The Honey Harvest

March 18th, 2010

This morning after breakfast, we began weeding the beds along the front walkway. Kris went with Debbie to bring the car to the mechanic, and I got to participate in the honey harvest! This is one of the coolest things I have done here. Jack has a hive at the bottom of a large hill among some poplar trees, and the honey is harvested once a year. Lucky me! It was fascinating. Neil is Debbie’s cousin’s husband and helps Jack with the harvest, as Jack is just starting out and Neil is a professional. Neil has an extra set of protective gear so I suit up quickly, grab the camera and hop on the four-wheeler. Eventhough we are running a little late (Neil has to make an appointment at noon), Jack and Neil keep checking each other and forgetting gear, their interactions are pure comedy. But, they’re pretty laid back and we get down there with everything we need.
The hives are arranged in boxes stacked in three pillars. The boxes have no top or bottom so the bees can move freely within. The honey comb is built around wooden frames which hang inside the boxes like files in a file cabinet. To extract the honey, they first light some stringy burlap into a little puffer thing- looks like a kettle with a stoker attached to the end so the smoke can be pumped out the spout. They lift of the top of one of the stacks and give the bees a puff of smoke to chill them out. Then they lift a ‘file box’ and place it on a metal stand with a slide beneath it. Next, the bees are blown through the box with a blower so they slide on the ground, and then we place the box aside. This is where I helped out, transporting heavy boxes of honey comb away from the hive space to beside the four-wheeler, which was just a few paces away. This process continued until we had 10 boxes to stack on the trailer.
Today was cold and the bees don’t take well to lower temps. It makes them angrier, as if disturbing their hard work wasn’t enough. But, the girls didn’t swarm us or anything. Although at one point Jack was covered and even Neil said, “Uh, Jack. Mate, you’d do good to get those girls off you.” Neil and Jack are still relaxed and comical around the bees. How can you avoid jokes when the nature of bees? The girls do all the work, and the drones are essentially useless except for the lucky few that mate with the queen, then they die. Sometimes Neil harvests the honey with no gloves, in the summer of course. He was also excited to be able to show off some of his bee knowledge to me. At one point he grabbed a drone, sacrificing it to explain the mating procedure with the queen. He squeezed the abdomen which popped out his reproductive innards. When the drone mates with the queen, his reproductive innards are ripped out from him and it’s lights out after that. However, mating with the queen is the pinnacle of a drone’s life, so what’s there left to live for? They are ignored by the worker lady bees because they don’t do any work. We also found an unlucky bumble bee that had snuck into the hive. The ladies had torn it to shreds, inside and out, leaving only a black shell of its former furry figure.
We were given a file’s worth of honey comb from the experience, which Jack and Kris cut from the wooden frame. So now we have about a liter of unfiltered honey along with us!