Posts Tagged: Honey
California weather has been perfect for almond set
The warm, dry late winter weather in California has been good news for almond farmers who were concerned about a bee shortage during bloom, reported Capital Press.
"It looks good right now," said Rich Buchner, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Tehama County. "The bees are out working like crazy. It's going to be warm and dry over the next 10 days, so it should be about perfect for almond set."
Almond growers are enjoying a vibrant blossom season even though California only had about 500,000 bee colonies available as of mid-February to pollinate this year's crop of 800,000 acres, according to Eric Mussen, UCCE specialist in the Department of Entomology at UC Davis. Typically, as many as 1.6 million are needed to provide two colonies per acre.
The favorable weather for bee activity comes with a catch, however. Precipitation totals are behind seasonal averages.
A honey bee on an almond blossom. (Photo: Kathy Keatley Garvey)
About those honey bees...
CCD, the mysterious phenomenon characterized by adult bees abandoning the hive, leaving behind the queen bee, immature brood and stored food, surfaced in the winter of 2006. Scientists believe CCD is caused by multiple factors: diseases, viruses, pesticides, pests, malnutrition and stress.
Meanwhile, misinformation about bees continues to surface. Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media often caption a syrphid fly as a bee or a syrphid fly as a bumble bee. Magazine and newspaper editors frequently misidentify a syrhpid fly (aka flower fly and hover fly) as a honey bee. Even the cover of the well-respected book, Bees of the World, by Christopher O’Toole and Anthony Raw shows a fly, not a bee. University of Illinois-based entomologist Alex Wild, who received his doctorate from UC Davis, mentioned the error in his Scientific American blog.
So, we asked noted honey bee authority Eric Mussen, UC Cooperative Extension apiculturist based in the UC Davis Department of Entomology: What should the general public know about honey bees? Can you share some basic information? A honey bee primer?
First of all, honey bees are not native to the United States. European colonists introduced them to what is now the United States in 1622. The site: the Jamestown colony in Virginia. Then in 1853, the honey bees were introduced to California. The site: San Jose.
“Honey bees,” Mussen says, “are commercial pollination workhorses, while native bees — mostly solitary — pollinate the native plants of field and forest. Around 250 commercial California beekeepers operate about 500,000 honey bee colonies, approximately one-fifth of the country’s supply. Over 72 percent of commercial crop pollination is conducted in California, and about one-third of our daily diet is dependent upon bee pollination. We also have about 6,000 small-scale or hobby beekeepers, who tend to keep one to five colonies.”
Mussen attributes CCD with “fomenting great media and public interest. It also sparked an increase in the number of small scale beekeepers.”
About 60,000 individuals, including the queen, thousands of worker bees (sterile females) and drones (male bees) comprise a colony in the late spring/summer.
“Up to a thousand drones are present during the mating season,” Mussen says, “but they get evicted at the end of the fall.”
The drones serve one purpose: to mate with a queen. And then they die. When a virgin queen is about 10 days old, she will mate with 12 to 20 drones on one or more mating flights. The queen returns to the hive and begins laying eggs, as many as 2,000 eggs a day.
“Bees are vegetarians and live on pollen and nectar obtained from flowers or extra-floral nectarines,” Mussen says. “A mix of pollens is required to meet honey bee nutritional needs.”
During the active season, a honey bee colony each day requires an acre-equivalent of blooms in order to meet its nutritional needs. Bees store both pollens and honey for winter food. The bees usually forage within five miles of the hive. Nutrition is crucial to a healthy hive.
“Malnutrition impairs the protective physiological systems — particularly the immune system and detoxification system — and leads to less productive and shorter-lived bees,” Mussen says.
The bottom line: “More research is required to find better ways to reduce populations of honey bee parasites, reduce levels of honey bee diseases, and develop beekeeping management practices that prevent excessive losses of honey bee colonies during the year.”
Honey bee on blanket flower, Gaillardia. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
This floral visitor, a syrphid fly, is often mistaken for a honey bee. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Pomegranates, figs and honey!
And honey? The Golden State ranks second in honey production, eclipsed only by North Dakota.
So why not combine all of them into a dessert? And add some walnuts and goat cheese for good measure--and good taste?
That’s exactly what Julie Loke of the Davis Food Co-Op did at the debut event of the newly established Honey and Pollination Center of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science (RMI) at UC Davis.
The event, held Oct. 27 in the RMI’s Silverado Vineyards Sensory Theatre, drew talks on honey and pollination, and showcased a bee observation hive from the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.
The Honey and Pollination Center, approved earlier this year by the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, aims to “make UC Davis the nation’s leading authority on honey, honey bees and pollination by combining the resources and expertise of RMI and the Department of Entomology’s Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility,” said RMI executive director Clare Hasler-Lewis.
The center's goals include:
- Expand research and education concerning nutrition, health, quality and appreciation of honey
- Develop useful information for California’s agricultural bounty that depends on insect pollination
- Help the honey industry establish labeling guidelines to guarantee pure and unadulterated varietal honey
- Coordinate a multidisciplinary team of experts in honey production, pollination and bee health
- Promote the use of locally procured honey in the home, food industry and restaurants
Loke, the Davis Co-Op Teaching Kitchen coordinator, says she’s been obsessed with food for as long as she can remember. With 10 years of experience following “foodie adventures” (her repertoire includes running a kitchen on an eco-cruise, working in an organic garden, and teaching kids how to cook from scratch), she now teaches cooking classes at the Davis Co-Op, where she works full-time doing marketing, education and events.
The pomegranate is one of her favorite new foods.
“I’m from the East Coast and Midwest and had very little exposure to them growing up,” she said. “I love the act of breaking open the skin and having the arils (the juicy seeds) pop out, like a beautiful present! I love to eat them just out of hand but have incorporated them in everything from grains with toasted almonds to tossing them in most any salad and especially in desserts for a fun pop of tartness."
So when Loke delivered her presentation on how to make Baklava-Inspired Napoleans with fresh figs, pomegranate, honey and chevre mousse - and then served the dessert to the crowd - the crowd clamored for more.
This pastry serves 6 to 8 people, but “depending on how you cut the baklava and how much mousse you use, it could feed even more,” Loke says. She describes it as "crispy layers of phyllo dough, walnuts and spices, balanced atop dollops of tangy goat cheese mousse with fresh local figs, drizzled in California orange blossom honey."
Baklava Inspired Napoleans with Fresh Figs, Pomegranate, Honey and Chevre Mousse
Ingredients:
1/2 stick of butter
10 sheets whole wheat phyllo dough, thawed
10 fresh figs, sliced into thinnish rounds or thin wedges, tossed in a little thinned honey
2 cups chevre mousse (see recipe below)
1/4 cup honey, such as Moonshine Trading Company’s California orange blossom
1 cup finely chopped raw walnuts or pistachios
1/2 cup raw sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon allspice
Directions:
Thaw phyllo dough in the refrigerator overnight. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. You can melt the butter in the preheating oven or in short bursts in the microwave or in a pan on the stove—watch it closely. Set aside in a warm spot on the stove.
In a food processor, finely mince the nuts, sugar and all of the spices. It should be fairly fine easy to sprinkle over the dough. Or chop by hand and mix. Set aside. This will be layered between each sheet of phyllo dough. Prepare two sheet pans that are large enough to hold the phyllo sheets or close to it; you can always trim the phyllo to fit. Gently unwrap the phyllo and cover with a clean, damp fuzz-free dishtowel. Lift a whole sheet of phyllo from the pile and carefully lay out over the sheet pan. Replace the damp dishtowel over the pile. Using a pastry brush, lightly butter the first layer and lightly sprinkle with the spiced nut filling. Repeat and continue until you’ve done 4 sheets. Now carefully cut into 4-inch x 4-inch squares, or any other size or shape you can imagine. Then repeat the whole process on the other pan. Place into a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes, or until golden brown and flaky. Let cool and then using your figs, honey and chevre mousse, layer into little towers. Drizzle all over with honey.
Chevre Mousse
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup goat cheese (chevre), room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract and/or orange zest
2 tablespoons sugar
In a mixing bowl, whip the goat cheese with the whisk attachment until it starts to soften. Add the cream and orange zest and continue mixing until soft peaks just begin to form. Be careful you don’t overheat.
(Editor's note: If a pomegranate perplexes you, Julie Loke will be teaching a short introductory class on pomegranates at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 9, in the teaching kitchen of the Davis Food Co-op. She’ll show folks how to select, cut open, and juice pomegranates, and she'll provide a few recipes as well. The cost is $7. See http://davisfood.coop/education/cookingclasses.)
California is the sole producer of 99 percent of the pomegranates grown in the United States. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
This bee observation hive from the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility was showcased at the Honey and Pollination Center event. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Close-up of Baklava-Inspired Napoleans. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
California's honeypot, from cradle to grave
Beekeepers are trucking some 1.5 million bee colonies around the state to help pollinate California’s 760,000 acres of almond orchards and 50 other fruit and nut crops. They continue to pollinate vegetable crops throughout the summer and early fall. Beyond pollination, bees are big business here. California is the second largest producer of honey in the country, producing over 27 million pounds of honey in 2010.
The chain of production leading to pollination and honey processing is long. Apiaries require hive construction and management, bee travel for nectar and pollination, honey extraction, processing and packaging. And each stage requires energy inputs in the form of fuel, electricity or nutrients.
Researchers at UC Davis and the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP) have created a way to calculate how much energy is required to produce a honey product, and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are created throughout the process. Looking at the chain of production for an entire operation, researchers can estimate the carbon footprint for a single kilogram of honey.
Recently, SAREP released a honey carbon calculator to help individual beekeepers, both hobbyist and commercial, track the greenhouse gases of their own apiaries.
The calculator is based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) of honey production, a cradle-to-grave accounting system used to track the energy requirements of products as diverse as cement, hybrid cars and almonds.
“With agriculture, a life cycle has to include all of the upstream materials acquisition and energy acquisition before you even get to the agricultural field. So we’re looking at the impacts of all of that,” said Sonja Brodt, program coordinator at UC SAREP who works on life cycle assessments.
The LCA of honey production is the first of its kind in the U.S. Alissa Kendall, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, spearheaded the effort to assess honey’s greenhouse gas impact. To her surprise, “the big finding was the role of transportation in the life cycle.” Transportation of bee colonies for pollination and over-wintering uses the greatest energy and creates the greatest emissions.
Tracking these emissions is ultimately a benefit to a farmer’s bottom line, said Kendall.
“There’s occasionally hostility to climate change and greenhouse gas research because it’s a very politicized issue," she said. But researchers find that “efficiency in operations is often well aligned with reducing greenhouse gases and climate footprint . . . and often goes hand in hand with reducing energy use and dependence on fossil fuels and oil.”
Elias Marvinney, a graduate student researcher focusing on agriculturally-produced greenhouse gas emissions said there are concrete financial rewards for being a net-carbon sequesterer.
"If you can put a carbon negative sticker on your product, then you just expanded your market," Marvinney said.
Currently, honey producers and processors can input their records into the carbon calculator to determine which part of their operations have the greatest emissions and see where the greatest improvements can be made. The calculator can be found at: http://asi.ucdavis.edu/sarep/sfr/life cycleassessments/honey
The calculator comes with a guide. Sonja Brodt of UC SAREP can address questions.
The article, Carbon footprint and air emissions inventories for US honey production: case studies, written by Alissa Kendall, Juhong Yuan and Sonja Brodt, was published in September's issue of The International Journal of Lifecycle Assessments.
UC studies flowering hedgerows' ability to attract pollinators
Claire Kremen, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, said the hedgerows can include a variety of plants with an eye toward providing pollinators with nectar from early spring until fall.
Research by farm advisors and farmers have already demonstrated the usefulness of on-farm hedgerows.
More than 20 years ago, Rachael Long, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Yolo County, was inspired by a visit to John Anderson's aptly named Hedgerow Farms in Winters.
"Jeepers, not only do we enhance biodiversity, but we can change our landscape to favor beneficial insects," she recalled thinking.