Could honey capture a sense of place?

Looking for the bees that visit my own garden

We've reached the time of year when there's little food to gather in the Willamette Valley. Spring has come so late in Portland that even my camellia tree, which is usually covered in hot-pink flowers by mid-February, is barely blooming. I've only just planted seeds in my raised beds. The foraging blogs and Facebook pages are silent.

It is a good time to eat honey, and taste the summer before.

Since last fall, I've been on a quest to find a beekeeper who keeps hives in our neighborhood. From May through August, our yard is filled with circling honeybees, and they practically inhale the fennel forest near our house. I've been wondering what this corner of the city tastes like to them, and whether it's possible to taste my own neighborhood through the honey they make.

Bees do eat local, says Carolyn Breece, a research assistant with Oregon State University's Honey Bee Lab. European honeybees (Apis mellifera) can fly up to three miles away from their hive, but most stick to a smaller radius. All through the flowering seasons, the bees in a colony that are charged with gathering nectar scout out the surrounding terrain, zeroing in on patches of flowers whose nectar has reached peak sugar levels. They return to the hive to dance out the location for their sisters. When the whole crew descends on a garden or wildflower field, each bee picks only one species of flower to harvest nectar from, a phenomenon called "nectar fidelity."

That specialization ends the moment the bees return home. Once each bee re-enters the hive, she disgorges the nectar she's stored in her honey crop, essentially sharing it with the colony’s kitchen staff. In this small sac, the nectar has interacted with enzymes that help convert plant sugars into forms of sugar that bees (and humans) can digest. The other collect the nectar, masticating it to help evaporate out the water, and deposit this liquid in cells. Once the honey grows thick, sugary, and safe to store, the bees seal each hexagonal cell with a top layer of wax.

Each capsule of honey, then, forms an aromatic pixel, a pure concentration of all the aromatic compounds in the nectar from which it was made. Depending on where the bees were coming from, it may taste vividly of one flower — maple, meadowfoam, fireweed — or the perfumes of several. The bees themselves can smell the nectar through their antennae. But they taste it for sweetness, or rather for subsistence, since its carbohydrates will keep the colony alive.

If a single honey cell is an aromatic pixel, then the colony’s annual honey production — which beekeepers extract and remove from the comb — forms a sort of fullscreen image: flower after flower's worth of nectar, collected by bee after bee, week after week. It is an olfactory portrait of a place, but a blurry one, a densely layered collage.

And yet this aromatic pileup is not bland like the sugar-amped, pasteurized honey you find on grocery store shelves. "A colony can have a different flavor of honey every single year, every single season," Carolyn says. "Honey from two colonies next to each other can be completely different as well." Tasting honeys side by side is like asking twin sisters for their memories of the same event. Honey is not a memory so much as the expression of the colony’s collective intelligence: a shared understanding.

tims_urban_bees

A post shared by Tim Wessels (@tims_urban_bees)

This winter, I came across a classified ad for North Portland honey on the Portland Urban Beekeepers website, and called Tim Wessel, of Tim's Urban Bees, to see if he'd sell me any. Tim mantains an apiary research and teaching center in St. Johns, three miles north of my house. He invited me to meet him there, in the far corner of a former shipyard site called Green Anchors. The complex, set below the St. Johns Bridge, reminded me of Oakland's anarchic creative energy — a warren of shipping container offices, greenhouses, and large objects that could be public art and could just be junk.

Tim only sells a small amount of his honey to people who might do interesting things with it. He's more interested in the bees than making money off the hives. (Michael, his partner in the research station, sells his own backyard honey to the public through his company, Little Bay Root.) Our hives mostly produce blackberry honey, Tim tells me as he hands over the jars. He only collects it once a year, in August, so the bees can store up more after the harvest in order to survive the winter.

Several studies have shown that urban colonies of honeybees have a more diverse diet than colonies in rural areas, thanks to backyard gardeners like me. Yet Portland's most invasive plant dominates. "The blackberry nectar flow is the number-one flow in western Oregon," Carolyn tells me later. "It's like a firehose of nectar."

Despite Tim's caveat, the jars he sells me don't taste like pure blackberry honey. It's actually honey from his 20 side-by-side colonies, whose millions of bees harvest nectar from innumerable flowers. The flavor greets me with citrus and spice, then wraps dark fruit in tropical garlands. Aromas flutter around my palate long after the sugar hit fades.

I would still love to find Arbor Lodge honey, particularly from the fennel forest, which vibrates with the sound of beewings in August. But I’m not sure what I would do to preserve any sense of place the honey might convey. The distinctiveness of Tim’s honey disappears behind the other flavors of everything I cook with it, from my mom's granola to vegetables roasted with lemon, red pepper, and honey.

I finally make a small batch of medovača or medica — Balkan honey liqueur — by infusing St. Johns honey into a quart of brandy made from a St. Johns plum tree. My North Portland Summer of 2022 medovača is not the easiest liqueur to drink. Unlike the honey liqueur we tasted in Belgrade, it’s burly and discordant. But something of the honey's unique constellation of nectars comes through.

In fact, Kathy and Josh's plum tree grows less than a mile from Tim's beehives. I’d like to think that one tiny piece of the liqueur’s fragrance — one aromatic molecule among so many — came from their flowers, pollinated by bees who gathered food in exchange.