Eons ago, long before I began keeping bees in Washington, a retired couple lived down the road from me. They were long-time beekeepers, people known well to the locals, who kept a sign tacked to a tree in their front yard: Honey for Sale. He was a hard-working but taciturn man; she was the equally diligent public face of their modest honey business.
One day at the nearby farmers market, I stopped by their booth to see if they had comb honey for sale. They did not but said I could stop by their house any time and buy a frame or two if I wouldn’t mind returning the empty frames. So I became a regular, trading the frames and a few dollars for more gorgeous golden goodness that I toted home in a cardboard box.
Months later, I ran into the same beekeeper in the dusty post office parking lot. Our conversation quickly turned to bigleaf maple honey (Acer macrophyllum), which she said was the finest in the world, never granulated, and was rare as pig’s pajamas. But as luck would have it, she and her husband intended to bottle a new crop the following week. She encouraged me to stop by the house before it sold out.
The trouble with bigleaf maple, she said, was they only got a good harvest once every eight to ten years. At the time, this made no sense to me. Like Himalayan blackberries and European slugs, bigleaf maples grow explosively along the Pacific Northwest coast. With leaves the size of bath mats, these behemoths thrive on the pervasive fall, winter, and spring rains that can quench the thirst of such ginormous organisms.
Everywhere I looked, I saw bigleaf maples, and everywhere I looked, I saw honey bees. So why was the honey so scarce? Why couldn’t such ubiquitous trees and bees find each other? In fact, I wondered how they could avoid each other. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking.
Riches from the rain
The very thing that grows gargantuan maple trees, the very thing that produces those iridescent strings of yellow-green flowers oozing with high-fructose nectar, the very thing that keeps the Northwest forest softly quiet and rich with moss, is the very thing that keeps the honey bees away. Rain. Incessant, unrelenting, interminable rain …
