Save the Bees

There is a petition going around to convince government to take action and protect the honey bee, which are crucial in the pollination of the vast majority of fruits and vegetables humans eat.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, huge number of honeys are dying which are having, and will continue to have, an impact on human crops.  I know we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism, but we need to do something before this also becomes a worldwide food crisis.

If you can, please sign the petition and pass it along.

***UPDATE***

As mentioned by a commenter (Thanks Mike), here is complimentary petition to sign.

42 year old mead discovered

This is amazing, someone found a box of 6 x 2.25 L bottles of mead from 1969!

I wish I could get my hands on some of that mead, I’d be eager to find out how it tastes.

I can barely get my mead to mature 6 months before the batch is consumed, I usually have to hide the last bottle so I can let it age a year or more.  I guess that is to be expected considering I make only small batches, though I still have more than 12 bottles of my first batch of mead … then again no one is clamouring for my first batch.

Earliest known winery found in Armenian cave

They found the oldest example of a complete wine production site in Armenia, which is over 6000 years old.  I wonder if they will find a similarly ancient site for mead production, that would be awesome.

Possible Cause of Bee Colony Collapse Found

An interesting article from the New York Times about the possible culprit behind the colony collapse phenomenon that has been killing the bees.  This has been a problem for the last four years, where anywhere from 20% to 40% of bee colonies in the US alone have died because of colony collapse.

The researchers say that a combined attack from a fungus and a virus appears to be responsible for the dreaded colony collapse.   They aren’t sure exactly how this happens yet, but there is hope that by using anti-fungal agents where the virus is detected, colony collapse can be averted.

If you are asking yourself why you should care, consider that pollination by bees can drastically increase the yields of fruit production.  For some common fruits (e.g. apricot, cherry, peach and plum) upto twice the yield is generated with bee pollination, but for apples bee pollination can increase the yield by almost 14 times (See the tables at the bottom of this page for some values)  With fewer bees to pollinate fruit trees, you would see less fruit available in the grocery stores, perhaps of poorer quality and you could expect to pay much more for what you do find.  Furthermore, honey could become a luxury item.  So I am very glad for this news indeed!

*** UPDATE ***

Apparently a more in depth investigation by CNN has traced the sources of the funding for this study, and a major contributor is Bayer Crop Science (a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG) the world’s largest pesticide producer.  I am grateful to local beekeeper Gord Campbell for pointing this out on his blog, I completely missed it.

The purpose driven mead

At this point one may ask the question: “What is the purpose of making mead?”

It is a valid question and one that I hope to answer, particularly for persons of the perpetual ponderous persuasion.

Mead update

So far I have mostly been talking about the making of my first couple of batches  of mead, which I started in February 2009.  I have mentioned in passing at the end of most of my entries what I thought of the meads after several weeks or a few months, but as I mentioned in my last entry mead needs to age a long time, upwards of a year.  For the batches that I still retain a few bottles (only one for  some, but I still have over a dozen from my first batch), they have been bottle aging for 12 – 18 months now.  So I wanted to take a moment at talk about the meads I have made up to this point, and discuss how they taste after a little aging.

Get thee to a mead’ry

Since I have been receiving a lot of encouraging comments from family and friends about my mead, I have continued to pursue this delicious hobby of mine.  I really appreciate their kind words, but I do have to take them with a grain of salt and aim to improve the quality of the meads I am producing.  So the talk of making this hobby a business making venture appear to me to be somewhat premature, I personally do not think I am anywhere near ready.  Each of my batches of mead are wildly different, and I have yet to master the art of converting what I have envisioned in my mind and my taste buds into a mead.  Mostly this will involve improving my mead making technique, and the other part will be taste experience.

The Best Advice I Ever Received

“Take the road less travelled” offered to me by a former professor I worked for in undergrad, and though I was never offered this bit of advice by anyone the phrase: “To thine own self be true.”

Both of these phrases have served me well in my travels and encounters; I have certainly taken the less beaten path for a professional career (Astrophysics). As for the second piece of advice, being true to myself forms the basis of my moral/honour system. For me that means being a decent, honest and upstanding individual even when there is no one around to witness any of my actions, and without the threat of punishment by some supernatural scopophiliac superintendent.

An idea is born

Despite the mild disappointment with my first attempt at mead made on the cheap, I decided to give it another try.  For my second attempt I decided to duplicate the Alfalfa Orange Cinnamon Mead recipe, but this time paying closer attention to sanitation and preparation.  I also decided to document the preparation steps in a little more detail.

Mead made on the cheap

After the success — **ahem** — with my first batch of mead, I thought about how I could improve my mead making expertise.  Namely, could I make smaller batches of mead to make things more manageable?  Furthermore, I could I make a batch of mead that didn’t require investing in new equipment?  On The Joy of Mead a post appeared about how to make a cheap one gallon of mead, which was right down my alley so I gave it a try.