St. John’s mellow evolution as a honey-making capital 

By Bob Tis

    Bluebird skies radiate over the green, green grass of the Carolina Valley as morning stretches out over our island. Out in the yard, behind the wood shop, there is a haunting buzz permeating the morning air. It’s bees. And they are having an orgy of Roman proportions.

It all started in the shop the day before when the dust from some Spanish Cedar being milled for cabinets destined for some local villa project caught their attention. The bees started rolling in it, they played in it and it looked like they were trying to eat the dust of the acrid hardwood. Then the bees sent the word out on the bee line about this imported wood that was being shaved like ice cream and friends came up the road from the Agricultural Center in Coral Bay and from perhaps a hundred other corners in the neighborhood where Josephine grows myriad flowers and fruit trees, for that free buffet fueled by this new favorite drug, free for the taking.

“It was quite the bee party,” reported the cabinet maker who drug the scrap wood and as much of the dust as he could out in the yard so bees would not swarm in his shop. Then more bees came.

  “The bees were everywhere,” commented one carpenter. “They were like hippies that came to Coral Bay for a Grateful Dead concert, they got all buzzed up and then they never left.”

But as Jimi Hendrix might explain, our bees aren’t necessarily stoned, just beautiful.

  Honey aficionados will tell you that what food a bee eats and what flowers they pollinate determine the nuances of the honey harvested from their comb. “The honey is more potent here, partly because of the greater spectrum of plants,” explained Francis Jackman, a gentle St. Lucian native who has been educating islanders on bees ever since the V.I. Department of Agriculture launched an initiative to stimulate beekeeping in 2008.

Slightly skeptical of all of this I attended an informal honey tasting at a small home down the Fork in the Road at Gifft Hill recently and found that the amazing silky-smooth honey from the famous Mr. Small’s combs in Cruz Bay carried many more subtleties than a more molasses-like nectar which our Number One Bee Man took from his hives in Coral Bay. For comparison’s sake, some supermarket brand honeys were put side-to-side with this raw  (unpasteurized) honey from St. John and there was absolutely no comparison. St. John’s honey is the bees knees.

Interestingly enough, bees are also very loyal to their home turf. St. John honey tastes different from nectar taken from the honeycombs in St. Thomas and in Tortola. In fact this nuance has churned up a bit of a local marketing frenzy, as a number of well-informed local apiculturists (the fancy word for beekeepers) have begun plying their trade with the assistance of some very knowledgeable folks at the University of the Virgin Islands Cooperative Extension Service and the V.I. Department of Agriculture. Do not be surprised to see St. John honey on the gourmet market shelves next time you visit Manhattan, or Missoula for that matter. In fact, local honey is already on the menu at La Tapa in Cruz Bay, and if you can find Mr. Small he’ll fill your mason jars and empty peanut butter jars with his honey (if he has any left). More honey vendors are come soon; many “bee school” grads have their own hives now and are just waiting for them to mature.

A little history: our bees, it seems, are Africanized Honey Bees or the “Killer Bees” we all read about in the 1990’s when scientists thought this wild strain of bees approaching Texas from South America was much angrier than they actually are. These bees look just like the typical “European” honeybees you find in the white boxy shelved units you see in the States. In fact it is the freewheeling nature and actions of the local “Africanized” bees that set them apart from the norm. Our St. John bees, it turns out, really buzz to the beat of a different drummer. Furthermore, it is not just honey that our bees are good at; they produce better ingredients for beeswax, bee pollen and candle wax as well. How about that!

One other major plus for our local bee industry is the timing. It appears to be perfect for our fledgling group of beekeepers because in the States they seem to have messed it up completely. It wasn’t widely known outside big farming circles until a few years ago but stateside beekeepers routinely truck bees around the country in giant tanker trucks, from one farm to the next, so they might constantly pollinate something. The “European” stateside bees, it seems, have finally gotten tired of this, or a little confused, and have stopped reproducing at their normal rate.

And who can blame them, one minute they are diving into Calla lilies in California and the next they are in a New Hampshire apple orchard.

“Buzz, buzz, buzz,” you can hear them saying. “Damn it’s cold here in New Hampshire, buzz, buzz, who cares about the damn queen.”

Our Africanized bees are less organized. They swarm (or have parties like the one at the woodshop) much more frequently and are usually feral opposed to being raised by professionals in boxes. This island toughness makes the bees much more resilient to disease, Jackman tells us. And, St. John oldtimers and honey aficionados explain, eating the honey from the local bees helps us from getting allergies and eases the effects of arthritis.

Also contrary to the pattern of Stateside bees, Africanized bees usually rear a new queen to stay with the original group and the old queen flies off with the swarm to the new party spot. While stateside bees might only swarm once a year, our little party animals swarm every six weeks or so. Scout bees often locate these spots much like high school kids looking for a spot to drink beer and have illegal campfires. Cinder blocks, tires, most anyplace off the beaten path will do. Sometimes they hang out on branches or in piles of wood until they can decide where to build their new clubhouse. If they can’t find a good spot they may fly four or five miles down the road and cluster again.

And their relationship with St. John is obviously symbiotic. “Bees pollinate 95 percent of our fruit,” Jackman explained to a group of budding apiculturists at the Ag Center recently. Happy bees, happy plants, happy people.

While it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to St. Johnians that our bees pack a little extra punch, the rest of the world is poised to find out. Part of the reason appears to be that our bees have a bigger desire to let it all hang out. Yes, sometimes the party gets a little wild and people get bit, but contrary to the movie version, Africanized bees do not fly out in swarms in attack mode, they just get a bit defensive of their queens, so caution is advised. The grand prize is that our bees are a little cooler than most, if a little more rowdy, and they produce a nectar that is a little sweeter. It’s a give and take, a yin and yang, that perfectly suits The Islands.

June 2010

Getting Started

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, but if you want to make your own honey the best way to start might be to visit www.GrowV.I.org, which is the Department of Agriculture site with links to beekeeping. The University of the Virgin Islands Cooperative Extension Service (693-1080) is another helpful tool. Locally, Nate and Maya, a Coral Bay couple, filmed a movie (on a cell phone) about their successful journey from finding a beehive on their roof to harvesting honey. Their Bee Movie is expected to be circulated at local video outlets this summer. And check out Alex’s honey at La Tapa! She is the owner/chef, and it comes from her own hives.