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By: Stephen Bishop
I try to live and let live, but I draw the line on people who put sugar in grits. Just last week I learned that our new county 4-H agent practices that heretical approach to grit cooking. It makes me wonder how effective new-hire drug screenings are if they can’t detect someone who uses such a simple illicit substance as granular glucose in grits. Just think of all the farmers who worked hard to plant, tend, and defend that corn from earworms, all so she could later defile it by sweetening something that should always remain salty. A good helping of salt (enough to raise your blood pressure about twenty points) is the only granular substance allowed in grits. In her defense, she was raised above the Mason-Dixon line where people must sweeten their inferior corn product, hominy, to make it edible.
And in my defense, I’m somewhat sensitive to the wasteful misuse of sugar. I think most beekeepers are. Sometimes I like to think about the good ole days when buying sugar didn’t require a down payment and thirty-year mortgage. What confuses me is how the price of sugar can spike and nearly double while the price of honey barely budges upward, even in a period of high inflation. To put it another way, why is the price of sugar so volatile while the price of honey is so inert? I’m sure there is a reasonable answer, but even if I knew what it was, it wouldn’t alleviate my apprehension while I’m waiting in the checkout line with a grocery cart full of sugar.
When I first started beekeeping, I remember thinking that I was never going to feed on point of principle because feeding sugar to bees was unnatural. Somewhere along the line I realized that losing bees to varroa was not fun, but losing bees to starvation was an absolute misery because it could have been so easily prevented. So now I feed bees on point of principle because starvation seems cruel.
And I think I can chart my journey through beekeeping by the size of sugar bags I buy. I started with 5-pound bags, then 10-pound bags, then 25-pound bags. In a major milestone, this year I just bought my first one-ton sack of sugar. The front-in-loader on my tractor could barely lift it. I was worried because it would have been just my luck to save money buying bulk sugar only to have it destroy my tractor, but thankfully I was able to get it unloaded and stored away without incident. I’m not sure what my next milestone will be — maybe a helicopter airlifting in a 100-ton sack of sugar?
Anyway, you might be wondering how you go about procuring a one-ton bulk sack of sugar? That is a good question that I don’t rightly know the answer to either. The way it worked for me is I met a well-connected beekeeper who knew a guy, who knew another guy in the restaurant industry, who knew a supplier who knew how to get bulk sugar. To be honest, I didn’t ask many questions. All I know is the bulk sugar was half the price per pound of 25-pound bags at the grocery store, plus I didn’t have to make multiple trips to the grocery store throughout the year to empty out the sugar aisle. Nor did I have a worry about an off-duty police officer spotting me with a cart full of sugar and suspecting I might be making moonshine.
Needless to say, I now have more sugar than I know what to do with. That said, you’ll still never catch me putting sugar on grits.
