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ahumanexperiencemoment · 5 years

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“I talk to the kids about bees and tell them about cides. Anything that’s a cide means kill. Anything that means kill is not good. Pesticide, herbicide… we don’t need it. We need to stop it and that’s the most important thing because if we don’t, we not gonna be here....”

What got you involved in beekeeping?

I will never forget stepping on a bee when I was three years old. I stepped on em... I don’t know, I am t three years old, what I know? I stepped on a bee and got stung. Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated with bugs. And then after hurricane Katrina, well, before Hurricane Katrina, I was helping my friend Adrian with bees. He lived over by the Mississippi river bridge, right up from Marti Gras Boulevard. So, I was helping him with the bees before the storm. After the storm, he got robbed three times in less than a month and his wife says, “Babe, we got to go, I can’t stay, I feel so violated in my own home.” So, they found property across the lake and they moved across the lake and before they moved across the lake, he gave me three splits. Which is, you rob a queen cell from a hive, and you put it in with a couple of frames of… maybe a frame of brood and a frame of honey and you hope for the best. He gave me three, two died over the winter, they didn’t make it, but one did and that was it. I got started from there.

When was this?

After Katrina, right about 2006, I started with the bees and then three years later, I am out here at the market and I have been out here ever since. So that’s 2009 or 2010, I been here. Nine or ten years I have been here.

So, you said that you started off with one that survived, what do you have now?

Fifty. So, I’m busy, I make all of this. I make the soup, I make the salve, I make the lotion, I make the sealer, I make everything. I gather the pollen, the honey and then I got sourwood, and I got orange blossom and those come from monofloro…, so I bring the bees to an organic citrus farm in Georgia. Then I got a friend and we do the sourwood in the foothills of the Smokies and when the bees are finished in Georgia, I bring them up to him and he works the bees on the sourwood. And then he says hey, it’s ready so I give him some money and then I got get the bees and bring them back south and I let them winter down in the organic citrus farm area. They take off the wildflower if there is any in the springtime and put empty frames on them. I get there, sometimes they’ve harvested, sometimes they haven’t but usually normally wait till they have done it because sometimes, I don’t usually have a whole lot of time because that’s my busy time of year, the springtime cause I do conventions. That’s the other job that pays the taxes and the insurance and all of that stuff.

The wonderful thing about the bees that it has brought to my life is being able to help people and be able to help somebody with something that they can’t get help for anyplace else. I saved my cousin’s life with propolis tincture and propolis pills. He had pseudomonas and he was in a hospital in North Oak’s Hospital. Six and half months, they couldn’t get his wound closed because the hardware that they put in his back was infected with pseudomonas and told them to take out the hardware and they said they can’t take out the hardware until the wound closes but the infection is not going to go away until you take out the hardware. So, I called him, cause his parents, you know just don’t get along, cause I stand up for and I’ll tell a doctor that he is an idiot as quick as look at him. I have no problem with that. Cause they aren’t as smart as I am sometimes. I’m not saying I am the smartest person in the world but, you know, if you only know what they taught you in those books and what they pumpin through the pharmaceuticals, then you don’t know a whole lot. So, anyway, I went to the hospital, found out that he had pseudomonas. I asked him what he has. So, I took this with me (holding a bottle of tincture) and some pills and we did a little aromatherapy on him to life up his spirits, then I dumped the alcohol based tincture in his back and he is biting the pillow and screaming like I just shot him. Make a long story a wound that a hospital couldn’t get closed in six and a half months was closed in a week.

Wow, that’s incredible.

Right? And I am not lying, I am not trying to sit here and tell you this. I am not going to park the Lamborghini in a six-car garage selling propolis for twenty dollars for half a ounce. It’s just not going to happen. But I am not interested in making money, I am interested in educating people about what needs to be done. And what needs to be done is that we need turbines in the Mississippi river instead of all these fossil fuels that we are using and the nuclear power because what are you doing to do with the waste from that? How about putting it in the backyards of everybody who is benefiting from it, like all of the shareholders? Those people? Give it to them. The share that they have, that’s the amount that they get when the rods are spent. Why not? It makes the most sense. But it’s all at our expense.

So, if you could go back to your eighteen-year-old self or another eighteen-year-old, what would….

I do, I talk to the kids about bees and tell them about cides. Anything that’s a cide means kill. Anything that means kill is not good. Pesticide, herbicide… we don’t need it. We need to stop it and that’s the most important thing because if we don’t, we not gonna be here. Do you know… I am not sure if it’s half a kilo but that’s a pound point one, right? Five hundred grams of glyphosate which is the main ingredient in Round Up has been used on every acre of cultivated land in the world. It is the most widely used chemical on the planet and being used by the megaton every year. Bayer owns Monsanto, Monsanto and Bayer are the largest producer of glyphosate on the planet, yet they say they care for bees. They care for bees as about as much as I care for cockroaches. They say they care for bees, but they just don’t tell you how they care for bees and they could care less. Because if you are producing glyphosate and the neonicotinoids and the nicotinoids, a synthetic form of nicotine that’s toxic to insects, it’s neurological toxin to them. So, when the bee uptakes anything from the plants that have been treated with, the plant concentrates these pesticides or herbicides in the nectar, in the pollen and that’s what the bee wants. So, when the bee takes it in, it can’t find its way back home. So that’s how you have seized colony collapse. And they are saying that’s not true. Well… yeah… okay… but we never had this problem before we have glyphosate and before we had neonics. We might have had some mites, but they could handle the mites because they had a strong immune system but the chemicals that they are giving the bees are weakening their immune systems. So, now they can’t handle the poor immune system and the chemicals and the mites, so they blame it on the varroa (mites) but it’s not the varroa, it’s the chemicals… and that’s my story and I am sticking to it. Because it’s true. How about let’s put some toxic stuff in your water and you gotta drink this stuff, because that’s the only water that’s available to you and it makes your immune system bad. Let’s send you to the hospital. What’s gonna happen? You are gonna get deathly ill because you can’t fight the germs that’s in a hospital. You’re gonna get MRSA or pseudomonas or whatever else is traveling around in the air system cause they really don’t clean that. You could be in the same room and the guy next to you has got pneumonia talking and hacking and you are in there… you are gonna get it cause your immune system is compromised. Well, that’s what they are doing to the bees. It’s not like we don’t have other alternatives. They are just turning a blind eye to it. Nobody wants to hear about biodynamics and health organics. Biodynamics… ya’ll go look that up. Biodynamics, the fruit is larger, it lasts longer, and you get more from the acreage than you do by commercial, chemically fit fed plants and GMOs (genetically modified organism) and all stuff like that. I’m not saying GMOs are all bad. It’s bad that they treat them with the glyphosate. They systemically seed coat it and that’s when the glyphosate concentrates in the nectar and in the pollen. If they didn’t systemically seed coat it, it would be alright but then they couldn’t spray it with round up and the plants would live. They are genetically designed to resist the glyphosate and that’s why they can seed coat it with it. And it can concentrate in the nectar and it doesn’t bother it (the plant). But if you don’t think that’s not going to hurt us in the long run, you got another thing coming. Every commercial on television is, oh, try this medicine. Ask your doctor about this. Then the next commercial that comes on is “Do you have Mesothelioma? Have you been exposed to asbestos?” Okay, well that’s a chemical that something we were using in housing and in brakes and everything twenty-five, thirty, fifty years ago. Or what about the other, the mesh that they put into your stomach? Or the medicine that you took that caused lymphoma? Or whatever, because one commercial is about the lawyer that’s suing the drug companies and the other is about get this from the drug company. It’s crazy. I mean, I am talking to doctors and stuff and they don’t even know about this (pointing to her tinctures and salves). The doctors don’t know about ichthammol, do you know what ichthammol is? Drawing salve, black salve?

I’ve heard of it.

Yeah, you use to could get it at every drug store in the world. You can’t hardly find it anymore. You can find it at the feed stores. It’s drawing salve. Like if you get a bruise? My grandma use to put it on us to draw that bruise out, like that. We used to put I on our hands when we would catch shrimp. You go to pick the shrimp and you put them in the scale to weigh them out and you get the little tips in your fingers and you can’t grab them to pull it out cause it has barbs on it. And the little cuticle, like cuticle material, you can’t pull it out, it breaks. But if you put the black salve on it, slather it on it, it would back out. You can use it on horses when the horses run in briars and stuff. They would put it on to draw the things out. You can still buy it at the feed store. If you ask a doctor what it is, he doesn’t know. Most of them have no idea.

I got run over by a car in 1990, I had a bruise on my leg that went from here (pointing to her hip) to here (pointing to her knee). The doctor said, that ain’t going away. I said, pfftt.. makes you an idiot. So I says, I will be back. I gotta come back and see you anyway. I said the bruise is going to be looking good by then. I went back six weeks later, and I slathered my leg with ichthammol and I’d sleep with it like wrapped around my leg like a diaper. He couldn’t believe it (bruise was gone). I was like, ya’ll don’t know everything. You are not even trying. Because one way is not the only way. When western medicine meets eastern medicine and you put the two together, we’re gonna have something. But when the left hand don’t know what the right hand is doing, we still stuck.

Gina Lanier

Gretna, Louisiana. 2019.

#ahumanexperiencemoment #Gretna #gretnalouisiana #gretnafarmersmarket #beekeeper #bees #save the bees #louisiana #LifeStories #life

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