The Taste of Honey & Protecting the Bees

On today’s outing, I’m hanging out with beekeeper and honey expert Mary Garrison and several thousand of her closest bee buddies. Mary keeps several hives in her yard in Moore County, North Carolina, not far from the famed golf courses of Pinehurst. She also runs Willabee Market and The Nectary bakery. Mary says that she aims to bridge pollinators and people with purposeful living, because every bee makes a difference.

We start our visit at the hives. I get to put on a bee suit so that I can get up close and personal with the bees, something I’ve dreamed of doing for years.

Mary explains that each hive is like a tiny, efficient, highly organized community where each bee has a specific duty in gathering nectar, keeping the hive healthy, protecting the queen, and making honey and honeycomb.

We then move inside to her charming kitchen for a honey tasting. She shares samples of six different honeys from around the world, a delicious lesson that proves that the color, flavor, and texture of honey varies tremendously depending on where the bees live and what they eat. Tasting honey, both alone and alongside other foods, is as nuanced and informative as tasting wine. Just like wine, local honey expresses terroir, the characteristic tastes imparted by the soil, sunlight, topography, and climate surrounding the hives.

The sourwood honey tasted the most familiar to me, because that’s the local honey my grandparents loved in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But my favorite that day was avocado honey from Mexico, a variety that’s new to me. It’s not infused with avocado; the bees get their nectar from the blossoms in large avocado groves. It was so dark and thick that I thought Mary had put sorghum molasses in the cup.  

Our two takeaway lessons from this lively field trip are that not all honey tastes the same and that we need to treasure and protect our bees. Local honey is a delicious treat, and it’s easy to find in many of our communities. Honeybees, along with all pollinators, are essential to our ecological survival. Nearly 80 percent of the crop plants around the world that produce our food and plant-based products require pollination by animals.   

Thanks, bees.   

Sheri Castle, award-winning food writer and cooking teacher, is known for melding culinary expertise, storytelling and humor, so she can tell a tale while making a memorable meal. Her creative, well-crafted recipes and practical advice inspire people to cook with confidence and enthusiasm. She's written a tall stack of cookbooks and her work appears in dozens of magazines. In 2019, the Southern Foodways Alliance named Sheri among Twenty Living Legends of Southern Food, calling her The Storyteller.

Sheri says that she's fueled by great ingredients and the endless pursuit of intriguing stories, usually about the role that food plays in our lives, families, communities and culture.

When she steps away from the kitchen or a local farm, Sheri enjoys spending quiet time at her home near Chapel Hill. She hails from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.