The Hindu : Front Page : The borders melt for these bees

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Oct 01, 2007
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The borders melt for these bees

MT. HERMON (Golan Heights): From a dry riverbed on this frontier mountain, under a fortified outpost where Israeli troops peer out at their Syrian enemies, Efraim Ezov sends his Israeli honeybees on daily sorties into Syrian airspace.

The result — dark, herb-flavored and reputed to enhance virility — is a unique honey from two countries that have been waging hot and cold war for six decades.

“Borders are a human system. Bees have no borders,” said Ezov, wearing a white protective suit and mask. The air was thick with yellow-black insects buzzing between their wooden hives in Israeli-controlled territory and the pollen-rich flowers across the front line, just 500 yards away and sealed to human traffic.

Ezov chose Mt. Hermon for his hives because of the distance from human settlement and agriculture, with its pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and because the mountain is home to about 250 species of wild plants that exist nowhere else. He says pollen from all of those plants together gives his honey its distinctive taste and purity.

Special ingredient

The key ingredient is ferula hermonis, a flower known locally as zallouh. It was familiar to the doctors of ancient Greece and the Islamic world for its effectiveness in improving libido and fertility, according to Stephen Fulder, an Israeli biochemist and pharmacologist who specializes in herbal medicine.

But although preliminary studies have shown some success with rodents, no studies have been carried out on humans and there is nothing conclusive to back up zallouh’s reputation, he said.

That has not dampened the plant’s popularity, especially in Lebanon, where it is dubbed “Lebanese Viagra.” — AP

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