Royal Jelly

Baleen and I spent a warm, San Francisco Sunday morning at Mr. and Mrs. Combover’s loft in a transitional SOMA neighborhood. Blood relatives might remember this as the loft that Baleen and I housesat for a week two Decembers ago where she learned that transitional, in this case, means walking to the bus in the pre-dawn darkness, and turning a corner to find a boot in her face, Karate Kid style, followed by two sharp jabs to the chest. When she finally turned around after just barely escaping contact, she saw the homeless black belt bent over a sidewalk tree, furiously digging out the dirt. Daylight dangers persist, but in a new form: Mr. Combover’s 20,000 rooftop bees.

Mr Combover, the Steve Irwin of domestic beekeeping, has dug deep into this niche audience of apiarists who, before the internet, used to collect in the hallways of suburban Holiday Inns once a year or mail each other photocopied pages of collected wisdom, and done what niche audiences don't really do: made it approachable. He fascinated us for an hour with tidbits from a few months on the job. Highlights include: his bees don’t sleep, they work work work for six straight weeks, then die dead; they can fly at speeds up to 20mph and find flowers to pollinate up to two miles from the hive so if you live in the Marina, you haven’t seen his bees, but for all you Pac Heights residents, don’t peel those bananas; bees can’t talk, but they can dance, which they do on the beehive dancefloor which is where one bee tells another by shaking it’s stinger this way or that, “check out the flowers over that way, sister,”; Chinese and Indian men might soon come a calling as the colony is at least 90% female; but most important of all, royal jelly, and a little bit of luck, turns normal bees into queen bees, Cleopatra to thousands and thousands of drones and workers.

So I’m searching for the equivalent concoction that will turn Baleen from just any old 200 ton mammal into the Queen of the Ocean. There’s lots of experimenting to come with plants and animals, cooked and uncooked, as solids or liquids, to be drunk or chewed, but nothing swallowed with a plugged nose, for royalty might require sacrifice, but taste just isn’t on that list. Not for Baleen at least.

Penne ala vodka or royal jelly?

Carrot and celery juice? Or royal jelly?