Maple Honey

A gateway to wonder

Once every few years
If the stars align
There will be maple honey
Borne of the millions of flowers
That drape the riverside trees
For two short weeks
In early April.

The bees must be ready
Must have weathered the cold and damp
The indoor months
Must have known intrinsically
That this bounty was coming
And chosen to raise thousands of young ones 
In February chill
Trusting in warmer times ahead.

There must be a break
In the showers of hail
The wind-driven mists
The mercurial weather of early spring
That can easily catch bees unaware
Swamping delicate wings
Chilling small bodies.

But if the bees are ready
And the Sun emerges
There is such bounty
That there is no competition
No hesitation
Just a mad dash to the flowers
As fast as wings will allow.

Bigleaf Maple flowers are edible
We sometimes put them in salads
Or fry them as fritters
Each one with a pinprick of nectar
The slightest hint of sweetness.
But there is nothing that we could possibly do
To collect all of those pinpricks
Combine them 
Concentrate them
And put them on our waffles.

If we were to try
Poking a syringe into each flower
Until we had a spoonful
It would be worth more than gold.

But the honeybees in their multitudes
Each one like a flying cell
In a living, conscious hive-body
Make it look easy
And I am most grateful
When they collect more than they need
And I am able to share.

A teaspoon of honey
Contains the life's work of ten bees
Flying over 500 miles in their lives
Visiting around 40,000 flowers
Forty thousand pinpricks
In each spoonful.

For a gallon, it's almost ten thousand bees
Flying to the Moon and back
Or fifteen times around the planet
Thirty million flowers visited
Thirty million moments in time
In one gallon of honey
One batch of mead.

We have subjected honeybees to great indignities
Artificial insemination
Hives packed and palletized
Shipped hither and yon
To pollinate our fields of almonds and clover
But we have never tamed them
And never will.

Wherever they are, bees make a home
Seek out the sweetest flowers
Tell each other where to find them
Gather pollen for their young ones
Gather aromatic resins
The poplar-bud scent of springtime
To seal their spaces.

We might store it in buckets and drums
Stock it on shelves
Drizzle it on Cheerios in factory lines
But honey is not
And will never be
A commodity
Uniform and consistent
And devoid of story.

Honey is always the sum total of millions of present moments
A book written by tiny feet and tiny tongues and tiny wings
April maple blossoms
Or late June linden
Or September goldenrod
Or a thousand others
Woven together 
And encapsulated in comb.

No two honeys will ever be truly identical
Each hive and each bee makes different decisions
Flying in different directions
Visiting different flowers.

The more we truly consider the world we inhabit
The more wondrous it becomes.

We don't actually make anything 
That nourishes or shelters us
Not wood or iron or corn or cotton
We just mine, refine, sow, harvest
Create a world of square edges
And "commodities" 
A veneer of uniformity
As if we cannot bear
Or do not wish
To see the wonder within.

Every stud in a wall grew on a mountainside
And bears rings that reflect wet years and dry years
Preserving a piece of the of the hot summer of 1958 
And the frigid winter of 1972
And the windstorm of 1987.

Every ounce of iron is borne of ancient rocks
Remnants of folded mountain ranges
That were once ocean floors
Laid down 2.7 billion years ago
When bacteria discovered photosynthesis
And pumped the ocean full of oxygen
Turning dissolved iron to settling rust.

So this wonder is not unique to honey
But perhaps honey is a gateway to wonder
To re-enchantment
To de-commodifying our minds
To escaping from bland existence
To stepping out of separation
And into relationship.

Maple honey has a flavor like no other
I savor it
I give thanks to the bees who gathered it
To the trees that bear the blossoms
To the rivers and streams that water the trees
To the Sun and living Earth that power the rivers
To the great and interconnected web
Of which I am a part
Sharing my own story
And my own creations.