Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

'The Honey Man' retains flavors of the land in unprocessed product
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Food/1128LEDE_HONEY
By Ronni Lundy | For The New Mexican

11/27/2007
The pint jar of unfiltered honey that Dionycio Padilla proffers looks like
an especially rich specimen of amber. Suspended in the toffee-colored
liquid are flecks of honeycomb, sable clumps of pollen, traces of propolis.

"There could be some bees' legs and a wing," Padilla says, smiling at the
jar — and, from the delighted tone of his voice, it appears that this
would be a good thing.

I dip my finger into the mélange, put it in my mouth and suddenly
once-metaphoric parts of the Bible seem to make literal sense: "land of
milk and honey," or how the apostle John wandered in the desert living on
locusts and wild honey. Of course a person could be sustained on honey like
this; it's not a condiment, but a whole food. I chew.

The overwhelming majority of the honey that is commercially available to
consumers has been through some form of processing. Even raw honey has been
minimally filtered to remove the sort of visible "debris" that thickens
Padilla's product. The filtering makes for honey that is easier to pour, to
cook with. Few people savor the idea of bits of comb and clumps of pollen
floating to the top of their cup of tea. But some do, believing there are
health properties in honey that contains pollen, royal jelly (the food
processed by worker bees to feed their queen) and propolis (the waxy
substance made by bees to enclose the comb). And some people prefer honey
like this simply for aesthetic reasons.

Terroir is the concept that the flavor of something edible — like wine
grapes, chile and onions, for example — is influenced by the land where
it is grown. Food scholars, vintners and aficionados debate its validity,
but Padilla's honey delivers it as fact. The bite in my mouth contains not
only the fragrance, but also microscopic pieces of the plants that fill the
Pecos River Valley that stretches below Padilla's home in Villanueva. It
may even contain bits of the actual Earth. I chew some more.

Caught between worlds

"So when did you first decide to keep bees, become The Honey Man?"

The answer, it turns out, is not unlike a bee's flight from one source of
pollen to another and another, yet always aimed toward home.

Not quite 60 years ago, Padilla was born in Las Vegas, N.M., the hometown
of his mother. His father was from the nearby village of San Ignacio. His
grandfather owned some 40,000 acres there, a sawmill, a local store. "He
had a little empire," Padilla says.

His grandmother was a curandera and a midwife. "She was also a storyteller.
I grew up in an oral tradition. I often think of my grandmother's house,
the vigas with herbs hanging to dry. She kept the house scrupulously clean.
So clean, so much respect for where and how they lived.

"It was so rural, so beautiful, so perfect, so pristine."

He recalls that the acequia in San Ignacio was his playground.

"I would go there to climb trees, to dream, to draw. I used to draw
pictures of bees when I was maybe 4 or 5, and their skeps (the classic
cone-shaped beehive). I wasn't really thinking about it; I just liked the
shape of the skep and the bees' movements mesmerized me."

But when he was about 6 years old, his parents moved the family to Taos,
another world.

"There was the influence of the pueblo there, the artists and writers,"
Padilla says. "It was still a small town then, but it was very different
than where I had been. And about that time, for many people my age,
television arrived and just changed everything. You went from having family
with your meals to having commercials."

Padilla's life was still rooted in family, however. They regularly made
trips back to San Ignacio. "There were no paved roads. The snowstorms could
be fierce, so making the trip required thought and planning. But there was
never any question if we would go. San Ignacio was home."

When Padilla later read Frank Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer — the
novel of a young pueblo boy schooled "away" in the white community who then
struggles the rest of his life because he fits in neither world — that
resonated with him. "In a similar way, I was caught between worlds," he
says. "But I knew I belonged in this world."

Padilla makes a gesture with his hand that takes in the whole of
Villanueva, but particularly the more than 100-year-old adobe building that
houses his studio, the equally old stone-faced adobe house where he lives,
the Pecos River running just below the edge of the escarpment where the
house stands, the hives of his bees.

So how did he make his peace between the age of television and the world of
his grandparents?

"I moved to Santa Fe and in the late 1960s, early 1970s there was that
whole back-to-the-land movement, a whole world of people who were thinking
like me," he says.

Padilla began to write poetry and played guitar — the latter well enough
that one famous band (that he will not identify) invited him to join. But
he injured his hand and had to give up guitar. "So I got a degree in
education and I taught, fourth through 12th grade, in Pecos and in Santa
Fe."

Singing to the bees

There was not some specific epiphany that led him to Villanueva and bees 20
years ago,
he says. "It was just never getting over wanting to be out in the country,
to hear church
bells ringing on Sunday, to walk along the acequia. In Villanueva there is
a way of life that is still clinging to the land, barely hanging on, but
still here," he says.

The village has perhaps 150 people and most of them were born there. "They
raise their own food and for money, sell stone, sell wood, get by," Padilla
says.

He heats his house with wood he splits, writes poetry and paints, and sells
unfiltered honey. It's not available in stores and he doesn't set up a
stand at a farmers market. People who want a taste of this land with their
sweetener find him, he says.

It's clear that Padilla's beekeeping is not primarily a money-making
venture. As he talks about his relationship with bees, it sounds more like
an art form, or a spiritual path — sometimes a dangerous one.

"When I first moved here, one of the neighbors said to me, 'You don't make
mistakes here. Mistakes can cost your life.' To live here requires thought
and attention. Even so, there's always an element of risk. I love it
because of that risk," he says.

In the fall, he camps among the hives some nights to protect them from
bears. "I doze and wake up every 15 minutes or so and walk around. Usually
that's enough to keep the bears away," he says.

One night a bear had knocked over a couple of hives before being frightened
away. "I was putting the hives back when I looked up and saw a mother bear.
You know how they tell you to never come between a mother and her cub? I
looked around and realized there was a cub coming with her and without
intending it, I was right between them," he says.

Padilla decided to concentrate on the work at hand. "I focused all my
attention on putting the hive back, calmly, so not to further disturb the
bees. I think she sensed I wasn't interested in her cub, or her, and she
was willing to leave it at that. When I looked up again, they were gone,"
he says.

The bees themselves can be risky business. Once, when another bear had
wrecked 15 hives, Padilla found himself moving already-agitated bees,
loading their hives on the back of a pickup at dusk. He realized too late
that the bee suit he had donned (with protective netting for the face and
full coverage of the body) was torn, and bees were getting in.

"When a bee is trapped between you and your clothing, there is nothing to
be done. The pressure of the cloth is frightening and when a bee is
frightened, it stings," he says. "I knew they were on my body and under my
veil, so I began to 'talk' to them. I kept saying, 'You can sting me, but
don't sting my eyes; sting me, don't sting my eyes.' "

Repeating this mantra, he got the hives and bees safely transferred, then
inventoried some 400 stings on his body. None of them were around his eyes.

Learning mutual respect

Traditionally, beekeepers rob their hives by carrying in a device that
creates smoke. "The smoke triggers fear in the bees, they think that their
home is on fire, that the hive will be burned, so they begin to gorge
themselves on the honey to evacuate," Padilla explains. While the bees are
distracted, the keeper can remove combs from the hive with relatively
little danger.

Padilla doesn't smoke his bees, he says, because the smoke masks his
particular scent.

"When I'm out watching the bees come and go, they begin to recognize my
scent, to trust me," he says. "So they aren't frightened when I come to the
hive for honey. I approach from the back, so it isn't quite so abrupt. And
when I take the honey, I leave more than is standard in the hive for the
bees."

Many commercial beekeepers have pollen traps on their hives, a narrow entry
which causes the bee to scrape its legs when entering, removing the pollen
that clings to them. "It's lucrative to sell the pollen," Padilla notes,
"but the bees are bringing that pollen into the hive to feed their young.
If you take it like that, you're causing stress to the hive and the bees. I
won't do that."

Padilla also has been changing from the conventional box hive to the
African top-bar hive. With the box hive, the keeper disassembles the boxes
to get to the honeycomb and in doing so, disturbs the bees. The top-bar
hive is a single trunk-like box that has a series of bars across the top.
The bees build the comb from each bar vertically down into the box. The
beekeeper can lift one after another without upsetting the whole system.

Padilla notes that there are other values to these hives: "Box hives are
pre-formed. In the top-bar hive, the bees build their combs freeform. It's
like jazz. It's beautiful," he says.

Top-bars also are handmade and, Padilla says, "like a piece of art
themselves." An empty top-bar hive that he has sitting on the porch of his
studio looks, in fact, like a prized artifact from Territorial days — a
trapezoidal chest painted and weathered a soft turquoise, like the sky
above.

Padilla has been phasing out the box hives he began with and now has only
about 40 of those compared to about 70 of the African top-bar hives. "If
you want to learn about bees, top-bar is what you use," he says.

And learning about the bees is the point for Padilla.

Lessons of the bees

"I definitely don't have anything to teach the bees, but they have a great
deal to teach me. When you spend enough time with the bees, you begin to
understand what the different sounds mean. The way they hum, you can tell
if they are angry or if they are satisfied. There is excitement when they
are making honey. And when the queen has died, it's just depressed. If you
bring in a new queen, when they perceive she is there, the joy and
excitement can be heard and be seen," Padilla says.

Padilla became a vegetarian after living with his bees. "I realized I
couldn't eat creatures with the level of awareness they have," he says.

The bees contribute far more than honey to his life, Padilla says. On one
part of his land, where he had kept bees for several years, a field of
evening primrose suddenly appeared one summer. The bees, he says, had
brought the pollen and planted the beautiful field.

And yes, he eats his thick, comb-encrusted, pollen-rich honey. Folk legend
says that the surprising longevity of rural Russian beekeepers can be
attributed to the fact that they sold the strained honey, keeping the
"caps" with debris to eat themselves.

"My father is 92," Padilla notes.

Does he eat your honey, I ask? The Honey Man just smiles.

To buy honey from Dionycio Padilla, call him in Villanueva at 575-421-2121
and leave a message. He will get back to you with information on prices and
to make arrangements.