Apalachicola Riverkeeper Cameron Baxley knows her river well. Her job is to advocate for and monitor the health of the Apalachicola River, its watershed, tributaries, shores and sloughs and everything that lives there, including the Tupelo tree.
As she boards her boat, she reflects on the importance of tupelo honey to the area of Wewahitchka.
“Not only is it a big lifestyle iconic thing for heritage, cultural thing for the area, but it was a big industry. It still is,” Baxley says.
Tupelo honey gets its name from the flowery tree that grows on the floodplains. From late-April to mid-May, the Tupelo blooms and beekeepers travel throughout the sloughs to collect and pollinate the flowers.
The honey industry is so ingrained to Wewahitchka culture that they have a Tupelo Festival each year to celebrate their own 'liquid gold'.
However, the lack of new sprouts, emergence of competition from other species, and manmade destruction of the natural floodplain has put the Tupelo in jeopardy. These issues caught the attention of John Tracy, a researcher at Louisiana State University.
"When I came to Apalachicola, I did observe that the majority of sprouts or younger tupelo trees were all sprouts coming off of the older trees, and I struggled to find successful young seedlings that had started from seed," Tracy says.
Tracy says younger Tupelo trees are struggling to survive past sprouting phase due to the overcrowding in the canopy.
“The reason why that is important is because that can impact its ability to compete with other species around it that are better adapted to drier environment,” Tracy says, species like the water hickory and oak tree.
These competitors to Tupelo grow taller and sprout a larger canopy which crowds out the needed sunlight for the Tupelo and competes for the same water supply.
“So it's less about these trees dying as a direct result of a drought event, but more so about the fact that it impedes their ability to compete with other species, and it allows those other species to work their way down into the swamps, where they then crowd the canopy,” Tracy says.
The first part of Tracy's research is to begin removing some of the local invasive canopy layer to allow the Tupelo seedlings to access sunlight.
“So we think it's important to kind of speed up the restoration process by removing those local invasives and restoring that tupelo regeneration underneath,” Tracy says.
Tupelo trees drop their seedlings into the river in the fall, where the seeds sink down into the floodplain then sprout in the spring when the waters begin to recede. But sometimes, nature sends a double flood, causing the saplings to wash away and die before they even begin to grow.
“That's when they're the most delicate," Tracy says. "That pulse, if it lasts long enough, can flood these seedlings and essentially choke them out to a point that we do have mortality of that entire seed lot.”
Tracy is currently working on crossbreeding a seed of Tupelo to become more resistant to a potential second flooding.
“An advantage their competitors have is that they have a heavier seed with more stored carbohydrates in it," Tracy says.
"With that advantage that allows them, their strategy is that they sprout more gradually throughout the growing season. They don't sprout everything all at once the minute the water drops out of the system. So if you get a second pulse early on in the spring or summer, you might. Their competitors might lose a few seedlings, but they're not going to lose all of them. And so whereas you might lose all of the tupelo oaks and hickories, which are their competitors in this case will have additional seeds that can sprout in those areas for the rest of the season.”
Then there’s the floodplain itself.
“There's these direct spoil sites where right at the spoil site, you're seeing where it dumps out,” Cameron Baxley says.
Baxley, the Apalachicola River Keeper, is talking about the work originally done by the Army Corps of Engineers.
We just finished zig-zagging up Sand Mountain, a towering deposit of sand on the rivers banks. At the top lies an area of desolate land, covered with weeds and small patches of grass. In the distance, you can see where the old riverbank used to be, with hardwoods and a new tree canopy present.
Baxley stops to catch her breath before explaining how the deposit has been carried down throughout the rest of the river and its channels.
“The other thing that people don't really see is that if you go back there, there's a whole slough back there that all this sand, that affiliated sand basically got blown out because they did overcapacity and it topped the berm," Baxley says.
"So they they did that across the river, topped the berm, went over capacity blue that whole thing out came here did it here. Kept doing it. So basically you're getting all this stuff. That's kind of a I think of it like waffle House hash browns, like smothered and covered. And so it's kind of smothering and covering a lot of the wetlands.”
Baxley explains that in the early 2000s the Army Corps of Engineers came out and dredged some of the sloughs with large mountains of sand.
Over the past two decades, storms, wind and the power of the water have shifted the sand down the river and throughout the floodplains, creating another layer on top of these wetlands, and limiting the amount of nutrients that the Tupelo’s are receiving.
According to Baxley, there’s no one willing to take the sand, but there is hope that the sand can be reinvigorated with new vegetation, like willows.
"If you re-vegetate it, all that root stuff, you know, whether it's grasses, some of the native grasses, their systems are like crazy long," Baxley says. "So if we could do, you know, grass along the slope and willows up top and revegetation it, then that stabilizes it. And it's just so it's kind of jumpstarting it a little bit.”
There are also rumblings of the Army Corps returning to the river in 2027, a solution that upsets local beekeeper Ben Lanier.
“All the Army Corps of Engineers do is screw up what God made," Lanier says. "That's all they ever done. That's what daddy said. Daddy said God, in his infinite wisdom, didn't know what he was doing when he made that river crooked. So the corps went over and cut curves out of it, pump it full of sand. He had no love for them at all.”
Lanier is a part of Lanier, LLC, a local beekeeping company located in Wewahitchka. Lanier says that his family has been in the Tupelo honey business for five generations and he has spent his entire life around the bees.
“I remember getting stung on the lip when I was two years old, down on 40 acres of land," Lanier says. "I remember that plainly and my mama got a straw and had drink through the straw all afternoon. I've just always had it because I've never had a job.”
Lanier is not worried about the Tupelo leaving entirely, but he is concerned when it comes to the idea of the Army Corps coming back to offer their expertise.
“They've already got it screwed up. They need to stay out of the swamp. They don't need to touch another. Nothing out there. They never, ever need to come back to my riverfront.”
While the idea of the Army Corps' returns is still just thoughts in the wind, others are preparing to take next steps to continue the honored tradition of Tupelo Honey along the banks of the Apalachicola.
John Tracy, the LSU researcher, wants to plant his test seeds next year in a partnership with Riverkeeper Cameron Baxley. Tracy says the best time to act is now.
"When we start to see shifts that happen over decades, that's when we know that something unnatural is happening and it's likely an anthropogenic impact going on there," Tracy says.
"So this is where we kind of have to step in. And this is where restoration becomes critically important to maintain functions that are not just important to the tupelo honey industry, but that also impact the health of the entire system and particularly the Bay ecosystem in this case."
