The Honey Trail: In Pursuit of Liquid Gold and Vanishing Bees

1 The Honey Cartographers

A Brief History of Bees, Hives, Honey,and Civilization

The incontrovertible facts in the natural history of the Bee are, in themselves, too remarkable to justify any attempt to draw upon the imagination for additional wonder.

—SIR WILLIAM JARDINE, The Natural History of the Bee (1840)

Yalla! Yalla! Yalla! Yalla! Does this dumb ass not understand Arabic? Yalla!

I’ve tried everything—digging my heels into his side, patting him consolingly on his neck, fiddling with his ears, telling him how lovely he is—but nothing is going to make this donkey budge.

Next to me, the towering Colossi of Memnon shimmer in the morning heat. The sky is a clear, bright blue, and this side of the Nile, on the West Bank of Luxor, toward the end of Ramadan and six weeks after the November 1997 massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, is deserted.

I want to take in the tragic beauty of this place as it stands here so quiet and lonely, I really do, but we’ve only been traveling for an hour and the rocky escarpment we are supposed to be climbing still towers far away in the distance. Whose dumb idea was it to travel by donkey anyway? I look around and sigh. My guide, Abdullah, has gone on ahead and I am all alone in this empty ancient touristscape. "Yalla, Daoud, please!" I whisper. But Daoud, who understands Arabic perfectly well and definitely knows that yalla means go, has disappeared somewhere up his own donkey’s . . .

Just then, Abdullah and his donkey, Ali, appear, biblically, on the horizon. I was talking to you and you weren’t there! the smiling, turbaned Egyptian beams, And so I came back. . . .

Abdullah, he won’t listen to a word I am saying! I know Abdullah is trying not to laugh. I can see the smirk on his lips as I bounce up and down on Daoud’s saddle, pressing my knees into his idiot side, and growling Yalla! Yalla! Yalla! through gritted teeth.

You are right, Grace, he is very stupid. Please don’t bother yourself. I will take his rope and tie it to Ali. Ali is a good donkey. He has traveled these mountains many times. He will lead all of us to the Tombs of the Nobles.

It’s as if Abdullah’s words contain some silent threat that only Daoud understands. For just as he moves toward him with the rope, my fat donkey shoots off up the road, with me holding on for dear life. We are headed for the escarpment, my legs are flapping up and down at the donkey’s sides, my body bouncing uncontrollably. Shwai! I call out shakily. Wait! But there’s no stopping Daoud. If it’s the Tombs of the Nobles I want, it’s the Tombs of the Nobles I’m going to get. "Shwai-aiai-ai, Da-a-ou-ou-oud!"

You will find the bees soon! calls Abdullah. Daoud knows where they are! He hoots with laughter and slaps Ali’s rump. Ali, showing his true beast-of-burden colors, brays and ambles slowly up the hill.

It’s only in looking back that I realize how appropriate that journey by donkey was. I had come in search of Rekhmire’s tomb, and to view one of the oldest beekeeping scenes ever recorded. It was all part of my newfound curiosity about honey and bees: While I was in Egypt I thought it would be interesting to go and see how the ancients did it. That’s all. I had no idea that this was the beginning of a convoluted journey that would see me following the bittersweet global honey industry.

But now I understand. It’s like that sometimes. You start out thinking you’re headed in one direction and then halfway down the road you realize the destination has changed. Maybe you were headed that way all along but just didn’t notice the signposts, or maybe the longer you stayed on the road, the more paths you found to take. Whatever the reasons, by the time you sit up and take notice, there’s no stopping because you already know too much, and so all you can do is trust that the road is leading you in the right direction.

Just like I had to trust that Daoud knew where we were headed, even though he had done nothing to gain that trust. But as we drew nearer to the Tombs of the Nobles it dawned on me that Daoud came from a long line of transporters. And although his ancestors would have held much loftier positions than his own bedraggled role as carrier of tourist, I realized that for Daoud a sense of direction was as genetically predetermined as his big donkey ears.

The donkey has been used as a mode of transport in Egypt probably almost as long as the sun god Ra has been shining his light on the pharaohs and nobles of this land. The asses of Ancient Egypt trudged those desert Theban hills packed with hives and honey destined for the palates of pharaohs, the mixing bowls of embalmers, the unguents of priests. They traveled great distances bearing honey and oils and cloth as gifts to soothe uncertain borders. Laden with prized wild honey, they were led through palace gates protected by archers. They were working animals, yes, but in a world still with promise. Not like Daoud’s, where the dusty air was filled with decay and poverty, loss and the cries of the dead both long gone and recently departed.

The Tombs of the Nobles don’t attract as much attention as their royal brothers in the Valley of the Kings. It’s a pity, because a lot of the artwork on the tomb walls is well preserved and reveals much about day-to-day life in Ancient Egypt—at least as far as the life of a noble went. These men held positions of authority—mayors, governors, inspectors, scribes—and Rekhmire was no exception. His tomb, also known as TT100, is a veritable diary of events in his illustrious career as vizier of taxation, justice, and foreign policy. Rekhmire held one hundred titles and received visitors from as far afield as Punt and Kefti, Kush and Retenu. But for all the prosperity and importance that is revealed in his impressive tomb, it is in those little diagrams of honey, harvests, and bees that I found a much greater story.

On the wall inside the vestibule a single bee is kept at bay by a man holding a smoking lamp. Another man below him takes honeycomb from a hive. The hives, painted a bluish gray to indicate they are made of unbaked clay, are stacked one upon the other. Placed near the hives, red dishes (thus implying they are made of baked clay) are filled with layers of draining honeycomb, while behind the beekeepers, men fill long clay pots with strained honey. Though it isn’t the oldest reference to beekeeping, its detail shows that in 1450 B.C. beekeeping and honey were not only fairly advanced and important industries in Ancient Egypt, but that honey and the bees’ godlike status had also slipped into the realm of big business. Which, I guess, if you compare it with the entanglement of governments, royalty, and big business today, is not such a huge leap to make.

During the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom, almost a thousand years before Rekhmire the Noble was enjoying the fruits of his bees’ labor, the Egyptians were painting another beekeeping scene in the sun temple of Neuserre. In those early days, honey and bees were synonymous with gods and royalty; while honey was considered a sacred offering, the bee, combined with the sedge plant, was the powerful symbol that represented king, unity, and the organized civilization that was Ancient Egypt. It was a huge accolade. As symbol of the pharaohs’ godlike glory, and with its sacred honey food, the bee was a revered creature that linked the earth with divinity.

It’s the kind of exalted role that has dogged the bee since time immemorial. While emperors and queens have long credited bees with the lofty ideals of civilization and power, gods have claimed them as saviors and healers. In the ancient Mediterranean lands of the goddess, bees—those all-female working parties—were called Melissae, Merope, Deborah, Birds of the Muses. They were symbols of Cybele and Demeter, Aphrodite and Artemis, caretakers of temples, icons of eroticism, sensuality, love, and death. Even in science, bees retain their goddess roots. As members of the Hymenoptera, those principal insect pollinators of flowering plants, their classification recalls the hymen, or veil, that covered the inner shrine of the goddess’s temple (as it covers the opening to the vagina), but also reminds us of the high priestess Hymen, who presided over marriage rituals and the honeymoon.

But where gods and goddesses, queens and emperors, have come and gone, the bee has been the one constant, a super role model for power and order and magic and truth. How has this tiny little insect made such an impact? How has it been able to weave a path through history that dissolves borders and time, transcends cultures and religion?

The journey of the bee and its honey is possibly one of the oldest of all time. From wild hives to man-made, honey has been in sweet demand always. Forever. Nonstop. Forget the Egyptians. Humans have been collecting honey for as long as they’ve been on the planet. And bees, those pollinators of the plant world, have been around for eons longer, as the latest bee find, estimated to be 100 million years old, proves. Dug up from a mine in northern Myanmar, and preserved in ancient amber, this old bee was buzzing its way among flowers when Cretaceous dinosaurs wandered the earth. It is older than the Himalayas; older than Australia and the Indian Ocean; older, even, than Antarctica. But although it may be the oldest specimen as yet uncovered, is it the Eve of the literally thousands of bee species so far documented?

From the smallest bee, Perdita minima at two millimeters, to the largest, Chalicodoma pluto at a whopping forty millimeters, bees have been pollinating plants and helping them reproduce for almost as long as there have been flowers (whose origin was best explained by Darwin as an an abominable mystery). But it is the Apis genus, or the honeybee, that has always been the most efficient at producing and storing honey, and thus the most user-friendly as far as humans are concerned. The seven species of honeybee that inhabit the planet all build nests of hexagonal wax cells and have highly social colonies. The dwarf honeybee, Apis florea, and the giant honeybee, Apis dorsata, build their nests in the warm open air of tropical Southeast Asia. Apis cerana, the eastern honeybee, has evolved so that it can survive in warm or cold climes, which means that its nests can also be contained in hives. This is the bee that built its hives in the Upper Indus basin in 300 B.C. and in China and Vietnam around A.D. 200. But it is Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, happily producing huge quantities of honey within the confines of a hive, that plays the most prominent role in all our lives.

Apis mellifera is native to many parts of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, though today it is much more of a global citizen. It is believed that it was these honey makers who featured so prominently in Ancient Egypt. And it was also more than likely these bees who appeared in rock paintings in Spain and Africa almost twenty thousand years ago. In Zimbabwe and South Africa, twelve images have been found so far that show ladders, bees in flight, and a hunter holding flames to smoke the bees out of their nest. In a cave in Valencia, Spain, someone painted the image of a man climbing a cliff, taking the honeycomb from a hive, and placing it in his basket. These images, along with the ones from Ancient Egypt, not only reveal the long-standing popularity of bees and honey through time, they also, incredibly, mirror the honey-collecting and beekeeping methods of many cultures today. From unbaked mud hives in the Sudan to straw baskets in Greece, wild hives in Borneo to forest tree honey in the Caucasus, it would seem that in some parts of the world not much has changed on the honey road for thousands of years.

And thank God for that. Because the more I journey in search of sweetness, the more I find myself going down another route of realpolitik, where power, corruption, greed, and fear reign; where no stone is being left unturned in making a bottom-line profit from this sweet nectar’s exalted reputation. From banned honey to smuggling rackets, suspected terrorist activities to bee viruses and environmental degradation, today’s international honey market is a ruthless and bitchy power struggle where countries vie for world dominance, and honey’s ability to dissolve borders is being milked for all its worth. It’s a greedy game, but as long as there are cultures and traditions far removed from the grasping, globalized ways of the modern world, then maybe there is still hope.

Admittedly the game isn’t new, though it has certainly reached the kind of heights that only the twenty-first century can offer. Even in Rekhmire’s day, demand for honey far outran local supply. As nobles, kings, and priests clamored to feed their stomachs, their beasts, their dead, and their gods with this sacred food, it wasn’t long before a brisk import industry started up. Beekeeping and honey may have been a major industry in Ancient Egypt, but to satisfy the increasing demand, exotic honeys were brought in from those now forgotten lands of Djahi, Retenu, Canaan, and Yaa. Egypt’s upper echelons paid handsomely for the rarest and most exotic honeys even though their neighbors’ home-grown hives would have produced a pure and delicious sugar-free honey. But a lot rests on one’s position, especially when divinity is at stake. And I imagine that as more and more people jumped on the honey bandwagon, and apiaries became as common as papyrus fields, prized wild honey would have been a status symbol of wealth indeed.

It’s perfectly understandable to want what’s good for us. And there’s no reason why we all shouldn’t want, or have, our own little piece of divinity. But more often than not it’s our hunger for divinity that is our undoing. And in our ignorant scrambling around to find it there will always be someone ready to sell us their not always holy supply. It’s happened to me twice. The first time was in India. I’d forgotten to pack the Himalayan honey I’d been given by a friend in the Uttarakhand town of Kausani and so decided to buy a jar of so-called Himalayan honey at New Delhi airport. Even though the address on the label was some industrial state in Delhi, why should I doubt its contents?

Himalayan honey is powerful stuff, filled with the scent of flowers grown at an altitude so high they are almost in heaven. And the honey I’d bought looked dark and thick, as it should be. But when I opened the jar back in my flat in Singapore, I found a black, gritty liquid that looked more as if it was dredged up from Bhopal than descended from the Himalayas. This was definitely not honey, though to this day I’m not sure what it was. It was the first time I threw a jar of honey away. Then several years later, in a dark and dusty grocery store in London’s Finsbury Park, I bought some Turkish pine honey.

You can tell a lot about a place by its honey. Greek thyme honey conjures a mosaic of smashed plates and ouzo. French honey is just about perfect. Italian chestnut honey gesticulates wildly. Try a spoonful of wild honey from Borneo and you are crawling up steep jungle in search of some rare and exotic flower. Himalayan honey is about as high as you can get on the path to God. English honey is anally bland and safe. Polish honey is secretive and musty, like some obliterated village beneath Stalin’s concrete. Portuguese honey sighs with unfulfilled longing. And Turkish pine honey’s woody scent and resinous flavor can transport you right into those sappy, sun-soaked Anatolian forests.

But what I’d bought in London was bad. Inedible. Not the pine honey I had come to love. It was then I started to worry. What was happening out there in the honey industry? Who was getting away with what was blatantly false advertising? How could I know whether the honey I was eating was good, uncontaminated, or even honey at all?

A lot of trust is needed in our globalized consumer world defined by shopping. Most of us lost touch lifetimes ago with the ideal of self-sufficiency. It suits our busy lifestyles to put our trust in the supermarkets of this world and to believe that the brand, the product, the label is what it says it is. To help us along, governments go to great lengths in passing laws that make manufacturers and producers state clearly, at times ridiculously so, what ingredients they’ve used in their products. These lawmakers continue to inspect, taste, and test products for impurities and things suspect. They monitor what comes in and what goes out of their countries. And every now and then they recall products deemed to be dangerous, or ban products from even reaching our shores. It’s a massive job keeping tabs on it all, especially now with the extent of our global markets and the tendency of some governments to turn a blind eye in the pursuit of free trade. But as with any kind of restrictive law, loopholes exist that make a mockery of the so-called tough, armor-plated laws governing food. Take, for instance, a product labeled almond cake that only has 1 percent almonds in it but 10 percent peanuts, or the all-natural muesli bar, whose main ingredients are glucose, sucrose, raw cane sugar, and fructose.

I guess we can be grateful that these labels inform, so that at least we have the choice whether to buy or not to buy based on the information provided. But can we really trust what the label says? I know for a fact that as far as honey is concerned, we can’t. If a product is labeled 100% Pure Honey, it doesn’t always mean it is. If you buy a jar that says it is Australian honey, sometimes it will also contain honey from China. And it’s been found that many a jar of prized manuka honey is not manuka at all. What about organic honey? How do you know it’s organic? Because the label says so? If there is an organic certification on the label, does it come from a recognized and authoritative organization that will insist the bees have not been fed sugar, that the paint used on the hives is organic, that the honey is not overheated, and that it is produced far enough away from any industry or urban environment? What chemicals have been used on the bees to keep them disease free? And how many places in the world today can claim they are free from genetically modified (GM) crops?

The farther I travel on this tangled, honeyed path, the more bewildering the journey becomes. Once upon a time, honey was just something that was always there, waiting patiently in a jar in the dark recesses of my kitchen cupboard, happy to come out, trickling, over Sunday pancake breakfasts. But now . . .

So, what exactly is honey? Depending on the country you live in the definition may differ, but if we go with the one provided by the Codex Alimentarius, a piece of legalese thought up in 1963 by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) consisting of 150 standards to enable the fair trade of food around the world, honey is:

the natural sweet substance, produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants, or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living part of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store, and leave in the honeycombs to ripen and mature.

Which in some ways is also not entirely accurate. There’s a whole host of bees other than the Apis variety out in the world that also produce sweet nectar. But let’s just keep it simple for now and see honey as coming from the honeybee.

Another thing to consider when classifying honey is its composition. Again, according to the FAO, honey is made up of complex sugars and trace protein, enzymes, amino acids, and minerals, and there are ways of treating bees, and extracting, processing, heating, and filtering honey that all help to maintain honey’s unique compositional characteristics.

Anything that deviates from these methods is believed to alter honey and by law it can no longer be classified as such.

Around 1.2 million metric tons of honey is produced worldwide each year. When you think that one little bee in its entire lifetime produces only a teaspoon of honey, it’s a humbling amount. The main raw honey producers are China, Argentina, and Mexico, and the biggest importers are Japan, the United States, and the European Union. Demand often far exceeds supply and, at the time of writing, prices were skyrocketing as traders scrambled to buy up the limited supplies of honey available. Regulatory bodies such as the European Union are doing their best to implement honey standards such as that of the Codex Alimentarius, and are continually updating their methods of testing to keep on top of the shifting state of honey. Even so, the significant reduction in raw material [honey] is what has encouraged unscrupulous traders, wholesalers, and even beekeepers themselves to mix other additives with the real thing.

China is the world’s largest honey producer and the largest raw honey supplier in the global market. Chinese honey usually defines world honey prices. But since 2001, a lot of Chinese honey has been found to have contained the antibiotic chloramphenicol. The drug, banned as a veterinary medicine around the world and used only sparingly on humans, was being used on their sick bees—yes, bees get sick, too—and, just as breast milk contains whatever a mother has ingested, the bees’ honey was tainted with chloramphenicol. It resulted in an almost worldwide ban on Chinese honey, because, in some rare cases, this drug can be fatal to humans. But what do you do if you are a world honey leader, if your aspirations to maintain this world dominance still stand strong, and some of your largest markets suddenly close their doors in your face?

Some call it circumventing, though I would call it smuggling. Chinese honey started turning up in countries like Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Turkey, and Malaysia. This in itself is not necessarily bad, but the fact that it was being shipped out as a product of these countries is fairly alarming. While these days China is making huge advances in improving its honey harvesting and processing methods, the Chinese have also managed to find another way around the chloramphenicol issue. Ultrafiltered honey, more commonly referred to as UF honey, is diluted with liters of water, heated to a high temperature, passed through an ultrafine ceramic or carbon filter, and then evaporated down to syrup again. In the process not only is every trace of impurity, including that of any banned antibiotics, removed, but all the good things that make honey what it is are also destroyed. Most honey experts say the end UF product is not honey at all, but rather a sweetener derived from honey.

Although it is being recognized as such by traders and brokers alike, the fact remains that it is still available on the market, as a Honey Update report from U.S. food brokers S. Kamberg & Co. in January 2005 indicates:

With large volumes of Chinese honey and ultra-filtered Chinese sweetener being sold freely into the world market, supply and price pressure should remain strong. This could continue until all contaminated Chinese honey has been ultra filtered and flushed through the system. It is uncertain at this time whether the Chinese are producing contaminant-free honey or at what levels.

Perhaps more alarmingly, though, UF honey is still being sold as honey in some countries. It’s difficult to detect if blended with other honeys, and it is cheap to buy. Yet the Codex Alimentarius, the Holy Grail of the world’s food standards, states clearly that Honey shall not be heated or processed to such an extent that its essential composition is changed and/or its quality is impaired; the European Union directive on what constitutes honey—2001/110/EC, Annex II—states that honey must not have been heated in such a way that the natural enzymes have been either destroyed or significantly inactivated; and even the stance of the Honey International Packers Association is clear in its objection to UF honey:

If subjected to an ultra-filtration process which involves the removal of trace components such as antibiotics and volatiles, but not sugars, then the resultant product could be deemed outwith the Standard and should not be called honey. Ultra-filtered product would not be of the nature, substance, or quality expected by the consumer of the product they know as honey and against the spirit of the Standard.

But let’s not just blame the Chinese. Without the demand, they wouldn’t even be in the game. And they are not the first to smuggle honey across borders, shipped out, repackaged and relabeled, and often with contraband secreted inside.

Then there’s honey analog. This is a fake honey made with corn syrup and other sugars, enzymatically processed the way bees make honey, and has been on the market for over a decade. In the late 1990s, Dhampur Sugar Mills in New Delhi were openly offering their honey analog to producers and packers around the world, stating that it was better than honey and purer too. While tests now exist to detect such blends, a new kind of fake honey using rice syrup is not so easy to pick out. In any case, countries such as the United States openly allow honey blends into the country. Cheaper and able to avoid the extreme duties imposed on pure Chinese honey, they are not only popular with the big food giants keen to use honey in their healthy processed foods, they also often end up on supermarket shelves labeled as pure honey. What is evident is that the global food industry is more than willing to choose a cheaper, impure product over the real thing. Why? Because brand honey is big business.

No doubt, the global honey market is a seesaw ride dependent on seasons and weather, trade mandates and bidding wars, making it almost as volatile as oil’s. In fact, in many ways, the two industries share a twisted kind of symbiosis. It’s ironic that both oil and honey are referred to as liquid gold, though certainly honey is, by far, the more ancient of these two nectars. But where the voracious search for oil is a matter of pumping as much money as possible into digging deeper and deeper wells to extract its ready, though dwindling, supply, the search for honey has turned into a desperate manipulation of one of nature’s oldest commodities. And could it even be that our consumption of oil and the associated carbon emissions is affecting our supply of honey?

A big factor that affects honey production is weather. What seems to be impacting the industry in many countries these days, including world honey leader China, is drought. Without rain plants don’t grow, flowers don’t bloom, bees can’t pollinate what’s not there, and so there’s no honey. It’s as simple as that. Whether this is to do with global warming or an El Niño cycle is irrelevant really, because in the bigger picture it’s just one way in which human interference is affecting this age-old industry.

All around the world, bees and honey are reflecting our huge appetite for destruction and consumption. Logging of forests and the decimation of native species, changing river hydrology, the introduction of foreign bee species and other exotic pests, land development, and so on all play a big part in the production of honey and thus its market. It explains why many beekeepers today are a miserable, grumbling lot.

If they keep logging the forests, one day leatherwood honey will only be a memory, said a beekeeper in Tasmania.

If we can’t stop the varroa mite, the manuka honey market will just disappear, said another in New Zealand.

If they go ahead with this palm oil plantation, our forest honey traditions will disappear, said a honey hunter in Borneo.

To add insult to injury, it seems the bees themselves are now under attack. Since 2005 colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been decimating hives across the United States and now in Europe and even in parts of Turkey. While some say that CCD is a common phenomenon, especially after a harsh winter, the fact is that millions of bees are simply up and leaving their hives and no one seems to know why. Some point to the radio signals from mobile phones, others suspect it’s a virus, still others say it’s from overprescribing too many medicines to bees whose little bodies, which don’t come equipped with much of an immune system, just can’t tolerate. But what about the increasing use of GM crops, or the abundance of chemical fertilizers sprayed on crops around the world?

Beekeeping in the twenty-first century has come a long way from the career once described by apiarist Reverend John Thorley in 1744 as a means of discovering the hand of God in nature. Today, it seems more about lamenting the hand of man in nature.

It’s a sticky road trip, this one, and it’s not always sweet, but one thing is for certain: With honey you can map the world. The journey I’ve undertaken to discover something about the global honey industry is not definitive—honey is universal, and one could easily travel for an entire lifetime in search of sweetness and still never taste all the honey that exists out there. I needed to be selective in my destinations and it was important that I had a plan. So I decided that each chapter would not only be about a certain country but would also focus on a specific aspect of the effects of globalization on honey. So for instance, while I chose Yemen for purely selfish reasons (to consume as much fresh Yemeni honey as possible), I was also curious to learn something of Yemeni honey’s alleged connections with Al-Qaeda and terrorism.

In Borneo I was keen to spend some time with honey hunters and taste the wild honey of the Apis dorsata bee, but I’d also learned that a local nongovernmental organization, or NGO, was doing some work with honey hunters in order to help address the problem of encroaching palm oil plantations. Here was an important environmental issue where honey was playing a major role. And so in choosing these two countries I was able to strike off other countries on the list. For example, India and Nepal harvest Apis dorsata hives and there is also much developmental work related to honey going on in those countries. Other Arabian and Middle Eastern countries were also off limits—unfortunately for me, because the honey across that part of the world is wonderful—simply because Yemen was my choice.

Africa is also a large omission. From what I did learn, organizations such as the UK-based Bees for Development are doing a lot of good work with countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania. In fact, as the founder of the organization, Dr. Nicola Bradbear, told me, In Africa, beekeeping is a social issue. But as I had chosen Borneo for an NGO focus and was also traveling to Turkey—where I know honey, particularly in the eastern part of the country, is also being used as a social development tool—I could strike out those African countries where honey is playing a similar role.

Australia and New Zealand were natural choices with their antipodean location, cultures, and their unique honey. And the United States, too, what with its antidumping duties and attempts to curb the vast quantities of Chinese and Argentinean honey that flood the market. But by the time I came around to visiting Argentina, finances were low and I was forced to make a choice. Do I go to Argentina, the world’s second-largest honey producer, or China, the world’s largest?

China won, mostly because its impact on the global honey market is all-encompassing, so Argentina, with its tango and steaks and gauchos, has been put on hold for another time.

Then there was Russia, once described by Winston Churchill as a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. I’m still not sure what my trip there was about, but I did find some incredible-tasting honey in the largest country in the world.

Still, I wonder how much I really had to do with my choices and the outcome of the journey. We like to believe we are in control, that our intelligence is supreme, that we can manipulate an outcome to our best advantage. But if ever a journey and its subject have taught me otherwise, it’s this one.

It began because I like honey. I knew nothing about bees or how honey is produced and yet doors opened wide, the right people always appeared, and even though at times I perhaps should have had concerns, I never once felt unsafe. And the funny thing is that bees are in my life like never before. I hadn’t even been stung by a bee until I was well into my twenties, but now when I am in the middle of rows upon rows of hives I feel calm and at peace. They also turn up at all sorts of strange and inopportune times, and not just when I am in search of them and their honey. They appear on my pillow as I am about to nod off to sleep, land on the rim of my cup while I’m having coffee with a friend, crawl at my feet as I drag luggage across airport tarmacs, hover outside my window as I work. It’s as if they are just checking in, making sure I am still following the road map of global proportions they have woven. And I wonder if this is happening because they, too, have lost track of where the journey is headed and where it began. Understandably so, in this whole sticky and entangled honey affair.

There is a fine difference between blindly buying into the image of honey as a pure and noble food and actually knowing its true worth. And maybe that’s where the problem lies—where we least expect the bitterness to reside, when we aren’t even looking for the twist because we think it nigh on impossible. Because we’ve had millennia to believe that something so good will always be