Loree Griffin Burns: A Life in Books

I try to be all cool about the bee sting thing, but truly I am not fearless around bees. For example, yesterday Ellen and I visited the home of our favorite beekeeper, Mary Duane, for a final bee book photo shoot. The idea was that we would help her harvest honey, capturing images of and fascinating facts about the process along the way.

Fascinating fact number one: honey right out of the hive is irresistible. The smell is intoxicating and the stickiness is endearing (at least to a newbie like me) and the taste, good lord, the taste is incredible. Mary let us try comb honey … the wax/honey mixture that is a by product of the harvesting process. It looks like this:





Ellen and I went outside to take that photo in the natural light, and we planned to follow it with a shot of me popping the comb honey into my mouth. But then this happened:





And as soon as I saw the bee on my hand I FREAKED. I screamed. I ran. And the bees followed me, of course, because I had raw honey in my hand. Ellen and Mary say I was quite entertaining; Ellen was laughing so hard she couldn't even get a photo of the rediculousness.

Not so cool.

What is cool, though, is that we bottled some of the honey I helped to harvest, and there is a dollop of that honey in the cup of tea sitting here beside me, and I will drink that sweet tea as I begin to write the final chapter of the bee book today.

Very cool, indeed.

Yesterday Ellen and I took a field trip to the home of beekeeper Mary Duane. We were collecting images for the bee book and I stumbled into what seemed to be great luck…

We were hoping to capture “the perfect sting” image: a honey bee with stinger inserted in human skin and sting gland and entrails readily visible. You will recall we attempted this image once before, using my forearm for the “human skin” bit. But that bee, in her death throes*, fell out of the frame. Our shot is good, but not perfect.

Yesterday we tried again. And this time … here is where the great luck comes in … Ellen offered to take the hit. (Is she not the best ever?) Ellen is sensitive to hornet stings and has not yet been stung by a honey bee, but she was determined to just get the whole sting thing over with. “I’ve got my Epi-pen,” she said. “Let’s do it.”**

And we did. Mary caught us a bee with her tweezers. Ellen rolled up her sleeve. I held Ellen’s camera at the ready. Bee abdomen was pressed to human arm. Bee stung. Human winced. Writer (emphasis here on writer) snapped photos.

The good news is that Ellen hardly reacted to the sting at all. And, technically, I got the shot. It's just that the shot is, well, not anywhere at all near in focus. Sigh.

Guess who got to be “human skin” the second time?








* After stinging, when the bee attempts to flee the scene, her sting gland and guts are ripped from her body. She dies from these wounds, which is why honey bees can only sting once.

** Please note we are not crazy. Every bee expert we have spoken to has assured us that it is highly unlikely for a person who is sensitive to wasp and/or hornet venom to also be sensitive to honey bee venom.

*** Okay. Maybe we are crazy.

Without honey bees to pollinate strawberry, raspberry, almond and other crops, the folks at Häagen-Dazs would be unable to make forty percent of their sixty ice cream flavors. Worrisome, to say the least. And so the company has launched its newest flavor, Vanilla Honey Bee, to celebrate the mighty honey bee and also to educate the public about honey bee health issues.

Being a meticulous researcher, I had to check it out.





Here’s the scoop: it is good. Really, really good. According to the (very astute) Burns children, “It tastes like honey.”

Häagen-Dazs is using funds from the sale of Vanilla Honey Bee to fund research programs at the University of California, Davis and the Pennsylvania State University. They’ve also created a kid-friendly website to educate the public about honey bees and their importance to our food supply.

See? Sometimes my work is painful (stinging myself with a honey bee, for example), and other times it is oh-so-super sweet.

Ellen Harasimowicz has taken hundreds of amazing images for THE HIVE DETECTIVES this week … but you have to wait until Spring 2010 to see them. Sorry!

To make it up to you, though, I offer you this fairly cool image. I took it with my camera, but its composition is heavily influenced by Ellen. She has taught me a lot this week. (And you thought I was only learning about bees!)




Here is another shot I took today in one of the Pennsylvania State University apiaries, where Ellen and I shadowed Maryann Frazier and Keith Marshall as they monitored hives and collected samples.




I got to help out a bit by manning the smoker. Notice I am gloveless:




Notice I stand much further away from the hive than Maryann does:




I am getting braver, but am not exactly a natural with the bees yet!


Tomorrow we head back home. And the writing begins ...

Yesterday was another incredible day in the field. I spent the afternoon in a bee yard with several commercial beekeepers:






one super cool honey bee scientist:






one amazing photographer:






and hundreds of thousands of honey bees. They were hard for me to catch on film, so you will have settle for these shots of me checking out a frame of bees and sneaking some honey straight from the hive.








Tomorrow we are off to Pennsylvania State University to interview and photograph more hive detectives. Stay tuned!