My father was a dangerous combination of a straight face and a strange sense of humor, so it was no wonder that none of us believed him when he said he was going out to get a hive of bees.

We lived in Scottsdale. People in Scottsdale don’t keep bees.

But that night, after the moonlit air had the heavy orange blossom scent that only comes for a few weeks, Dad drove up, and in the back of his International Harvester pickup truck—its air conditioner so effective it spit ice—there was a single hive of bees.

A white box, maybe three feet tall, two feet to each side.

And maybe because I was busy that night thinking the thoughts any ten-year-old would at the sudden arrival of a beehive in the backyard—that nobody would ever come play with me again—I had no idea how I would end up spending the rest of my life looking to recapture the taste of honey straight out of the hive, honey that I saw made bee by bee, flower by flower, before we spun it out under the centrifugal force of the extractor and our whole house smelled like the inside the world’s most delicious honey jar.

Forget the wine snobs who tell you that what they drink is the essence of the country. Any way you cut it, wine is just moldy old grapes.

Honey is the truest distillation of the landscape. Taste Arizona honey, you are filled with the globemallows, the undercurrent of ironwood, the cool air of a breeze coming off brittlebush in summer. A single drop holds the lightning that blinds night in autumn and draws the creosote scent from the rocks, or the dust storms that roll in ahead of the rain. Honey offers a lesson in the vital difference between flowers that grow in sand or in loam, those that get sun in the morning versus the ones that see only a little light in the afternoon.

Honey, says Tracy Dempsey, pastry chef at Cowboy Ciao in Scottsdale,  “lets you taste the surprising sweetness of the land without having to step outside the house.”

Although it all goes by the same name, honey that started off as, say, orange blossoms, is nothing at all like honey made from the nectar of desert wildflowers, from the fragile blue of desert lavender or just-after-dawn gold of catsclaw. Even honey from the same species of plant can look and taste vastly different—clover honey ranges from pale gold to an amber so deep that it seems like it’s trying to hide the secrets of its miraculous flavor, and even within that single species of flower, there is a gradation of taste—from the delicate taste of light, to the strong notes of dark.

Our bees were going to be sage and alfalfa bees, bees who worked the neighborhood gardens, bees who caught the delicate blooms that came up in the wash every year after flood season.
By the time I fixed my cereal on the morning my family became beekeepers, the hive was already in business, turning our neighborhood into food.

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Around the world, there are about 16,000 species of bee. Eight make honey. It’s that rare.

What we think of as the honey bee is technically the Western honey bee, Apis melifera. They are not native to North America; they were brought here by the Spaniards in the 17th century, men who called honey “liquid gold.” But even the Spanish came late to honey. In a way almost impossible to understand in our over-sugared world, honey was the only sweet flavor most of the ancients knew, and they held it in awe. The Egyptians thought bees grew from the tears of Ra, ruler of the gods; and in India, Vishnu, who holds more or less the same job, was called “honey born.” In Greece, bees led worthy pilgrims to the oracle at Delphi, and Aristotle believed that honey precipitated from the air when rainbows descended.

Think about that for a second: honey as a byproduct of rainbows.

And it’s no wonder honey was thought miraculous, because each honeybee is a gram of utter miracle. The 60,000 or so bees that make up the average hive have communication systems, air conditioning, food storage.  They may gather nectar from miles away, come back, do a little dance at the entrance to the hive, and instantly the other worker bees know exactly where to go.

The worker bees are all female, and they make up about 99% of the hive. The males, the drones, exist only to fertilize the hive’s lone queen, and when that’s done, before winter comes on, they’re usually kicked out.

In all the years we had bees, I was stung exactly once: barefoot in the backyard, I stepped on a drone. But if you’ve ever been stung by a bee on the wing, that’s a female worker. These are the ones you see making the brush come alive in spring; when the penstamon outside our house now are in full bloom, they let off a sound like an old refrigerator, there are so many bees at the flowers.

Female bees spend the first half of their lives, a long three weeks, working inside the hive, tending the queen, creating the wax cells for the honey to come, doing basic maintenance.

Then they head outside to gather nectar.

In a good, productive area, it takes over 50,000 miles of flying and the bees visiting more than two million flowers to make a single pound of honey. The average worker bee, before she drops dead of sheer exhaustion, her wings nearly worn out from the friction of air as she flies up to sixty miles per day, will contribute roughly 1/12 of a teaspoon.

Now consider that in the United States alone, we consume more than 400 million pounds of honey a year.

A  single hive can make 150 pounds of honey over the course of the warm months; in cold climates, they’ll use a third of that to get through the winter, but in more temperate regions, like our backyard in Scottsdale, they hardly need any honey as a backup plan, as something is blooming all year round and there’s always food coming in.

Whereas many states may only have a few standard varieties of honey, thanks to the climate and landscape diversity, Arizona the home of the exotic and rare, because there is never a time when something is not in bloom.

The problem is, most people never discover the depth of possibility within honey. They go to the grocery store, buy a plastic jar of something labeled “honey,” and call it good, even though that jar most likely came from another country. But as Chef Dempsey points out, “if it’s variety and uniqueness of flavor, character, and experience that you are looking for, choose the honeys that represent the unique landscape and flavor of a region.”

Come harvest time, beekeepers don their protective equipment—gloves and hood, a bellows that blows smoke onto the bees and sedates them—and go to the hives. They pull out the forms, kind of like vertical drawers, where the bees have made the honey cells. This is raw honeycomb, honey surrounded by beeswax—good for many ailments and maker of sweet smelling candles. 

Draw a knife across the wax caps, put your tongue to the honey. That instant will teach you more about the place you live than a hundred years of reading the morning paper.

The opened combs are put into an extractor, which spins the honey out. At this point, as the liquid drops into a collecting jar below, there may be all kinds of impurities, up to and including bits of bees. But these are natural, and unlike what happens next, don’t change the taste at all. I remember as a kid, the way the bees buzzed us as we spun the extractor, and I remember the taste as the first drops of sweet fell into the collecting jar.

Once the honey’s out of the comb, the producer has options: the best honey is only filtered, leaving it close to its natural state, but without the stray limbs. More commercial producers cook the amber liquid, breaking it down and making it smooth and consistent, so that each jar tastes nearly the same. But you can also ferment honey—that’s where mead comes from—or crystallize it, or just heat treat it, along the lines of pasteurizing milk.

The fact that Arizona is a year-round producer of honey means that our honeys are as changeable as the seasons. Chef Dempsey says of her own recipes that “honey is  a varietal, which encourages us to tailor our menus according to season and availability.”

While chefs change their menus, beekeepers move their hives with the season, taking advantage of topography and weather. Early spring brings the valley orange blossoms, smelling like the perfume of your first high school girlfriend; then it’s time for the true desert flowers, the bees moving from catsclaw to mesquite, to palo verde.  Next, camelthorn along the Little Colorado River valley comes into flower, producing a light honey you simply can’t find anywhere else. Finally it’s time for the mountains, where the bees dance at grass blooms and high-meadow wildflowers.

But there’s more to honey than its sweetness. Making local honey a regular part of your diet can ease allergy symptoms; it’s good for ulcers, and it’s full of antioxidants, important for heart health.

Anybody who’s watched the news knows that there is bad news with bees, too. Africanized bees—“killer bees”—entered Arizona in 1993. This aggressive strain was introduced into South America in 1956, by scientists looking to create a bee more adapted to the Brazilian tropics. Didn’t quite work out that way.

But there are ways of keeping Africanized bees—which look exactly like regular bees to the untrained eye—out of commercial hives. There’s no way to keep them from taking over wild hives, though; for example, a government study notes that  “hundreds of bee colonies call Saguaro National Park home. All of these colonies are now considered to be Africanized.”

Ironically, Africanized bees produce more honey than the domestic variety. That doesn’t stop bee fear, though. There’s been a wholesale destruction of wild bee colonies, and it’s getting harder and harder for commercial beekeepers to find places for their hives—over the past decade, the number of producers in the state has dropped by more than half.

There’s also a much bigger threat to honey production, tracheal and verroa mites that infest bees. Scientists are working overtime to find a fix for these parasites, but so far, the mites continue to spread out of control, devastating hives throughout North America.

Here’s a simple fact of nature, something we cannot afford to forget: roughly 3/5 of the plants in our country, and a full 1/3 of our daily diet,  depend on bee pollination, that little byproduct in the creation of honey.

So be grateful that even under threat, the bees still keep doing what they do. Flower by flower, they make us a gift of the landscape. Or, as Winnie the Pooh said, with only a bit of bias, “the only reason for being a bee that I know is making honey. . . . And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.”

Many years ago, my father brought home a beehive.  It took me a long time to understand how that night he also brought home the possibility of understanding where I live in the most vivid way possible,  on the tongue.  Oh, we may all too often face over-processed honey in a plastic bear, but when you know there is more, the possibilities are endless.  Stop at the farmer’s market, look for honey from tamarisk, fairy duster, from wild pecans.  A single drop of pure Arizona honey can change your world.