Tupelo

An Ogeechee tupelo tree highlighted in the Dead Lakes area of Wewahitchka, Florida

The flowers are fragile, the season short, its bees are under attack and there’s only one small region on Earth where it can be made. So what’s so sweet about tupelo honey? Everything.

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SPUN OUT OF NIGHT, the darkness here oozes over the roads, drips between the leaves and down the trunks of the cypress and tupelo and settles deep into the swamp water of the Florida panhandle, turning it so black you can’t tell where to breathe. The cypress wear it, hang it in their Spanish moss and carry night into day. But the tupelos do something else in the darkness, something extraordinary and golden, and when dawn breaks in the right season and the awesome sunlight warms the swamps, that gold can find your lips, and then the center of your open heart, for no other tree in this world makes a tupelo flower, and no other flower makes possible the pour of heaven that is tupelo honey.

Treasure-gold with a lime tint, tupelo honey tastes like soft buttered citrus. It has a sense of fresh-cut white wood about it, maybe a whisper of pear and spice. There’s no aftertaste of which to speak, but the best parts of the sweetness linger longer than a contented sigh. It adorns dishes in fine European restaurants and sweetens coffee in humble North Florida kitchens, and it’s there for the taking wherever tupelo trees and bees come together. Compared to the stuff in the plastic bear that goes for $5 at your local grocery (which might not even be honey), tupelo honey can sell for $30 per pound online, with one company offering a 20oz bottle of its “Gold Reserve” for $120.

It’s expensive because it’s good, rare and hard to harvest. The tupelo tree only flowers for a few weeks each year, sometimes only for a few days, and so there’s not much time to get it. Add in weather, worker issues, out-of-state bees brought in by seasonal interlopers looking to score big, plus plenty of fake tupelo honey on the market, and the challenges are daunting. There are no shortcuts; it can only be gathered where people care enough to do it right— and where there are tupelo trees. Primarily, that means in Wewahitchka, Florida, and don’t try telling anyone here that folks up in Georgia make tupelo honey, too.

“This is the only place in the world where the trees grow in enough abundance to produce it commercially,” says Glynnis Lanier, married to Ben Lanier, whose family has been making tupelo honey in “Wewa,” as the locals call it, since 1898. “Tupelo trees will grow in different places, but you don’t have enough of them to make quality honey. Quality tupelo honey is made only in Wewa.”

Georgians will disagree, of course, but there’s no denying that the Wewa area is the center of the tupelo universe, and possibly nearer to heaven than even the beekeepers realize.

The Trees

Wewa sits in the wilds of Florida’s panhandle, about an hour and a half down a state highway southwest of Tallahassee. Besides a honey festival in May, near when the tupelo tree flowers, and some attention as the setting for the Peter Fonda-as-beekeeper movie Ulee’s Gold (the Laniers were consultants for the film), it’s a quiet town. Back in the 1950s the area raised a chorus when a local Baptist preacher named Elvy Callaway declared his nearby town of Bristol to be the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden. Elvy noted the area’s gopher wood (Noah’s preferred material for arks); the local river system with four heads, as described for Eden; and that 28 of the 30-some trees mentioned in the Bible are found here. Tupelo didn’t make it into the Good Book, but the tree is here, and nearly only here.

Specifically, the tree in question is nyssa ogeche, a deciduous tree commonly called white tupelo or Ogeechee tupelo [just “tupelo” throughout this story].

“It’s native to this area, but there are pockets throughout the Florida panhandle and up into Georgia,” says Ray Bodrey, Jr., an agricultural scientist who directs the University of Florida Gulf County Extension, based in Wewa. “The population here is one of the largest population sets of the tree that I know of.”

As Bodrey explains, tupelo trees require a lot of water and like to grow in the water, but not in water that’s too deep. Also, tupelos like water slowly flowing, not standing, and they like a temperate climate. All of that nicely describes Wewa’s Dead Lakes area, 6,700 acres that is, as local Matt Godwin describes it, “part swamp, part river, part lake and all pristine Florida wilderness.” Accordingly, it’s no surprise that the trees flourish here, their branches winding over the water, sometimes bearing little bunches of fruit, a not unpleasantly bitter “river lime” once favored for preserves.

Godwin runs Off The Map Expeditions, taking tourists fishing, kayaking and exploring on the Dead Lakes, where the Chipola and Apalachicola Rivers connect. He explains that where you do find tupelos inland, they won’t be far from water and likely were in water at some point. This last fact sets locals buzzing as dams in Georgia and fights over water rights have led to lower water levels in the Wewa area and, according to a 2008 U.S. Geologic Survey report, a 44 percent drop in the region’s Ogeechee tupelo population between 1976 and 2004. Adding to the challenge is that the tupelo tree’s flowers, when they do appear, are fragile, easily knocked off in a strong rain, for example.

“Everything comes into play with the tupelo tree,” says Glynnis. “It’s a real fickle bloom. It’s like other things that the bees work, other blossoms, it can rain and then they can go back to work and get nectar from it. But with the tupelo blossom they can’t do that; it has to completely dry back out before they can get nectar out of it again.”

Bee hive in a home garden at Blue-Eyed Girl Honey [above]; white tupelo “river limes” [left]; a bee working a tupelo flower [opposite]

The Bees

“The manufacturing process doesn’t change across honey types,” explains Dr. Jamie Ellis, Gahan Endowed Professor of Entomology in the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of Florida, and a renowned honey bee expert. “Bees will collect nectar the same way, take it back to their hive the same way, and mix in enzymes and evaporate off a lot of water the same way, but you’ll get different colors and flavors and qualities of honey. Honey bees are really good at finding nectar and will gravitate to plants that produce a lot of it. Tupelo produces a lot of nectar, and the unique attributes of the nectar that are part of the tupelo contribution make it a palatable and desirable honey for humans.”

Dr. Ellis points out that most of the roughly 20,000 species of bees in the world are solitary bees, not social, while honey bees live in a colony—a functioning group of bees, usually near 1,000, that all live together in a “hive,” which is the structure in which they live. He says an average Florida colony will forage from three to five miles from its hive and produce between 50 and 60lbs of honey per year, perhaps up to 250lbs if it’s a really good year. It’s tough to put an average on tupelo production, given the variables involved and the short production window, but he agrees the bees favor it when it’s in bloom.

In terms of actually gathering the nectar to make tupelo honey, bees will eat a little honey pre-flight for energy, and then the process goes something like this:

Honey bees go to flowers, stick their tongues in, and suck nectar up into a special organ in their body called the “crop,” which is kind of a nectar storage tank, and then fly back to their hive and spit that up into wax cells—aka the honeycomb, which in a beekeeper’s hive is built on a “frame.” Frames are kept in “boxes,” and often there are ten frames to a box, with multiple boxes stacked in a hive. While the nectar is in the crop, certain enzymes begin to mix with it, and the enzymic changes continue once the spit-up nectar is in the comb. Raw nectar is something like 20% sugar and 80% water, and the bees need to reverse that ratio; it needs to be roughly 20% water and 80% sugar, for logistical reasons (more concentrated means it takes up less space) and because wet nectar is prone to fermentation. To dry the nectar, the bees will stand at the entrance to the hive and fan their wings, evaporating off the excess moisture. Once that’s sorted, they cap it with a layer of wax and it’s done.

Curiously, as Dr. Ellis explains, individual bees are cold blooded while a colony is warm blooded. This is demonstrated in the colony’s ability to thermoregulate, keeping the hive’s center core near 94.5˚F, he says, which is critical to keeping the colony safe.

“When it’s hot, the bees will collect water and sprinkle it around the comb,” he says, “then they’ll stand at the hive entrance and fan their wings to cool the nest.” Conversely, when temperatures dip below 50˚F or so, “they’ll cluster into a tight ball, un-hinge their flight muscles from their wings and shiver their flight muscles, which heats the cluster of bees. The honey is in there to help them generate the energy to keep them alive.”

Bees can’t do much about the weather, of course, and Hurricane Michael—the category 5 storm that hit the Florida panhandle in 2018—tore them up, damaging hives and stripping vegetation to the point that the bees were effectively starving. Some beekeepers brought in trucks of corn syrup to feed their bees while the vegetation repopulated, but the hurricane’s impact can still be felt today. Worse than weather, however, is the varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that gets onto a bee and sucks out its fat bodies, often transmitting various viruses back to the bee in the process. An infestation of these leads to the death of an entire colony, and the Laniers and other beekeepers say there’s little they can do to fight it.

“There’s hardly anything that’ll kill that mite; nothing works anymore,” says Glynnis. “They will kill your hives so fast it’s unbelievable… It’s kinda scary because people don’t understand that one out of every three things you eat primarily comes from a honey bee; they’re the pollinators for that food and people don’t realize that. Ben’s dad had a lady tell him one time, she wasn’t worried about the bees— she’d ‘just go buy her food at the grocery store.’ People, they just can’t make that connection.”

The bees will stand at the hive entrance and fan their wings to help evaporate excess moisture off the honey

The People

For beekeepers like Ben Lanier, that connection is very real. “He’s an old-time real beekeeper,” Glynnis says, “takes care of them like they’re his children.” As part of family tradition of working tupelo honey that goes back over 100 years, Ben and Glynnis still sell their honey today under the L.L. Lanier & Son’s label (still appropriate, as the Lanier’s 18-year-old son is in the business, too). Having forgotten more about bees than most people will ever learn, Ben still remembers his first bee encounter: “Getting stung on the lip when I was about 2,” he says. “Daddy toted me out in the bee yard and one stung me on the lip; my lip pooched out and I remember momma holding me, and I remember slobberin’, my lip swelled up and they got me a straw so I could drink. That’s the first bee sting I remember.”

On the other end of the experience spectrum, Gary Adkison and Pam Palmer are just a few years into the tupelo trade, working 50 hives under the Blue-Eyed Girl Honey label while running their construction business, Hive & Home. For the couple, there’s more to it than just the business, there’s something elemental.

“I had this great career, changing people’s lives putting them in houses that I’d built,” says Gary, a hardworking home-builder who explained that the crash in 2008 essentially wiped him out. “I lost everything I’d worked for. It was like stepping back in time, and when I found bees it was like getting back in touch with mother nature, getting back in touch with God. I fell in love with beekeeping.”

A Wewa native, Gary says the honey connection to his hometown also means something to him, a sentiment shared by Pam, also an area native, who met Gary through bees. The former school guidance counselor and principal of the local middle school, she’d helped enroll Gary’s kids in kindergarten. A few years ago, with the kids grown and both of them moved on from past relationships, “the bees definitely brought us together,” she says. “Gary gets it from the hive to the bottle, and I get it from the bottle to the store shelf. I could never do what he does, and he could never do what I do. Everything in our lives is that way.”

There’s a wide range of people in beekeeping for a wide range of reasons, and while the bees do the work of actually making the honey, each beekeeper also affects the finished product—and not just a little.

The bees are just after the nectar—it’s up to the beekeeper to determine the quality of the honey

Ben & Glynnis Lanier and a jar of their much-lauded tupelo honey; sign on a roadside shop in Wewa [opposite]

The Product

“The bees are just after the nectar,” says Glynnis. “It’s up to the beekeeper to determine the quality of the honey.” As she and Ben explain, bees make honey from whatever’s around, and so an area sparsely populated by tupelo would yield a honey only fractionally made from tupelo nectar—i.e., not pure tupelo honey. Also, if the harvested honey includes portions of honey made before or after the tupelo blooms, then it, too, would contain honey from other nectars.

Some beekeepers put their hives on barges and push them up under the tupelo that grow along the riverbanks. Others build dirt mounds near the tupelo and set their hives on them, out of the water. The closer to the tupelo, the easier for the bees and the more honey they make. Another problem, several beekeepers told us, is people from out of town bringing bees into the Wewa area during tupelo season and “squatting” them on land around town. I spoke with one such operator from Michigan who, like many other beekeepers, does big business by pollenating agricultural fields in California and other states, moving his bees around on trucks or shipping them to areas that need his services. Come tupelo season, he told me he’ll take 8,000 hives to the Wewa area to harvest as much tupelo as possible. Consider that the Laniers run fewer than 1,000 hives and one can understand the local frustrations, especially as the Laniers make only tupelo honey with their bees; they don’t send them out for pollenation or make other honeys. Outside of tupelo season, Ben says, “I’m just tryin’ to keep ’em alive.”

The Michigan company purchased land in Wewa and has reached out to locals, but, the rep admits, “we’re still a Yankee from Northern Michigan in the Southern Florida panhandle, and some people let us know it.”

When the tupelo season is on things move fast, and knowing when to start and stop taking honey is key. Take honey too early and it will include nectar from whatever bloomed before the tupelo. Leave your last take too late, and you’ll get nectar from whatever’s blooming after, often gallberry. The key is to get as much pure tupelo honey as possible in the short couple of weeks the tupelo is blooming, which means cleaning the hives’ frames during the “overlap” period at the beginning of the season and taking your last honey before the bees are into something else. Timing comes down to experience, and Ben has plenty.

“I watch the trees, and how the blossom is progressing, I will get in a boat and go down the river and look at the trees. And I’ll taste of it, stick my thumbnail in it and taste of the nectar that’s coming in,” he says. “Black gum’s the last thing that blooms before the tupelo; it’s real clear, clear as water almost, but it sugars—if you let it go in with the tupelo it turns to sugar, and a lot of people do that. And I’ll take the honey a second time, before the tupelo. I’ll clean ’em out and then go back and clean ’em out again if they put black gum in there, and I’ll make less honey to make a better grade of honey.”

In working with the bees, the Laniers and other experienced beekeepers use smoke to help keep the bees calm (it masks an alarm pheromone bees give off when they feel threatened) but they don’t care for the hazmat-style top-to-toe bee suits you see on TV: “We never wear bee suits, never have,” says Glynnis. “A lot of times we work ’em even without a bee hat on, but you have to pick your days and times to do that.”

The ideal time, she says, is when it’s bright, “sunshiny” and warm—“when they’re out working. The more are out working, the less there are at home to get angry with you.”

Full hives are offloaded onto boats or trucks, the frames removed, the wax caps covering the honey are cut off of the frames, and the frames are then put into a honey spinner/extractor, which does just what it says: spins the frames around ’til the honey comes off. From there, the

It’s hard work taking honey in spring; most people can’t cut it, can’t even make it through the day

Laniers strain it and bottle it raw, with no in-between stages to compromise the honey’s taste or quality.

“It’s real labor-intensive—anything you do with bees, it’s labor-intensive,” Glynnis explains. “The boxes get really heavy. That box can weigh 80lbs, and if you’ve got three boxes on one hive, that’s a lot of lifting to take honey in the spring. You have to have some big, strong, young boys, most people can’t cut it. We’ve worked a lot of young boys and most of ’em can’t cut it, can’t even make it through the day.

“We keep things pretty basic. We do a lot of things the same way they were doing it back when Ben’s dad worked. We have a machine now that cuts the caps off; we used to do it by hand with a scraper. And the extractors used to be hand-cranked, they’re run by a motor now; but that really is about the only thing that we’ve changed. We strain it through cheesecloth to catch the wax, and we still bottle it by hand. When you run it though those bottling machines it puts heat on it. We don’t let any heat touch our honey, it’s one of the reasons our honey tastes so much better.”

It’s also the reason real tupelo honey offers so many nutritional benefits. Tupelo honey has a uniquely high fructose-to-glucose ratio; seven types of vitamin B; vitamin C; amino acids; and small amounts of proteins and various enzymes. Because of its composition, it doesn’t crystallize like other honeys. Large honey operations typically heat honey to keep it from crystallizing, extending shelf life in grocery stores, but this process also removes the nutritional benefits and yields little more than a sugary sweetener. Beekeepers told me that the State of Florida only requires 51% of the honey to be sourced from tupelo to be labeled as such, and so there’s a wide range of qualities on the market, making it advisable to source from a reputable provider.

“I can tell you immediately about the quality of a honey,” Glynnis says. “It’s just years of doing it; you know by the smell, the taste and several different things.”

Open a jar of regular honey, Glynnis says, and you’ll get a “caramelly” smell, which means it’s been heated. In contrast, a jar of pure tupelo offers a floral smell. Likewise, if there’s gallberry in there, not uncommon for some honeys

Sign at the Lanier’s honey shop [above]; Pam Palmer and Gary Adkison of Hive & Home and Blue-eyed Girl Honey

sold as tupelo, she says there will be a bitter taste at the end, which pure tupelo honey does not have.

Color, smell, taste… It’s not easy, but that’s why tupelo honey commands the prices and the affection that it does. There are a lot of realities and challenges to tupelo honey, and no matter how prepared you are or how ready you feel, it all comes down to a single truth: “You get one shot a year at it,” Glynnis says, “and that’s it.”

The Dawn of Dominance

“The Big Three” first played together on the pro debut of Jack Nicklaus

Arnold Palmer [right] at the ground-breaking of CC of Miami with [l to r] Charles Netter, John Black, Guy Bailey & Joseph Benner

Palmer, Nicklaus and Player became known as golf’s “Big Three” by the end of 1962, but records show that the first time these three legends played together was at a made-for-TV exhibition at the Country Club of Miami nearly 60 years ago. From waist-deep in the archives, Dave Shedloski reports

IT WAS BILLED AS A GRAND OPENING but also as a grand entrance for another potential star of professional golf. It ended up signifying a grand beginning to perhaps the most compelling and important era in the game, marked by the intertwining careers of three all-time great competitors and sportsmen.

The occasion was an exhibition, dubbed the “Orange Bowl Classic,” and it was set up to a blast. Portions of it aired on CBS Sports, and it featured a fourball of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Sam Snead on December 30, 1961, at the Country Club of Miami, which was marking its grand opening.

Now approaching its 60th anniversary, this was among golf’s earliest made-for-television events, and our research shows it was the first time the “Big Three” played together as professionals—and probably the first time they stepped on a tee together at all.

It was a power foursome who split four ways a purse of $10,000, no matter who won. Palmer, the reigning Open champion, already was the most popular figure in the game. He also was the host professional at the new Florida club. South Africa’s Player was coming off a season in which he’d won the Masters and had become the first foreign-born player to lead the tour’s money list. Nicklaus had finished off his amateur career by winning the NCAA Championship and his second U.S. Amateur title and was making his professional debut. And Snead was a legend, of course, once part of another exceptionally gifted trio that included Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, all of them born in 1912. Though he was nearing 50, Snead had captured the Tournament of Champions that year for his 81st victory, the penultimate win of his career.

Nicklaus and Palmer had crossed paths once before, in the fall of 1958 in Athens, Ohio, as participants in

“Yep, I hit my first shot as a professional in the water. All these years later I still want to go back and hit that shot again” — Jack Nicklaus

“Dow Finsterwald Day” at Athens CC. Finsterwald— one of Palmer’s closest friends—had won the 1958 PGA Championship, and as part of the celebration Palmer paired with Ohio’s amateur phenom against Finsterwald and another amateur standout, Howard Baker Saunders of nearby Gallipolis, Ohio. The Palmer-Nicklaus team won, thanks mainly to a course-record 62 from Palmer, the reigning Masters champ.

Meanwhile, Player never had met the “burly Ohioan,” as one newspaper described Nicklaus, but he immediately took a liking to the young Golden Bear in Miami. “He’s a powerful boy… and a nice fellow besides,” Player was quoted in the newspapers after shooting a winning 70. “It’s one thing to be a great golfer and quite another to be a nice fellow, too.”

Snead carded a 71, while Nicklaus and Palmer settled for 73s. The four men carded a best-ball score of 67. The host pro was less than thrilled. “My game is shot,” Palmer told reporters. “You saw how terrible I was out there.”

Nicklaus, who stopped by CC of Miami a few years ago unannounced, thrilling golfers in attendance, recalls the day clearly, mostly because he hit into water hazards three times, including a pull-hook on the first hole. He told the Miami Herald after the event: “I was disappointed because I wanted my first drive as a pro to be something extra.”

“Yep, I hit my first shot as a professional in the water,” he said more recently. “All these years later I still want to go back and hit that tee shot again.”

Palmer said the exhibition was the first of many “to stimulate interest in golf,” and when Nicklaus won his first professional title, the 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont—by beating Palmer in a playoff—a pattern started to emerge.

Fred Corcoran, a former tournament manager for the tour, was telling reporters that golf was on the verge of “the third great cycle of golf,” with Nicklaus, Palmer and Player. Before them, he said, had been Snead, Nelson and Hogan, and preceding them was Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen.

Later that year, the first World Series of Golf was held at Firestone CC in Akron, Ohio. It featured the major winners of 1962. They were Palmer, Nicklaus and Player. The era of “The Big Three” was at hand.

The legendary “Big Three” marked a period of golf that saw unprecedented growth and popularity in the game spurred by three men who were rivals, fierce competitors, friends—and the best players in the world who took their craft to practically every corner of it.

“I don’t know that we ever talked about our being ‘The Big Three’ or any of us ever uttered any personal thoughts about the fact that we shared that sort of collective identity,” Palmer once told me. “I think we just let it happen.” It happened, as Nicklaus said, “because we were winning everything,” and Player noted that, “Jack, Arnold and myself, we won over 350 golf tournaments.”

“The Big Three” was a marketing dream for sure, but it was no gimmick: the moniker was well-earned—and was integral to the evolution of the pro game we know today.

MIAMI FIVE

Today, the Country Club of Miami is part of a five-strong portfolio of golf courses operated under the auspices of Miami-Dade County Parks. The other four courses are the nine-hole Briar Bay layout (designed by Bruce Devlin and Robert Von Hagge); Crandon Golf at Key Biscayne, which is a former Champions Tour venue; the nine-hole Greynolds Golf Course which dates back to 1964; and Palmetto Golf Course, which is the oldest of the quintet, dating back to 1959 and designed by Dick Wilson, who also laid out the original 18 holes at Palmer’s Bay Hill. The Country Club of Miami is a 36-hole club with a rich tournament history. Robert Trent Jones designed the original 18 to wide acclaim, with Lee Trevino among the list of its tour champions. Comedian Jackie Gleason lived at the club and would regularly host famous guests on the course including Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.