ROSH HASHANAH
Bee Smarts Learn about the honey you’ll dip your apples in this holiday season. LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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n Rosh Hashanah, when we wish each other a sweet new year, it seems natural that we associate that wish with honey. Honey, the sweetener mentioned in the Bible (Hebrew devash), is even sweeter than table sugar. Veteran beekeeper Joel Letvin of Bloomfield Hills points out that most often when the Bible mentions honey, it means the thick juice of dates or figs (which your grocery store might call dibs, the Arabic equivalent of devash). Bee honey does unequivocally appear in Samson’s riddle (Judges 14:18ff). The Talmudic rabbis knew that bee
honey was kosher and only had to explain why. Their answer, that the bees “bring it into their bodies and do not excrete it from their bodies” (Bekhorot 7b), apparently means that however much chemical change the bees introduce in processing the honey does not reach the level of making honey “the product of a forbidden creature.” The bees process the nectar they gather from the flowers. The nectar has such a low concentration of sugars that it would hardly taste sweet at all. Letvin describes how the bees gather one drop of nectar at a time and then evaporate away the extra water. They also add enzymes to effect the
transformation. “I called my business the Liquid Sunshine Honey Company because that, in effect, describes honey. Plants turn sunshine into flower nectar; bees collect that nectar and turn it into honey.” Farmers need honeybees to pollinate their crops and will pay for their services. Honey is almost a byproduct of the main business. Letvin did beekeeping in California until he moved back to Michigan in 1978. In California, where it does not rain for more than half the year, beekeepers must follow the irrigation schedule, following the pollination schedule for agricultural
A Win-Win Situation at Yad Ezra
Giving Garden at Yad Ezra
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SEPTEMBER 2 • 2021
Since 1990, Yad Ezra has been providing supplemental kosher food and other services to those in need in the Jewish community. More than five years ago, as part of that mission, Yad Ezra started Giving Gardens, raising fresh food for its clients. Josh Gordon, manager of Giving Gardens, loves to have bees. “Bees are wonderful pollinators. We see increased yield from our garden because we have resident honeybees.”
But when Gordon became Giving Gardens manager, he reluctantly recognized that the staff could not continue the hives. Beekeeping requires expertise and more work than the organization could spare. Meanwhile, a neighbor, Thomas Demeter, had his own problem. Demeter’s wife, knowing about his long-deferred dream of someday becoming a beekeeper, bought him a present of a course with SEMBA,
