When one 1,200-pound tank is full, I switch the tube leading into it to one of the others and empty the tank. When I am extracting honey, I process all of it without heat and empty the bottling tanks into sixty-pound plastic containers with tightly fitting lids to keep out moisture. Throughout the year, before I make sales trips I will warm the honey enough to break down its crystals. Unheated honey tastes better than heated, but unheated honey crystallizes, and American consumers prefer honey in liquid, not crystalline, form, so I must heat and bottle it before I can sell it.
But now we are simply taking honey from the combs as rapidly as possible, to preserve its flavor and quality, and putting it into sixty-pound storage containers. We have set ourselves the goal of running twelve extractor loads through the system each day. We can do that before the worst of the August-afternoon heat makes the job too uncomfortable. Some supers are fuller than others, but normally it takes us about four or five days to extract all the honey we have harvested in three. When we are finished, we head back out to the beeyards and fill up the honey house once again, repeating the whole process until every super is emptied of honey.
Harvesting and extracting honey is hot, heavy, repetitious labor. Because bees are lively, complicated and unpredictable animals, and therefore interesting, and because honey is just honey, I find this part of the operation more like work than the rest of it. I am grateful to have such a hardworking and good-humored partner as Tony to help me.
Over the past five years Tony has made his spending money by cutting cordwood, and so as we drove around to the beeyards we talked about wood and woodcutting. I told him I had cut most of my firewood for winter, but that there was one tree out in back of my home beeyard I was going to have to call in one of the neighbors to fell. It is a big tree, and the sixteen-inch bar on my chain saw is too short to go through it in a single cut. I’ve never dropped a tree so big, and I was afraid of making a cut on each side. On the last day Tony worked for me in the honey house he brought along his own bigger chain saw.
“When we’re done in here,” he said, “I’m gonna go out and drop that big tree for you.”
And he did, too. The best helper I’ve ever had.
When Tony leaves in the afternoon, I like to go back into the cabin to shower away the layer of stickiness and weariness that has accumulated from a day of working in the honey house. As the shower pours over me, I think what a fine plan it is that honey is soluble in water. My feet ache from standing on the concrete floor of the honey house, so after my shower I like to prop them up, drink a cup of coffee, enjoy the comfortable tiredness that comes after a day of hard physical labor and contemplate my good fortune at actually being able to make a living by associating with a bunch of bugs.
Later on, at sunset, I have more work to do. The honeycombs still have a small amount of honey left in them after they are removed from the extractor. It is too little to try to remove mechanically, but too much to leave in the combs when they are stored for the winter, because it would attract cockroaches and ants. So each morning at dawn, before the bees start flying, I have loaded into my old half-ton truck the supers we processed the previous day and driven them out toward the woodlot. During the day the bees have removed every last trace of honey from them. On the first day I took out a load, the bees, of course, did not know it was there. But within a quarter of an hour they were sure to have discovered it and recruited their sister workers. During the day, thousands of bees worked feverishly on the cleanup. Having learned the position of such a splendid source of food, they were waiting for me the next morning when I drove up, circling impatiently in the air above the spot where the truck had been. By the fourth day, they knew the time I’d be there—5:30 A.M.—and they kept their appointment with me and the pickup all during the rest of the harvest. After the last day that supers have been cleaned up and stored, I know they will still wait expectantly in the same spot for several mornings, hovering in the air in the dawn light at the spot where the truck has been parked in days past. At sunset—as the bees start to return to their hives, and before the nocturnal wax moths start flying—I have been walking out to the truck each day to drive the load of clean supers back to my storage shed, where I unload and fumigate them.
Wax moths are a problem for beekeepers who store empty comb-filled equipment in all but the most northerly parts of this country. Without bees to keep them in check, wax moths who can find ways into the supers will lay their eggs, which will hatch into hungry larvae. If a beekeeper stores comb without fumigating it to kill them he will find nothing but the ruined skeletons of comb, ropy webbing where the wax-moth larvae have worked, and frass and cocoons nested into the wooden frame parts when he opens the supers up in the spring. So I fumigate as I stack. I use para-dichlorobenzene crystals, one of several fumigants available. The vapor from the fumigant is heavier than air and will kill larvae below it. I stack three supers on a pallet, tear off a corner of newspaper, put a tablespoonful of para-dichlorobenzene on it, place it in the center of the super on top of the frames and then cover the top with a layer of newspaper to seal in the fumes. I repeat the process above the newspaper layer until I have reached the roof of the shed and have a stack twelve supers high. I place a cover above the final newspaper sheet so that mice cannot get into the stack and make nests.
The para-dichlorobenzene fumes kill live wax-moth larvae, but they do not affect the eggs adult wax moths may have laid, so in ten days I will have to repeat the process to kill any new larvae that may have hatched out in the interim. I leave no supers uncovered, and I seal up any cracks or holes I find with duct tape so wax moths cannot squeeze in and lay new eggs. After the second fumigation, the stacks of supers should be safe from wax moths if they are not disturbed in any way. The para-dichlorobenzene crystals break down rapidly in warm weather, and after a few days the fumes dissipate, so by springtime, when the supers are ready to use again, there will be no residue left in them.
Yesterday evening, I brought in the last load of supers from this year’s honey harvest. I was in a hurry, because I had other work to do in the evening, and so I went out for the supers a little too early. It was still light, and I knew there would be many bees left on the supers. The day had been hotter than usual, and after my shower I had slipped the most minimal of sundresses over my nakedness and called it getting dressed. But before I walked out to get the supers, I pulled on a pair of heavy socks and workboots to walk through the pasture back to the truck. I often see copperheads on that open ground. Copperheads are the shyest, least aggressive snakes I know. Their dearest wish is to slither away from a human being, but if I were to step directly on one, he would strike to defend himself. A copperhead’s bite, although not fatal, is poisonous enough to make me sick, and so I wear boots when I walk through the pasture. In my sundress and Mammy Yokum footwear I must look the real hillbilly.
Not only honeybees, but wasps and bumblebees as well remained on the supers in the truck when I got to it. Some of them blew off as I drove back to the storage shed. I knew that the ones remaining were so singleminded and intent on their work that they wouldn’t bother me while I unloaded the truck, so I climbed up on it and began shaking each super free of bees as I unloaded. The bees swirled around, hardly noticing me as they worked and as I worked. When the bees were shaken from the supers they fell to the truck bed, and some of them began flying up underneath my sundress. I could feel them crawling across my skin. The bees were in a good mood, to be sure, but it was asking too much of them not to sting when they discovered they were trapped under the dress. I didn’t want to be stung, so I peeled off the sundress. Once they were freed from the confining cloth, they flew away peacefully and I continued to unload the truck inside a cloud of bees, naked as a jaybird except for my big workboots.
The late-afternoon light had changed to dusk when I was done. I pulled on my sundress and drove the truck under the pine trees, where I had left it. Another honey harvest was ended.
I started to walk back to the c
abin, but the cries of nighthawks made me stop and look up. Nighthawks are related to whippoorwills and chuck-will’s-widows and are not hawks at all. With their long, pointed wings, the underside of which are banded with white, they are easy to recognize, and are often seen around city parking lots, where they feed on the insects attracted by overhead lights. I sometimes see them here in the evening, swooping after the first of the night-flying insects but not often in such numbers as they were last evening. Their calls—peeee-eent, pe-ee-eeent—filled the air. They were gathered not to feed on bees—although they were probably doing some of that too—but to migrate. Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds.
Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but the nighthawk migration tells of shortening days and a season’s end. The honey harvest marks it, also. The end of the bees’ year is the beginning of the bees’ year. It is mine, too.
Afterword
February 14, 1988. Valentine’s Day. I am a beekeeper but I am also a writer, and some years ago I sat down at the typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced. I wasn’t sure why I was here, and because I am a rational creature and like to know what’s going on, I wanted to process what I was doing through my brain cells, to put it into words and see if I could arrive at an understanding of it. I had always written for an audience, but this time I was writing for myself, and what I put on paper over the next couple of years was unlike anything I had written before. I traced the natural history of my hilltop from one springtime to the next, discovering by the second spring that I was in a new place and understanding the value of where I was. It was a little like minimalist music. Each day resembled the one preceding it; the steps were barely noticeable, but the end was different from the beginning. I had made a record of changes I had thought too subtle for me to have noticed until I started writing.
I had not been writing for publication, and I was astonished when a friend told me I was writing a book. My agent said I was writing a book, too, and in due course my editor at Random House said I was writing a book. After it was published it even looked like a book. And I was still astonished, and remain so to this day. Once put out into the world, that supposed book took on a life of its own; it became a part of the process of change in my life.
I was in town one day after it was published, picking up my mail. The letter on top of the pile had a return address in Washington, D.C., under the name of an old friend from college. Seeing his name opened a door of memory so easily and so happily that it was hard to believe I had closed it as firmly as I thought I had more than thirty years ago. It was the oddest feeling. “Of course,” I thought to myself. “Of course.”
In his letter my friend said he had seen a review of my book in The New York Times the previous Sunday. He had not known my last name, the name of my former husband, but he had still recognized me after all these years from the picture accompanying the review. He had bought the book and sat up all night reading it. He briefly sketched what had been happening in his life in the years since we had gone our different ways. Would I answer his letter? I did. But before he had had a chance to receive my reply he had telephoned. There has seldom been a day since that we have not talked on the telephone or been together. He came visiting. We canoed. We took trips. We swam. I stayed with him in Washington for longer and longer stretches of time. One thing led to another, and yesterday we were married.
His work and his interests keep him, for the most part, in Washington. Mine take me to two places. I want to be with him in the city, but my Ozark hilltop and its wild things and wild places pull me all the time. This probably sounds complicated and it is, although in quite practical terms it will be less complicated by the time I can reduce my beekeeping down to the hundred hives I want; they will produce just enough honey to take care of my established accounts in St. Louis, Boston, New York and Washington. The frequent, time-consuming sales trips to other places will be over. Selling honey has always been the least appealing part of beekeeping to me, anyway. It is a very complex life, but, after all, I’ve never wanted a simple one; keeping the various aspects of it that change brings about into some sort of harmony is the liveliest and most interesting kind of life I know.
I delight in moving back and forth between two ways of living, one reflecting off the other, clarifying both in the process. I like knowing how to use the subway as well as how to bring proper function back to my 1954 pickup when it becomes balky out in a remote beeyard. I like seeing both experimental theater on Fourteenth Street and deer grazing winter grasses at twilight on my Ozark hillside. I like playing dress-up and going to an embassy party to watch people who get their names in the newspapers parry with one another. And I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself and getting as close to the bees’ lives as they will let me, remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human. I like company and learning to say “we” again. I like solitude. I like loving a man and I like being loved by him.
Glossary
Balling. Bees’ method of killing a queen by surrounding her in a compact mass.
Bee brush. A wooden-handled brush with long soft plastic bristles that can be used to gently remove bees from places their keeper does not want them.
Bee dance. The patterned motions by which bees communicate tactilely.
Bee escape. A small one-way door that fits into the hole in an inner cover, and which may be used to allow bees to leave one part of their hive but bars them from returning to it.
Bee space. A distance of a quarter to half an inch that bees will not fill with comb.
Beeyard. A place in which bees are kept in hives.
Bottom board. The rimmed platform on which hive bodies stand.
Brood. Eggs, larvae and developing immature bees.
Cleansing flights. Flights bees make from their hive to defecate.
Colony. A group of related bees that live together as a unit.
Drawn comb. Honeycomb that has been fully worked by bees; the foundation cells have been built up into deep hexagonal wax cups to receive either nectar and pollen or the queen’s eggs.
Drone. A male bee.
Entrance reducer. A block of wood or other material that closes off most of a beehive entrance.
Frame. The supporting structure for honeycomb within a hive.
Frame grip. A grasping tool used for removing single frames from a beehive.
Fume board. A rimmed board cut to the outside dimensions of an open beehive top. It is covered with fabric, and will absorb liquid bee repellent. Placed fabric side down, the fumes from the repellent will drive the bees downward into the lower reaches of their hive.
Hive. Technically this word refers to the wooden boxes and their parts in which bees live, but it is often used loosely by beekeepers as well as by the public as a synonym for “colony.”
Hive body. The basic unit of a beehive, which contains the comb on which bees live and work.
Hive staple. A large tinned wire staple used for holding together beehive parts while they are being moved.
Hive tool. A short stout prying implement for loosening beehive parts.
Ill tempered. The state of bees who are quick to sting. May be caused by temporary stress, such as poor weather or queenlessness, or by genetic predisposition, such as that found in wild (German) bees or Africanized bees.
Inner cover. Board on top of hive bodies but under the telescoping or outer cover.
Laying worker. A worker bee who lays nonfertile eggs in a queenless colony.
Nuc. Rhymes with duke. A small beehive containing three or four frames used as a starter for a standard ten-frame hive.
Nuptial flight. The flight from her hive made by a virgin queen to
mate with drones.
Outyard. A place where bees in their hives are kept, away from the beekeeper’s principal place of operation.
Package bees. Bees with a queen gathered by a bee breeder and shipped in a screenwire cage.
Propolis. A gummy substance manufactured by bees, principally from plant resins, used by the bees to seal up the inside of their hive. The word is derived from the Greek, and means before (i.e., in front of) the city (the bees’ place of living).
Queen. The fertile female bee who lays eggs from which all the bees in a colony grow.
Queen cell. A pendant, peanut-shaped cell, larger than those in which worker bees or drones develop, in which the queen pupates.
Queen excluders. Rigid welded wires placed in wooden frames cut to the outside dimensions of the hive body and super tops. The wires are close enough together to keep the queen from going through but far enough apart to allow passage to the smaller worker bees. Drones cannot pass through them, either.
Queenright. The condition in which a colony of bees finds itself when it has a vigorous, well-mated queen who is capable of laying eggs.
Robbing. The stealing of honey or nectar from a hive by worker bees from other colonies. Robber bees, as my daughter-in-law, Liddy, phrases it, are “females gone wrong.” They often have a sleek, greasy appearance.
Smoker. A hand-held metal firebox attached to a bellows that is used to generate the smoke which quiets bees as their keeper works with them.
Supers. The cases for honeycomb frames that are shallower than hive bodies and sit on top of them.
Supersedure. A process by which the bees raise a new queen to replace one who is no longer adequate to their needs, and who is termed by beekeepers to be a “failing queen.”
A Book of Bees Page 16
