The buzz is all about honey in the Heights
Locally harvested hives sweeten the menu at Zelko Bistro
Kyrie O'Connor, Senior Editor/ Deputy , Houston Chronicle & EPPY Award winner
Karen Warren, Staff
Jamie Zelko harvests honey at Zelko Bistro.
The honey looks nothing like the pale stuff you get from a squeeze bear: It's dark, elemental, erotic. It looks like what it is: the product of living beings.
Dalia Zelko lifts up a screen from a hive box, heavy with wax, dripping with honey. Later, she cuts small chunks, comb and all, out of the screen and offers them for tasting. "Be careful. It's very rich," says Jamie Zelko, but I don't listen.
Dalia and Jamie, the founders of the Heights Honeybee Project, maintain 89-and-counting hives, most of them in the south part of the city, 40 in Alvin. The hives are on the property of volunteers willing to house them. The nonprofit project is what is commonly called a labor of love, a trite phrase that undercounts how much labor and how much love are involved.
The Zelkos, who are married and have a first-grader daughter, Viane, became passionate about bees when they saw the documentary "The Vanishing of the Bees" about three years ago, detailing the plague of colony collapse disorder, which has dramatically shrunk the population of useful honeybees.
Why care about the lack of honeybees, other than being happy not to be stung? Dalia, a master chemist, puts it succinctly: "No pollination, no farm, no food." It's not a stretch to say bees keep us alive.
Neither Dalia nor Jamie knew much about bees when they started out, but they're quick studies. They knew early on that they wanted to populate their hives with wild bees, not commercially grown ones. (They work in concert with bee wrangler Jennifer Scott.) For one thing, it's a way of saving native bees and moving them from nuisance situations to productive lives. For another, the wild bees, often hybrids of the unfairly maligned black Africanized bees and European gold-and-black bees, are sturdier, harder working, less prone to disease.
It's tough work. ("It's working because we're working" is how Jamie puts it.) The Zelkos make their own frames (there are 10 to a box) and sedulously try to maintain the most natural conditions for the bees, including recycling comb from which the honey has been extracted. "God owns the bees; we just create the environment," says Jamie.
Karen Warren, Staff
The Zelkos sell the honey at their restaurant.
Dalia may describe herself as a "science nerd," but she is almost mystical when she describes her relationship to the honeybees. "The bees know you are working with them, and they change their disposition the more you visit," she says. "They know who you are and remember you. If you establish a bond, you see more production of honey." She knows their various buzzes. Sometimes she sings to them.
Dalia is working with the medical center on medicinal benefits of bees and honey. (Jamie's allergies went away when she started eating local honey regularly.) Bee stings seem to help people with auto-immune disorders. But a bee will sting only in extreme circumstances. "The sting is a kamikaze act. The bee must really be threatened to actually sacrifice its life," says Jamie.
Over the holidays, Zelko Bistro had honey and beeswax candles for sale. They sold out. All proceeds get plowed back into the project.
Here are some facts about bees and honey: It takes 36 million blossoms to make one 10-frame box full of honey. A jar of honey requires 2 million blossoms. A bee's territory can't exceed a one-mile radius. Bees can see colors. Don't wear black if you visit a hive. Don't wear perfume.
Both Dalia and Jamie speak of the long relationship between bees and humans. Egyptians used honey in the preservation of mummies. The bee is a key symbol in Freemasonry. Jamie sums it up: "It's the coolest thing, and it's stunning, and it's ancient."
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