the dusty blue sea and your smell of olive oil and lavender and wondering if this could really be happening, if anyone was watching. Are you sure? You asked slowly, your eyes with mine. Yes. Continue reading YOU WERE A QUEEN→
One of the greatest things about staying at Honey Pie Hives and Herbals was sampling all the delicious concoctions that Bay and Gavin made. In fact, many of the things we sampled I had never tried before. The most exciting thing was to see the way they utilised ingredients and produce right under their nose. Bay and Gavin just seemed to have a real connection to their backyard, knowing each plant by name and knowing ways to use them. Some might call it “making something out of nothing” it’s not really ‘nothing’ though is it? It’s just all those things that are invisible to us until we actually look a little closer… Here are my top five:
1. Mead. Gavin (chief mead-maker) was testing and establishing new recipes for mead. Although we had already consumed a crazy amount of mead while staying at Spirit Hills, this was another experience entirely. The mead Gavin made was sweeter and more intense to drink. It was more like a Port, something to enjoy solo before or after a meal. Some fancy folks might even call it an Aperitif or Digestif. He also made a special type of mead which is like a beer-mead called a Braggot, made with hops, or another type of grain as a base. All of this he made with left over honey from the honey harvest.
Herbal oils in the sun
2. Herbal Oils. So we didn’t eat these but we did get to make and try products that contained them. Bay makes these beautiful oils by filling a jar with a fresh herb and then covering completely with oil (she uses Organic Sunflower Oil). She leaves these outside in the sun for 6-8 weeks to infuse completely. While we were there we made two types. Darcy collected Plantain, which to the naked eye is just a weed, but it actually holds amazing anti-itch medicinal properties. I collected Yarrow which is an anti-inflammatory. Bay uses these oils to make healing salves, check these out.
Rowan berries
3. Rowan Berries. I’d never heard of these but they are just so beautiful I had to share a picture. A friend of Bay and Gavin’s has a tree on his property and gave them a huge bag full of berries. Above is a picture of Darcy cleaning them up and getting rid of the leaves ready to make Rowan Berry Mead (named after the berry and also their 9 year old son Rowan). I must admit they were almost unbearably sour, but I think that will translate beautifully into mead.
4. Flavoured Honey. As it was honey harvest Darcy had the pleasure of bottling hundreds of bottles of honey. Honey Pie Hives and Herbals offers a great range of flavoured honeys. This includes, cinnamon, cranberry, ginger and chocolate. This process involves adding the particular flavour ingredient to crystalised honey prior to bottling. There are three varieties of honeys that the bees make all on their own: Wildflower, Lavender and Buckwheat. Generally if there is one type of flower en masse near the hives (i.e. Lavender or Buckwheat), the bees will be attracted to pollinate only that flower, creating a specific type of honey. If there are several varieties the bees will make a honey that comes from a variety of flowers. This is what Honey Pie calls “Wildflower” honey.
Cherry bark shrub
5. Shrub. Now this was an entirely new experience for me. A shrub is a concoction involving vinegar, sugar and some kind of fruit or vegetable or something to give flavour. The shrub that I tasted was a cherry bark shrub and it tasted like a cleaner version of Dr. Pepper. Crazy, I know. After Bay pruned her Cherry Tree she cleaned some of the twigs and then blended them up in her food processor! She then combined this with equal parts sugar and vinegar and let it hang out in the fridge for a couple of weeks. It sounds wild, but it was awesome. The best way to drink it is as a kind of cordial thing to add to cocktails or mocktails or beertails (it’s good with beer). She made a us a cocktail that we took to the beach using shrub, gin, lemon, elderberry juice and soda. Delicious! PV
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found working in the bee yards at Spirit Hills very meditative. The droning sound of bees lures you into a sense of timelessness, and hours can pass very quickly. One of the main tasks I assisted with was replacing Queen bees in the hives. After a couple of years the Queen may start to slow down in her egg laying, which in turn may slow down the activity of the hive. For this reason sometimes a Queen is removed and replaced by a younger woman!
But doing this is a slow and tricky process. First the Queen must be found in amongst the thousands upon thousands of worker bees in the hive. She looks a little thinner and longer than her daughters, but often that is the only obvious difference. Once she is found, she is removed and a new Queen is put in her place. Sometimes Hugo would find the Queen in five minutes, other times it would take us over an hour to find her, or we would fail to find her at all. This video is my attempt to capture what this task was like; relaxing, repetitive and meditative. See if you can spot a Queen! DV
As mentioned earlier Spirit Hills makes beautiful mead with honey. In order to get all the delicious organic honey needed, they manage a lot of bee hives. I got to help out Hugo with the bees over our stay (thanks Hugo!). And as a result bees have been on my mind a lot lately. They say that the drone of bees can create a trance like state, which would explain why hours in the bee yards seemed to pass so quickly. But this doesn’t totally explain why people get so into bees, demonstrated by the disproportionate amount of art they inspire (this 80’s pop classic being just one good example, and here is a list of all fictional bees!).
I think part of the appeal of bees is that we have so much to learn from these lil guys. Understandably, many people think the Queen bee runs a strict dictatorial system of government. But while I was at Spirit Hills I got to read a great book called Honeybee Democracy. In it super bee nerd Dr T. Seeley demonstrates that when it comes to key decisions the hive operates as a democracy. For example an idea for the hive to relocate will be considered by the other bees, and if enough bees like the sound of the idea, the move is made. I kind of want to try and draw some parallels between the bee’s form of democracy and that of Australia, with its legally entrenched and largely symbolic monarch combined with a very democratic form of government. But I think that could get messy…
So just quickly, other cool bee facts I have learned include the role of the Drone bee (the males). Drone bees purpose in life is to try and have sex with a Queen bee. This is unlikely, as each Queen goes on one maiden flight at the start of her life in which she mates with several bees, amassing a collection of thousands of sperm which she stores in a sac, and uses for the next few years to fertilise the eggs she lays. If a Drone is lucky enough to get lucky with a Queen, his penis explodes from the experience and he dies instantly, dropping from the place of their passion 30m above the ground. If he is not so ‘lucky’, he sits around in the hive all summer just eating and drinking and getting in the way, and then the Worker bees (females) drag him out of the hive and block his return so he will die in the cold of winter…. As I said a lot to learn!
Clearly I am wigging out about bees. Which is why I will leave my final bee fact (for now) being that bees are in danger. This is a serious problem. Einstein is quoted as saying that if the bees all died humans would survive for only four years. I don’t know what this stat is based on, but c’mon, he was a pretty sharp dude. So basically the way bees are dying en masse around the world is something worth thinking about. People are not certain why this is happening, but it is argued that pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisim’s have played a part in screwing with the bees beautiful and finely tuned way of life. It is such a sad example of the way humans can destroy the most beautiful things they depend on… a lot to learn indeed. DV
the sociable weavers 