Green Bean

Dr Porcu lives in a granite Sardinian hilltop town called Berchideddu. A friendly bar-tender, giving directions, jokes that being the community’s doctor is only a hobby really. His preoccupation is keeping 400 colonies of bees and making honey.

The road to Berchideddu climbs steeply up out of Olbia through a boulder strewn Mediterranean maquis. On New Year’s Eve the foliage is luxuriant and green, greedily sucking up the mid winter rains. But the plants here have to be incredibly resilient to the soaring, earth baking summer heat; this landscape is about survival: store and protect. There are abundant strategies; oily leaves and intense fruits like myrtle and juniper, thick fire-resistant bark on the cork-oak, long periods of dormancy for orchids and asphodels, thorns and spikes and fleshy leaves on Indian fig and agave. Beekeeping in this habitat is also strategic, tapping the rich nectar flow as the flowers come and go. The incredible range of distinctive honeys it produces is a quintessential expression of this community of plants and people.

The doctor grew up here. He studied on the continent and although he’s always on call to care for the little town’s health, his training has also helped breath new life into beekeeping for Sardinia. Keeping bees and eating honey has a long history and his combination of science and tradition gives it a future. I find him and his sons are in the honey room, the scene of a lot of recent activity as this year’s crop of Strawberry Tree or Corbezzolo honey has just been extracted from the comb. As the already fine-crystalled honey is being decanted into deep tanks, they tell me that the mild autumn meant that this is the best harvest in a generation.

Exciting news as this remarkable honey is prized for its coffee like bitterness and rarity. Sardinia has been famous for its bitter-sweet honey since ancient-Greek traders visited the shores. It’s difficult to produce, only the strongest colonies will manage to gather any quantity. Now, the bees have gone down into hibernation, but it won’t be long, a month or two, until the spring sunshine will entice them out just as the rosemary comes into flower. If they are lucky, they may get a small amount of pale, herby Rosemary honey. Having worked his bees hard on the Corbezzolo, the Dr is more keen to get them back to strength in time for the spring flowering.

Honey tells the story of a passing season. Capturing for ever in a jar the nectar of a million flowers and the extraordinary cooperation between the apiarist and his bees. A careful beekeeper like Dr Porcu will watch the season as carefully as his bees and harvest honey between phases of flowering. Concentrating on mono-floral honeys is the equivalent to the wine world’s cru. The terroir is the land with its spectrum of flora and it reveals itself in a variety of colours and textures, aromas and flavours.

Some colonies will be kept up in the scrubby maquis where the bees will be able to visit tree heather producing a creamy, nutty, caramel honey. Others will be transported, by night, down to pastures for asphodel and then cardoon. Both plants occupy a niche created by centuries of Sardinian sheep-herding and it is perhaps these two honeys that are the most unique expression of beekeeping in Sardinia. The Asphodel, a beautiful star-like flower enjoys the poor soils of ancient pasture and gives a wonderful, sparkling yellow, delicate floral honey. The Cardoon, an invasive thistle would perhaps be discouraged by shepherds in other countries. Here the dried flower heads served a vital role as an alternative to animal rennet for making pecorino cheese. Letting them grow and picking them as they tended the flock, the cardoon is so extensive that it yields a good crop of a rich spicy honey. It’s an island favourite with roast lamb or the tangy lemon and ricotta fried sabeda pastries.

Until relatively recently, beekeeping and shepherding went hand in hand. Shepherds kept bees in cylindrical hives of cork bark. This ancient practice came to an abrupt end in the 1980’s with the arrival of varroa, a parasite that decimated the wild swarms that occupied the bark hives. Beekeeping had to be re-invented in Sardinia. From that time on, keeping bees, managing them in rational frame hives, became a full time occupation. Before, it had been a supplement to a shepherd family’s food supply and income. Sardinia had gone global, bringing travellers and honey customers, spreading stories of the magical island but bringing modern threats too, like the varroa. Thanks to a handful of older beekeepers that rallied a younger generation to get to grips with commercial beekeeping, the industry is alive and well. Dr Porcu’s knowledge of human health wasn’t wasted on the bees and he’s had an important part to play in helping the new beekeeping community adapt to its modern challenges.

I’m enchanted as Dr Porcu tells me a hundred stories, taking me through the year tasting a dozen delightful honeys. On this winter day, opening the cold glass jars takes me to another season; refreshing, perfumed Acacia, as sweet as the spring air, glorious fruity full bodied Thyme… There’s a whole world here. This is a man who combines two careers but lives a tradition bringing it into the 21^st century. His sons are studying on the continent now too but can be sure that a healthy opportunity awaits them at home to be part of a wonderfully connected and productive relationship with their territory.