"These utterly unique honeys rank as the best I have ever tasted. American Tupelo, Kiwi Manuka, Australian Jara, Scottish Heather, and Tasmanian Leatherwood, move over! I no longer have any time for my Greek Thyme!! So completely deep, and exotic, are the kaleidoscopic flavour profiles these Portuguese honeys present, my sweet tooth has abandoned ice cream, chocolate, and hard-candy for a clearly superior force. As a wine writer, and long-time collector, I recognise an exemplary palate when I taste the evidence. Well done, Wild about Honey, don't ever become civilised!!! "Dominic
.Dear Friends,
it can't have escaped anyone on this planet that there is a hugely infectious pandemic around and that much of the advice is of course public health advice with regard to minimizing exposure to yourself and to others potentially more vulnerable.
The other and equally important dimension to this is keeping your personal immunity and that of your family robust.
Mental health.
The first thing is catch up on sleep, very little helps more than catching up on your typically sleep deprived self. Typically (according to an NIMH study) most people take about two weeks to restore this sleep deficit. Rest as much as your body needs and when it wants.
Sleeping sufficiently will also restore your adrenals( and kidney chi) and balance out your hormonal and autonomic nervous system. Get out of fight/flight/freeze mode and back to balance. Chronic stress will keep you in fight/flight/freeze mode and exhaust you. Remember most of your metabolic repair processes occur while you are asleep.
If you have a meditation practice or practice something meditative like gardening so much the better. Do more. Your thoughts or stress will diminish your immune responses worse than most things. As Edgar Cayce said "why worry when you can pray". It really amounts to using your mind and faculties in a different way. A healthier way altogether. Keep your humour, even if you are unwell. Do not believe your chronic fear and anxiety, even if they seem warranted, for they are not your friends and they will not help you. Spread love instead.
Pranayama, yogic breathing practices, Chi-Kung, Tai-chi, Nei gung, are all invaluable for creating the conditions of health and strengthening your capacity to deal with pathogens in an appropriate manner.
Medicinal Health
In terms of supplements/ powerful natural anti-virals, use Propolis, you can buy it tinctured or get the raw stuff and tincture it in alcohol yourself. ( will take a couple of weeks). Olive leaf extract is also another powerful anti viral.
Vitamins A Palmitate ( a very bioavailable form) , high doses of Vitaminc C and D. ( get in the sun, as much as possible). As much fresh food as possible given the constraints of supply. Vitamin D and A are powerful hormones which have a profound ability to support and regulate and strengthen your immune system. Sunshine, fresh food, clean and plentiful spring water.
Herbs and Foods
Steam inhalation with essential oils like tea tree and eucalyptus, and camphor or menthol.
If you have access to herbs like Osha Root, or plantain ( not the fruit) herbs with specific compounds for lung health make excellent teas, also don't forget the classic lemon/ honey/ginger tea.
Fermented foods and pickles are amazing, Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Yoghurt, Kefir, are all excellent for your gut health/ microbiome, ( the repository of your immune system-responsible for 80% of your immune system). These are super-easy to make at home and ready in a few days. You can have fun with this too, and do it with your kids (and keep them occupied.)
Lastly Raw Arbutus honey, which also has specific compounds which are beneficial for lung health, general immunity and much besides.
Alcohol - Try not to drink or else minimize consumption, Alcohol plays havoc with you immune response and general hormonal and immune system health.
Vaccines
I am adding this section which I edited out when I first published because it is a subject which has become so politicized and propagandized that it is now a case of an idiotic polarization of you either being Vax or Anti-Vax, for which read science/anti-science. Only people with a vested interest in squashing real discussion or the emergence of knowledge create these kind of simple dichotomies. The Salk vaccine did eliminate polio, and the eradication of smallpox by vaccination were both undoubted successes. ( neither of these were live attenuated vaccines and were given singly) The current advice to stay indoors and socially isolate has a benign social and epidemiological purpose, to stop transmission. This is fine. But unaccompanied by real health advice, and I cannot stress this enough, is hugely incomplete, there is big difference between fighting disease and creating the conditions for health. We have become addicted to a kind of idiotic thinking where we simply see pathological conditions as somehow an invisible malign agent from the outside which must be terminated or killed with some kind of pharmaceutical cure. People don't die from Viruses, they die from an un-calibrated immune response by your own body with a compromised immune system. Every human is broadly the same but functionally, we are quite a spectrum, there is no one size fits all solution, vaccines are no exception and if you give them to someone already compromised you will do them harm. Vaccines are also poorly functioning agents which try and incite an immune response from your adaptive immune system, they can compromise your Microbiome, neural and interferon systems and crucially your own ability to fight illness. We now have live attenuated, poorly tested vaccines, often multiple vaccines given at the same time to children and infants. To aid their efficacy adjutants like aluminium and mercury are added. Remember that when you give someone a vaccine, you are giving them a dose of an illness, one may be OK for a moderately functioning immune system to deal with, many all at once can simply create chaos in the human body. Not to mention the fact that they are poorly tested and never tested together. Please Consider this. Politically and commercially they are expedient and profitable and I have no doubt that i the not too distant future, mandatory vaccinations will be linked to all kinds of social access. Will we all be obliged to take a corona virus vaccine when it emerges? Possibly, and if that is successful it will be a model for future public health policy. Not a future I personally welcome.
In the meantime look after yourself and those you love and anyone else who needs a little help. Stay well, keep loving, keep your humor and remember that despite the grief and despair, in the fullness of time, with patience and courage, this too will pass.
love to all. xR
Dear Folks, we are still delivering orders and will continue to do so as long as the logistics and circumstances permit,
Raw honey has always been a time honoured way of boosting your immunity and general health so it might not be a bad idea to stock up while things are still functioning and available. We still have everything in stock including Raw Arbutus, Thyme, Heather, Eucalyptus, Chestnut and Serra da Estrela Mountain honey. wishing you all love and wellness in troubling times.XR
It has been a while since I ventured back on to this blog, yes, my aversion to all things digital has been a driver (or lack of it) but it's been a crazy year, moving home, changing our entire production setup, emptying the warehouse, just to name a few of many tasks to get from here to there.....so excuses and apologies made, let us proceed.
Summer is the time when we sell the least and buy the most, the majority of all honey is harvested from spring to the end of summer and purchased during that time. It is still the most fun part of the work. Out on the hunt for new bee-keepers, revisiting old ones and of course finding and tasting honey. A most favourite occupation. Especially when things exceed expectations.
So a brave new season beckons and first, the good news is that despite tougher conditions, we met a couple of new beekeepers and we have some truly wonderful honeys to offer. Rich, dark, highly aromatic Algarvian heather, superb complex dark wildflower honeys, robust resinous Eucalyptus, delicate and floral Wild Lavender, velvety Oak rich mountain honey, a superb crop of the mighty Arbutus and some more surprises coming by the end of Autumn, which will be announced closer to the time. Most of the new honey becomes available through the autumn as old stocks run out. There is no exact moment when this happens, it just takes its own sweet time.
Challenges
For the most part the last few years have been incredibly challenging for beekeepers and bees. Mostly climate driven, although the north and centre of Portugal now also have to contend with the Asian hornet menace, a truly horrific and savage predator that decimates the gentle honeybee populations. Spare a thought for Beekeepers who this year have regularly been reporting huge losses.
The Climate situation is now it seems, permanently changed and changing. The temperate zone of the world, the wonderful mid 30 latitudes around the planet, (think California, Portugal ,the entire Mediterranean and Levant, the fertile crescent) which cradled civilization as we know it and has been the moderate, nurturing, fertile growing zone for us humans is being encroached upon in such a way that we now experience, more and more extremes instead, the "sattvic" centre ground is literally being lost to climate extremity the world over, droughts, extremes of temperature and erratic rainfall patterns are now the new normal. Not unlike the the human world where the moderate centre ground is giving way to extreme ideologies. In purely physical terms this is somehow inevitable as the moment that precedes a new equilibrium from one state to another is presaged by extreme change, as potential turns kinetic.
We no longer can choose to mitigate or adapt, we have to do both and more to survive and I am not talking about corporate and governmental greenwash like carbon taxes and offsetting your flights by paying some rapacious corporation to plant eucalyptus trees. I humbly suggest looking at the work of all these incredible people.
Charles Eisenstein https://charleseisenstein.org
Allan Savory https://www.savory.global/
Walter Jehne http://www.globalcoolingearth.org/regenerate-earth/
The BXT Update
Nearly three years and three months ago, one of those changes of state occurred albeit in the political sphere, and we have been in the twilight zone ever since, unable to plan, to move, to build, to consider even how to proceed at all. Like trying to hit a sub-atomic particle, blindfold, with a hammer. The only reason Wild about honey has survived in the UK thus far is that we made the only strategic decision we could and went to Europe instead and now have people enjoying our honey in Holland and Ireland and very soon, Belgium. Sadly after holding our prices steady for three years, we have now been forced to raise them as we cannot absorb any more of the losses from the devaluation of sterling, the costs we have already incurred and the general loss of consumer confidence. Still as long, fingers crossed, we don't have a calamitous crash out of the EU, we expect to be bringing you the very best honey for years to come.
XXR
