Once seriously threatened by DDT and other pesticides, bald eagles have made a comeback in Nebraska. They were taken off the threatened species list in 2008 and the number of bald eagles occurring in Nebraska during the non-breeding season has increased during the last several decades according to Nebraska Game and Parks.

Bald eagles can be seen year-round across the state of Nebraska. However, during the critical wintering period, eagles often concentrate in areas where waters remain free of ice and food, such as migrating fowl, is available. Near the dam spillway of reservoirs and power plants is a popular viewing area.

Photographer extraordinaire and Friend of Buzz Savories Don Brockmeier was out recently catching some stunning shots of these fascinating birds. Our thanks to him for sharing these.

Here’s something optimistic to think about while you’re tapping your foot and waiting for spring: Buzz Savories honey really is both good and good for you.

According to the Mayo Clinic, honey’s mix of amino acids, vitamins, minerals, iron, zinc and antioxidants honey has been clinically proven to have benefits as a cough suppressant for upper respiratory infections and topically to treat burns and promote wound healing. Other health areas where honey is being seriously researched include cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disease and neurological disease, where honey might offer antidepressant, anticonvulsant and anti-anxiety benefits. Medical grade honey is already well accepted to promote wound healing, particularly in burns.

We’re not saying Buzz Savories Artisanal Honey is all you need to stay healthy. But it’s a start.

Let’s face it. February is a dark month in the dead of winter, so perhaps it’s no wonder that it’s become associated with a lively festival celebrating romantic love and sensuality. This month, we want to show you some sweet, sensuous ideas to help you appreciate a romantic cuddle by the fire…without resorting to chocolate.

There is some dispute about how this mid-winter holiday came to be. Some say Pope Galacius 1 ordained a day in February to replace the ancient Roman festival Lupercalia, a bawdy celebration of fertility. As the years went on, the holiday grew sweeter. Chocolate treats and other candies, along with flowers and cards became lovers’ gifts. Chaucer and Shakespeare romanticized Valentine’s Day in their work, and it gained popularity throughout Britain and the rest of Europe.

Now we think chocolate is fine in its place, but on Valentine’s Day it’s become cliché. For a fresh take on the holiday, try Café con Miel. With only four ingredients — espresso or strong coffee, a single-source artisanal honey such as Buzz Savories, milk, and a spice of your choice – cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, or nutmeg — café con miel has been widely enjoyed as an afternoon pick-me-up or an evening dessert for generations of Spaniards.

With a crackling fire and a few bees wax candles, Café con Miel might go well with Honey Cake as a sweet treat. It’s easy to make, and the taste, crumb and texture bring out the sweet honey flavor.

For a spectacular finish to a romantic evening, how about rice pudding with fresh fruit and a swirl of Buzz Savories Artisanal Honey?  I especially like it because the fresh strawberries, blueberries, raspberries or pears (choose the fruits or berries you like best) add color and a pleasantly sour flavor that balances the sweetness in the rice and honey swirl.

We hope you enjoy a sweet month. To help it along, let us suggest a Honey Gift Set with two jars of our artisanal honey, three beeswax candles, our “Recibees” cookbook and more.

Sweet eating.

Here’s something to contemplate as you consider the new year, and with a little help from the Pollinator Partnership, some easy ways to make the world a better place .

According to the USDA, three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and more than a third of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce. More than 3,500 species of native bees help increase crop yields with the help of animal pollinators like butterflies, moths, birds and bats, and beetles and other insects.

That makes pollinators vitally important to every human on earth. The trouble is that the habitat for pollinators is shrinking at an alarming rate, and one thing we’ve taken to heart is if you want to have honey, you have to protect the bees, and if you want to protect the bees, you have to protect where they live.

The Pollinator Partnership offers us ten New Year’s resolutions you can adopt to help preserve pollinator habitat where you live. Do as many as you can. We think they are all worthy of your consideration.

1. I will plant native flowers, grasses, shrubs and trees in my yard and garden, promote the use of native plants to other gardeners in my area, and collect native seed from my garden to share with neighbors.
   
   
2. I will provide food for pollinators all year by having spring, summer, and fall blooming plants in my garden and yard.
   
   
3. I will leave leaf litter, stems, twigs and logs in my garden for nesting bees and for butterflies to lay their eggs and overwinter.
   
   
4. I will take steps to reduce or eliminate pesticide use on areas within my control.
   
   
5. I will learn about invasive plants and do what I can to manage or eliminate them from my local landscape.
   
   
6. I will make environmentally-friendly decisions to reduce my carbon footprint in order to help improve pollinator health and habitat quality.
   
   
7. I will support pollinator-friendly farmers by buying local organic or low-spray produce.
   
   
8. I will support my local beekeepers by buying local bee products like raw honey.
   
   
9. I will volunteer to plant a pollinator garden in my community, and take part in local citizen science initiatives. 
   
   
10. I will continue supporting pollinator conservation organizations through my donations.

I am learning about the taste of various honeys, including how professionals advise we practice tasting the honey in the jars we buy. First, they suggest we check the label to see if we’re buying a local artisanal honey instead of  a commercial, mass-produced honey blended together from any number of different hives in the U.S. as well as China, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and other countries. Granted, it’s all honey, but blended honeys lose the taste and smell of specific flowers, whereas local honey captures the flavors of the nectar in the flowers within one-and-a-half miles of the bee’s hive, enabling a distinctly recognizable taste. 

Not unlike wine, professional honey tasters advise we first open a jar and inhale the perfume of the honey, then drop a bit on your tongue, then swirl it around your mouth reaching the roof of the mouth, the cheeks and across the tongue.  Cleanse your mouth with water then repeat the test several more times, thinking of the flavors you are tasting — cinnamon, black cherry, clover, grass, and others. Try to find words to describe the flavor.

Local, artisanal honey really is different. Do me a favor. Buy a jar of Buzz Savories Artisanal Honey and do a honey tasting of your own. I taste clover and a hint of cinnamon, but I would be fascinated the learn the flavors that you identify.

According to the Codex Alimentarius (1981), the internationally accepted standard for foods, honey is the natural sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants, which bees collect and then transform with specific substances of their own bodies. The resulting product is then deposited, dehydrated and stored in the honeycomb by the bees to ripen and mature. The transformation of nectar into honey must be completely made by bees.

The Codex states that honey sold as such should not have any objectional matter, flavors, aroma, or taint, and that no pollen may be removed. It also rules out any addition to the honey, such as water, pollen, enzymes or any treatment intended to change honey’s essential composition or alter quality.

Pseudo Honey 

Honey, alongside milk, milk products and olive oil, are the top three foods often fraudulently tainted by cheap substitutes. Pseudo honey, for example, has been mixed with less expensive sweeteners such as corn syrup, cane syrup or sugar. So, buyer beware. If the product labeled “Honey” costs substantially less than a local honey, it may be mixed with a lower-quality sweetener and won’t have the nutritional properties or the flavor of a 100% real honey.

One way to know for sure: buy your honey from a trusted source — Buzz Savories.

Historians estimate that mustard has been used as a spice since at least 3000 BC, and not long after this flavor discovery, mustard was developed as a condiment when the ground seeds were mixed with the fresh, unfermented juice of wine grapes. It is thought to be one of the first crops to be domesticated, and varieties of mustard were used throughout ancient Egypt, India, and China and soon spread to the rest of the world.

Given such a long and distinguished history and worldwide acceptance, I find it fascinating that the first references to whole grain mustard — where seeds are only partially ground or left whole in the finished condiment — doesn’t occur until the 1970s. The 1970s. Mssrs. Grey and Poupon started selling their Dijon mustard product in 1777.

Whole grain mustards, such as Buzz Savories Honey Mustard and Spicy Beer Mustard are simply mustards that have been ground just enough to form a paste, but not so much that it fully breaks down all the mustard seeds, creating a thick, coarse texture. Whole grain mustard is not beholden to any formula per se, which explains why there are so many artisanal choices online. Most use wine and/or vinegar in their recipe, and a portion of heartier brown and black seeds instead of yellow to provide a little extra punch. Buzz Savories uses beer from a local microbrew which we think gives the finished product a more rounded taste.

I personally love the extra texture and bite of a whole grain mustard. Not only does whole grain mustard make a great spread for sandwiches, but it’s a great condiment to serve with a charcuterie and cheese board. It’s also very pleasant in a vinaigrette, combined with minced shallots, garlic, honey, olive oil, salt and pepper, or as an ingredient in a number of the recipes you’ll find on our recipe page.

If you haven’t tried Buzz Savories Honey Mustard and Spicy Beer Mustard, we hope you do. And that when you do, you find something new to like in the world.

Depending on the circumstances of the moment, the statements “life is short” and “life is long” are both true. However, what’s pertinent to either philosophy, is to beware the dangers of falling into a rut.  

We understand the comfort of a routine, and, sure, it’s fine to have the same breakfast every day or go to a coffee shop where they greet you with, “Hey, how ya doin’ today? The usual?” We get it. But for life to have piquancy, you need to mix in a little change all the time. It doesn’t have to be big; you don’t have to move to Paris or buy a boat. Just do something to prove you’re brave enough to, say, use something different on your hot dog than the same yellow mustard you’ve used since you were a kid.

We can help with that. If you haven’t spent some time browsing through our recipe collection, you should know it’s a good way to find different ways of doing some things you might have fallen into a rut about. For example, we show you how to add a spicy twist to old standbys like grilled corn on the cob, beef stroganoff, deviled eggs, grilled cheese sandwiches and barbecued chicken. We give you several different takes on standard salmon recipes and pasta dishes, and introduce you to the Bees Knees, a gin-citrus-honey cocktail, with a history dating back to the bathtub gin of the Roaring Twenties.

Here’s a suggestion for getting out of ruts like sugar and French’s mustard and adding a depth and richness to your everyday life. Every week, pick something from our recipe collection to try. It’s not a big change, just something a little different. If you like it, hallelujah; if you don’t, it’s not your last meal.

And for a follow-up, you can always take a different path when you walk the dog.

Regular readers know that in April of 2022, we removed a 12’ x 12’ section of sod from the front lawn of my house in Holdrege, Nebraska and replaced it with a pollinator garden.

By replacing plain green grass with a variety of plants that appeal to pollinators, we expect to improve the natural environment for plants, insects, birds and other small creatures in my own yard as well as the yards of a fairly large number of my neighbors.

Now, in full summer, we are starting to see some real action in the garden. Bushy growth of Big Bluestem a native prairie grass, nestles in with the White Prairie Clover and Black-Eyed Susan. And, ahh, here’s a new bloom — this one is one of the Bee Balms, called wild Monardo. The lemon-mint variety is common on the prairies and like all Bee Balms, it is especially effective at attracting pollinating insects. Any day now I expect to be seeing blooms on the Grayhead Coneflower, Stiff Goldenrod, Butterfly Milkweed and Lacy-leaf Coreopsis which are also sharing space in the new garden.

I recommend setting aside green grass space for a pollinator garden. Not only does it get rid of some arguably useless lawn, but it’s also simple to prepare and plant, and requires only minimal care beyond providing water. Then all you have to do is wait for the individual plants to show up and bloom and soon after the pollinators appear. 

PS: I saw a Swallow-Tail butterfly this week too and expect to see more varieties of butterflies as we get farther into in August. A great little gift to keep on hand is the Honey Gift Set with a pollinator seed kit included.