Kombucha for the Honey Purist
For more than twenty-five years, I have been keeping colonies of honeybees. My approach to beekeeping is small-scale and based on “bee-centric” organic practices. Honeybees have been building their own combs for millions of years, but we humans have been beekeeping for only a few thousand years, at most. We are still continuing to learn about who they are.
For me, becoming and “beeing” a beekeeper began with a love and passion for honey. When I was five years old, I saw a bottle of “cut comb” honey in the display window of my great-grandfather’s jewelry and clock/ watch repair store. In that moment, I fell in love with honey and with honeybees.
Today, I am still in love with honey (and the bees), and I consider honey to be even more exquisite, delicious, and diverse than the world’s finest, most expensive wines. To taste a truly local, raw, handcrafted honey is to taste the essence of the land itself. That taste begins with the unique qualities of local soils and with the distinct nectar “flavors” of local flowering plants.
Honey is only one of bees’ many gifts to the human species. Another is the act of pollination itself. Along with several other endangered pollinators like monarch butterflies, bumblebees and many solitary native bee species, honeybees are vital to the continuation of life on Earth.
As someone who loves and eats honey every day, I appreciate Wild Tonic Jun Kombucha and the people who are involved in its creation and production. Before I tried this refreshing drink, I always felt as if honeybased drinks (like mead, for example) were not worthy of honey. Why eat honey in any other form than liquid or crystallized honey itself? Somehow raw honey seemed diminished and corrupted by the other products that it was used to create.
Wild Tonic Jun Kombucha is truly different. While it’s true that Jun Kombucha is not honey itself, this drink does express the beautiful, ethereal, yet Earth-bound essence of honey. The beauty of honey and the honeybee are alive in this slightly fermented product. It is the “next best thing” to enjoying raw local honey itself. This drink is a creative human expression of what honey can “bee” in another, enjoyable form.
As an organic practices beekeeper, I also appreciate the fact that Wild Tonic Jun Kombucha is made with USDA certified organic honey. That label helps to ensure that the bees who made this honey were treated with respect. It means that they were not treated with miticides and other agricultural chemicals that ultimately harm the bees more than they help them.
Being responsible for helping take care of the bees so that they can take good care of themselves: that to me is the essence of successful beekeeping. Beekeeping means being in a dynamic relationship with the bees, listening to them, learning from them, and learning from our mistakes and successes as beekeeping practitioners.
The honeybee is a living, sentient, intelligent being, and she is an expression of the sacred feminine. In my interactions and conversations with the folks at Wild Tonic, I can tell that they understand what these words mean. They know and continue to remember from whom the essence of Jun Kombucha ultimately comes: from our beloved honeybees. They also know that if we are going to take something special from the bees, then we have a responsibility to give something back.
Viva las Abejas!
