Bees and herbal medicine with Susanna Raeven

Bee Medicine with Susanna Raeven
Susanna: And every single individual entity is defined by a common goal that defines everything that's being done and not being done in this huge community where everybody has their place. And it's like a web of life in a wooden box in its most precious constellation. I just love bees. They're so amazing.
Lana: You're listening to Plant Love Radio episode number 64.
Hi there. I hope you're doing well. I have a question for you today. Do you have a sweet tooth, even if you said no. I bet honey and maple syrup, a two sweeteners you enjoy in your diet because I often struggle with my love for sweets. I've been educating myself more and more on the topic of bees and the medicine.
And my today's conversation is a perfect example. My guest Susanna Raven is a community herbalist wisewoman, medicine grower and owner of Raven Crest Botanicals. Susana holds in her heart, a deep connection to the plant. She lives with the plants in her gardens and studies Earth-centered spiritual ceremonies and cultures.
While practicing Western herbalism, Susanna applies the concepts of Traditional Chinese Medicine in her work and calls on wisdom of healing, master plants from the Amazon. She offers herbal consultations, leads plant walks and is a guest teacher of Arbor vitae school of Traditional herbalism, and she hosts herbal retreats on the beautiful farm in upstate New York.
In today's discussion we look at how working with the plans can sometimes feel like performing on the theater stage. We discussed five important bee products, their medicinal properties, and their use considerations. At last we'll look at some pretty interesting controversy, for example, why you should stop using products that incorporate Royal jelly.
This conversation has been recorded before the start of pandemic. So we talked about retreats and other activities of the farm and apothecary. So I just wanted to let you know that farm and apothecary are open, but the retreat center will reopen in 2021. At last I put together a quick guide on bee products we discussed today as a podcast bonus. You can find the link to podcast bonuses and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at https://plantloveradio.com/64. Enjoy.
Lana: Susanna. Hi. How are you doing?
Susanna: I am so good. Thank you so much.
Susanna's begining in herbalism
Lana: I am delighted to have you here on the show. Wanted to begin our conversation by exploring ways in which you started herbal medicine. How did this path begin for you?
Susanna: It began a really long time ago when I was little and I'm living in Germany with my family and my mother Catalina. She was always very interested in medieval herbalism specially, herbalism by Hildegard Von Bingen. She was a nun who had a great protectors in the Catholic church and she was a visionary and have these beautiful downloads and dreams, and really, really deeply connected to the natural world, especially to the healing powers of the plants.
And eventually she was actually allowed to go and build her own cloister that she built herself with a group of nuns and kind of do her own thing out there and work with the plants. But so she was working with these medieval recipes. And I was probably around eight or 10 and my mom would be out in the garden, little porch and she would whirl calendula called Ringelblume in German. And she would get pork lard because that's what people in the middle ages used to make salves that didn't have Italian cold press olive oil, and she would make a salve for the rash for the dog. And she'd boil the blossoms in the pork lard and then put it on the dog. And I was just, maybe it was even a little bit in puberty, but I was basically, "mom, what are you doing?"
So I was really not interested at all at the time. It was just a little bit of a mother daughter relationship going on. But my mom, worked with a lot of herbs and she always brought yarrow into the house and made tea and other tinctures for other people.
So she had a beautiful green thumb, and she was very, very, very inspiring for all the people around us. Maybe less for me when I was at that certain age. I have a very green thumb myself, always used to have beautiful plans, beautiful porch when I was in Brooklyn. I used to be an actress actually. And, that's what brought me to the United States. I went to acting school and I had like an eight to 10 years run. And then I got into a little bit of a crisis because I was acting a lot, but not really making any money with it. And I'm very much of a perfectionist.
It was, it was hard to continue. And so eventually I stopped and I got into a little bit of a crisis and I was like in my early forties and I just didn't know anymore what to actually do with myself. Because I always felt that acting, theater was my inspiration, you know, just being on stage.
And being really connected to the part, becoming this character that somebody else wrote, just losing, you know, own essence and letting it merge with this other, being that somebody else created in this perfect production with a scene partner just with you and the director is great and the audience is with you and everything is just comes together.
And it's like a beam of light that enters through the top of your head and you just become pure inspiration. And you just ride this wave that just that's writing, that's creating itself. Moment to moment. And everything's really when everything is exactly how it's supposed to be. You know, there's, there's no one stirring anymore.
It's just the ship that becomes the captain, such a beautiful moment. And I just couldn't have that. You know, I didn't make it as an actress. This is so much competition and I had an accent and so I stopped acting and I just didn't know anymore what I was supposed to be doing instead.
I was really lost. I was working in IT at the time. And I just became frustrated and bitter and sad and all those things. I was like, Oh my God, this is terrible. So I started meditating. I started exploring healing modalities for the mind. We got this beautiful property in upstate New York, like an hour drive out of Albany.
Very much all tucked in the woods in the middle of nowhere. This beautiful old farmhouse from 1795, that used to be the living quarter of a saw mill owner. So there's still the foundation of the saw mill in the woods. So I left the city because I didn't want to be just a New Yorker who doesn't like her job and is otherwise not very inspired, but needs to make all this money to pay the incredibly expensive rent.
So I moved to the country and I just realized how healing it is to just be up here and not in the city anymore. I think that was just really the biggest transformation for me to just find myself and find a new purpose or maybe the purpose that it was always supposed to have. But anyways, I started meditating.
I started working a little bit with plants. And in a very deep meditative state, I had this huge download that came through. And it was just this very simple voice that just like you have to work with medicinal plants. And it just clicked because everything about that thought and this house owned and the vision and everything that came up when I heard that sentence felt exactly like that beam of light that came through the crown of my head into me when I was on stage In this beautiful moment that I just described before. It was exactly the same.
And I was just so overjoyed to have found this insight, was like hint from the universe. It was like nudging me. Like you can do other things. You can do this. And everything about it felt completely right. And so I was a good girl and I took it , like the angels had spoken to me and I took it and I signed up for my first herbal class .
And started planting herbs in the garden, just a few in the beginning. I didn't have a greenhouse that ordered seedlings and, and then 12 years later we have Raven Crest Botanicals, which is a medicinal herb farm, and then herbal apothecary and the retreat center for earth centric practices.
And we're still expanding and exploring how we can share the medicine, all the medicines that come from the land with as many people as possible. But what I find really sweet is that, you know, after all those years of doing all those other things, how I feel like the plans have always called me. Right.
They have called me when I was a child. They have called me through my mother, you know, through my ancestors and I didn't hear them back then. But then when they called me again, when I was really low and I just need to hear something from somewhere else cause I didn't have any ideas anymore.
It's just so beautiful how they found me. It's almost like they were always there and they were just waiting for this moment where I actually asked so I could hear the answer. It was really beautiful.
Lana: It is such a beautiful story. And it also has a couple of things that really, excite me, Hildegard, didn't start writing until she was a little bit older. Is that correct? So I think that, your inspiring story tells us that it's never too late and that plants always have a bigger plan for you. Sometimes you might not realize that this is what you are meant to do here and to be here, but it will come to you. It will come to you. Maybe it doesn't come in your childhood. And for many of my guests here on this podcast, it happens early on. But not always. And so I really love this story.
And then the other piece that really excites me is your ability to recognize that this is the guiding light, that this is something that is really telling you that this is your path. So thank you so much for sharing it.
Wearing many hats
Lana: You mentioned that you wear many hats, you're a wise woman, you're a community herbalist. You're a herb grower, a medicine maker, a beekeeper, you host retreats, you steward your land. How do you take all these facets and how do they come seamlessly together for you?
Susanna: Yeah. I always have a lot of irons in the fire. I think I'm very much a fire person, you know? So I'm an Aries, I'm a fire horse. Winters are a little tough for me, yes, I can rest, but I need to see green. Green is so important for me. I went on a vision quest five years ago and one of the really important insights I received during my time out in the wild that I may never, ever, ever again, spend a whole winter in upstate New York without going away at least for a couple of weeks to recharge on the color green.
So I need to be either in the jungle or in some tropical green could be Ireland. It has to be green, very, very important. But yeah, a lot of irons and a lot of fires and I've always been like that. Even when I was little, if you sent me to a buffet, I have to have everything on my plate, I have to try everything.
It's just a part of my personality, I like to embrace a lot of things. I like to think of it as really as a symphony of life, also with my music, they cause on top of all of that, I'm also a musician. I have a band called the Tribe of Love, and we playing healing medicine music.
So all of this, actually it comes together to me. It just fits my being. I have a lot of facets to share and I thrive most when I'm actually able to express them all at the same time.
Bees and Tree Medicine
Lana: One of the areas that I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into, today is bees and tree medicine. I wanted to ask you if you remember how you began working with bees.
Susanna: Wow, we've been here at Raven crest for, I think this is our 15th summer. And I don't quite remember why actually, but we got our first beehive, two or three years after. I think it might've been a Christmas present from my partner. I think maybe he mentioned, Oh, we should have some bees. And so I got him a bee kit and we got our first two bee packages that summer. And then ever since , it's such a beautiful addition to the land. We have a lot of wild pollinators and wild bees, but we've had honeybees on the land now for the last 12 or 13 years. And, last winter was the first time when we lost all three hives.
So sad. And it was it's the first early spring where we didn't have any honeybees and the garden felt empty. I really missed it. You know, the Crocuses, the very , very first blossoms on the trees, the puppies that come up really early, there just weren't any bees until we got new hives installed this year.
So, Yeah, it was hard to see the garden without honeybees. I love them so much. And just the energy, the sound of them buzzing, the bees together with the hummingbirds together with a wild pollinators. It's such a beautiful expression of life in the garden. And it's so crucial for our survival really. A huge percentage of our food actually depends on pollinators.
And, so I just love to create the sanctuary here. And we have so many hummingbirds here and we feed them and we plant plants particular for the hummingbirds. This working with the plants really calls and working with pollinators it's the same expression of Gaia. It's just all in extension. The Blue Jays are an extension of the Oak trees and the bees are an extension of the plants. So it's really all one story.
Lana: That's beautiful. Thank you.
Herbal Medicine to support the bees
Lana: You mentioned that this winter you lost all your three beehives. So you had to bring new bees to restart the process. I found it absolutely fascinating that you give them the sugar water, but you're making it into the tea. Can you talk a little bit more about this concept of supporting the bees with herbal medicine?
Susanna: The first time I heard about making a bee tea, is from the local beekeeper where I purchase most of the honey from, that is in the larger batches of our medicine, like our fire cider and elderberry syrup that we're making here because I don't really collect our honey to make medicine.
It's just really, for our own sweet tooth and a little bit of Rose honey that we making. But, he's an older gentleman and he says, yeah, I always put some thyme in there. And I collect some herbs and put them in there and, you know, some dandelion, basically the flowers that they also would be foraging. And I read up on it, and then I also saw this really interesting interview by Paul Stamets on YouTube. He talks about the bees were coming and stealing the woodchips or the sawdust that he had inoculated with reishi spores. And they were basically carrying them off and like bringing them into the hive.
And they actually tested in a lab the lifespan of a bee if she has reishi mushroom, when adaptogenetic mushrooms in their food, compared to not when they're exposed to toxins. And so what they found out is that the reason why bees are so, so susceptible to environmental toxins is because they don't have the ability to detox.
Lana: Interesting.
Susanna: So it's just builds up and a bee that goes out into fields of GMO, Roundup sprayed, whatever people spray it in the gardens. Yes, it's mostly Roundup and it's mostly Monsanto, but if I go to the hardware store, there are so much chemical toxins that everybody can buy. It's really terrible what people buy and put on there, lawn of all places. So the dandilions don't come up, which is such healing medicine for people, but it's also healing medicine for the Earth. We just eradicating the medicine that is freely given to us. And so they're just absorbed and collect and store all these toxins in their body.
And so I think one of the reasons why the lifespan of the bees is short is that one is just the physical exhaustion, but also just the accumulation of pesticides in that little bodies. And, so adding reishi to the bee tea, I hope that I'm making a difference. Paul Stamets in his research found out that giving them reishi mushroom or other mushroom extracts actually expended their lifetime quite a bit, which means that it helps them to detox. And so we use reishi mushroom as humans too, to detox because it's bitter and it has a detoxing effect on the body.
It's has a great affinity to the liver. It's a liver protective, so it protects the liver from toxins, but also helps the liver to flush toxins out of the body. So it seems like it works in the same way on the honeybee.
And then besides that I'm giving them the strengths of the root that I put in and the sunshine of the blossoms that I've put into the tea. And I know, well, that's not the same as having them eat the honey that they collected. I know it's not same information, but it's a, it's a gesture. And I think it makes a difference and they really, really like it.
Lana: I agree with you.
Bee Products
Lana: I want to ask you to talk about the bees themselves and things they create that we use nutritionally and medicinally. So whether it is honey or propolis, bee pollen or people and Royal jelly, all these things. Can you tell us a little bit about the cycle and the products you utilize in your own medicine making or in your cooking or in general?
Susanna: Sure. Yeah. So a beehive brings into the hive every day water, bees need to drink quite a lot. So if you ever install a beehive, you have to make sure that you have a good accessible water source, not a pool where they're drowning, but something where they can land, maybe a water Lily pedal where they can land on at the edge the pond. They're bringing in nectar and they bring in pollen. Those are the three things that they're bringing in and then sometimes a good parts of the year they also bring in a resin from tree blossoms and trees themselves.
Honey
So let's start with honey. Maybe that's the most common one. So they bring in nectar, which that turned into honey.
The bee has a little extra stomach that it uses to transport the nectar that it drinks. And then once the forager bees go back into the hive, they regurgitate the nectar and they pass it on to the worker bees, which are all female, by the way. They are all daughters of the same queen, that received the nectar and store them in the wax cells.It's really brilliant because when you look at the wax foundation and you look at the beautiful cells, there are tilted up about one or two degrees. So when the nectar goes in there, it doesn't run out because it's very liquid. And then they fend the water out, so it becomes just 18% water and that's then honey. And so the honey is used to feed them in the winter. So they got capped with a little bit of wax, so they don't dry out and they feed the babies with the honey. And so we extract honey. I don't take a whole lot of honey from my bees, I actually love for them to have enough honey in their hive to feed themselves through the whole winter.
So I want them to be able to enjoy and nourish themselves on what they're supposed to be eating. So I take maybe six frames from a super that's on top of three or four hive boxes. So very, very, very gentle. But what happens in the industry really is all the honey gets taken. And what we feed the bees instead is sugar water versus honey as a living food, full of vitamins and digestive enzymes from the bee digestive tract that is passed on from one bee to the other. It's a living food that has a lot of nourishment and life force in it and sunshine. Jacqueline Freeman and her book 'Song of Increase' even talks about how the bees when they're store the honey in their hive, they collect different nectars in different times of the year. It's basically like a calendar. When they're store them in this way, during the long, cold winter month when they don't leave the hive at all, they can actually relive and re eat what the year has provided them with.
So by us taking all of this away and just giving them white sugar instead, it's really a crime, to the species, to the beings that live in the hive. We let them work so hard. One forager bee collects enough nectar to make an eighth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime, which is very short. They actually just lived like five to six weeks. And they forage for about two to three before their little bodies start to give out from all the hard work that they've been doing.
So that's honey, and it's a beautiful food. It has a lot of pollen in it as well. So working with local honey from a local small-scale beekeeper can really help you to get slowly use to the pollen that are in your local area.
So that can be really nice. It's also a really beautiful wound healer. So if you have especially a burn wound you can just put a little bit of honey on, and then just a little bandaid over it or a little gauze, and that can be really healing. It's very, very healing for burn wounds and so if you ever have G-d forbid something really bad happening, just putting honey on, because burn wounds just dry out. That's like the biggest thing and the honey just seals it.
So honey is completely anti-microbial. No pathogen, no microbes can live in there because it is so hungry for water because it's so little water in it that as soon as a bacteria going, it actually sucks the water out of the organism.
And so honey itself is antiseptic. Even mixing honey with water still has antiseptic properties. So we can even use that just as a wound wash. And it's delicious. And we use some honey here that we infuse with our own herbs. So we make a Rose petal honey, tulsi honey and lemon balm honey, a thyme honey, that's all made with fresh herbs and it just sits in the honey for six weeks and it's delicious and has beautiful properties.
And sometimes we use that to sweeten a tincture we're making for someone or something, especially bitter. We take the edge off a little bit with those. So that's honey, honey comes out of the beehive.
Beeswax
They make a beeswax. It's actually made by a little gland that they have in their abdomen. And they kind of scrape it off and then they use it to build their wax foundation.
They need to drink a lot of nectar to be able to make wax. So if there's a slow nectar flow, we call it, if there's not a lot of nectar flowing right now, either because it's just too dry. Plants are also depending on the moisture in the world around them to able to make a lot of nectar. Or it has just like rained and rained and rained, they can make less and less wax, so they need a certain condition. And sometimes, especially when you install a new hive, it's quite helpful to give them a lot of food in the very beginning. So usually they say you should give them sugar water for three months just to establish, to make it easy for them.
So something that we do here is rather than doing that because they do need extra, especially when you install a hive in April or Mary, there's not that much nectar out there yet. It starts in June. So we make a bee tea. That is a very, very strong tea of dandelion root and calendula and chamomile and lemon balm and lemongrass.
And we add some reishi to that as well, to support their immune system, to help them detox. And then we add the sugar to that. So yes, it has the white sugar in it. And that's the sugar that they need, but that is a good way to support them better than just giving them sugar water if they need something.
So that's the beeswax and we use beeswax in our apothecary here to make our creams and balms. Sometimes I get it from a local beekeeper when he has some extra, happy to use that I don't really take beeswax from my bees. I just have three hives and I just leave all the foundation in for them. But it can be used to seal wood and, wonderful sealer and, used in a lot of cosmetics of course.
Pollen
So we have, Honey, oh pollen. Bees carry the pollen in that little they're called pollen baskets. They're really not baskets. They actually just hair that they have on the back of their legs.
I just love sitting out there and watching the bees and the bumblebees like roll around in the pollen bath, and I'm thinking this must be so much fun. It's so lovely. And then they use their front legs and they kind of everything that they have on them. They have it on their eyeballs.
They just have it everywhere. They just brush it towards the back of their legs. Then it gets stuck on those little hairs than they have on their back legs. And they carry that home and they actually don't eat pollen themselves there for the babies. So pollen are high protein, and they're always stored around the cells where the queen has been laying eggs.
So they usually in the brood box, which is usually a little bit lower in the hive. And, and so they just have them right next to their babies and they get fed, with that. And then they're also of course, store pollen for the winter because the queen keeps laying between a thousand and fifteen hundred eggs a day. Depending on the type of bee it could be a little more, a little less, but they need to keep feeding their babies through the whole winter to keep the colony large enough so they can actually create enough body heat by the size of the drills of bees that keep the clean, safe and warm in the middle.
So yeah, collecting pollen from the behive really means you're taking away the food that was collected to feed their brood.
Propolis
Lana: Can I ask you to talk a little bit about propolis? Because this is one of the substances that we also get from the beehive. What is it about, how is it used? Why is it important?
Susanna: Yeah, propolis as one of my favorite medicines, actually. Propolis is tree medicine made by bees and the bees go out and they collect resin, either early in the year from tree blossoms. So for example, poplar and birches create a certain amount of resin, a little bit of sap, but they're also collected from conifers like pine and hemlock and other firs. And they're bringing it into the hive. And they mix it up with a little bit on nectar and a little bit of pollen and a little bit of beeswax.
So it has a little bit of everything. Everything is in there and they turn it into so many different things that are crucial for the health of the hive. So propolis means before the city, propolis is a highly anti-microbial very highly antimicrobial substance. It's an antifungal, antiviral, antibiotic. It's a great immunostimulant, it's an antiinflammatory. It's kind of all of these medicinal properties. And so one thing they do is they create footmats like a little carpet of propolis at the end entrance of the hive. So when the forage of bees come in and they have pathogens on their feet, they kind of like walk over propolis to neutralize that then the line every cell that the queen is going to lay an egg in with propolis, creating an antiseptic stairwell environment for the nursery.
And propolis is brittle when cold, but like chewing gum really soft when it's hot. And so on hot summer days they sealed a hive with it from the inside, making sure there's no drafts coming in. There's no other animals coming in and they'll also create these structures to redirect air flow inside the hive.
So it's incredibly versatile and they use it for so many things. So when we take propolis from the hive, I just take a little bit, usually when you open up the hive, you need to use a hive tool to open it because it's sealed. We can't just open. It's actually stuck. And then you can scrape some of that propolis often you just get a couple of splinters every time when you open it, but you can extract it straight into a hundred percent alcohol vodka by itself doesn't work. It has to be a hundred percent alcohol because there's nothing water soluble in there. It's all resin. Then that can be used externally and internally in so many different ways. Sometimes people ask me, well, if you were stranded on an Island, yes, let's have me stranding on an Island please. But if you would strand on an Island and you could just take one single medicine with you, what would you take? And that's really hard for me to say, because I love everything. I don't have favorite children, I love it all, but if I would really have to make a choice, I would probably take propolis which is a really big thing to say, you can use it externally, you can use the powder, you can put it in a cream, you can use the alcohol. If you just use a little bit of propolis tincture on a small wound, the alcohol will evaporate and it will make a liquid bandaid, that's super healing, super good wound healer. you can do the same thing in your mouth. It actually seals your gums. So if you have open sores in your mouth or really sore gums, it tightens your gums. So it's really great for oral health. You can take it internally, it boosts your immune system. You can use it for ulcers. You can use it for food poisoning. It's like a great thing for you to travel with.
if you go to a country and you know the food or the water might not sit well with you, I always take propolis before I go on the plane in case everybody else is sick around you on you can just inhale it. It's really incredible it's smells like coffee, vanilla cinnamon, honey.
It's just like so many different essential oils that are in there. and, yeah, it's a really great wound healer and really great immunostimulant. So if I work with cancer patients, it's not the cure for cancer, but I almost always add propolis is to the protocol and you can use it in acute infection. So. If you go like, Oh God, I just ate something. Or I have a flu coming on. Just take a lot of propolis.
You can take 30 drops three times a day. That's a good high dose, but you can also just take every day. it's basically a complete healing agent, that's so dense . It's beautiful medicine and it comes from trees, but it starts with the sap that they collect, but it's actually made by bees.
Lana: That is so beautiful.
Royal jelly
Susanna: And then there's Royal jelly. So Royal jelly is a very, very special like a creamy substance. Nursing bees are bees that have just hatched and they're called nursing bees because as soon as bees hatch they take care of the brood in the brood chamber, where they just came out. And they have this little gland on the top of their head that produces Royal jelly. And they have it just for about two weeks. So for two weeks, they can collect it from the heads and feed it to the baby around them.
And then that gland stops working and they become guard bees and they move into different areas in the hive. So a bee starts out as a nursing bee, then she becomes a worker in the hive, maybe building foundation. And then she might be a guard bee for a couple of days, and then she becomes a forager bee.
And that's the life, the work and life cycle of a of a worker bee in inner beehive. So every bee actually does everything for time in there in her life.
Lana: And so you said that they live?
Susanna: They live for about four to six weeks.
Lana: four to six weeks. Wow.
Susanna: It's short. Yeah. And so that's why it's so important that the queen is healthy and lies enough eggs so to make sure that the colony has a certain amount of bees to be able to go out, collect enough food. Right. And, then also have the size of a colony big enough to survive the winter.
One of the reasons why they don't live that long is because once they start foraging, that's when life becomes really hard, right? So they go sometimes a mile, you know, like they go quite a ways if they find something really close, but if they find a good food source they can fly also further.
And just being back and forth and being eaten by birds and getting entangled in a spider web, getting swept away by a rainstorm. And at some point their bodies just give out, you know, their wings become frail. And they usually die often outside. Sometimes I see bees that really want to come back into the hive with pollen and the guard bees don't even let them in anymore.
Because they already see that she doesn't have the energy to really support the hive anymore. And you can see them. They just die outside. They just give up, they just go to the side of the hive and they just die there. And if they die inside the hive, the worker bees bring them outside. So there's always like a little pile of dead bees in front of the hive. And that's totally normal.
I do want to say another thing about Royal jelly because that's in a lot of cosmetics and I have a really strong opinion about that. So Royal jelly is given only to the babies. And depending on how many days the babies are fed Royal jelly defines the sex of the bee. So, if it's just for a few days, it will become a worker bee. If the larva is fed a few more days, it becomes a drone, a male, a male bee, and a larva that's fed exclusively Royal jelly turns into a queen.
So that is magic. That is a magical substance that defines the sex organs that are developed in an insect, it's incredible. It's so precious. It doesn't get stored anywhere. It just comes straight from the nursing bees pharyngeal glands and he goes straight to the babies.
They basically pour it into the cell where the larvae swimming in. So when you look at it, you know, they're like swimming in Royal jelly from the first few days. And, and so we taking this out to put it on our faces as a cosmetic tool to make sure that the wrinkles don't show and it's really hard for a beehive to give up that substance because really the only way to force a beehive to make more and more Royal jelly is to remove the queen from the hive. It's just an earthquake that goes through your existence and it pulls the carpet underneath everything they're designed to do because the health, the mental and physical health of the hive is defined by the health of the queen, but the presence and the health of the queen and the pheromone, the sex hormone that the scent of the queen is what holds the whole hive together.
And so by taking the queen out, there's a great uproar, great confusion. It's a huge amount of stress on the hive because without the queen, the hive can not survive. Nobody's laying eggs. So that means without the queen, we need to make a new queen. We need to make a new queen now. They give them frames that have superseded cells on them that have a larva in it, that have an egg in it. So the whole hive is like, Oh my God, we have to make a queen. So they keep pouring Royal jelly. And the amount of that, it's like a superseded queen cells like this big, it's like a quarter inch or like half an inch diameter. They work like crazy and all the nursing bees, everybody puts the Royal jelly in there and then they just come and scoop it out with a spoon. And that goes into your cream. So it's like the abuse that is created for the whole hive, everybody's in there. This constant state of stress to create Royal jelly, but we just scoop out and put into cosmetic product is mind blowing to me.
So I know Royal jelly has beautiful healing properties and some people need it for, and it helps them for certain diseases. And I think if that's the case of Royal jelly is the only thing that helps you, then use some. But having Royal jelly in your smoothie every morning or needing to have Royal jelly and your facial cream it's just wrong. That's just how I feel.
Lana: Thank you. Thank you for talking about this. I think it's very important and very powerful for our listeners to understand and to know.
There are some people that are afraid of bees and especially of being stung by a bee. And also there are different types of procedures right now where someone will get a facial being stung by the bees. Can you please talk about this?
Susanna: Yeah. yeah. So only the only the worker bees can sting, drones don't have a stinger, they don't collect food that don't take care of babies. The only task that drones have is to mate with Queens from other hives during their Virgin flight. And then they come back to their own hive and they're beg for food.
And they're heavily supported by the hive. Every worker bees feeds the drone when he asks for food, because this a very, very important task is to spread the gene and the energy of that queen, that lineage out into the wild. So make sure that her lineage can continue in other hives as well.
So they actually spreading their medicine amongst each other, right. Amongst the different hives. but yeah, a worker bee when she stings, she offers her life, in defense of her hive , it's a sacrifice. The stinger actually has a barb and when it penetrates your skin, there's a little sack that has the poison in it. And when she sets the stinger and flies off, it actually pulls the poison sac out of her body and she dies. And, I imagine that being a very painful process. But there is the hive mind which I find so, so incredibly fascinating, which is the consciousness of the hive that evolves around the wellbeing of the queen and the queen evolves around having her gene pool and her lineage, to be continued in the world.
If she's a strong queen, then she will lay a lot of eggs and a lot of drones from from her lineage, we'll go out and mate with other Queens. So there's this incredibly large population of individual beings. there's usually between 50,000 and 90,000 bees in a thriving hive in the middle of summer.
And every single entity, every individual entity, is defined by a common goal. That defines everything that's being done and not being done in this huge community where everybody has their place. And it's like a web of life in a wooden box in its most precious constellation. I just love bees. They're so amazing.
And so, yeah if the hive needs to be defended either because you sit too close to it or you come and steal a honey you know, a bear comes, And they come and sting you and the scent of one bee stinging you there's, everything is done through scent in the hive, you know, makes all the other bees really, really angry as well. So if you get stung once it's a good idea to move away really, really quickly if you're not protected, because it's very possible that more will come to make sure that you move away even further than even faster.
Lana: That's great, sometimes people are afraid of being stung by the bees because they think that bees are more interested in us than they are in flowers. Do you agree with that?
Susanna: No, no, I don't agree that that. There are other pollinators like yellow jackets. They're quite territorial and they quite aggressive. And if you get stung by a wasp wasp, don't have that barb in their stinger. So they, the same wasp can sting you over and over multiple times.
And I'm actually really allergic to wasps. I'm also quite allergic to bee stings. So I wear my bee suit and my gloves.
Sometimes in the summer, especially when you just install them, really early in the summer when the nectar flow is incredibly strong, so there's a lot of food coming in and everybody's just really happy. There's a vibration of the beehive in early summer like June, July, that Jacqueline Freeman calls the song of increase. And that's also the title of her book in which she recorded conversations that she had with her bees. It's such a beautiful book. So if I was recommend any bee book, to get to know bees, I would recommend that one. And, it's incredible, just actually sitting next to a hive with or without a bee suit, if you're allergic wear a bee suit, but I actually get pretty close in early summer because everything is just so abundant. And if the queen is healthy, that keeps everything together. They really are not interested in you. They're just so busy going out for more nectar, bringing in more pollen, getting the drones out to meet other Queens. It's just in and out. And there are guard bees. And sometimes like last year I stuck in my head a little bit. I was pushing it a little bit. I just came a little bit close to the entrance and I want to see a really close and a guard became and bumped me right on the forehead. She didn't sting yet, she just bumped me. And then you have about three to five seconds, time to move really quickly. And if you move quickly enough, she's not going to come after you. And she's going like, Hey, what are you doing? Get outta here.
What was I talking about? Sorry, what was the question?
Lana: I don't remember what the question was, but I will definitely include the book that you're recommending. So thanks so much as far as resources. And so I know you were telling me earlier, this experience that you had with your, bees and your beehive, where you were able to move them, can you share it with us?
Susanna: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We installed three new beehives this spring and one of them swarmed, last week. And so that happens because the queen is really strong. She lays so many eggs so quickly and they just run out of space and in the box. And even though I gave him some space, I just want to expand. And it's such a beautiful expression. It's like, we want to, we want to fly. We want to go wild. We want to go to other places, explore the world. And so what happens is they make another queen and I'm usually the emerging new young queen fights the old queen to the death because they can only be one queen in a hive.
That's usually how an older queen goes. She gets defeated by her own daughter that just hatched out of her queen cell. But when a hive is about to swarm, what's going to happen is the old queen takes about half to two thirds of all of the worker population with her. And they leave the hive and they find a new home, where those scout bees think it will be a good location for them.
And then you queen just takes over the old realm. And so she basically reigns over her sisters in the beginning until she starts laying her own eggs. And then she needs to go out on her Virgin flight mate with drones from other hives, come back and then she will take over the hive. So both Queens actually survived.
and so what they do when they swarm, I don't want to call it party. It's like a festival, like all 10,000 bees all up in the air and they just. The sound of that it's incredible, like this cloud of bees with a queen in the middle, impossible to detect, cause everything is buzzing around her.
They go on their plane, just a temporary spot to rest. And so that's typically, when you see your swarming behive, it looks kind of scary because there's thousands of bees hanging in the drove. You know, sometimes they sit on a car sometimes set on an electric wire, or on a tree branch. And then, so they just rest there for a moment and they're sent out scout bees that will look for the perfect location for them to move in.
And then once the bee scouts come back and they had a democratic decision process about which place will be the nicest that all take off. And then they go to their final destination. So having, a swarm type, like that is a good opportunity to add another hive to your garden.
And what's really beautiful about this time is that since they don't have any babies and they don't have any honey and the queen is like all the way in the middle of this drove of worker bees, they don't really have anything to defend, so they're not aggressive, they don't sting.
So very different from opening a beehive and working with them there. I try to convince them to maybe go back in a box and be part of my garden. But they were actually on a tree trunk. It's usually easy when the hang on a branch, because you can knock on the branch and they all fall into the box that you put underneath.
But these were actually on a tree trunk and they were impossible to knock off cause they were kind of half on the ground. So I put my bee suit on. And it was in a thicket too. It was really the perfect hiding spots. It's a miracle that we even saw them go there. But I trying to convince them to maybe, go into this box that I offered them.
And so I put some honey field frames in there and some frames that already had a little bit of beeswax foundation, make it easy for them. Look. Here's a house that the fridge is full. There's a couch in the living room. You could just move over here. It's a foot away if you wanted to go. But of course I don't go without the queen.
Right. Can't just obandon the queen for an Ikea home. So, I try to get as much of the hive into the box, hoping that I could also move the queen. So I just sat in the thicket with my bee suit and I actually took my gloves off. and I had read from Jacqueline Freeman that based on like, to be brushed or rushed.
So they don't like to be brushed into a bag or anything like that. And she had mentioned to work with feathers. So I had this really big buzzard feather, and I just sat on the fallen tree right next to the bee and for an hour and a half, I scooped table spoons of beas with this big feather off the drove of this clump of trees, like really carefully just putting the feather in and just kind of asking them to walk on.
And then when you pull the feather off the actually all hanging on each other, it's like a chain of bees needs to climb up and then gently shaking them into the hive box that are offered them as a new home. And, It was amazing. It was thrilling. And at the same time, incredibly calm.
And I felt so focused and in the moment, just so incredibly present because really the possibility of being stung by so many bees, even though just my hands were being exposed. The power that the hive has that they don't abuse. They only use it when they have to. Bees don't sting you, when you just walk by. And I have to say this, if you have a queen less hive, they're just very confused and very aggressive because there's just nothing that really holds them together.
But in that particular situation, a hive that's just was incredibly generous and they actually allowed me. They're allowed me to do that for an hour and a half. And then eventually I got stung by just one. And I think it was because I either squished her a little bit or maybe I came a little bit too close to the queen. Cause I was kind of getting into the middle of it. So I stepped away.
Then I said, okay, so this is all I do. If you'd like to go into the hive box, it's here for you. And they didn't, the next day they were all back out on the trunk and then they were outside in the rain for a day and I put a roof over them, so they wouldn't get wet. And then I put a hive box on top of them with honey and went up to eat and then they went back into the cloud and then the day later, their scouts finally came back and they all took off to be wild and free
Lana: Oh, wow.
Susanna: And it was beautiful. And I just wished them well, it's like, I don't need another beehive.
I just offered it to them. You know, she would like to stay here. You know what the box is like, cause he just came out of a box, but you want something else? Go, go and be free. Be a wild bee. That's beautiful.
Lana: Such a beautiful story. And it also has this element of poetry. It almost feels like a ceremony. And I think it's a great transition for us because ceremonies and retreats is something that you do on your land right now. And I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about that.
Ceremonies and retreats
Susanna: Yeah. Yeah. Raven Crest is not only in herbal apothecary. We also a retreat center, for herbalism, yoga, meditation, and other Earth centered practices. Also we have Songbird retreats to find your voice and vocal transformation. Yeah, that is something that is just another fire that a really big iron went in with a lot of enthusiasm.
Three or four years ago I decided, Oh, this land is so beautiful and the garden is so lovely. We should have a retreat, let's invite people and come up and learn how to make herbal medicine. And so we did, and we didn't have guest houses yet back then, people were just sleeping on the floor in the main house, cause that's all we had. But the garden is the garden in the plans. So everything was already there that we really wanted to share. So it was very simple. But I remember that at the end of that weekend, people have beautiful transformative experiences and everybody left so bright and shining and happy and inspired and connected. And I sat here on Sunday evening and it's felt same as the stage and working with the plans, it had the same energy. It was like, everything is aligned. Everything has purpose. Everything is just what it wants to be, what it needs to be. And so we started offering retreats. And so over the last three years, we have added a lot of beautiful buildings on the land.
We have a 10 sided reciprocal roof, Woodlands temple, that sits 20 people in a circle of where we hold classes. When it rains, it's heated. You can do yoga in there, do sacred council and any kind of circle work really, meditation.
We have an outdoor dojo that has a transparent roof, in the woods. So you can also meditate or teach or they fits 20 people well. So 20 is right now our magic number. It's like a good number, so the retreats stay personal, but also the amount of energy of people that's the land can support easily. And, we added two new beautiful guest houses where people can stay.
We have two swimming ponds. They have a permaculture forest garden. That's just five years old. It's really starting to come together. We have the beehives, we have a big vegetable fields. We used to also cook for retreats. So lots of produce comes from the farm here that we spent lots and lots of time planting and preparing in the spring. We're almost done now. And so that's Raven Crest right now as well. So we are retreat center and we offer all sorts of events here. some of them, I teach, I also have other herbalists come. I have yoga instructors and meditation instructors from New York city come on. So the retreat center is also open to be rented by other teachers, which I really, really enjoy because now people that are interested in yoga and meditation come to enjoy the place as well.
And, what I really, really love is the feel of the land when there's people here. We work a flower essences so I work very closely with the subtle energies of the flowers and the plants. And sometimes when people come here, especially a retreat that I have re learn how to make flower essences and connect with plants in this way and learn how to actually communicate with the plants.
And how easy that is and how subtle and beautiful to bring yourself into a place where you're so calm and so quiet that you can actually hear what is being released, transferred, said on the other side, comes from the plant. When I walked through the garden when I have 10- 15 people in the garden, and that all make a flower essence that are so deeply connected to the plant world that they can actually have a communication. And I go out in the garden I just feel everybody is so happy, not just the people who are making the essence, but the whole land is just so happy to be seen. and I feel this so often, like when we go out into nature and we actually look at some moss and it's just incredible when you actually just take the time to get onto your knees and look at a detail that's just mind blowingly beautiful and complex. And just so precious that the Earth it's so longing for us to recognize and see her in all her beauty, which is really what I feel this world needs right now. It's us connecting with Earth that we need to get off our phones, off of social media, off of TV, off of the news even, just to actually unplug from that and plug into the Earth itself so that we can really feel own connection, our home, our source, where are we all coming from. We are Earth, we are Earth children. We're not separate from her. We are an expression of Gaia. And so by helping people to connect with a piece of land to pray for the waters tomake a plant mandala, to bow, to the energies of the four directions, to harvest medicinal mushroom and make an immunity broth or teach people how to make their own medicine, let's you realize how important it is to fight for her wellbeing and her health.
Lana: Very very beautifully said. Susanna, I have a couple of more questions for you. So as someone who is listening about this and getting as excited as I am about visiting Raven Crest one day, how can people find you on the web or social media? How can they learn a little bit more about you?
Susanna: Yeah. So we have a website https://ravencrestbotanicals.com, and that has all the information of everything we do. Really. There is a whole product line we make 70 different herbal remedies, skincare products. We make tinctures, elixirs, love potions, moisturizers, facial mists, massage oils, smoke blends, really lovely teas that are made with all the herbs grown, dried and hand harvested on our land here. And there's also a section about retreats. So the full retreat schedule.
And then we are on Facebook, on Instagram, Raven Crest Botanicals. So if you just look for Raven Crest botanicals, you will definitely find us.
Lana: Okay. I will definitely include the links to these resources in the show notes. And my last question for you is, do you have any parting thoughts for our audience? Whether something on bees or something in general would be great.
Susanna: I really wish for this world and for as many people as possible to go outside and connect. Finding the beauty in nature and the gratitude for those gifts and the deep connection that we've been denying for such a long time. That is so essential to, to connect us to our own soul, to our own spirit, to feed our spirit, to get us out of this rat race of city life and indoor and fluorescent lights, but to actually go out and get some sunshine and look at plants, go forest bathing, leave your house. Get off the couch and go somewhere green. I'd like to share a poem. Okay. I was, I was in the Amazon and I had a really, really beautiful, deep experience there.
And I connected with the color green in an incredible way while I was down there. And from that experience emerged this poem. And I think that's why I like to close it with.
Green is the color of your heart chakra
Is it the color of love
Green is the color of mother earth
Is the color of her love for all her children
Green is the color of mother Bear licking her cubs
Is the color of father Wolf teaching his young to Howell
Is the color of the Eagle eye watching over all of us
Green is the color of a dolphin's heart
It's the color of whale song
Green is the color of your heart chakra
It's the color of love.
Lana: So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much
Susanna: Thank you. That was so much fun.
Lana: Thank you for joining me today. I hope you've enjoyed this conversation with Susanna Raven. If you'd like access to podcast bonuses or any of the resources mentioned in today's episode, please head over to https://plantloveradio.com/64.
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The music you hear in the introduction was written by a neighbor of mine, David Scholl and it's called Something about Cat - my deepest gratitude to Bill Gilligan for this opportunity to play it.
Thanks again for being here today. I really appreciate you. Till the next time, thank you for loving plants and planting love!