Sweeteners

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The Tastes of Honey

Buy honey and save the bees. You'll also help preserve the diversity of plant life—and the survival of orchard crops, from almonds to apples—while enjoying sweet tastes as diverse as the flowers of the field, garden and farm. Honey varieties range as far as the insects can fly, from alfalfa, clover, lavender, thyme, chestnut, linden, orange and goldenrod, to rare Appalachian sourwood, Tasmanian leatherwood, ohia lehua from the Hawaiian rainforest canopy, and resinous pine. There are more than 300 distinct types of honey in the U.S. alone, according to the National Honey Board, and a pound of honey can have involved bee travels covering 55,000 miles, visiting two million flowers. There are at least 4,500 species of native bees in North America, in addition to the European honeybee, which was imported to these shores 400 years ago. In exchange for their nectar, flowering plants are pollinated by bees, as every schoolchild learns. It's a lesson worth remembering, at a time when the U.S. wild bee population has shrunk by 90 percent in 25 years, while kept bees have diminished by 50 percent.

Pesticides and non-native parasitic mites have exacted this deadly toll, in addition to the disappearance of wild woodlands and fields where native bees roamed, as Sharon Levy reports in the Summer 2006 OnEarth magazine. "With the accelerating decline of native bees, honeybees are becoming ever more critical to farmers," Levy writes. In the spring of 2005, in one fell swoop, a third of all commercial honeybees died out. Now many farmers, such as California almond growers that season, hire migratory beekeepers who travel thousands of miles to pollinate crops. And when wild plants and insects vanish, whole ecosystems are thrown off-balance. "In the long run, our own survival is deeply entwined with the lives of bees," Levy writes.

To help protect bees and their habitats, buy artisanal honey traceable to specific plants and locales, and choose organic food and cotton grown without pesticides. And you won't have to travel to enjoy the taste of summer on the wing in Provence, Louisiana, Hawaii, Indiana, Vermont or just about anywhere you'd like to try.

Resources

Honeys from distinct locales can be found at www.honeylocator.com, www.localharvest.org, www.volcanoislandhoney.com and www.gotbody.com .

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