Amanda Miller
Columnist
Lettuce Eat Local
Though honeybees are very small insects, the numbers in facts about them seem impossibly large. For example, there can be 50,000 bees in an average beehive; bees’ wings beat around 11,400 times a minute; a queen bee can lay upwards of 1500 eggs in a day. The USDA says that honeybees pollinate over 130 types of vegetables, fruits, and nuts, facilitating the production of about $15 billion worth of crops every single year.
Another mindblowing fact is that it takes approximately 1200 bees flying a total of 60,000 miles and visiting over two million flowers to get enough nectar to make a pound of honey. A corollary trivia tidbit is that worker bees live about 6 weeks, and each one will only produce somewhere between 1/12 and ½ teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. (I keep finding different actual numbers for some of these stats, but the points remain: it’s a lot, or a very little.)
Suddenly it makes a lot of sense why honey isn’t the cheapest sweetener on the market. I often buy local honey by the gallon, since by another amazing reality it doesn’t go bad, and that purchase can come with a little sticker shock — until I think of the millions of bees whose lives’ work went into our consumption.
Not because of price, but because of our desire to be semi-self-sustainable, Brian and I would love to have our own honeybee hives. But since we are both allergic to beestings, and we don’t want our sting:life ratio to match bees’ 1:1, it seems like a hobby better left to others. Brian has found several hives in various fields and alerted beekeeper friends of ours, so we are not unintroduced to hyperlocal honey. Local raw honey is supposed to help with seasonal allergies (as well as a whole smorgasbord of other potential health benefits), helping your body acclimate to the area pollens, so I’ll consider our consumption of it a medical practice.
Fortunately, we know that Benson isn’t similarly allergic to bees, since last year he had no reaction when he got stung by one that was also (wisely) investigating our waste chocolate feedpile. My favorite part of that story is that, in his two-year-old diction, he would tell us how Papa and Eeyore were with him. We figured out he meant Leroy, but the nickname may forever stick.
And perhaps it’s partially our fault since we play an audio storytelling of Winnie the Pooh for Benson every night — “My favorite thing is me coming to visit you, and then you ask, ‘How about a small smackerel of honey?’ ” — but I think Benson would brave the odds even if he were allergic. That boy can sense the honey jar being pulled out of the cupboard from anywhere in the house. (He literally grabbed the honey and ran away with it while I was trying to take the picture.) “I just need a yittle yick on my finger!”
To be fair, is there much that isn’t improved with a smidgen of honey? Even just add the word and it instantly sounds better: honey whipped cream, honey mustard, honey glazed salmon, honey grahams, honey bread, honey barbeque, honey roasted carrots…basically everything except honey badger. Drizzle it on everything from oatmeal to cheese to avocado toast, and your life will be better.
Like Proverbs 16:34 says, “Kind words are like honey — sweet to the soul and healthy for the body,” so let’s have lots of both.
There are so many honey-focused recipes we do that I could share for this H is for Honey article, and I was stuck between this and a hot honey chile butter I also just made. But that one was too easy (you can see the ingredients in the name…) and this dressing is an awesome addition to autumn salads. It’s thick, creamy, sweet but not too sweet, and pairs beautifully with all the fall things like butternut squash, apples, kale, etc, although it’s also getting used around here as a dunk for our cherry tomatoes that are finally ripening.
Prep tips: I’m not typically a brand follower, but I’m getting to be a big fan of Duke’s mayonnaise. Maybe it’s just because I’m a Southerner at heart, or maybe it is better.
2 cups mayo
1 ¼ cup dijon
⅓ – ½ cup local honey
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
dash cayenne
salt to taste
Blend or whisk all ingredients until smooth. Season to your tastes.
