Has anyone here ever kept bees, raised vanilla orchids, morel mushrooms or saffron?

I have these in my garden and expect to see them some time next month. I also have both wild and planted orchids and so far they are all worry free plants. I also have many perennials that are intended to attract both bees and butterflies and they do a fine job. Bee keeping is not on my DIY list.

Beautiful. Isn’t that a wild looking flower? Thanks, Cruiser.

Raised bees 35 years ago, morel mushrooms were picked in old apple orchards in Vermont.

It sounds like you have quite the recipe going there. Don’t forget the ginger.

I received six fall-flowering orchid bulbs from a friend last October. Immediately placed them in containers, and left them outside. After the first frost, they bloomed, and each one produced three delicate strands of saffron. I’m not sure if they need a frost in order to bloom or not, but it did not hurt them at all.

I don’t keep bees, but I love having them in my garden.

Thanks for answering, everyone. Every year about this time, I try to add a little something around here. It’s a nice climate for growing things and my job, if it can be called one, is to make this place self-sustaining as far as expenses like taxes, etc., go. So far, so good, but a little munny in me parse wouldn’t hurt, either.

@Cruiser Are you in a dry or wet climate? North or Southern Lats of the US?

@Tropical_Willie What kind of bees? Did you have any recurring problems?

@Here2_4 Yeah, ginger. It might work in the loamy land above me. I’m thinking about vanilla because I have a grove of large, healthy pecans and mangos that would make excellent supports for them. They have a nice flower and natural vanilla sells and ships well. They require melipona bees for pollination, though. Nice enough bees. Small and stinglerless. They specialize in vanilla and produce an extraordinary honey. If they get into the Mangos, that could only add to the flavor. I have to be careful of the ecological impact on this island. The ranger here checked and said the gov has no problem with the Meliponas as there are more aggressive European Melitas here that will control the population if they trespass into their territory. I see very few here on this part of the island. I’ll test with one colony of about 300 brought in from the Yucatan. Do you know anything about ginger?

@Yetanotheruser I’m not sure either, Strauss. From what I’ve gathered, based on the little bit of literature I have on them and on the net, they require direct sunlight and many sunny days. I’m surprised your saffron survived a frost. Shows how much I have to learn.

What do these four things have in common?

Retirement? Boredom? ADD?

@rojo Challenge. Well, the vanilla won’t propagate without the melipona bees, but that’s about it. I’m just looking for something interesting to do besides run sheep, fruit and pecans.

Well, the saffron could be a plus if you suffer from Gout.

But, I think I would go with the Psilocybin over Morel. Better colors.

And the bees if you like peas.

@Espiritus_Corvus West of Chicago planting zone 5a

@rojo I do get a nasty bout of gout about once a year. How is saffron used for gout? And the peas and bees thing. I don’t quite understand that.

@Cruiser Corn country. Are you on the Fox, or beyond?

@Espiritus_Corvus 3 blocks east of the Fox. Kayak there all the time.

@Cruiser I’m betting you’re in Aurora. I was in St. Charles from January to late August, 1973. Worked for Burlington Northern. I canoed that river all summer long. It was nice. It was also all there was to do. But I liked it. I went back there in 2008 and it blew my mind. Houses everywhere. Nice houses, but Chicago has really exploded since ‘73.

You ever hear about that medical school they had there back at the turn of the century where the headmaster was caught stealing local corpses from the cemetery for his anatomy lessons?

@Espiritus_Corvus
From an old poem I learned at my mothers knee:

I eat my peas with honey;
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.

@rojo Ha. I’ll put that on the back labels.

For gout I use Colchicine (have to get in it Mexico or Canada or pay out the ass for it in US) Colchicine is a drug for gout. It is mentioned by Hypocrites in its natural form, meadow saffron.
Actually, it is not true Crocus sativa (saffron) but Colchicum autumnale.

This is why you can get it much cheaper in Mexico and Canada:

From wiki:

An unintended consequence of the 2006 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety program called the Unapproved Drugs Initiative — through which the FDA sought more rigorous testing of efficacy and safety of colchicine and other unapproved drugs — was a price increase of 2000 percent for “a gout remedy so old that the ancient Greeks knew about its effects.“Under Unapproved Drugs Initiative” small companies like URL Pharma — Philadelphia drugmaker — were rewarded with licenses for testing of medicines like colchicine. In 2009, the FDA reviewed a New Drug Application for colchicine submitted by URL Pharma. URL Pharma did the testing, gained FDA formal approval and was granted rights over colchicine. With this monopoly pricing power, the price of colchicine increased.

In 2012 Asia’s biggest drugmaker — Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. — acquired URL Pharma for $800 million including the rights to colchicine (brand name Colcrys) earning $1.2 billion in revenue by raising the price even more.[23]

Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the FDA. On July 30, 2009 the FDA approved colchicine as a monotherapy for the treatment of three different indications (familial Mediterranean fever, acute gout flares, and for the prophylaxis of gout flares), and gave URL Pharma a three-year marketing exclusivity agreementin exchange for URL Pharma doing 17 new studies and investing $100 million into the product, of which $45 million went to the FDA for the application fee. URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per tablet to $4.85, and the FDA removed the older unapproved colchicine from the market in October 2010, both in oral and intravenous forms, but gave pharmacies the opportunity to buy up the older unapproved colchicine. Colchicine in combination with probenecid has been FDA approved prior to 1982.

In August 2009, colchicine won FDA approval in the United States as a stand-alone drug for the treatment of acute flares of gout and familial Mediterranean fever. It had previously been approved as an ingredient in an FDA-approved combination product for gout. The approval was based on a study in which two doses (1.2mg and 0.6mg) an hour apart were as effective as higher doses in combating the acute flare of gout.
Marketing exclusivity in the United States

As a drug antedating the FDA, colchicine was sold in the United States for many years without having been reviewed by the FDA for safety and efficacy. The FDA reviewed approved colchicine for gout flares, awarding Colcrys a three-year term of market exclusivity, prohibiting generic sales, and increasing the price of the drug from $0.09 to $4.85 per tablet.[

Fox river in Illinois! My neighbor’s cousin had a fishing lake in Plainfield in the early sixties, and we used to go up to Montgomery to net crawdads for the bait tank!

@rojo No kidding? Yeah, Colchicine is great to have around. Itty-bitty white pills. Sadly, I’m quite familiar with them. I’m also familiar with the violent gastric effects: nothing like having to run to the bathroom when you can’t even walk. I’ve always wondered why it’s so bloody expensive, its’s ancient stuff, at least as old as some vasodilators that cost only pennies per pill. Galen’s patent must have run out by now. I wonder how much saffron you need for a couple of doses and if it’s any gentler. This is good to know.

@Yetanotheruser Holy shit. Old school week on Fluther.

@rojo. Thanks for that. Solved that little mystery. So, if these patents of exclusivity were issued in 2009, there should be some cheap generics back on the US market. No? Have you seen any? (I won’t comment on the insanity and outright mendacity of FDA policy other than it just pisses me off and is just another example of that fucking government not working in the interest of its own citizenry).

@Espiritus_Corvus

From what I understand they, like many if not most other pharma industries, “tweek” the formula when the patents are expiring, not altering it drastically but just enough that they can then re-up their patent and keep it out of the generic market.

@rojo Yeah, I think the rule is that it has to be 20% different to be reconsidered. Not sure how the patent office measures that, though. A change like that, legally, would require millions to be poured into phase two studies to get the new formula approved (not so rigorous as a phase three or four for new drugs), but it sounds to me like all you really need is a $45 million bribe to the FDA to git ‘er done. That figures to be about $2.25 mil per percentage point. No problemo.

@Espiritus_Corvus I can walk to Pottawatomie Park and do so every 4th of July to watch the Fireworks.

@Espiritus_Corvus No re-occurring problem, but lost them to severe winter weather. They were European bees from what I could find out, had a hive for ten years.