Off the Beaten Track: Healing Stings

Marianna with her honey frames

Our guest today is Marianna Holzer, a third-generation bookbinder, who also happens to be Heidi’s sister. She owns the Holzer Bindery in Hinesburg, Vermont, and specializes in book restoration and preservation, a topic that she wrote about for us earlier this year (you can find her bookbinding post here). Marianna is also a beekeeper and her post today is all about the medicinal uses of bee venom. Marianna can be found at the Holzer Bindery website.

 

Nearly twenty years ago, I suffered a mysterious health crisis. One day, without warning, I went completely blind in my right eye. Gradually, my vision came back and then it happened again -- six months later I lost the vision in my other eye.

After much testing and a few other episodes, I received the diagnosis: Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This was a condition I knew nothing about, but after learning as much as I could, I became quite depressed and fearful of when it would strike again. Fatigue is common problem in MS, and I had that in spades. I had always been a very healthy person and loved being outdoors, counting gardening, hiking, and bicycling among my favorite activities.

A friend told me about a man in a town not far from us who had helped folks with MS by stinging them with honeybees. This sounded pretty far out, but I was ready to try anything in order to feel better. My husband, Rik Palieri, and I drove down to Middlebury, Vermont, from our home near Burlington to meet this man, Charlie Mraz, and to learn about the bees.

Charlie Mraz

Charlie, a tall, gray-haired man with a twinkle in his eye, was an old-time Vermont beekeeper who had recently turned 88. As a young man, he had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis until older beekeepers told him that bee stings would be a good remedy for this condition. He wrote their advice off as an old wives’ tale until he was accidentally stung on the knee by his own bees. The next day, he realized that he felt much better. He began intentionally stinging himself with the bees and found it helped so much that he began to offer the same treatment to others.

One day a woman came to Charlie saying that he’d treated her for arthritis only to discover a few years later, when her symptoms returned, that she had MS. Since the bee stings had kept her symptom-free for so long the first time, she thought she’d try it again, and sure enough, it helped!

 

Charlie ushered us into his home where he was helping a woman with severe arthritis by holding bees against her hip and her leg until she received several stings. He then turned to us. He asked me a few questions about my symptoms, allergies, and medications. I asked him if it would hurt. He gave me a test sting on my leg and waited a few minutes to see if I would have a severe reaction. While we waited, he told me about acupressure points and meridian lines (healing pathways in the body), pressing on these points to see if I was sore. Every time I said “ouch!” he chuckled and marked the spot with a red wax pencil. He gave me 7 or 8 stings, telling me to start out slowly with only a few stings, and then he taught us how to handle the bees ourselves.

The next step was to go out to his bee yard to collect bees in a jar to take home. We walked up a few steps to go outside, and the woman he had treated when we arrived turned around and went down the stairs, paused, climbed up them again and paused once more, a quizzical look on her face. After going up and down several more times, she turned to us with tears in her eyes and told us that this was the first time she had been able to climb stairs without pain in many years. It gave me hope.

Charlie gave us an old mayonnaise jar into which he had put a little honey, covered with a tissue, and then added a cardboard roll for the bees to cling to. He clamped the jar over a hole drilled into the side of a hive and the bees flowed into it. He slid the jar off the hive and screwed on a perforated lid. Charlie sent us home with this jar full of bees and told us to get tweezers to hold the bees while stinging.  He said we should come back when we needed more bees or to call if we needed advice or support.

The honey bee treatment I learned from Charlie Mraz is called Bee Sting Therapy or Bee Venom Therapy. It is a form of apitherapy, a holistic medicine that relies on natural products of the beehive to improve and maintain health and to alleviate pain and disability, whether from injury or illness. There is even an Apitherapy Society dedicated to promoting this approach to healing. Products of the honey bee include bee venom, honey, pollen, royal jelly, propolis, and beeswax. These amazing insects have been used in alternative, or complimentary, medicinal therapies for thousands of years.

Marianna's bee hives

Honey bees and their healing venom have changed my life. My husband, Rik noticed a lightening of my spirit right away, I have more energy, more hope and feel empowered, as I have now found something I can do for myself.

 

To keep up with my treatment, I became interested in beekeeping and soon had hives of my own. I loved sitting by the hives and watching those busy little creatures coming in for a landing, loaded down with nectar and colorful pollen sacs on their legs. I felt a return of my love of nature, and rejoiced in gathering the honey to share with friends.

Come join me in watching these busy little workers as they gather nectar for the hive in the following video of my bee yard (set to music by Rik Palieri from his CD, Music in Me).

Off the Beaten Track: Bookbinding—A Family Tradition

Our guest today is Marianna Holzer, a third-generation bookbinder, who also happens to be Heidi’s sister. She owns the Holzer Book Bindery in Hinesburg, Vermont, and specializes in book restoration and preservation. She was recently featured on WCAX TV's Made in Vermont series. To learn more about Marianna and the Holzer Bindery, visit her website. And be sure to check out the WCAX video of Marianna at work.

I grew up in a bookbinding family. It all started with my grandfather, Ulrich Holzer, who emigrated to Boston from a Swiss village on Lake Constance, after learning his craft in Italy. His two sons and three daughters all worked in the business. Everyone loved to read and the story went, “you have to wait for your books to be read by each member of the family before you get them back.”

Our house was filled with books, most of which were beautifully bound in leather with colorful marble paper and gold lettering. Every evening, my father, Albert, would read stories to us from those precious volumes: Mother Goose, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Han Christian Anderson, or Mark Twain. Then I discovered Gone With the Wind, Jane Eyre, and the works of Louisa May Alcott. All these stories stood on our shelves and I wouldn’t go anywhere without a book in hand. We even had a complete set of Dickens, crafted with a blue leather cover and matching marble paper that a long-ago customer had commissioned then failed to retrieve.

Years later I became a bookbinder myself. My father had died when I was still young, but my mother, who’d learned the craft in her native Germany, set up a small bindery in our new home in southern Vermont. There she taught my sister and me some of the basics skills needed to bind books. We made simple blank journals and repaired a few literary treasures for family friends. After college, I discovered a small bindery in northern Vermont and went to work for them. This bindery mended and repaired municipal records for cities and towns all across the United States. What a gift it was to get paid to do what I loved: take care of books. I deepened my skills in creating those leather covers, stamping gold letters and designs on the spine as well as restoring and rebinding books that were falling apart.

In addition to working on the municipal records, I took on smaller jobs—the cookbook that was falling apart, the treasured family bible, the much loved and worn children’s books. Sometimes we would get a request to create a special book for someone’s birthday, wedding, or another special occasion. These were the projects I really loved to work on.

The company that had employed me for nearly 30 years was sold to new owners out of state when the original proprietors decided to retire. This brought many changes, culminating in extensive layoffs. I had collected a lot of tools over the years, which augmented those I already owned, left over from the family’s Boston bindery. Some of them are big heavy cast iron tools like a guillotine to trim the pages, a backer to hold a book while you round the spine with a special, fat-headed hammer, and a big press to press the books in the final stages of the work. Other essential tools are small, like the bone folder, the glue brush, a ruler and good quality, sharp scissors.

I was collecting all these tools with the intention that “some day,” “after I retire,” I would open a small bindery of my own.  Well, that day came a lot sooner than I had planned. After the initial shock of losing a steady paycheck and company health insurance, I am finding renewed joy in having my own family business, working with my husband, Rik Palieri, to repair that abused cookbook, imprint a name on a bible, or make a beautiful cover for someone’s first book.

Our current project is rebinding a book called The People’s Home Library, published in 1917. This copy was in terrible shape with the front and back pages torn and crumpled, many of them falling right out of the book. It is exciting to take something in such poor shape, mend the torn pages, re-sew the book and put it all back together, using the original cover material and making it readable once again. This particular book is so interesting that the customer may find herself waiting for us to read it before she gets it back! Together, Rik and I are continuing the Holzer family tradition of turning old books into new and creating finely crafted heirlooms for future generations to enjoy.