(majestic music)
- [Narrator] The God, Re, wept
and the tears from his eyes fell on the ground
and turned into a bee.
(majestic music)
(bees buzzing)
- [Narrator] If you could bottle sunlight,
what would it taste like?
It depends on how it got into that bottle.
- Honey, for me, has always been a snapshot
of place and time.
It's like rings on a tree.
It is literally a moment that it took the bees
to pollinate, harvest, create all this honey.
And it's amber in an edible form.
- [Narrator] This is Oregon wildflower honey.
Aged for four months in a bourbon barrel.
- I always describe barrel aging as matchmaking.
I put that honey in and I'll go,
"Am I going to be at a wedding
at the end of these last six to seven months?
Is this a match made in heaven?
Is this like the perfect couple?"
or am I gonna see them in six months and be like,
"Yeah, we just decided to be friends."
- [Narrator] Nothing has ever captured
brewer and distiller Lee Hedgmon's imagination
quite like honey.
Honey is mostly sugar,
but can have a surprising array of flavors and smells.
- (laughs) So my favorite is buckwheat honey
that I get from the Salem area.
And this was a buckwheat honey that smells like,
excuse my French, it smells like horse shit,
and I absolutely love it because of that.
Because it's so pungent, it lingers no matter what,
but it changes.
- [Narrator] Every flower is different
so the honey from those flowers is also different.
And if you're serious about exploring honey's potential,
you have to learn from the creatures who make it, the bees.
- I actually took up beekeeping
because I wanted to be more informed.
And the more I learned,
the more I grew to love keeping bees,
but also I grew to really respect the products
that they make.
- [Narrator] Honey bees aren't from the Northwest.
White settlers brought them here on the Oregon Trail.
That beekeeping tradition stretches back
thousands of years to the first recorded domestic beehives
in ancient Egypt.
Where humans first figured out how to keep bees,
breeding them to be more friendly and more productive.
- [Narrator] The bee made her honeycomb
and busied herself with the flowers of every plant.
(majestic music)
- [Narrator] To understand the flavor potential of honey,
We have to understand bees.
And there would be no bees without flowers.
For a flowering plant to reproduce,
it needs something to carry pollen
from one plant to another.
About 100 million years ago,
flowers learned they could get insects to do this for them,
in exchange for a little sweet drink.
- They're we would like to call floravores.
So they're, bees are getting all their food
from flower sources.
So they're getting their carbohydrates from that nectar
and they're getting their protein from that pollen resource.
- [Narrator] Flowering plants photosynthesize sunlight
into sugary nectar,
which pools in the wells at the base of flowers.
Foraging bees gather the nectar with their long tongues
stored in a special honey stomach,
and bring it back to the hive.
There, they pass the nectar from sister to sister.
They're all female. Adding chemicals from their honey
stomachs to help preserve it.
They fan it with their wings to dry it out
and store it in chambers made of wax,
secreted from special glands on their abdomens.
- Honeybees are the queens of efficiency.
They've really dialed it in over evolutionary time.
- [Narrator] A single bee will make an eighth of a teaspoon
of honey in its lifetime, and only lives a few weeks,
continually replaced by larvae
hatched from hundreds of eggs the queen lays every day.
But while individuals may die,
the honeycomb survives,
helping ensure the hive can survive the winter.
- It's a very altruistic kind of society that they live in,
where it's, you know, all for the greater good
of the next generation of bees coming out.
And for the survivability of the colony as a whole
that they're not necessarily going to see.
- [Narrator] Don't worry, most honey bee hives produce
more honey than they need,
and responsible beekeepers know
how much they can safely take.
Honey bees are just one of hundreds of bee species,
most of which don't make honey.
They survive winter by hibernating,
but making honeycomb gives honey bees an advantage.
- So basically, they've come up
with a pantry stable food source
that they can tap into during the cold months
when there's no flowers that bloom,
and utilize that to continue to keep
just enough of their colony alive
so they can come out roaring in spring.
- [Narrator] To honey bees,
honey supports a large workforce,
able to stay awake all winter
and hop out on early spring days to get the best flowers
while other bees are still asleep.
But to us, honey is only a taste of the true value
of our relationship with bees.
- [Narrator] And so wax was made and also honey,
out of the tears of Re.
(upbeat music)
- Oregon honey is special
because there's so many great varieties
that come from this state.
It's a very diverse agricultural state
and there is a wide variety of crops.
So the bees love that.
They love multifloral opportunities
to pollinate all these crops,
and so, it really is unique.
- [Narrator] Apples, cherries, pears,
many iconic Northwest crops couldn't exist
without the tireless pollination efforts of bees.
And all of those tiny bee tongues gathering nectar,
it adds up to about 3 million pounds of honey
each year in Oregon.
- Our legacy is that we are the largest honey packer
in the region,
and that's involving buying the honey,
packaging it, and distributing it.
All the way to artisan fermented honey,
which is sort of like a vinegar product
that we actually discovered in Thailand,
all the way to a brown butter honey ghee
that's amazing as a spread.
- [Narrator] But sometimes simple and raw is best.
(upbeat music)
- So our Oregon raw honey from hive to bottle.
The beekeeper harvests that honey,
so they take off the caps of the combs
and use an extractor to spin out the honey
from those frames and they drain it into barrels.
We'll bottle it,
we'll package it up into cases,
take it over to our distribution center,
and then wait for the orders to roll in.
- [Narrator] Oregon isn't the biggest honey producing state,
North Dakota is the champion by a long shot.
But what we lack in volume,
we make up for in variety and surprise.
Lee's wildflower honey took on a citrus flavor.
Later, this might turn into a creamed, spreadable honey,
but for now, it's the perfect sweetener
for a summer cocktail.
(upbeat music)
- That's good. (laughs)
- Honey is a very cool substance.
We'd never be able to go to flowers with a little syringe
and pull out all this nectar resource
and then condense it down.
They do this amazing work to go grab that nectar,
put it into an easy exploitable way
for us humans to tap into
so we can really taste the floral world around us.
So I mean, that's kinda magic.
- [Narrator] The sweetness of honey is the taste of photons
generated in the core of the sun,
transmitted through space,
converted into sugars, gathered by bees,
passed from sister to sister,
infused, fanned, and stored, and waxed.
Each step changes it,
giving it a local flavor and creating a bridge
from our breakfast tables to the sun,
the cosmic powerhouse of life on Earth.
(majestic music)
(waves susurrating)
(bees buzzing)