Lola: A Honey of a Gal!

I was so pleased to see Lola Canola at the downtown farmer's market yesterday. I met her two years ago when I performed Madame Beespeaker at the same market. She was selling honey left and right--people just couldn't get enough of it, and they wanted the really big buckets. She says that people here have become passionate about eating local.

I love these prayer flags Lola made with the word "honey" in several different languages.

Kids love the honey sticks. The all time favorite is root beer flavor. The sour flavors are popular with teenagers.

"Do you dream about bees," I ask her? "Yes I do," she said, and I worry about them. I dream about our bees, about moths getting into the honey because I forget to put the lid on the hive." Last night I dreamed there was a zucchini at the market that was so big that someone made a table out of it. That'd be one big zuke.


This honey is made from alfalfa nectar. People were asking what to do when it crystallizes. "Just gently heat it up," she says. Then she explained how you can place the jar in a water bath in a pot of hot water until it melts down into the liquid state. I bought a chunk of honeycomb to melt onto my porridge in the morning. Yum.

Michael Fernandes told me that he lived in a town where there was a beekeeper who always had a few stray bees flying around him as he walked through the town. (I suspect they were wasps attracted to the traces of honey on his skin and clothing.) One woman in the town who got stung by a bee (or was it a wasp?) tried to sue the beekeeper for damages. The case was thrown out of court.