Show Me the Honey Read online

  If you were feeling sorry for the poor old forager bees out there in the fields slaving away while the young processors have it easy, think again. Here is the most disgusting step in the process. After fanning the honey, the processor bees must secrete wax out of tiny glands located on the undersides of their rear ends in order to cap each cell. You could say the processors are literally working their little behinds off.

  Finally, after all of the bees’ hard work producing honey to sustain them over the winter, humans come in like Jesse James to rob their precious stores. The human honey-making process—or, more appropriately, honey-taking process—is simple. It’s also very sticky and hasn’t changed much in 100 years. Did I mention it is very sticky?

  Once a hive box is full of honey, you must begin by pulling the individual frames out, much like you might pull files out of a filing cabinet. These frames weigh about a quarter pound each when they are first installed and empty in the spring. At the end of the summer, if the weather conditions are perfect and you are just plain lucky, the frames should weigh about 3 pounds each. A box of 10 honey-laden frames weighs about 30 pounds, and a good harvest would consist of three boxes, or 90 pounds.

  After removing the frames from the hive boxes, you need to take a brush, similar to the hand-held kind used to sweep dust into a dustpan, and gently sweep the bees crawling all over the frames back into the hive. Since I rarely sweep my floors, I don’t have much practice at this, and I’ve had to learn the hard way that if you sweep too hard, you crush the bees. If you sweep too lightly, the bees are not fazed in the slightest and keep right on busily crawling about their tasks. Bee sweeping is a fine art.

  When the frames are free of bees, you must inspect them to ensure the honey cells are capped with wax. Uncapped cells are a signal that the bees were likely in the middle of fanning the honey to reduce its water content and it is not yet ready for harvest. Can you say “soggy toast”?

  Once the frames are removed from the hive, they need to be stored in tightly sealed tubs. Tupperware makes ideal large rubber tubs that most beekeepers use. Don’t forget to seal the lids properly or, just like when Jesse James robbed banks and the sheriff pursued him, the bees will chase you down to get their honey back. Leave an unsealed tub of frames near a hive for five minutes and hundreds of bees will try to reclaim it. It is best to make a clean getaway. With proper storage, those frames of honey can be left for years. However, most people extract the tasty ambrosia shortly after the heist.

  Honey extraction is a three-step process. First, the sealed hexagon-shaped combs need to be unsealed. This requires an uncapping fork, which looks like a hair pick and might have been used to coif the hippest Afros in the ’70s. I like the uncapping fork because it’s fun to run the sharp metal comb over the thousands of tiny cells and watch them burst open with honey. Don’t forget to uncap both sides of the frame. If you want to use Mother Nature’s friend Omnipresent Gravity to get the honey out, leave the frames for a week or two in a very hot room until it all drips out by itself. But most of us don’t have time to wait that long, so this is where the honey extractor comes in.

  A honey extractor is a round contraption, usually made of stainless steel, about the same size as a washing machine. Four or six frames go into special cages in the extractor that are attached to a hand-crank gear assembly. When you crank the gears, the cages holding the frames spin around faster and faster and faster. When they are spinning fast enough, Omnipresent Gravity’s cousin Centrifugal Force arrives to lend a hand. The sheer force of the circular whirling pulls the honey out of each frame. It takes about two minutes of hard cranking for all of the honey to splatter onto the clean walls inside the extractor. The honey then slowly flows to the bottom of the extractor, where a valve opens to let it flow into big plastic pails.

  The filtering is next. Most people don’t like bee legs, antennae, little pieces of wax, or tiny twigs in their honey. Too many unwanted bits and pieces of debris can turn honey into stew, so the honey needs to be strained through a small wire mesh screen placed on top of an empty tub. Do this in a warm room so the honey is soft enough to flow smoothly.

  The first-year of the Houseboat Honey bonanza required some ingenuity for this part of the process. Since the bathroom is the smallest room in my houseboat, it was easy to crank the heat up, leave the honey there overnight, and then strain it the next day when the honey was warmed up. Sometimes the honey may need to be strained a second time through a finer screen if it is particularly dense with unwanted particles. By extracting the honey in the kitchen and then straining the honey in the bathroom, I was able to make a complete sticky mess out of two rooms in my houseboat.

  I then migrated to the living room and made a sticky mess there too, doing the bottling. Why not mess up the entire house? Of the three steps, the bottling requires the most skilful eye, for you must stop pouring at the exact right time, precisely within a quarter of an inch of each bottle’s brim. Miss that all-important marker by one-tenth of a second and watch honey overflow all over your hands, seep onto your shoes, and then spread out across the floor.

  For me, the best part of processing honey was buying the jars, because the jars come in all different shapes and sizes. As I learned in the advertising business, packaging is 90 percent of the product. Some jars have old-fashioned raised glass relief designs, but I prefer the skinny, tubular jars. They make half a pound of honey look like three-quarters of a pound. You can also choose the plastic squeeze bears and relive your childhood by listening to an audiobook of The House at Pooh Corner.

  After your honey is safely deposited in the desired jar, you must tightly secure the lid and stick on a label. I wanted my labels to stand out, so I used the same goofy artwork I painted on my beehive boxes once I took ownership of them from Miriam and Len.

  The process of making honey, the world’s greatest processed food, requires time, patience, and hard work for bee and human. The bees do a three-season nectar-laden dance with Mother Nature, swallowing up summer’s sweet floral offerings, then puking them up and fanning them to perfection. The human heist follows on the heels of their labours, just before winter. Unbeknownst to the bees, however, there is a bit of revenge as we Jesse James “wannabees” make a giant sticky mess of every room in our houses. There is justice as well. As responsible beekeepers, we must be sure to leave our girls enough of a store to make it through the winter and replace what we have taken with a food processed by humans.

  Together, bugkind and humankind put a great deal of effort into this delightful product that graces many a pantry across the land. And don’t forget: honey is delicious, looks great, lasts forever, and is as messy and sticky to serve as all get-out.

  The Outyard

  When it comes to practical, handy jobs, I take shortcuts. My attention to detail and general handiwork are just plain sloppy; I have two left hands and get distracted easily. I wouldn’t have been a good architect, carpenter, or craftsperson. I ignore the old adage “Measure twice and cut once.” Why measure at all when it’s quicker just to guess? And what’s a level for? Beekeeping requires many meticulous skills I lack, but I get by because Jeannie has them.

  Being a bee demands those very same skills. Bees are exacting perfectionists focused on building flawless symmetrical honeycomb. There are no shortcuts when constructing the thousands of six-sided cells comprising a hive. If one of those hexagons is a bit out of whack, the whole colony can collapse. Every time I lift out a frame of bees from a hive to inspect it, I am impressed by the degree of collaboration and construction taking place. Bees know exactly what to do and when to do it. Each one is toiling away at the task at hand, head down, focused on a successful end product. Never do you see a couple of bees off to the side of the hive arguing or disagreeing. Never do you see a bee lounging about.

  It comes as no surprise to me then that beehives are composed almost entirely of female worker bees. Women, often, simply pay more attention to detail. Jeannie is an excellent beekeeper—she loves perf
ect right angles and takes on every task fastidiously. Nowhere was this more evident than when we moved four of her beehives to the outyard.

  Let me explain what an outyard is. Successful beekeeping is all about the flow of nectar. In spring and summer, forager bees fly around collecting nectar from flowers and plants, bringing it back to the hive to be processed into honey. But what if the fields and flower beds near the hive have dried up as they do in midsummer? Beekeepers can intervene and move the bees to greener pastures. As long as the bees are moved miles—not inches—away from their original spot, they can adjust and make the transition. If you want chubby bees, take them where the getting is good: the outyard. Moving bees to greener, higher elevations for four to six weeks in late summer gives them a better chance of surviving the winter, and gives you a better chance of getting more honey.

  Here’s an analogy of what moving beehives to an outyard is all about. Let’s say you live in a crowded apartment building in some dust-bowl town and a drought has dried up your food source. Then, for some inexplicable reason, your entire apartment building is lifted up, transported, and plunked down in Las Vegas, right behind one of those casinos with a fantastic all-you-can-eat buffet. Every day you visit the buffet and eat all you can, gorging happily and contentedly. If you are like me, you sneak some extra food out in your pockets and store it away for the future. After a month or two of living in Sin City, you become fat and happy. You have spare food socked away in your apartment suite. The dust bowl is a forgotten hardship. Come fall, your apartment building is once again elevated and plunked down back in your hometown for the winter. No problem. Your pantry is full of delicious, life-sustaining manna. That’s the concept of an outyard: it’s a place to get fat and happy.

  Outyards are usually far away from the city on the side of a mountain or in a field in the middle of nowhere. Jeannie’s bee club and a neighbouring club joined forces to create a communal outyard for their members. They got permission to occupy a small plot of land from a forestry company that had logging rights to hundreds of recently harvested acres. The clubs were charged nothing for taking over the relatively minuscule 1,000-square-foot plot on the side of a mountain, 75 miles from the outskirts of town. The outyard was surrounded by miles and miles of fields full of a prolific plant called fireweed. After an area has been logged, it is the first plant to grow back. To bees, fireweed is like steak and lobster with baked potatoes smothered in sour cream. They love it, can’t get enough of it, and it fattens them up.

  Converting raw land into an outyard takes a lot of work. In this case, it required about half a dozen members from the two bee clubs, armed with shovels and shears, to devote eight hours over a weekend in late spring. They cleared vegetation, levelled the ground so hives could be put in place, and installed an electric fence. The electric fence, which was powered by solar panels, was meant to keep bears from crashing the smorgasbord line and going straight for their favourite dish: honey.

  Each member of the bee clubs was invited to transfer up to half a dozen hives to the outyard and leave them there for four to six weeks in late summer. That’s when I entered the picture—after the hard work had been done. Or so I had hoped, but boy, was I wrong about that!

  On the day before the transfer, Jeannie enlisted my help to prepare her four hives. To emphasize why the hives had to be “prepared” for the trip, I must point out that they would be taken up a very bumpy old logging road at 5:00AM in the back of a pickup truck. We would then take them off the truck bed, hastily carry them into the outyard, and wrestle them into place. These weren’t just ordinary crates; they were high-rise homes to 50,000 very alive, very sensitive insects. Think of how careful you are when you put your dog or cat in a crate, load it into your car, and take it across town. Then multiply that: 50,000 × 4 hives = 200,000 precious pets.

  Jeannie was quite clear with me that a robust series of rope webbing and carefully screwed-in wooden supports, along with ratchet tie-down straps and fasteners, would have to be adhered to each of the old-fashioned filing cabinet–style hives. Each hive had to be sturdily reinforced to ensure the safety of her bees. The fact that each hive was four boxes tall made the task of stabilizing each tower more challenging. And don’t forget the boxes we were preparing were full of live bees. The buzzing inside while we cinched up the straps and tightened the tie-downs was a bit unnerving to say the least. Standing by Jeannie’s side with a hammer in my hand, I was given careful instructions that I ignored, forgot, or was incapable of carrying out, apparently. Truthfully, I was uncertain which end of the hammer to hold.

  After 20 minutes of strapping and wrapping ropes, using a drill to drive in screws, cinching ratchets, and banging in nails, I impatiently and stupidly proclaimed, “I’m finished with this one. It’s fine. I’ll move on to the next one now.” My precise and exacting girlfriend vehemently disagreed with me, wanting the hive to be fortified with tighter ropes, more vertical wooden slats, and another fastener. She inspected my shoddy work and pointed out what I had done wrong. I took umbrage and disagreed, and then we did something that bees never do—we argued over who was right, instead of working together in harmony for the common good.

  After a short verbal scuffle, I begrudgingly acquiesced and returned to battening down the hatches. Silently following Jeannie’s instructions, I couldn’t help thinking that Harry Houdini couldn’t escape from this crate. The rebellious little voice inside my head stubbornly repeated, “We are putting way too much effort into this!” By the third hive I couldn’t stand it. I told Jeannie she was taking this whole move way too seriously and it was taking way too long. So we argued some more, and by the time we started working on the fourth hive, it was clear to me that even if it took all night, I should just follow her instructions and do as I was told.

  Finally, after two seemingly endless hours, all four hives were prepared and ready to be loaded onto the back of her dad’s old blue Toyota pickup truck. In the process of preparing the hives, I had avoided getting stung but struck one of my fingers with a hammer. There was a slight bruise, but it wasn’t as big as the bruise to my ego. When we went to bed that night, four super-secure Fort Knox–like towers containing a couple of hundred thousand somnolent bees rested on the back of the truck bed. The indestructible boxes were so well fortified that, I swear, if the truck had happened to be struck by a nuclear missile the next morning, the bees would have been safe. We set our alarm for 4:00AM to arise well before the bees in order to move them with minimal disturbance.

  As you may recall, it is best to move bees in the dark, cool night air. Not because you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, but because that is when the bees are comfortably situated indoors. Obviously, when it gets sunny, they are itching to get out and forage for nectar. It is also dangerous to move a sealed hive in direct sunlight because the bees inside can easily overheat and die. In the hot sun, sealed hives turn into ovens, with 50,000 agitated bees rubbing against each other, creating friction that intensifies the heat. So we met the other members from Jeannie’s bee club on the side of the highway in the shadowy, cool pre-dawn. Dressed head to toe in bee suits, we drove our pickups and trailers stacked with hives. I worried that any passing motorists seeing a bunch of people in white costumes driving redneck trucks in the dark might get the mistaken idea that we were a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

  The first thing I did as the five trucks pulled up was discreetly inspect how each hive had been prepared for the bumpy mountain road ahead. There was a great degree of variance. Some hives were well fortified, but none was as secure as ours. Other hives had only one strap or bungee cord wrapped around them. I stopped myself just short of opening my big mouth and saying, “Look, I was right! All we had to do was fasten these boxes together with a single bungee cord. We could have gotten to bed an hour earlier last night.” I had created enough acrimony with my lack of cooperation and sloppy shortcuts; besides, the jury was still out on each beekeeper’s hive prep and whether or not the hives would withstand the r
oads ahead.

  Six trucks were scheduled to make the trip to the outyard that morning. A guy named Bill from the other bee club, who had organized the whole crazy scheme, drove the lead truck. While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, Bill sheepishly admitted to us that his wife didn’t really want him to keep bees. She was worried about him getting stung, which was ironic considering he also trained German shepherds for the police department. After waiting 15 precious minutes for the last truck, we had no choice but to leave without it. It was already getting warmer as the sun rose, and soon the bees would be baking. Each truck was loaded with about six hives, adding up to hundreds of thousands of increasingly uncomfortable and agitated bees per pickup.

  The entire convoy, collectively carrying about 1.5 million bees, pulled out and proceeded down the road in the direction of the fresh subalpine meadows and the delicious fireweed plants. Jeannie and I were in the second truck, following Bill closely and worrying about the effect the rising sun would have on our hives. We were already behind schedule, and the sun would be up in 45 minutes. It was a race against time. As we drove, the occasional errant bee escaped from one particular hive on Bill’s truck and was briefly illuminated in our headlights.

  Soon the first bee struck our windshield. Splat. At 40 miles per hour, it sadly became immediate collateral damage. By the time we had travelled 20 miles down the highway, our windshield was covered with sticky dead bees. Then we slowed down and exited the paved highway onto a rural road that led to a pothole-filled arterial logging road lined with thick fir trees. It got bumpier and bumpier as we slowed our pace to ascend the hill, climbing closer and closer to the restricted licensed forest area blocked by a locked gate.