Royal Jelly

One day in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, a vendor extolled the virtues of royal jelly, the substance created by honeybees to feed their queen, to a glamorous Italian woman. My sister, incogneets, of course, watched as he demonstrated the topical application on his own face, likened royal jelly to the fountain of youth, and promised that regular use of the substance would erase years from the Italian woman's life. The vendor had found his target population for sure: foreign, with money to spend, and deeply concerned about wrinkles.

Royal jelly has been touted as a miracle substance for centuries. I've often wondered how, back in the day, anyone thought that a cactus might be edible. I feel the same way about royal jelly-- who came up with this idea of bee food as topical cream? I imagine some wacky Ancient Egyptian beekeeper discovering the queen's special stash of R.J. in the hive and smearing it all over her face. Why? We'll never know. But something stuck, because royal jelly is hawked worldwide as a miracle, from Burt's Bees products to vendors in the Mekong Delta.

Personally, it seems a bit too precious of an idea to be true: only food fit for a queen contains the secret of youth, blah blah blah. As I've mentioned many times before, the queen ain't all that. She's a baby-making machine, so her food must be pretty nourishing, but it still doesn't follow that it makes sense to smear it on the outside of one's body. Conceptually, perhaps. A conception that, like so many, falls apart in reality.

The seller had an answer for haters like me: "You can eat it too!" he explained of the 2 oz. bottle of royal jelly that cost more than the aggregate costs of my sister's six month journey through Southeast Asia. Although theoretically, eating royal jelly makes more sense to me in terms of deriving health benefits, it seems strangely naive to liken the nutritional needs of a queen bee to those of an adult human. In "Royal Jelly" by Ronald Dahl, a father forcefully feeds his underweight newborn royal jelly. (It is an incredibly creepy, yet strangely informational short story that is highly recommended reading.) The father explains to his wife:

"Practically nobody in the world can afford to buy royal jelly just for eating except maybe one or two multimillionaires. The people who buy it are the ones who make women's face creams and things like that. They're using it as a stunt. They mix a tiny pinch of it into a big jar of face cream and it's selling like hot cakes for absolutely enormous prices. They claim it takes out the wrinkles."

We are obsessed with youth! Why youth? What I mean is, why is youth so cherished, why is aging so desperately feared? Fine, aesthetics. Health. But we tend to collectively forget most of the unsexy aspects of youth, like having to go to bed at specific times, having to eat things we didn't like, puberty, braces and, later on, being broke. Plus, is there no beauty in a lined face?

All worker bees follow the same lifeline. They begin their lives as nurse bees, then become builders, architects, until finally they become foragers. Bees must go through a training period before foraging. During this period they practice flying short distances, presumably learn the waggle dance, build up their wing strength, you know, normal bee stuff. You can tell which ones are foragers-in-training outside the hive: they're the tentative little dudes (gender neutral, because all foragers are necessarily female) making circles that grow over time.

Foraging, in my opinion, is the best part for honeybees, a pleasure afforded only to the oldest folks in the hive. They get to go explore all the flowers in the hood! Healthy honeybees will forage until their bodies wear out: tattered wings, limbs missing, cockeyed, perhaps. Hopefully they die in the fields among the flowers. Otherwise they'll be carried out by their sisters and deposited as far away from the hive as possible. (Honeybees are impeccably tidy.)

Bees got it right, in my opinion: save the best for last. Imagine if we were constantly looking ahead, waiting for wisdom. We'd be excited by wrinkles and balding. We'd write songs called "Forever Old." Retirement would be like spring break in Cancun.

I might eat royal jelly if, and this is a big if, I realize, somebody convinced me that by eating it I would become a bee, like in Dahl's story, but only for one day and not in the winter. Imagine the secrets that would be revealed to me! Who is behind the hive mind?!?

The same sister, plagued with unquenchable wanderlust, loves this quote from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible,and I believe it is an apt way to wrap up this rambling post:

"To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow."

I don't want to be obsessed with youth when I am old. I want to enjoy it now, live it, use it, celebrate it. But when it's gone, and I'm not sure that it ever really leaves, I will look in the mirror at a face marked with change, and hopefully I will smile with the knowledge that I really, truly lived the life I'd imagined.

The Queen Must Die

I love the name of this book: at once dramatic, prescriptive, and poignant!

Spring and summer have formed a hybrid season, occurring now, that exhibits the worst qualities of each. Spring's freshness has withered in summer's humidity. Summer sunshine has been overshadowed by spring's warm rains and white skies. Thus, the following passage, describing early spring, is untimely. But I love it so much that I've peppered photos of early spring throughout, to lure the reader into reminiscing, if momentarily:

New colonies are usually started in the spring. It is important that [honeybees] build up quickly for the first honeyflow, that rich vernal harvest of early nectar, a time when nature herself is drunk with love and ecstasy, a time of alternate warm rains and cloudless skies, of flowering dogwood, locust, iris, shad, and earth.

The honeybee, released from winter bondage, revels in the renewed flowering of the earth, humming her own ode to joy.

And yet, over this exaltation, this climactic fulfillment of nature, hovers an explicable sadness that seems to have no place amidst such excitement of new life, as if it alone knows how soon all will vanish.

Any honey-lover knows that not all honey is created equal. Most honey found in supermarkets has been filtered so thoroughly that it barely resembles the original substance in looks or taste. Raw honey and honeycomb, my personal favorites, are pretty much untreated and provide a the honey-eater a richer, more satisfying gustatory experience.

Spring honey, usually harvested in May or June, is lighter due to the color of the nectar and pollen of early spring flowers. Summer honey, usually harvested in late August or September, is typically darker.

Summer introduces a whole new family of native wildflowers. If it ever stops raining for more than a day, the honeybees will meet this year's late-summer blooms, which start emerging in July. I can't wait to see what outrageous colors Ma Nature splashes across the city!

Legend of the Voodoo Honey Cake

How does New Orleans relate to honeybees?

I just returned from a fantastic trip to the Big Easy with hundreds of cool photos burning a metaphorical hole in my virtual pocket. Battling a biting urge to use The Bee Team blog as my personal travelogue, I returned to this question time and time again. An entirely bee-free vacation, the connection was not immediately apparent until I was sitting on the A train back in the city. An old friend had read about my beekeeping adventures and, knowing I’d be visiting another old friend in New Orleans, she sent a book called Plan Bee, by Susan Brackney, to his house for me. (I’ve always loved the use of “c/o such-and-such” in addresses. It calls to mind transients of today and yesteryear… au pairs, hobos, outlaws, governesses… and now apparently novice beekeepers…)

Around 125^th Street heading uptown, I came upon this passage, in which the author describes the prevalence of bee motifs in ancient texts:

“…Many voodoo practitioners also believed … if you were to form small cakes of honey, amaranth seed, and a dash of whiskey, and then eat the cakes just before the new moon, you would be able to see into the future.” (Brackney, Susan. Plan Bee. New York: Penguin, 2009. p60) MLA Citation Style BOO-ya! Lib Arts Education 4eva!

(I will not apologize for that last bit, even though its inherent dorkiness may be considered cringe-worthy.)

Aha! A connection between New Orleans and honeybees! Although I neither outstretched my palm to a mystic seer nor purchased a voodoo doll from the dozens of tourist shops in the French Quarter, there is a bewitchery about New Orleans that tenderly tantalizes the traveler-not-tourist. This idea that connections exist between all things—the lines of your life through your hands, past to present to future, fiction to fact and perpetually back again—hangs in the air like the humidity.

Around 145^th Street, I made a mental note to do some serious Googling on variations of “honey voodoo bees amaranth.” Not a nanosecond later, my eyes registered a footnote following the aforementioned passage, suggesting to me that the author, Susan Brackley, would provide a citation for her source of this information. Contrastingly, Brackley used the footnote to detail her own experience making see-into-the-future honey cakes. She did not bake them. This, she explains, might account for her inability to see the future, beyond an intuitive image of herself returning to the kitchen to clean up the mess.

Call me a college grad, but I’d hoped that the author would legitimize her statement by providing me with an actual citation: the name of another book that backs her up. That this is how we determine what’s “true” is very weird. But what can I say? I wanted to be 100% certain that this “fact” was not invented by Susan Brackney. I do realize that the theoretical author of the theoretical cited work might have invented this bee-voodoo connection, as well. How many times does an untruth—or a half-truth, or an interpretation, or an urban legend, or an I-want-to-believe—have to be repeated in order for someone to deem it “the truth?

Once home, I commenced Googling. I must say that Google Books, which allows you to read the entire text of millions of rare books (without stringent publishing houses,) lends the traditional Google search a certain je ne sais quoi that legitimizes one’s studies immediately. A quick search directed me to the whole text of a book alternately titled Voodoo Tales: As told among the Negroes of the Southwest (for boring, racially obsessed Americans) and Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers, (for eccentric, Harry-Potter-loving Brits) published simultaneously in 1893 and written by a certain Mary Alicia Owen.

(I’m proud to be ‘Merican, but I’m going to reference the British title of the book. “Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers” has a whimsical ring to it that pleases me immensely.)

The book is categorized as “Fiction,” but claims to be “Collected From Original Sources” on its title page. The book’s narrative, a series of edifying voodoo stories recounted by two old black women to a white child (called “Tow Head,”) alternates between fancy-pants English and a kind of Black-Creole-Southern Missourian patois. Charles Godfrey Leland, blatant Englishman and author of the Introduction to Old Rabbit describes this particular patois as “Negro English” that “American readers will readily understand” but that English readers will not, and will need, written in parenthesis, “plain English [in] the correct form of many words which otherwise [might] have been, though perhaps only for a moment, unintelligible.” (Owen, Mary Alicia, Charles Godfrey Leland. Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers. London: Putnam, 1893. Introduction, ix)

Ah, Charles Godfrey Leland and his “Negro English.” Ol’ Charlie. He sounds like a well proper gent, schooled in the old fashioned art of racial elitism.

But I digress...

The following passage about bees is from Mary Alicia Owen’s old book:

““Ise out o’ sorts fum top to toe. Dem bees”—she qualified them with an adjective not necessary to repeat—“am ‘stractin’ me.”

“Wut dey done?"

“Me dremp ‘bout um.”

“Dat er mighty good dream—

‘Dream o’ honey, lots o’ money;

Dream o’ bees, lib at yo’ ease’”

“Na disaway dat my dream go. Hit bin dat de bees wuz all daid, an’ de hibe (hive) chock full o’ mots (moths).”

That was serious. All the aunties sighed in sympathy.” (Old Rabbit, 11-12)

For those of you who skipped/skimmed that last part, a summary: A woman tells some other women ("the aunties") that her bees are bothering her. Contrary to the apparently popular saying that dreaming of bees is all puppies and sunshine, the woman's dream involves dead bees and moth-infested hives. The passage alternates between standard (somewhat stodgy) English and the voodoo patois so precisely documented by Mary Alicia Owens. (Thank goodness Charlie clarified that ‘hibe’ in voodoo-speak means ‘hive’ in English. That's a toughie.)

The bee banter continues, and is conveniently and predictably summed up in Plan Bee. In short, I inadvertently found the very citation I was hoping for! It seems that Susan Brackney, author of Plan Bee, did the exact same research for her book as I did for her quote! Sometimes the connections between things are easier to discover than one might imagine…

Mary Alicia Owen, a woman versed in both fancy-pants English and voodoo-steeped English patois, sent her manuscript to good ol’ Charlie without the intention of having it published. I picture modest Mary as a young black woman in the 1890s with a penchant for observing and recording her Southern Missourian voodoo culture, and thus documenting an oral tradition.

I imagine Charlie receiving Ms. Owen’s manuscript in the mail, (why did she send it to England, I wonder?) and realizing that this is his golden ticket! Charlie describes the book as a rare glance into a world inaccessible to outsiders. He talks it up, praising Ms. Owen’s dual fluency and declaring Old Rabbit a gem for those who study folk lure.

I Google Mary Alicia Owen and instantly learn that she is a graduate of Vassar College! This changes things. I learn many things besides her being white, including the fact that she “studied” voodoo in Cuba. It seems that our authentic source is, herself, an outsider.

This is our original “fact:”

Voodoo practitioners made cakes from honey, amaranth seeds, and whiskey to eat before the new moon in order to see into the future.

The legend of the voodoo honey cake is:

- first recorded by Mary Alicia Owen, a white woman talking to voodoo-practicing black folk ((“Gathered from Original Sources,” remember?) (Is she TOW HEAD???))

- published by Charles Godfrey Leland, who claims (without mention of race) that Ms. Owen’s insight into the culture and traditions of Voodoo is unprecedented.

- read by Susan Brackney, author of Plan Bee, who claims, without citing a source, that making honey cakes to see into the future was a common Voodoo practice.

- Imparted to you by me, albeit examined to its probable death.

Here ends my scrutiny of the relationship between New Orleans and bees. I leave you to ponder the “truth” of the legend of the voodoo honey cake, and perhaps even truth in general, if you’re so inclined.

I’m not and never will be a bee, just like Ms. Owen was not and would never be a voodoo practitioner. Fact, fiction, truth, untruth, perspective, opinion… as any fortuneteller will attest, everything is connected. One takes what one chooses.

Now, I will unabashedly display my un-bee-related photos of lovely New Orleans.

Composed with love, patience, and a dragging internet connection,

Cara