Paul Cappy Last Resort bee yard, Monkton, Vermont December 2006 a profile in courage, Paul Cappy It is always an honor to be around a person of courage.   This week I spent three days with Paul Cappy as we gathered some of our colonies of honey bees in eight yards around and in Chittenden and Addison Country, Vermont; he is taking over the stewardship of these bees, bringing them to Florida for the winter to make an increase in the number of colonies and then back to Lake Ontario, New York for the pollination of apples in the Spring. Paul has been with the bees for 48 years and started pollinating when he was 16 years old. Over these years he has managed his own commercial operation, inspected thousands of bee hives for the Department of Agriculture in New York, and been a faithful advocate for the honey bee. Bravery is required to run a commercial bee operation in these times, and anyone like Paul who is willing to make the commitment, work the long hours and expose themselves to the risk of losing a large percent of their bees each season and fluctuations in the crop, deserves our deepest respect. Farmers like Paul are some of the unsung heroes who support the operation and prosperity of our country. It is hard to understand the level of work required until you work with along side him. Paul lifts beehives onto the truck, to go on the road to Florida. This week, we gathered bees in the snow and wind, from early in the morning, until the evening when the light of the full moon allowed us to work. Nothing would stop Paul; when his truck and forklift would get stuck in the mud, I would pull him out with our truck. When the fields were too wet and the hills too step to get his truck in to the bees, he would carry them ¼ mile on his forklift to get them to our trucks, hour after hour. If they were not taken to Florida for the milder winter and early spring, when hives are split to increase the numbers and make up for losses, many of these colonies would pass on. As Paul is a savior of the bees, he is typical of the men and women across this continent who are committed to honey bees. With almost 40% of we eat dependent on pollination by insects, much of this by honey bees, our food supply depends on these farmers taking care of the beautiful insects. Honey bees are the “canary in the coal mine”; their populations are crashing this winter because the water and air are not clean anymore. In the bees' weakened state, mites and viruses move in to decimate our honey bees. The truth is that the average age of beekeepers is increasing. With fewer young people going into the field these days, less honey is being produced in North America. Correspondingly, there is more contaminated, dead honey from overseas filling the shelves of your market. Thank you for supporting the beekeepers in the United States and Canada who take care of the bees and support their continued existence in our communities. If you have the patience and some of the courage of Paul Cappy, consider mentoring with a beekeeper and supporting these divine creatures. The bees are a gift and you will receive great satisfaction and health benefits by passing on this old culture. In appreciation for your support of the bees and plant medicine, we wish you a blessed and joyous December, Friday, Dec. 15, 6 pm: Beekeeping in Nigeria & Ghana- Free Slide Show & Talk by Apiculturist Keith Morris, Honey Gardens Apiaries at the new honey house, 2777 VT Route 7, Ferrisburgh, Based on Keith’s recent experience with FarmServe Africa, learn about alternative beekeeping techniques, “top-bar hives,” the role of bees in their native habitat, and ways these West African communities are developing mutually beneficial partnerships with this amazing insect. Our honey house is on the West/Lake Champlain side of VT Route 7, about a mile north of Vergennes and ½ hour south of Burlington, the old Marvins Carvins property.   See a video clip of some of our time with the bees and on the land this season by Jan Cannon. click on the picture.

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November 2006 honeybees in traditional communities, Ghana, Africa Sankpala is a small rural village outside Tamale, in the Sahel (Sub-Saharan scrublands) of Northern Ghana. This community beekeeping collective and I made a beeswax based shea butter-ginger healing salve and a ginger-cayenne-raw honey home cough remedy. They may begin to produce salves for market. a field report from Keith Morris, part 1 of 2      Throughout this past summer I’ve had the honor of working in West Africa as a volunteer apiculture specialist with FarmServe Africa.  I met with small family farmers, youth groups, a variety of co-ops, women’s collectives, ‘resettlement communities’, university students and professors, as well as agricultural specialists and extension agents in Nigeria and Ghana, all excited about the power of the honeybee and its medicines.       The art of beekeeping is anything but new to Africa, the original home of the honeybee.  As long as people and these creatures have coexisted, there have been ‘honey hunters’, and legends and rituals surrounding this magical insect.  The world’s first master beekeepers were the Egyptians, who saw honey as tears of the sun god Ra, and moved hives up and down the Nile on rafts to pollinate crops.  Kings and queens were prepared for the journey to the afterlife with giant pots of raw honey, and their bodies were mummified with secret recipes made with the antibiotic and preservative properties of propolis.          In Africa today, the legacies of missionaries and colonialism as well as contemporary corruption and destructive economic development continue to erode agricultural traditions, especially traditions of healing with plants and products of the beehive.  The intention of apicultural training programs are primarily economic: to create additional income to alleviate poverty, and to diversify and add value to farms’ products; but the benefits of a partnership between people and these insects are far greater in scope.        The vast majority of people in Africa have little or no access to formalized healthcare, yet are still subject to a dominant cultural perspective that their traditional means of healing are ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’.  This has resulted in a tremendous loss of knowledge about medicinal plants and their uses, and a perceived dependence on manufactured ‘medicines’.  As I came to realize the magnitude of this loss, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my community of growers and herbalists at home, and appreciated further the importance of the mission of Honey Gardens.  I found new esteem for those who are working to preserve traditions and learn more about healing plants, and these people became some of my greatest allies and teachers in Ghana and Nigeria. A wild hive in the Botanical Gardens, East Legon, Ghana. Note how propolized the hole in the tree is. This is not only a testament to this hives great age, but also protects the opening in the tree from infection and termites. Yet another mutually beneficial relationship by the bees!!      Honey, beeswax, and propolis extracts are ideal mediums for many of the vast diversity of medicinal plants in West Africa; they preserve them and make them more palatable, protect and disinfect wounds, and offer their own important healing and nutritive benefits.       By bringing the beehive directly into the agricultural landscape, we bring in one of nature’s greatest teachers about cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships; the makers of the world’s only imperishable food; greater pollination for crops and higher germination rates in saved seeds; wax for light, preserving wood, batik, and healing salves; the potent and diverse nutrients of pollen and larvae; and the powerful medicine of propolis.  These things not only offer potential for an endless variety of products to be made for sale, but most importantly, provide people the increased ability to generate medicines and healing practices for their own communities.      "If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable." Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) Honey Gardens new meadery has legs. Mead is made from honey and water, and is thought to be the oldest fermented beverage. Our first mead, Melissa is an 8% sparkling wine with no sulfites and naturally carbonated in the bottle, and will be available in Vermont in late November. The honey in all of our mead will come from the region and the elderberry, blueberry, and black currant fruit in our fruit meads will come from organic growers in the region and will be available in the summer of 2007. See a video clip of some of our time with the bees and on the land this season by Jan Cannon,click here. Moving honey bees and working with them in Spring 2006          http://www.jancannonfilms.com   Thank you for your support of the honey bees and plant medicine.

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harvest 2006 newsletter seeing interdependence of nature and people Frederique Keller harvesting elderberries, Hinesburg The gathering of elderberries will continue for several weeks as the luscious umbels of purple berries ripen at a different pace throughout the fields. Walking through the plants we can see that the deer have been here and left their mark. There are chunks missing from leaves on one side of the land. After growing for three years, these elderberry are able to weather the grazing of the deer. Now that they are seven feet tall, there is a natural pruning taking place each season. The deer jump over the fence wires, no longer electrified as the charger and battery have been taken to a bee yard along a bear highway where it is needed. When the elderberry are younger, being a meal to a deer means a passing in life. Now there is a balance in nature here, a dynamic equilibrium of the wild.  We see the interdependence of nature and people everyday. This web is delicate, and yet it is so strong. There is enough here to feed the 4 legged deer and the 2 legged people. In the flexibility of life, all are provided for, all is interdependent. thank you for your interest in and support of plant medicine, a purple umbel of elderberry, ready for harvest, for  plant medicine, jam, wine, or a coloring agent     elderberry recipes from Lewis & Nancy Hill, Greensboro, Vermont receipes to make honey wine with elderberry and other fruit   The frog does not drink up The pond in which he lives. Native American proverb

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summer 2006 raising queen bees from survivors in organic beekeeping Tim eyes his queen cells with the doting concern of a mother hen. Each of these waxy peanut-shaped cells contains a queen bee that within the hour are placed within a small, four frame mini-hive called a nucleus. After another day a virgin queen will emerge and in another 2 weeks she will be fully mated and laying eggs, the bees collecting nectar and pollen, and the hive well on its way to building up for a long cold winter dormant period. These queens were raised from our survivor stock, as we have, for the past two winters lost around 60% of the colonies. The hives that are left have the vigor, winter hardiness, and timely buildup onto northern floral sources, not to mention having survived living with mites. Last year we began to raise our own queens as we saw the promise and success in the work of other northern beekeepers Kirk Webster, Anicet Desrochers, and Mike Palmer. Through the work of these dedicated beekeepers we have come to an invaluable understanding the value and potential inherent in each apiary. One of our goals at Honey Gardens Apiaries is to gravitate towards raising the kind of bees that can tolerate the mites without chemical treatments. This is by no means a search for the silver bullet but a whole system approach that Kirk Webster and others’ work has inspired here. First, by interrupting the brood cycle of the hive the mite cycle is also interrupted, reducing mite populations and giving the bees a slight advantage. The new queen imparts a vigor and enthusiasm to the hive which seems to have a negative effect on the mites. Secondly, the colonies that survive the winter build up with tremendous energy in the spring and can be used to replace the honey producing colonies that succumbed to the mites. Thirdly, by continuing to remove and split failing colonies we will improve the overall productivity, survivability and sustainability of the apiary. Lastly, by splitting a failing hive in the summer, we are renewing the valuable resource of the bees and the brood and increasing the potential of the apiary as a whole. Our bottom line here is not honey production, though we do want to cover our expenses, our heart is to raise bees to survive, to thrive here in our bioregion, to learn what these bees need in our increasingly stressful world. We can no longer afford to harvest without thanksgiving. It is time to return the love, admiration, and understanding to the world beyond ourselves. These little queen cells are a possible bridge to the great grandchildren that we will never know that they may also hear the hum of a hive, to see the magic of a burning candle, to marvel at bees sipping at flowers, to be in awe of a swarm in flight, to be close to the oneness of the hive. “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience rather we are spiritual beings having a human experience”   ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin   a field of purple loosestrife in Grand Isle County, Vermont gathering plant medicine from the land Last week I traveled up north to the Champlain Islands with Charlotte and Macky to gather purple loosestrife. This herb offers its healing gifts in the Propolis Spray. It is styptic (helps stop bleeding), antibiotic, and astringent (contracts tissues, draws out infection). This spray is used to help heal wounds and sore throats, as well as to heal and strengthen the gums. Purple loosestrife can also be used internally to control diarrhea and heavy periods.  This is generally done with a decoction of the dried flowers. Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) has a complicated past, as it was brought over from Eurasia in the 1800’s, both inadvertently and as a landscape plant. It has since spread though waterways and marshlands, and is now considered an invasive and noxious weed. It tends to crowd out native plants such as cattails, sedges and bulrushes, decreasing forage and habitat for wildlife. On the other hand, honey bees and other pollinating insects gather tons of nectar each summer from the flowers. They have come to rely upon on it in dry years as it blooms well in the marshlands even then. Since 1995 Vermont state agencies have been releasing several European insects to control the spread of this plant. As far as we know, we have the only permit in the state of Vermont to harvest purple loosestrife. We choose to appreciate the gifts it has to offer, rather than to fight against it. And although we certainly do not encourage the spread of this plant, we do feel a bit of loss as it disappears from our area, and we must travel further to find it for use as medicine. There are a number of species that have been introduced to this area, not to mention honey bees (brought from Europe in the early 1600’s), which have been beneficial in many ways. A wise local community herbalist recently spoke about how the native people of Vermont, the Abenaki, took on dandelion and burdock as their staple foods. These are two highly nutritious, yet non-native species that could be used to our healthful benefit, not just seen as a nuisance in the lawn or pasture. Another wise woman shared with me that the flower essence of the purple loosestrife is used to help us fulfill our greatest potential. We hope that the plants and their stewards may all achieve this goal.       The first fruits of the new crop of honey are now in the honey house. For over 2,000 years the first fruits have always carried a spirit of thankfulness and gratitude. The beginning of the new crop is a very special light honey we savor these gifts that spring from the land and appreciate your support of our bees and their work. an informative article on the anti-diabetic actions of elderberry The Traditional Plant Treatment, Sambucus nigra(elder) Exhibits Insulin-Like and Insulin-Releasing Actions in Vitro a letter on relief from poison ivy with propolis spray

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June 2006 our best crop Meriwether, Todd, the Barrows bee yard, West Ferrisburgh, Vermont There are defining moments in life that you always remember, a passage in a relationship that is a poignant reminder of a special time. This month our daughter Meriwether became comfortable with the bees and is now a beekeeper. In what could be the hardest week of the year, we needed help in the field. The strong colonies have to be split to make new hives. If they are not, they will swarm and not make any honey. The increase makes up for the winter losses and brings new mite-resistant queens into the operation that are essential to organic beekeeping. Small hives, called nucs, are made to receive the queens, all with the orchestration that requires the precision of placement within hours of arriving. With the ongoing weeks of a rainy season, we had to bring carts of equipment through many a long field, where the trucks could not go. The bears never let us forget that they are around. We clean up around them as electric fences are rebuilt for the new season. It was exhausting. She was a trooper, never a single complaint. Last year I realized Meriwether was on her way when she took off honey with Sam for the day and remarked later that the stings she had received were good for her. Eighteen years of hearing the mantra around Dad had been successful. I was happy that most stings were on a place where a sledding accident/ice hockey had been stressful to her knees. The bees go to where they are needed. The healing in bee venom therapy continues after thousands of years. Honey bees are gentle. They get a bad rap because of their aggressive cousins, wasps and hornets. Learning to become comfortable with them at this time is more important than the details of management. By the end of the week, Meriwether was taking colonies with 40,000 bees apart, looking for queens and queen cells, moving colonies around to new positions in the bee yards, and identifying the strength and condition of each bee hive. Free will is so important. This is a time when she wanted to help. There will always be honey around for family. Now she was ready to learn how to take care of her own bees, make her own honey, share the skills and pass them on to her own family, pollinate the neighborhood. Meriwether, August 1993, Charlotte, Vermont Meriwether has become a gentle warrior for the Earth, now sent to China for two weeks to meet with other 19 year olds from around the world to prepare to be a leader for the near future, talking about the environment, peace, agriculture, poverty. Our hope is with this generation. May they do better than we have. If it takes a village to raise a child, thank you all very much.   our best crop 2001 guide to making new plants from elderberrys, pictures of us making cuttings last week This season’s plants will be ready at the honey house on Saturday July 22.   new and improved candles! After some research and testing we have chosen new wicksto use in our votive and pillar candles. This is a natural cotton and paper braided wick. Thesetwo candles now burn with a larger flame, offering more light. beeswax tealight candles   We also now offer pure beeswax tealight candles. These are in their own small metal cup and are perfect for small candle holders and they keep all of the wax contained. As always, burn candles in a safe candle holder, and never leave unattended. Our candles are 100% pure beeswax with no extra scents or blended waxes added. They burn cleanly, improving indoor air quality and smell sweet, like honey. We hope that you enjoy them!

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May 2006 beverage makin’ joy ! Jason, moving the bees. Spring 2006 Historically, sodas and other thirst quenching drinks were prepared at home and had nutritional value.  The ingredients were wild crafted and the results produced a beverage that was refreshing and also gave a boost to the system.  Root beer, Jamaican style ginger ale, switchel, beet kvass, and kombucha tea have tonic effects on the body system.  These drinks were a way of bringing health into the home.  Not magical elixirs, these beverages were more supplemental in their medicinal value.  Today, chances are any soda or refreshing beverage on the market has been completely stripped of any of the health tonic qualities that originally inspired the flavors of the drink.  We can help take our health back into our hands by preparing home made beverages from fresh ingredients.  When we make sodas and other beverages we are directly connected to the actual ingredients and the particular flavors they impart.  We see that in order to access the medicinal properties of yellow dock root or dandelion root in our root beer, we must mask the astringent bitterness with sassafras root bark and honey.  To offset the bite of freshly grated ginger for ginger ale it is necessary to add some citrus juice and honey.    The flavors are powerful and there is nothing artificial about them.  Nature provides the nutrition and through sodas we can access it. When making sodas, the flavor intensity of the ingredients and honey sweetness can be tailored to the individual.  Thirst-quenching beverages need not be overly sweet.  Tart, sour or bitter flavors can be just as satisfying.  In our country, few flavor choices exist for people outside of overly sweet or salty.  Most of these foods are dead.  Bring life to your family and friends!  Put burdock root back into your root beer, use beets from your garden in your beet kvass and let yeast and bacteria work together to give kombucha tea that satisfying sour taste with a subtle sweetness. Making healthy beverages in the form of soda pop and other drinks is easy and fun.  It is possible to create fresh beverages full of health promoting microorganisms with tastes that hint of sweetness, but also of other tones like sour or tart or bitter tastes that are wonderful and that most people aren’t as familiar with.                                   Lee with a toast of honey ginger ale as he bottles the first of the new crop of orange blossom honey, the first crop of the season. for recipes and information, click underlines to access:                     Ginger Hibiscus Ale   - Jamaican style ginger ale with a strong ginger bite and a beautiful red color from dried hibiscus flowers that impart a wonderful hint of tartness. Root Beer Tonic with Fresh Roots   - you can dig some of your own roots for your root beer in your own backyard.  See why root beer is called root beer! Mint-Lime Cooler - subtle and refreshing with a blend of joyous flavors. Rhubarb Bliss - a soda that makes refreshing use of the tremendous rhubarb stalks. Beet Kvass- a variation of a traditional Eastern European drink from Russia, a purple beauty.  Kombucha tea - which is a zooglea, or a symbiotic colony of yeast and bacteria that produce a gel-like opaque colony to ferment the tea. From Eurasia, there are many stories about the medicinal value. Switchel - a traditional Vermont farmhouse drink that uses organic cider vinegar to make a mouth-puckering summertime drink.  Long a favorite for those bailing hay or working bees on a hot day. Gound Ivy Mead - try your hand at making one of the oldest fermented beverages in human history.   Friday June 9 ~ tea tasting, talk & slide show with John Wetzel, upon his return from visiting tea farms in India this Spring, 7 – 8:30 PM Saturday June 10 ~ beginning beekeeping class, 10 AM – 2 PM Saturday July 22  ~ release of two elderberry cultivars Coomer & Berry Hill, from stock of Lewis Hill, 10 AM – 2 PM using honey house propolis salve on fever blisters healing through honey bees ~ the next Charles Mraz Apitherapy course on bee venom therapy will be September 21 – 24, 2006 in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.Apitherapy.org Congratulations to Abraham Gingerich,on his graduation from 8th grade. At 9 he started driving two horses, working on the family farm, plowing & disking the land, bringing in hay. These days, at 13, he drives five horses to get the work done, and it’s easier on the horses. His younger brother Amos, 11, said this week, “He would drive more if we let him.”

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April 2006 fire & moving to the light of Spring coming out of the fire is a family that is stronger For the last two weeks, we have made the rounds and visited each colony of bees.   There is a lot of walking as the land is too wet to drive on to get closer to each yard this is part of the sacredness of the journey. The quietness of the fields is punctuated by the birds and gentle winds. After four months of winter, packing cases and insulated wraps are taken off. Boxes of honey are transferred from the hives that have died, and do not need it, to those that are alive, and hungry for more food. It is a very symbolic act as one member of the family gives new life to another. As beautiful as Spring is with all of the birthing on the land, this greeting of the bees is a  very somber time for me as many of the bees have passed on. With the decline of the bees worldwide because of the deterioration of the water and the air, these loses are very evident each day in the Spring. Working organically with our bees, we do not use chemicals that could artificially keep them alive. The exciting news is that we are seeing the light and hope of the turnaround in the health and strength of our bee populations. Now we are in the second year of a long term program to raise queens bees from the survivors. In these last weeks, we saw that queens Sam raised last year overwintered the best and were among the strongest. This gives us great encouragement to continue. I understand that while moving the bees South two winters ago enabled us to build them up after their loses and make a huge crop last season, it does not make them stronger our work with queen bees is a vital part of the path to sustainability and better health for the bees and beekeepers. For over 100 years, the bees have been challenged by American Foulbrood, a major disease of the young bees, the “brood”, that has a distinctive odor, called “foul”. It kills the bees, but does not harm the honey. We have learned to smell it when opening up a hive. Our bees do not have much of this as we work organically with them a hive will be burned when discovered and the disease and weaker bees taken out of circulation. Drugs will only mask the symptoms and not get rid of the bacterial spores. The drugs allow the disease to spread throughout an operation. Because of the extensive use of drugs for this disease, much of the Chinese honey on the market in recent years has been contaminated. Last night I burned a hive that Tim had found earlier in Charlotte. The burning is conducted with great respect for the bees to not do this would threaten and weaken each of their other families in this community. The fire that burns away that which is not wanted is a metaphor for many of us personally this Spring. As we moved the honey house to Route 7 in Ferrisburgh, we made a huge fire and burned that which we needed to clean up and remove from our work. The moving was a team effort and was a time to reflect on some things that I feel are important over all the years in our most honorable honey house: looking southwest through the Lake Champlain Valley, where our honey house is now and many of our bee yards are. across Lake Champlain are the Adirondack Mountains The healing goodness of elderberry has been shared with many via our elderberry extract and the distribution of plants each season. We work with the Amish community, on their land and with their families. Dan Miller was encouraged to build bee equipment for us, and a family business was born and has grown to serve the beekeeping community in New York State and the region. There is another side of the story with an invasive plant like purple loosestrife, which is involved in enormous healing as well as providing tons of honey to pollinating insects. We have seen that people working together can make a difference in their health and in the market. Our work is a string of partnerships across the land, and for that I am most grateful. Because of your interest and support of the bees through the market, they will survive, get stronger and prosper. Thank you so much. classes at the honey house,  click through for more info. Saturday May 6, 2006 Soda Pop Makin’ Workshop (root beer, ginger ale, ginger hibiscus, mint lime cooler, switchel)   10:00 am  - noon  with Doug Erb Saturday May 6, 2006 Mead Makin’ Workshop   1 - 2 pm with Doug Erb Saturday June 10, 2006  beginning beekeeping class Saturday July 22, 2006 ~ release of two elderberry cultivars, Coomer & Berry Hill, from stock of Lewis Hill a testimony on using honey & elderberry on “myositis ossificans” The next Charles Mraz Apitherapy course on bee venom therapy will be September 21 – 24, 2006 in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.Apitherapy.org The Evidence Supporting the Use of Honey as a Wound Dressing Ross Scatchard’s field report on bees in Yucatan, Mexico

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February 2006 the angels of agriculture healing with bees Mary Lokers at the honey house “Ouch, that one really, really hurt!”  “That one was the kidney point representing fear.”   That was what my acupuncturist/bee venom therapist said to me after stinging me with a bee.  Acupuncture is based on releasing stuck energy through meridian points in the body.  With bee venom therapy, the process is greatly enhanced. I was first introduced to bee venom therapy in October 2005 when I apprenticed at Honey Gardens Apiaries.  During my week there extracting and bottling honey, wrapping hives, I was stung several times.  My co-workers informed me that bees are divinely inspired to sting at points where your body needs attention.  I was fascinated and I wanted to learn more.  Todd shared how he stings people on purpose, the healing art of bee venom therapy (BVT). I told him of my physical struggles and he consulted his acupuncturist/BVT teacher regarding a plan for stings.  We began the process right away.  I was stung on purpose in several meridian points.  I was told I reacted well I was swollen, red and itchy for several days.  But the pain from the arthritis in my knees subsided.    I learned that to be really effective, the stinging needs to be done regularly for an amount of time determined necessary.  A few months later, I spent three weeks with Todd’s acupuncturist friend and experienced freedom in many ways.  I never before realized how emotions such as fear and sorrow affect health. I will continue to seek healing from the bees by ordering my own bees and stinging myself as needed. I am thankful for the education I received while working at Honey Gardens.  I am amazed at the many healing facets of the bee.  Bee venom therapy is just one facet.  It is now my privilege to share this wealth of information all over the country doing demos of Honey Garden’s products and marketing for this small Vermont bee farm.                               for more information on bee venom therapy, see www.Apitherapy.org or contact Honey Gardens Graham Dodds, honey bee savior saving the honey bee in Texas  It was my grandfather, who I called Ga, that first introduced me to the world of honey bees and beekeeping. Growing up in Texas, I would spend my summers with him and my grandmother at their home in Scotland. In the tight community where they lived, everyone knew Ga as “the beekeeper”. During those summers in Scotland, the neighbors would call for our help when swarms of bees would gather in their trees. Swarming is a natural process honey bees use for family improvement and survival. Half of the bees in a hive will leave to allow for a new, younger queen to be raised. Also, when they get too crowded in the hive, some swarm and leave for a new home where they will have more room. Ga and I would set out on a wild goose chase and follow behind the bees.  He was too old to climb the trees, and so once the bees were settled, it was me who would be given the clippers and set up the tree to fetch them. My Ga never wore much protection as the stings were good for his rheumatoid arthritis, and as a result I never wore much protection either. Up a tree I would go, with just shorts, a T-shirt, and a veil to do my best to bring the bees gently down. I would then place them in a box on the ground and return after sundown to retrieve them and bring them home. There would be thousands of bees ! I would stand in awe and watch the bees calmly crawl into their new home. In Junior High, I got my first beehive from a local pest control company that did not want to exterminate honey bees. I was soon getting dozens of calls a week. Recently I went out with Amy to save the biggest most grandiose colony I have ever seen in the wild. Using a very precarious ladder, we managed to saw the branch off that the bees were clinging to. As they fell into the hive below, the ladder fell over and bees exploded into the air, their colony in pieces on the ground. We were sad, feeling that the most beautiful colony I had ever seen had been destroyed. Knowing that they would have perished with pesticides if we had not finished the job, I gently placed the comb back into the box and left all there for the day. When I returned the next morning, all of the bees were inside of their new hive, calm and fixing up the comb that had broken. I can not save all of the bees in Texas, but it is important to do what we are able. I feel it is critical in today’s age to save these wonderful insects and to educate people about how truly beneficial they are. I hope that everyone can learn to value their healing gifts for our health. Honey used topically is being used in healing, including diabetic foot ulcers http://www.diabetesincontrol.com/modules.php?name=News& file=article& sid=2880

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