Don’t Worry Bee Happy
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Published September 8, 2005
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What would you do if you were an interior designer whose partner or spouse asked for two bee hives for his birthday? Join a bee club. Uh...huh! That’s exactly what Shelley Arrowsmith did when Norman Gilroy made his surprise request.
It all started when Norman found two “bee suits” at a garage sale for a bargain $10 each; conveniently, one was a man’s size and one was a woman’s size. He convinced Shelley to keep the beekeeper suits and “made me put them in storage instead of wearing them to a costume party!”
Norm worked on convincing Shelley they needed to have honey bees: “They are rare and almost extinct!” After a couple of years of this and planting organic orchards and vegetables on their two-and-a-half-acre farm off Burndale Road south of Sonoma, Norm actually did ask for two bee hives for his birthday.
First they joined “The Bee Club,” more formally known as the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association, which is known to have experts as members and others who share equipment. “Some people sell bee hives there as a business,” Shelley explained. Then they bought a copy of “ABCs and XYZs of Beekeeping,” the encyclopedia for beekeepers for more than sixty years.
One very early morning the couple drove to Sebastopol and came home with their loaded bee hives, placed them in their “bee yard, and have had bees ever since.”
The bees and organic farming are a long way from her youth in Indio, California. A graduate of the then California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland, Shelley worked as a successful interior designer, including for the firm Robinson & Mills. In 1994 she earned a Masters in the Art of Business from the innovative California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, emphasizing the human perspective of business instead of the number crunching side.
Shelley met Norm by taking a class in environmental structural design from him at CCAC. Later, as the world turns, Shelley and Norm founded the Institute for Human Environment in Sausalito, focusing on environment, planning, and art, and put on educational programs for many organizations, including the California coastal planning team in 1979, and learning expeditions to Italy and Holland to see how they developed and worked their coastal plans.
As the bees began to occupy more of Shelley’s fascination and time, she planted herbs and other plants to influence what the bees took in, and therefore the flavor of the honey they put out. She planted buckwheat to produce a darker honey, mint, star thistle, mustard, oregano, basil, garlic, cardoon, lavender, and chives, all of which produce different nectars consumed by the bees, and contribute different flavors to the honey batches. Because bees venture up to five miles away, eastside Sonoma wisteria, blooming for an unusual third time this summer, has added flavor to some batches of honey.
We had the good luck to visit Arrowsmith Farms last week on the one day a month when Shelley and neighbor Orna Pascal were extracting honey from the hives’ frames in which bees develop their honeycombs. Orna lives on the farm, has a degree from U.C. Berkeley in environmental planning, and now is a productive artist, basket weaver, greeting card designer, and good enough friend to help with the job of extracting honey upstairs in Arrowsmith’s lavender barn on a hot Sonoma day.
Dressed in lavender capris, pink tank top, pink visor, and a white apron, with her reddish braid hanging down the middle of her back a couple of elegant feet, Shelley holds one of the rectangular frames and, with a hot electric knife, delicately removes the wax caps left by the bees. The bees’ goal is to store the honey for themselves, and not for Shelley or us, for food in the winter. If she cuts too deeply into the wax, the bees have to use too much nectar to rebuild the wax, and therefore can’t put that nectar and energy into producing honey. Obviously Shelley’s bees like the way she treats and respects them, and keep coming back and producing
After removing the wax, Shelley or Orna places the frame in a metal machine that spins fast and basically blows the honey out of the cells, each one built by the bees at a slight angle. Then Orna places a white plastic bucket containing a netting filter under the extractor’s spigot, and turns it to let the lovely thick goo flow. Offering visitors sanitary popsicle sticks to dip into the freshly extracted honey, oooohs and aaahhhs fill the room. Speaking of barrel tastings, this is nirvana.
Orna pours the bucketfuls into large containers, which are eventually decanted into jars for sale. Shelley makes her own labels on her computer, and sells this divine condiment at Sonoma’s Tuesday evening Farmers’ Market and at both the Thursday and Sunday Farmers’ Markets at the Marin Civic Center in San Rafael.
Then there are the duck eggs, all of which are sold to Larkspur’s famed Lark Creek Inn, chicken eggs that are sold to regular customers, and the 400 square feet of garlic that sells like crazy everywhere.
Shelley’s ceramic plates, seeds, and skin balms, are all “value-added by-products” of the honey, like her garlic plate she designed to hold the organic garlic she grows.
Shelley also loves to cook, and shares with us a couple of her favorite recipes, of course using her best-anywhere honey. What a life!
Shelley’s Fig Chutney
Ingredients:
Preparation: Honey and Vinegar Salad Dressing.
According to Shelley and Susanna Hoffman in her book The Olive Caper, the ancient Greeks poured a secret salad dressing, called “oximeli,” over vegetables. It’s a mixture of honey, vinegar, and water, according to a recipe from Galen, the famous Greek physician and food writer, among other talents.
Galen’s preparation instructions say, “Simmer the honey till it foams, discard the scum, add enough vinegar to make it neither too sharp nor too sweet, boil again till it is mixed and not raw. For use, mix with water, as you would mix water with wine.” Many Europeans used to mix water with wine for their children. You might want to substitute a little olive oil for the water in the salad dressing.
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