Living Through the Honey

Ben Lanier of L.L. Lanier & Son’s has been making pure Tupelo honey—just like his father and his grandfather before him, all the way back to 1898.

by Daniel Wallace
photography by Colleen Duffley and Courtland William Richards

Florida’s Highway 22, heading east out of the renowned beachside paradise that is Panama City, is so straight that if your tires are true you can drive the entire stretch without touching the steering wheel. The highway comes to an abrupt end in Wewahitchka. The locals— all 1,800 of them—call it “Wewa” (which sounds like “we what” without the letter t). It’s a place where everybody knows everybody, and their dogs too. The kind of place where, if you had moved there thirty years ago, you’d still be known as “the new guy” today. It’s a sweet little town.

In fact, it’s very sweet. This is because, for two weeks every spring down ten miles of the Apalachicola River, the tupelo tree is in bloom. Nowhere else in the entire world are so many tupelo trees blooming white in such profusion. During these two weeks, honeybees journey from flower to flower in search of pollen only their tongues can retrieve; with it they return to their apiaries. In these man-made beehives the tasty “champagne of honey” is made—a honey that’s removed and bottled by men and women as industrious as the bees.

Tupelo honey. You’ve heard of it; you may have seen the movie it inspired, Ulee’s Gold. And you may have even sung along to the song Van Morrison wrote about it, the one that compares the syrup to the woman he loves. So, you have to figure this stuff is either really good, or the honeybees hired an amazing publicist.

It’s really good. But what person in their right mind would try to make a living off a crop produced by insects over a period of fourteen days? Frankly, there isn’t one.

Which brings me to Ben Lanier.

Last fall, Ben turned forty-eight years old, which means he’s been in the Tupelo honey business around, oh, forty-eight years or so. And he’s definitely not in his right mind. Ben is the “son” on the sign at the outskirts of  Wewa, which reads, “Tupelo Honey Since 1898 L.L. Lanier and Son.” He took over the business in 1991 from his father, L.L., who took it over from his father, Lavernor Laveon Lanier Sr., half a century before that. Who Ben’s become is due both to nature and nurture, with a dash of his own brand of craziness thrown in.

“I do exactly what I want to,” he said.  “Always have. Never worn a tie, never punched a clock. I’ve never done anything but bees my entire life.” Then, apropos of almost nothing, he asked, “Ever had a mullet gizzard? Mullets are the only fish with a gizzard, you know. They’re real good.”

That’s Ben Lanier. He’s the kind of man one usually describes as ‘colorful,’ but the word doesn’t really do him justice. Ben is all the colors in the big box of crayons. A tall man who used to be taller (“I’ve shrunk a little since I had my back operated on”), he’s funny, as easygoing as a dog on a hot day, and proudly self-described as “one-quarter swamp rat, one-quarter beach bum, and one-half redneck.”

This must be the perfect trait combination for a beekeeper.

I met Ben this past fall, long after the arduous weeks of late April and May. He wasn’t doing a lot with the bees right then. Glynnis, his beautiful wife, was taking care of business: filling orders, talking to customers on the phone, and managing the website from a closed-in back porch at the Lanier home. But Ben was busy. He pointed to his two-year-old son, Heath. “That’s my job now,” Ben said. “Raising him. He’s all I do these days, and all I need to do.”

The only child of an only child of an only child, Heath is next in line for the business, all nine hundred hives, roughly 4,500 pounds of bees all told. But there’s a question as to whether the bees will be there when he’s ready for them. The bees are being assaulted by both nature and man. The Varroa mite is killing them directly, and cheap imports are killing small family businesses. According to Ben, honeybees pollinate sixty percent of all that we eat. He leaned in close then, and almost whispered, “If the terrorists killed all the honeybees, there’d be a famine of biblical proportions. And they’d win. How could you fight on an empty stomach?”

I asked Ben what he would do if the bees were wiped out and the honey they ship came to an end. I expected a somber answer, but Ben just smiled. “I’d fish,” he said. “Live off the land. I’m a hunter-gatherer.” He doesn’t have to go far to gather: the land around his property is full of oranges, grapefruits, okra, peas, and grapes. Although he doesn’t drink himself, he makes wine. He also can satisfy the meaty part of his food pyramid, and he has the guns and the antlers to prove it. They’re everywhere.

But for now, at least, he doesn’t have to don a bearskin and crawl through the forest. The honey is flowing. It begins, of course, with the bee, which makes hundreds of trips from the flower to the hive to make just a teaspoonful of honey. The nectar is deposited in the man-made comb, or plank, and after it’s full, it’s taken to an extractor, a drum that spins and spins, flinging the honey onto the sides of the tank, draining through a spigot. It is then drained through a cheesecloth, bottled, and that’s it: you have Tupelo honey—Northwest Florida’s unique gift to the world.

Ben might hire two or three people to help bring in the honey, but that’s just temporary help. Justin Sizemore, who’s in his early twenties, does most of the labeling and bottling; Louisa Bryant has been lending a hand with the odds and ends for almost thirty years; and Glynnis runs the day-to-day business operations. All this happens in a small tin shed in the Lanier backyard. Ben, of course, takes care of the bees.

And the process of making Tupelo honey requires additional expertise. To ensure that the hive is pure, a colony has to be stripped of the honey that was in it before the bloom began. Then, the new crop has to be removed before it can be mixed with other honey sources.

Timing is critical. What honey tastes like depends on what the bees are eating. Black tupelo, titi, black gum, and other honey plants bloom prior to the white tupelo tree and help build up the colony, but it is the white tupelo that produces pure Tupelo honey. Nowhere else in the world does the tree exist in such concentrations as in Ben’s virtual backyard along the Chipola and Apalachicola rivers and their tributaries.

Tupelo honey is special in another way, too: Because of its high fructose content, around forty-four percent, it lasts forever. In fact, it’s so special, the high-fructose/low-glucose ratio allows some people with diabetes to enjoy it. Fine, unmixed Tupelo honey is more costly than typical honey because it contains no additives and is not filtered, colored, or heated. All the nutrients, living enzymes, and pollen are still there, intact as nature made the honey. To make that happen, it takes someone with real experience. Say, a hundred years of it, which is what you get when you add up Ben’s years in the business and that of his forebearers. The same can be said of his flair for spinning a yarn ... or two ... or more.

The richest storytelling is suffused with the spirit of the past, so it makes sense that Ben can spin a yarn like a natural poet. He spun a few of them in the Wewa office, the house his father was born in, the house where he saw his deceased grandfather lying on the bed. “I was three, and I remember that,” Ben said. “When they told me he was dead I said, ‘Does that mean he’s never going to wear his shoes again?’ ”

That, to me, is poetry.

Later that day Ben drove me to his father’s house. At age eighty-two, L.L.’s eyes still sparkle when he gets to the good part of one his stories. Father and son echo each other in the most fundamental ways, their philosophies consonant. In the end, it’s not about the bees, or the honey, at all. “It’s about people,” both of them told me. “Outside of people, there ain’t nothing.”

The Laniers have friends all around the world. I met a few of them. When I was sitting there talking to Ben, Frank Buckner and his wife walked in for a surprise visit. They’re from Alabama and hadn’t seen Ben in a half-dozen years. I asked him how they met. “Through the honey,” he said. Later I asked Glynnis how she met Ben. “Through the honey,” she said. And then I asked Ben how Victor Nunez came to make a movie about their bees. He just smiled at me. He didn’t even have to say it.

Through the honey. Finally, I got it. What a sweet, crazy life it is, living through the honey.