For all the usual reasons, Fall is my favorite time of the year: the warm, breezy days; the crisp evenings; the kaleidoscopic colors of the turning leaves. There isn't much that I find more pleasurable than taking a walk around my neighborhood, kicking up the red and gold leaves fallen from the maples and the oaks, smelling the earthy scents of Autumn, and listening to the birds and the squirrels go about their business of preparing for winter.
Fall is also honey time.
All summer, the bees have been doing their thing, flitting from clover to clover or dandelion-to-dandelion, or whatever it is that bees flit to and from, gathering nectar in their second stomachs (bees have two, y'know: one for storing nectar and one for storing Twinkies(tm)). They worked hard (several hundred flower's-worth) and carried their nectar back to the hive, where worker bees sucked it out of the nectar stomachs and let their own enzymes work on it (sometimes called "chewing") for an hour or so (much like Twinkies(tm), except that Twinkies(tm) generally require far more than an hour to process).
The bees then spread the liquid-y soon-to-be-honey goo out through the hive so that the water could evaporate from it, sometimes fanning their wings over the stuff to make it get gooier faster (possibly like Twinkies(tm); I have no idea).
Once the newly-minted honey was the right consistency, they covered it up with wax and went off to do the whole process again, to the tune of eighty or a hundred pounds of honey and comb.
Then my mom and I came along and steal about thirty pounds of the stuff.
My mom keeps a couple of hives. They've been doing pretty well, knock on wood (gotta be some around here somewhere), when other hives in the area have just, well, vanished. That's been going on with bees in the past few years. They've just been ... vanishing. Possibly abducted by aliens. Jury's still out.
I've helped my mom harvest the honey for the last two years. In year one, we didn't have too many problems. It was a bit cold, so the bees were quiet. We smoked them heavily -- which doesn't mean that we rolled them up in cigarette papers and lit up, but rather that we took a watering-can-looking thing called a smoker, put some cloth in it, lit that on fire, and then, using a bellows, blew smoke through the hive to make the bees less likely to want to use their anti-honey-defense systems (stingers) on us -- then took one of the newly bee-free hives with us back up to the house. We cut out the combs, put 'em in jars, and gavethem to friends (and kept several ourselves, of course).
This year was ... different.
For one thing, it was warmer. The bees became active as soon as we approached the hive. Little, dark, six-legged beasties intent on protecting hive and queen, no matter the cost (and the cost for them could be high: if a bee leaves its stinger in an intruder, then that bee, um, doesn't make it). We were wearing protective garb -- white clothes, white beekeeper's hats (you know, those funky pith helmets with veils draped all around?), and gloves; well, my mom had gloves ... I'd forgotten mine. Still, it was disconcerting to have dozens ... um, several dozens ... um, hundreds ... um, eeek! ... of bees buzzing all around and climbing all over us, looking for a way in through our gear.
We smoked.
We smoked some more.
We ran out of smoke and had to sacrifice a shirt to the cause.
Smoked, smoked, smoked, and still the bees wouldn't calm down. We began to suspect that A). the bees had become Africanized, even though the so-called "killer" bees weren't supposed to have gotten this far north yet, B). The bees were actually the result of either a genetic experiment gone horribly awry or what happens when you combine pesticides with Twinkies(tm), or C). They were just really, really tough bees.
I got stung once, on the hand, and somehow one got through my mother's defenses and stung her on the lip-- the cheap way to look like Angelina Jolie, but not one that I think either my mom or Angelina Jolie would recommend.
At last we got the honey freed from the hives and from the super-guardian bees. It's all bottled up now, waiting to go onto biscuits or into cookies.
Still, I'm a bit concerned. Everytime I see a bee, it seems like he's looking at me.
Plotting revenge.
*
The author was not seriously injured while collecting honey, although his finger was swollen for three days from where he was stung.
Photo Caption: My mum, girded for bee war.
Photo Caption: Smoking out the bees.
Photo Caption: The final product.
