I’m pretty sure honey has magical powers, because, in one case at least, I’ve seen it transform a man. The old guy who lives behind me went from cantankerous to sugary-sweet just like that. All it took was a steady supply of my hand-labeled jars full of honey, and now he’s a veritable Pooh Bear with a taste for the bees’ annual crop.1
The funny thing is I’d never really planned to take any honey away from my bees to begin with. I figured they worked for it, and they should be allowed to keep it. But that was before I realized that if the bees are too productive, they will fill every nook and cranny with honey—after which time they unfailingly swarm, creating a truly unnerving neighborhood spectacle. To put a stop to that, I had to offer them more space. Since I didn’t have enough empty supers and frames to add on to the existing hives, I would have to pull out a few of their filled frames, extract the honey they contained, and then put the now-empty honeycomb sections back into the hives for the bees to refill. I just wasn’t so sure how.
Pawing through the spare beekeeping equipment I had on hand, I found a few plastic oval-shaped gizmos that I knew to be bee “escapes”—small, one-way “doors” that beekeepers insert in their hives a day or so before they remove full supers of honey. The oval-shaped insert was designed to fit inside the middle of an inner cover board, but I didn’t know which side should face up and which should face down. It didn’t look like there were any instructions for them either, so after asking around, I popped the bee escape into the cover board, marched out to the hive, and placed the board just under the super from which I would take several honey-filled frames. All the beekeepers I asked said in about twenty-four hours the top super would be completely free of bees. Any bees that had been inside would eventually exit through the one-way bee escape, and even if they changed their minds and decided to pop back up there for some reason, they wouldn’t be able to. That made me confident enough to stride out the next day sans bee smoker, jumpsuit, or veil. I lifted the top covers off my hive only to have hundreds of angry bees boil out and come after me. To this day I do not blame them. Because I installed the bee escape facing the wrong way, I’d unintentionally trapped much of the hive inside the already cramped top super.
There is a profusion of bee escapes that, in the right hands, are foolproof and effective. Aside from the plastic ones designed to fit inside inner cover boards, there are many other bee escapes in assorted shapes and sizes, and most of them function on the same one-way-door principle. But there are beekeepers who choose to drive their bees away via chemical rather than mechanical means. To clear any honey-filled supers to be commandeered, the beekeeper applies a small amount of very foul-smelling butyric anhydride to one side of a cloth-covered “fume” board.2 This board is fitted, smelly side down, over the super to be removed, and within a few minutes, any bees previously occupying that level of the hive will have scurried out, leaving the beekeeper to cart the super off to his honey house. Still, other beekeepers—usually from the large commercial outfits—use gas-powered or electric bee “blowers,” which quickly dislodge the bees with puffs of air.
But some people prefer less high-tech methods to separate honeybees from their honey. Using a wide, silky “bee brush,” a beekeeper can lightly sweep bees off individual frames, one frame at a time. Once a frame is bee-free, it can be set off to the side in an empty super topped with a lid for safekeeping. As soon as the beekeeper has removed as many frames as he wishes, he’ll spirit them away for honey extraction.
Although I bristle at the expression “robbing the bees,” I admit that each time I carry a few frames, heavy with honey, inside to be extracted, I feel as if I’ve gotten away with real treasure. But it wasn’t always this way. The first few times I harvested honey from my hives, I ended up with several bottles of yeasty, fermenting goo. The problem was I’d mixed a large amount of uncapped nectar in with what had been completely ripened, capped honey. Old-timers call that uncapped nectar “green” honey, and really, I would’ve been better off leaving any frames with large portions of it inside my hives, so that the bees could properly finish what they’d started. Because it still has a very high moisture content, green honey presents an agreeable enough environment for wild yeasts to flourish; fully ripened honey doesn’t. To fix the problem, I had the bright idea to evaporate some of the water off by heating the freshly extracted honey in a large pot on my stovetop. Although I kept stirring the substandard fare, I only succeeded in making things worse. The honey got too hot, and in a flash, it darkened ominously and smelled like sweet, burning hair. Happily, by now, I have things figured out . . .
The Guinness Book of World Records reports a Greek beekeeper extracted the heaviest honeycomb to date; it weighed in at 22 pounds, 14 ounces.
* * *
The average hobbyist’s honey extractor is simple but elegant. Typically, it’s a large, stainless steel drum that will hold just a few frames of honey at a time. The frames are suspended vertically in wire baskets connected to a hand crank at the top of the extractor. When that crank is turned, centrifugal force flings the honey out of the honeycomb’s waxy cells and down the drum’s smooth walls. Beekeepers with larger apiaries often use electric-powered extractors that can hold more than a hundred frames at once, but no matter how many frames one can process at a time, there’s no getting around the fact that the wax-sealed honeycomb must first be uncapped, and that can be a very messy job.
There is a gadget for just about every part of beekeeping, and cell uncapping is no exception. The beekeeper prone to buying lots of fancy equipment (or in fairness, one who bottles a lot more honey than I do) will use an uncapping knife—that’s a knife with a built-in heat element—to slice through the bees’ waxy seals like so much butter. There, too, are lower-tech uncapping “forks” or “scratchers” that look a bit like those metal hair picks the 1970s set used to keep in their back pockets. Beekeepers drag the tines of these lightly over the capped wax to poke uniform holes over the honey-filled cells.
One lacking any of these “official” uncapping tools can seesaw a serrated kitchen knife just underneath the honeycomb’s waxy surface, but it’s difficult not to lose copious amounts of honey in the process. This honey, along with the loose wax bits, is set aside to be dealt with a little later, and after each frame has been uncapped on both sides, it’s ready to go into the extractor.3 Whether with electricity or elbow grease, the frames are spun, and the honey flies out and collects in the bottom of the extractor. The beekeeper might scrape the extractor walls to get every last drop, and when he’s ready, he’ll open the spigot and strain the honey through a few layers of cheesecloth. This removes any stray clumps of pollen and the occasional bit of honeybee wing or other debris, and finally, the honey is ready to bottle.
Many large honey-packing facilities won’t bottle honey until it has been heated and filtered half to death. In order to “pasteurize” their honey, they bring it to very high temperatures, and sometimes they process it even further by shooting high-pressure streams of honey through a series of filters. If you’ve ever bought any at one of those big chain supermarkets or department stores, odds are you’ve already tasted honey that has been thoroughly tortured in these ways. The sad part of it is honey doesn’t really need to be pasteurized at all, but the companies do it to destroy any lurking yeasts and to increase their honey’s shelf life.4 The pressurized filtration step removes air bubbles along with tiny bits of pollen and wax so that the final product looks perfectly clear—even if it has been robbed of some of its more subtle flavors.5
Truly, a spoonful of just-harvested, unpasteurized, unfiltered honey can taste more complex than a vintage port wine. There are at least 300 varieties of honey in the United States alone, and as with wine, honey’s many flavors and colors are influenced by geographic location, rainfall, soil conditions, and time of harvest. Bruce Wolk, director of marketing for the National Honey Board, has noticed that chefs particularly prize it: “Especially at white tablecloth restaurants, chefs have been really pursuing the different flavors of honey and even the different aromas of honey. They value honey very much for its ability to flavor dishes differently.”
Honey is never quite the same from year to year or season to season. What a beekeeper extracts in the spring is usually much clearer and lighter colored than honey from late summer, and while most people seem to like the taste of spring clover honey best, some swear the dark, really complex wild-flower honeys reign supreme. Foodies with highly sophisticated palates seek out honey made solely from individual flower types, and although it may seem difficult, isolating specific honey varieties is actually pretty easy. Tracy Hunter, a successful Indiana-based beekeeper, sells a dozen different honey varieties, including black locust, alfalfa, apple blossom, blueberry, and even lavender. “A beekeeper has to be in tune with what’s in bloom and what his bees are working and then be able to remove that before it is mixed with any other honey in the hive,” he says. The fact that bees will work just one flower type at a time makes isolating different honey flavors a little easier. Say a worker is attracted to a dandelion in the yard. She will devote her full attention to that specific flower variety—and furthermore, to that individual flower—until that dandelion is all dried up. “A majority of the bees are working one type of flower, so they won’t mix the honey in their bodies, and when you look in the hive, you’ll see that each type of honey is put together. You’ll see different colors of honey in different sections of honeycomb,” Hunter says.
Those colors can run the gamut from nearly white to dark chocolate brown, but somewhere along the way, it was decided that consumers were willing to pay more for the lighter honey than the darker stuff. That complicated things for commercial beekeepers and honey packagers, who didn’t always agree on what counted as high-priced “light” honey and what should sell as the lower-rated “dark.” Official standards for honey hues are now in place, with honey ranging from “water white,” “white,” and “extra light amber” to “light amber,” “amber,” and “dark amber.” To see just how their honey stacks up, some beekeepers eyeball color swatches akin to the paint sample strips one might pore over in a home improvement store or, more aptly, the blonds, reds, and rich browns on display at the beauty parlor. But as you might guess, there are people for whom color swatches simply won’t do. To determine whether this season’s crop is “water white” or just a run-of-the-mill “amber,” they use digital honey analyzers to precisely measure the amount of light absorbed by each honey sample, and then they compare their readings to those of widely accepted honey color standards.
Color and flavor aren’t the only qualities that can set one kind of honey apart from another. Bees foraging almost exclusively on certain types of rhododendrons—especially Rhododendron ponticum, which grows in the mountainous areas of Turkey—make a truly memorable honey. Sometimes called “mad honey,” once ingested it can cause dizziness, nausea and vomiting, irregular heartbeat, and more. The culprit? Dangerous grayanotoxin contained in the rhododendrons’ nectar. Sometimes known as rhodotoxin, grayanotoxin is a naturally occurring toxin found in certain types of rhododendron plants as well as mountain laurel and sheep laurel. Just three and a half tablespoons is enough to make one sick, but happily, time is usually an adequate antidote. The symptoms of grayanotoxin poisoning disappear in about twenty-four hours for most people, but in severe cases, doctors sometimes will administer treatments to mitigate the more serious side effects, including loss of coordination and convulsions.6
In his famous work Anabis, Xenophon describes the Greek army’s run-in with grayanotoxin:
The effect upon the soldiers who tasted the combs was, that they all went for the nonce quite off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhoea, with a total inability to stand steady on their legs. A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death’s door. So they lay, hundreds of them, as if there had been a great defeat, a prey to the cruellest despondency. But the next day, none had died; and almost at the same hour of the day at which they had eaten they recovered their senses, and on the third or fourth day got on their legs again like convalescents after a severe course of medical treatment.
Scholars believe mad honey was even left intentionally for others to find. In The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, author Eva Crane points to Volume 12 of Strabo’s Geographica for proof:
Strabo . . . described the military use of toxic honey from the same region in the Third Mithridatic War, probably in 65 BC, and it is likely that this honey . . . came from R. ponticum. The Heptacometae, inhabitants of Pontus, placed on the road by which Pompey’s soldiers would pass through the mountains “vessels filled with maddening honey, which is procured from the branches of trees. The men who had tasted the honey were attacked and easily despatched.” About 1,200 men were probably killed on this occasion.
Actually getting one’s hands on enough of that nectar to do the job wouldn’t be easy, so even if you did have a couple of rhododendrons in your yard, you needn’t be worried.
To hear some people talk, you’d think honey could cure cancer, save the whales, and bring about world peace. Oodles of claims have been made about the benefits of honey, and they’ve been repeated so many times that we’ve come to accept them as fact. But not so fast. Yes, there are lots of things about honey that are technically true. For one, honey contains protein, anti-oxidants, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals, but they’re present in such tiny amounts that you’d have to eat dozens of cases of honey each month to make it really count. As for all the people who believe eating local honey, which is chock-full of pollen from area flora, will help to diminish the effects of certain allergies, so far at least, scientific studies haven’t been able to prove unequivocally that there is a connection between eating honey and easing one’s sneezing and sniffling. Same goes for honey’s antibacterial and antimicrobial properties. “There have been a lot of attributes ascribed to honey that really don’t stand up under the scrutiny of scientific investigation,” admits Bruce Wolk of the National Honey Board. “Most of the research that’s been presented in terms of the medicinal benefits of honey have largely come from overseas and really have not gone under the scrutiny of a legitimate, double-blind study by a medical school or research institution in [the United States].”
There are sixty-four calories per table-spoon of honey.
That’s not to say honey doesn’t offer any benefits. A small study conducted by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine revealed that a dose of honey given to kids with upper respiratory tract infections outperformed doses of cough medicine.
There are a few other areas in which honey really shines. Wolk says honey’s the only ecofriendly sweetener around: “Virtually every other sweetener has a net-negative effect on the environment. It has a large carbon footprint. Honey doesn’t.” Scandinavian researchers analyzed the different energy costs associated with growing, harvesting, processing, storing, and transporting different types of sweeteners including honey as well as sugars derived from sugarcane, beets, and corn. I think what they found finally justifies putting a halo over honey. While sugarcane, beets, and corn require irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides—and in some cases, a ton of backbreaking human labor in Third World countries—honey does not. It’s simply one of the by-products honeybees make, and as they gather assorted floral nectars, they offer their invaluable pollination services to boot. Besides that, honey doesn’t need to be shipped in from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or even farther reaches like sugar does, so all in all, honey’s a pretty sweet deal.
Although decidedly more mundane, another of honey’s benefits is its humectant property. Because it retains moisture so well, you’ll sometimes find it in soaps, lip balms, and creams, and bakers like to use honey for extra-moist breads, cakes, and brownies.
Want to start reaping the benefits of honey yourself? Before you put that cute plastic honey bear in your cart, you’d better read the label carefully. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has no labeling standards for the commodity, and that has allowed a lot of honey pretenders to sneak in. Wolk explains, “When you see something that says ‘honey blend,’ for example, most of us take that to mean, well, it might be a combination of tupelo, orange blossom, and clover, but that’s not what those labels imply at all. Those labels imply that they’re taking honey and they’re cutting it—maybe 50 percent, maybe more—with another filler that’s much cheaper.” Sometimes manufacturers will add high fructose corn syrup or maltose syrup and honey “flavorings” to cut production costs, and if you read the fine print, you’ll have a better idea of just what you’re spooning into your tea or spreading onto your toast.
To make matters worse, there are loads of products with the word “honey” in their name that don’t contain much of the real thing. The next time you’re at the grocery store, take a look at some of the labels. If honey is listed right above the preservatives, you’ll know there’s virtually none in there, but if it’s listed closer to the top, you can be assured you’re getting what you paid for.
Once you’re pretty sure you’ve got the real thing, there are all sorts of uses for honey you can try. For instance, I once helped a friend make several batches of honey wine. Producing five gallons of an extra-hard, extra-sweet mead required eighteen pounds of raw honey, and although the result was decidedly ambrosial, it seemed almost sinful to use so much honey. So, here are a few recipes that don’t require quite as much of the sweet stuff.
Fat-Free Honey Herb Dressing
Makes ½ cup
¼ cup white wine vinegar
¼ cup honey
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or mint
1 tablespoon minced green onion
Salt and pepper, to taste
In a small bowl, combine all the ingredients. Mix well.
Curried Honey Sweet Potato Soup
Makes 8 cups
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, diced
4 medium-sized cloves garlic, peeled
6 cups (48 ounces) chicken or vegetable stock
1 pound sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 medium russet potato, peeled and cut into chunks
2 teaspoons salt
6 tablespoons orange blossom honey, divided
1 medium red bell pepper, seeded and diced
2 to 3 teaspoons curry powder
½ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro, optional
Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a soup pot. Add the onion and sauté until translucent, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté 1 minute. Add the stock, potatoes, and salt. Cover and simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.
Puree the mixture in batches, put the soup back over low heat, and add 5 tablespoons of the honey, bell pepper, curry powder, pepper, and ginger. Bring to a simmer, taste, and adjust seasonings.
Microwave remaining 1 tablespoon of honey for 5 seconds on high. Serve the soup drizzled with a little warm honey and sprinkled with chopped cilantro, if desired. Serves 4 to 6.
Makes 16 servings
½ cup butter or margarine, melted
2 tablespoons honey
2/3 cup walnuts, sliced or diced
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups granola cereal
1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 350ºF. Place all ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Blend well. Pat into a greased 8-inch square baking dish. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool and cut into 16 bars.
Baklava
3 cups finely chopped walnuts
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
Ground cloves
1½ cups clarified butter, divided (see below)
½ cup honey
1 package (16 ounces) filo pastry sheets
Honey Syrup (see page 149)
Preheat oven to 325ºF. Combine the walnuts and spices in a medium bowl. Reserve ½ cup clarified butter for brushing the top and bottom layers; stir the honey into the remaining 1 cup butter. Brush the bottom of a 13 × 9 × 2-inch baking pan with clarified butter. Cut the filo sheets in half crosswise; trim to 13 × 9-inch rectangles. Cover the filo with waxed paper and a damp towel to keep it from drying out.
Line the pan with 10 sheets of filo, brushing each with clarified butter; sprinkle with 1/3 cup walnut mixture. Place 2 sheets filo on top of the walnut layer, brushing each with honey-butter mixture. Sprinkle with 1/3 cup walnut mixture. Repeat, layering 2 sheets filo, brushing each with honey-butter mixture and sprinkling with 1/3 cup walnut mixture until all the nut mixture is used. Top with remaining filo sheets, brushing each with clarified butter. With a sharp knife, cut the baklava into diamond-shaped pieces, carefully cutting through all layers.
Bake for 45 minutes. Reduce heat to 275ºF and bake 20 minutes more. Remove from oven; while still hot, carefully spoon cool Honey Syrup over the entire surface.
To clarify butter: Cut 1 pound butter into pieces and melt in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Skim off the foam; strain the clear yellow liquid into a bowl, leaving the cloudy residue in the bottom of the pan.
Honey Syrup
1 cup honey
¾ cup water
½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
3 whole cloves
1 cinnamon stick, 3 inches long
1½ teaspoons lemon juice
Combine the honey, water, lemon peel, cloves, and cinnamon stick in a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer 20 minutes. Add the lemon juice; simmer 5 minutes more. Remove from heat, and cool. Remove the cloves and cinnamon stick before using.
Having bees means having a lot of beeswax, too. My honeycomb cappings alone quickly pile up. I keep them in my freezer until I have enough to bother with, and once I do, I place the large chunks, which are still sticky from the residual honey, into the legs of a pair of old pantyhose. I tie knots above the wax and place the whole thing into a pot of water, slowly heating the pot until the wax in the hose begins to melt. The pure beeswax floats out of the nylons and up to the surface, forming a skim. Once I think I’ve gotten most of the wax, I remove the pantyhose, which now contain what beekeepers call the “slumgum”—a hodgepodge of dark brown clumps of propolis, pollen, bits of old cocoons, and any other leftovers. As the water in the large pot cools, the wax at the top hardens into a fragrant, cream-colored disk. This is rendered beeswax, and it can be used to make candles, soaps, and lotions. As with my early attempts to extract honey, my first crack at candle making was a spectacular failure. (If only I’d realized that before I’d given them to friends and family as gifts.)
I suppose I should’ve known something wasn’t quite right just by looking at them. Rather than a buttery yellow, my candles were greenish, tinged like the yolk of an egg that’s been boiled for far too long. Moreover, their texture was sandy, not smooth. I had been so eager to enjoy the warm glow of handmade candlelight that I hadn’t bothered to render the beeswax completely. My candles were roughly equal parts slumgum and beeswax, and when lit, they hissed and popped strangely. Sometimes the wicks became dislodged and fell right out of the candles’ centers, and of those that retained their wicks, many spontaneously extinguished themselves, as if out of shame for having been so shabbily crafted. Nevertheless, I tried to burn a few of them, I rubbed one along the edge of a dresser drawer to make it open more smoothly, and at some point accepting defeat, I threw the rest of the votives back in the freezer with the next batch of raw wax cappings.
* * *
I’ve gotten better at rendering my wax, and at some point, I decided I should try making my own beeswax soap. As you might imagine, that turned out about as well as my first candles had. I’d searched hardware stores for lye flakes, and finally found some, billed as a supercaustic drain cleaner and sporting a bright red skull and crossbones. I’d need olive and palm oils also, but coming up empty on the palm oil, I assumed I could substitute the same amount of coconut oil instead.7 That was the first in a series of blunders that would contribute to the foulest “soap” ever.
My daredevil boyfriend had come over to help, and immediately preoccupied himself with the lye. Seeking some connection with one of his literary heroes—Tyler Durden of Chuck Palahniuk’s fantastic Fight Club—he gave the back of his hand a chaste little kiss and sprinkled a few lye flakes over the top. Because he hadn’t gotten his hand wet, nothing special happened, but soon we would both develop a new regard for the alkali’s power. My attention had wandered somewhat, and the small pot of lye water I’d been tending overflowed impressively.
Pressing on, I mixed the fats with the lye, paying no attention to the temperature of either, added a few drops of vanilla oil, poured the finished product into a plastic pan, and waited for our abomination to cure. We noticed a few small pools of water standing on the surface of the soap, and inexplicably, my boyfriend dipped the tip of his tongue into one of them.8 Just as his flesh started to burn, I recognized the puddles for what they were—diminutive lakes of leftover lye water. (By the way, should you ever have an unfortunate Tyler Durden moment of your own, you can neutralize the lye by rinsing with vinegar.) Despite that extra lye, we allowed the soap a couple of weeks to cure, and when it finally was time, we excitedly cut the contents of the pan into small bars, and took them to our respective bathrooms to try out. The soap hardly lathered at all, smelled like cake mix, and left me covered with a slightly gritty, oily residue. (Sadly, I was forced to wash the homemade soap off with the store-bought kind.)
But working with beeswax need not be disastrous. You can often buy perfectly rendered bars of it from local beekeepers, candlemaking supply houses, or craft stores. And if you plan to make your own soap, you can find most of what you need at health food stores. Here are a few beeswax projects to try.
Can-Do Candles
Newspapers
Candle mold
Vegetable oil spray
Candle wicks
Modeling clay or Plasti-Tak
Old long-sleeved shirt (optional)
Oven mitts
Beeswax
Old coffeepot or pan solely for melting beeswax
Small knife (optional)
To make decent candles, you must start with properly rendered beeswax. That means no honeybee antennae, legs, or pollen allowed. You’ll also need a mold, which you can get at most craft supply stores. The mold I use is made of plastic and makes six votive candles that are an inch and a half in diameter. And then comes the candlewick. While you can buy whole spools of candlewick, I recommend getting precut, measured wicks with metal bottoms, since you’re just starting out. The package label should tell you for which candle diameters the wicks are suited, so once you’ve chosen your mold, you can find compatible wicks. (The wicks I use are suitable for use in candles that are 1 to 2 inches in diameter.)
Spread a few thick layers of newspaper down to start, and make sure the inside of your candle mold is clean and dry. If you see any debris, wipe it away; otherwise, it will be stuck on the outside of your finished candles. Next, spray the inside of your mold with cooking oil, so your candles will come out easily once it’s time. At this point, I stick the wick ends, one through each hole, through what will be the tops of my finished candles. As you do this, make sure each wick stays straight and that the metal bottom attached to it is flush with what will be the bottom of your candle. Turn your attention back to the top of your candle, bending the wick slightly to help it stay in place. For the next step I use Plasti-Tak—that sticky putty that I used in high school to hang up my Pink Floyd posters—but you could just as easily use modeling clay. You’ll want to secure the tops of your wicks with this on the outside of your candle mold. That way the wicks won’t slip out of place, causing beeswax to stream out of the little wick holes in your mold. But if you do have a lavalike beeswax flow, the thick newspapers are there to catch any spills or leaks.
Now to the fun part. An old long-sleeved shirt and oven mitts are nice to have in case you accidentally splash yourself with hot wax, so put those on and carefully melt the beeswax in a pan. (Because beeswax is a real pain to clean up, it’s best to have one pan solely devoted to melting it, but even an old metal coffeepot with a nice pouring spout will work.) As the wax starts to melt, keep the pan moving—I don’t even let mine touch the burner on my gas stove—because beeswax is rather flammable stuff. Let the hot wax cool just a little in its container, and then slowly pour it into your mold until it reaches what is the lip of the mold and the bottom of your candle. (Warning: If you didn’t seal the wicks properly in place and cover the wick holes completely with modeling clay or Plasti-Tak, some of the wax will find its way out of the mold and onto the newspaper.)
As the wax cools and hardens, you may notice that there is now some extra room at the top of your mold. Melt more beeswax and top off any candles that came out low on wax. Once the beeswax has cooled and hardened completely, you can turn the mold over, and gently cut away any extra wax that managed to seep through the wick holes. Set any of this extra wax aside to be rerendered later. Almost finished! Pop your candles out of the molds, and if you like, you can gently trim any excess wax from around the wick. Please don’t feel bad if your candles look awful. You’ll get the hang of it with practice, and anyway, the beauty of beeswax is that you can always remelt it and try, try again.
Oh, but aren’t candles a little humdrum? If you’ve got a taste for the macabre, I wholeheartedly recommend the do-it-yourself death mask instead. Some of the most famous ones—like those of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—were cast in beeswax by Madame Tussaud, skilled in the art of figure sculpting and easily the indubitable queen of beeswax. According to Kate Berridge, the author of Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax, Tussaud was also the queen of spin:
Having presented herself as a victim and survivor of the French Revolution, Madame Tussaud remains for all time suspended in people’s imagination as a young woman with a guillotine-fresh head in her lap. The image of an innocent woman in a bloody apron being forced to make death heads to save her own neck elicited both sympathy and curiosity in her public.
Even now, Madame Tussaud’s name—and her stories—live on. Tour any of her thriving waxworks museums, and you’re sure to hear that she made those death masks of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their contemporaries under duress. It’s more likely, though, that she actively sought to profit from the public’s ghoulish fascination with the carnage of the day.
Fast-forward to the present, and you’ll find less gore and more star power in the exhibits bearing her name. There are waxen replicas of Britney Spears, Shaquille O’Neil, George W. Bush, and other modern notables she would never meet. Some things don’t change, though: All of the figures in Madame Tussaud’s wax museums are still made with beeswax. Since today’s wax studio artists don’t necessarily have the actual subjects at their disposal, they must work from photos and measurements to sculpt clay models. They then make plaster casts of the models, and once those have hardened completely, the casts are filled with hot beeswax tinted with color to match the real people’s various skin tones. For the last step, glass eyes are installed, human hair is inserted—one hair at a time—into the celebrity scalps, and then they are carefully painted, to incredibly lifelike effect.
Since you’re only making a death mask and not a full, waxy homage to yourself, you won’t have to go to nearly all that trouble. Better still, you don’t even have to be dead.
Lots of beeswax
Metal pot
Swim cap or plastic wrap
Petroleum jelly
Alginate/nontoxic life casting mold mix
Water
2 large mixing bowls
Whisk or electric beaters
Extra-large drinking straws
Scissors
Spoon
Old towel or plastic tarp
Pad of paper and pen
Sand
A friend you trust not to kill you
Before you subject your face to any life casting product, make sure you won’t have an allergic reaction to it by mixing a small batch to test on your foot or hand. Once you’re sure it’s okay, you can put on the swim cap or plastic wrap to cover your hairline while your friend works with the life casting mold mix. The one I like calls for equal parts of life casting mold mix powder and water, but yours might be different. Your pal should stir that vigorously to break up the clumps. Meanwhile, smooth the petroleum jelly along your hairline if any of it is still showing and over your eyebrows. When it’s time to close your eyes, you’ll also carefully jelly your eyelashes.9 Snip one extra-large drinking straw into four sections, and insert two of the sections into each nostril. You’d better be sure that the straws fit comfortably and that they won’t slip out, because, for a good 10 to 20 minutes, they will be your only source of air.10 At this point, lie down on the towel or tarp, which will catch any drips, and keep your eyes and mouth shut tightly from now until you’re free of the molding compound. By now your friend should have the mold mix ready, and he or she can carefully drizzle the liquid life casting mix onto your nose and around each nostril with the spoon, taking pains to leave your breathing straws untouched.11 After that delicate operation, pour most of the rest of the mix onto the face.12 Keep your face frozen—no smiling or frowning, no crinkling of eyebrows. Charades-like hand gestures and that pen and pad of paper will be your means of communication for the next 10 minutes or so.13
Made entirely out of beeswax, this “death mask” is eerily life-like and luminous.
Once the mold material has completely hardened into a rubbery shell, put both of your hands against your face, while slowly sitting upright. Now lean forward, and gravity will help the mask come off into your hands. Gently pull the straws out of the mold and then turn it around in order to dab a little extra mix into each nostril. While that addition hardens, fill the other large mixing bowl with sand, and then place the finished mold with the negative image of your face up. Use the sand to thoroughly support the mold, especially around its edges. If you peer into the mold, you should see great detail—right down to every line, pore, and hair. Melt the beeswax on the stove, pour it into the mold, and let it sit overnight. When the wax has cooled and solidified, you can remove the beeswax mask. Unfortunately, you may have to tear the delicate mold to get to it, but if you do want to use the same mold repeatedly, have your friend apply plaster-impregnated gauze strips to the outside of the mold form while it’s still on your face. This will make your mold much sturdier, but waiting for the plaster bandages to harden up can take another 10 minutes or more. After that, follow the same steps to create your creepy wax visage.
You may have to do a little fine-tuning where the straws used to be. I used a small knife and wooden carving tools to clean up my waxy nostrils. As a finishing touch, I painted the wax with a very watery acrylic paint mix to match my own skin tone, and I added a little color to my lips, eyelashes, and eyebrows. My death mask looks real enough that, if I squint a bit, I can envision it resting in a satin-lined casket with a smattering of my relatives weeping nearby.
Susan’s “Respect the Lye!” Beeswax Soap14
3 ounces grated beeswax15
5 ounces coconut oil
4 ounces olive oil
4 ounces palm oil
2.12 ounces lye
5 ounces distilled water
Goggles
Rubber gloves
2 wooden spoons
Plastic measuring spoons
Plastic spatula
Metal pot
2 glass candy thermometers
Ceramic or glass mixing bowls
Glass measuring cup
Kitchen scale that measures in ounces
Petroleum jelly
Plastic or glass soap mold16
Vinegar
First, slather petroleum jelly onto the bottom and sides of the inside of your mold. (I use one of those plastic trays that fits inside a cashbox, but there are all kinds of mold possibilities.) Set your greased mold aside for now.
Next, with the precision of a chemist, weigh all your ingredients except for the lye. Seriously, be very exacting here. Put the oils and beeswax together in your metal pot, and set that aside. Fill the glass measuring cup with distilled water. (Again, precision matters.)
On the scale, make sure the weighing bin—or whatever plastic container you’re using to contain the lye flakes or crystals as you measure—is clean and completely dry. Like fire, lye is useful, but its power must be respected, so keep the lye-neutralizing vinegar close at hand in case of accidents. Now, put on your goggles and rubber gloves. Using a small, plastic spoon, measure the 2.12 ounces of lye, then go outdoors with the water-filled measuring cup, measured lye, wooden spoon, and one of the glass candy thermometers for the next step.17 Be sure to find a safe place away from kids and pets.
In soap making, accurate measurements are a must.
Now it’s time to mix the lye. Slowly pour the measured lye into the water—never the other way around, because it can splash and burn! Stir gently, and the lye water will heat up and become transparent. Stick the thermometer in, and you’ll be amazed at how hot this stuff gets. Leave it to cool. The target temperature will be 120ºF for both the lye solution and your mixture of beeswax and oils, and getting both to exactly 120ºF at the same time can be tricky.
Go back inside to heat the fats on the stove top, slowly mixing with the other wooden spoon. To melt everything together, the temperature of the wax and oils will go well above 120ºF. When all has melted, gently pour the fatty liquid into a large glass or ceramic bowl, and stick in the other glass candy thermometer. At this point I’ll take this bowl outside and put it next to the lye water to compare the temperatures on each. When the fat and the lye fall to 120ºF, then it’s time to pour the lye into the bowl of mixed fats. Stir this with the wooden spoon you originally used for mixing the beeswax and oils. As the lye binds with the fats, the mixture will become thick and creamy like vanilla pudding. It takes me anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes of mixing before the consistency is right. When you can drizzle the mixture off your spoon and into the bowl with the drizzled lines resting on the top for a second or so, you’ve reached the point soap makers call “trace.”
Homemade bars of beeswax soap.
At trace, pour the soap-to-be into your mold and smooth the top with a spatula as needed. Lightly press a sheet of plastic wrap onto the top of the soap, and let it “cure” or harden in the mold for a few days. You’re almost there. . . . Turn the soap out of the mold and let it cure awhile more before cutting it into bars. You should end up with one pound of pleasing yellow soap. I cut mine into six small bars.
Utah is known as “the beehive state,” and the honeybee is the official state insect of Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
Nancy’s Lip Balm
1 cup grated beeswax
14 ounces coconut oil
5 tablespoons honey
5 tablespoons pure vanilla extract
Heat the wax in a saucepan over low heat to 150ºF. In a separate saucepan, heat the oil to the same temperature. When both are heated to the proper temperature, add the coconut oil to the beeswax, remove the pan from heat, and stir steadily until well blended. Then add the honey and the vanilla extract and continue to stir until well blended. Pour into tubes or tubs, allow to cool overnight, and then cap the containers and store at room temperature, out of direct sunlight.
For every person who believes honey is a miracle food, there are several more who feel the same way about bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly. It was Ronald Reagan who helped spur the pollen boom of the 1980s. “President Reagan ate two things that were a little unusual. If you went to the White House, he always had a jar of jelly beans on the desk, and he used to keep pollen bars in the refrigerator,” says John Ambrose, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University. “They were sort of the precursor to the nutrient bars we have now, and every day, supposedly, he ate two pollen bars.” Pollen is still thought to increase stamina, eliminate allergies, promote weight loss, lower cholesterol, and reduce the signs of aging. The list of pollen’s presumed benefits goes on and on and on, but Ambrose adds, “The idea of pollen being nature’s perfect food, I always tell my classes, ‘It is—but only if you’re a bee!’ So much of it is not digestible, and then there’s the cost factor and everything else.”
Pollen is pricey because it takes a lot of the tiny grains to pack into “energy” bars or fill up the bottles in your local health food store. Beekeepers collect it by attaching pollen traps to hive entrances. When pollen-loaded workers return to the hive, they have to pass through the trap on their way inside, but because the trap’s entry points are extremely narrow, the bees must scrape most of the pollen from their leg baskets in order to make it past the trap. The pollen they scrape off then drops into an isolated tray for the beekeeper to collect later. It seems a shame that a fully loaded worker bee should have to leave most of her “groceries” outside in this way, and as if that weren’t discouraging enough, sometimes bees lose legs or wings trying to get through the contraptions. Also, colonies with attached pollen traps end up working even harder. “Bees will compensate for pollen traps, so if you put a trap on, the bees will actually collect more pollen to make up for the deficiency,” Ambrose says.18
Assorted pollen grains from a sunflower, morning glory, hollyhock, lily, primrose, and castor bean viewed under an electron microscope. Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility, Dartmouth College
All that and researchers have yet to definitively prove that pollen does people any real good. In fact, ingesting pollen might even be harmful. Consider this: Around the same time that Reagan was polishing off those pollen bars, many orchardists were relying on “microencapsulated” pesticides such as PennCap-M to control insect pests over long periods of time.19 The insecticide was contained in tiny capsules to slow down its decomposition. “From a growers standpoint that was good, because they could put it out there and it would kill the pests longer,” Ambrose says. Not wanting to harm the valuable honeybee pollinators, the orchard growers knew better than to apply the pesticide while their fruit trees were in bloom. They waited until the orchard bloom had ended to spray, but Ambrose points out that area bee colonies were dying anyway. “Bee colonies were dying in the late winter and early spring. We would take samples and find the pesticides that you would find in PennCap-M. Nobody was applying that then, because there was nothing growing. So, it was sort of a mystery.”
Soon enough, the mystery was solved. The pesticide microcapsules were about the same size as pollen, and honeybees foraging on clover, dandelions, and other flowers directly under treated trees were picking up both the pesticide and grains of pollen and carrying them back to the hive either to feed larvae currently being raised or to put into long-term storage. Bees that were fed the pesticide-tainted pollen right away would die right away, and those larvae fed the bad pollen in the spring—along with the nurse bees feeding them—died in the spring. The use of PennCap-M was largely discontinued, but highly toxic pesticides and microencapsulated products still abound, and I imagine some of them do make their way into honeybees’ pollen stores.
To raise awareness of the dangers posed to insects and wildlife, the Environmental Protection Agency separates pesticides into three groups and requires manufacturers to explicitly label their products. “If a pesticide is highly toxic to bees—that is, it’s a Category 1—the Environmental Protection Agency requires it to have a warning label saying, ‘This product is toxic to bees, mammals, aquatic life, birds,’ that sort of thing,” Ambrose says. You might think most Category 1 pesticides are available only to big agricultural businesses, but you’d be wrong. Actually, there are plenty of them on the shelves of most home improvement stores, and if you look, you might even find some in your own garden shed.
It can be hard to break the pesticide habit—especially when the Japanese beetles are ravaging your rosebushes for the third consecutive year—but doing without them really is best for area honeybees. In my own garden, I handpick the beetles mating on my asparagus plants and spray any aphids I see with a solution of soapy water. Planting some of the same plants honeybees like also helps to attract beneficial insects such as lacewings, parasitic wasps, and ladybugs, which, in turn, prey on my insect pests.
Still, if you think you must rely on a pesticide, reach for a Category 3 or Category 2 first, and look for products that break down quickly. Most important of all, apply the pesticide at a time when honeybees and wild pollinators aren’t out foraging. “Up North, the best time would be in the evening, and then, if you have a pesticide that has a half-life of twelve hours, if you apply it at eight o’clock at night, . . . by eight o’clock the next morning, it’s going to have lost half of its toxicity, so even if bees do come into contact with it, it’s going to be safer,” Ambrose notes. And for people living in the South, he recommends applying their pesticides in the late afternoon: “What happens, as you go further south, is you tend to have higher temperatures, and the plants stop producing nectar—or the nectar is all evaporated—by the time you apply it.”
* * *
Collected a lot like pollen, propolis is another honeybee commodity with supposed health benefits, but by now, I’m guessing you know what I think of that. . . . Collecting royal jelly is even more complicated. Beekeepers must open up the queen cells and scoop out the pearly substance with a toothpick. Some large beekeeping operations use tiny vacuums about the size of a pencil to suck out the royal gloop. It takes well over 100 queen cells to come up with just a couple of tablespoons’ worth. And for what? So that cosmeticians can entice aging ladies to plunk down eighty bucks a pop for tiny tubes of Gelée Royale Wrinkle Defying Serum? Well, crinkles and all, I plan to grow old with a little dignity. While I’ll always enjoy a spoonful of honey and my beeswax soap, I’ll be leaving the royal jelly for the real queens.
1 Truly I have grown to like him. The nicest thing anyone has ever had to say about my honey came straight from him. Here’s the honest-to-goodness, direct quote: “I’mohnna tell ewe. That was the BEST honey ah have EVER had. Good body. More flavorful. You gotchoo sum GOOD bees now!”
2 Butyric anhydride smells like rancid butter mixed with vomit, and a little bit really packs a wallop. I once took the tiniest whiff for myself and nearly threw up.
3 Wax cappings can be wrapped in cheesecloth and squeezed in order to drain the last bit of honey clinging to them, and the leftover wax itself can enjoy a second life when made into soap, poured into candle molds, or should the need arise, fashioned into menacing voodoo dolls.
4 High temperatures during the pasteurization process destroy the seed crystals that are naturally present in raw honey. Eliminate them and the honey isn’t as apt to granulate and ferment.
5 One thing honey doesn’t lose? The Clostridium botulinum spores, which, although rare, can be present in both pasteurized and raw honeys. They don’t pose much of a threat to adults, but infants under one year old shouldn’t be fed honey.
6 After eating large amounts of toxic leaves, some goats have died.
7 Palm oil isn’t as hard to find as I originally thought. Many of the solid vegetable shortenings sold at health food stores are made entirely from palm oil.
8 Curious men. Why do you do the things you do?
9 If you have a mustache or beard you’d like to keep, cover those with a layer of petroleum jelly as well.
10 If you have a cold or sinus infection that makes breathing through your nose difficult, this is obviously not the project for you!
11 Mixed properly, it should have the consistency of pancake batter, but because the life casting compound sets up fairly quickly, you don’t have much time to obsess over every little lump.
12 This is about the time some face models get extremely nervous. Try to stay calm, breathe through your straws, and just think how cool your death mask is going to look.
13 I did a lot of pointing to my watch and then turning one hand palm up, to ask, Is it almost time to get this mess of my face?
14 Many thanks go to the folks at Majestic Mountain Sage in Logan, Utah. They have an online lye calculator that made coming up with this recipe painless, and happily, I no longer make pans full of unusable goo.
15 I like to grate mine with a hand grater I use just for soap and candlemaking, because finely grated beeswax melts more quickly and evenly into the other fats.
16 This recipe makes a pound of soap and will fit perfectly into a 9×3×2-inch pan.
17 Lye produces dangerous, caustic fumes, and so that I don’t end up breathing them, I’ve learned to mix my lye solution outside.
18 There is at least one good reason to use pollen traps. When pollen is plentiful, beekeepers sometimes will collect it with the intention of returning the stored pollen to their bees in the early spring. This helps bee colonies to more quickly build their populations—even if pollen sources outside are still a bit scarce.
19 The heavy-duty pesticide originated from World War II nerve gas research.