f r e s h s t a r t
Monday, October 01, 2007
Among other things, a beekeeper
During a discussion about food this past summer, a friend of mine told me that she was giving up honey, in part because she believed that taking honey from the bees kills them. Ethical questions aside, thoughts about beekeeping and beekeepers started rolling around my brain, and stirred up an old memory. Didn’t my Dad used to keep bees when I was little?
My Dad spent most of his childhood, teenage, and young adult years living in Lansing, Michigan. In his mid 20’s he married my Mom, who grew up on a dairy farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. About a year into their marriage, when I was still a baby, they decided to move to the U.P., and ended up living in one of the family farmhouses (I think my great-grandparents’). I can imagine this being a bit of a culture shock for my Dad, but from his stories he seemed to embrace it. The house was heated by a wood-burning stove, so he went out every weekend with my grandfather to chop down trees on grandpa’s land for firewood, he joined a horse shoe league at the local bar, started building furniture in the basement. And…my memory was correct, he did keep bees for a year.
I called him to ask him about it and he laughed. He and his friend Jerry decided to try keeping bees. They bought hives and smokers and colonies of bees and went at it. He described the structure of the hive and how it works, or at least how it worked for the hobbyist beekeeper over 20 years ago. Modern hives are divided into two parts. The bottom chamber is a home for the queen, her eggs and larvae, and is where the brood lives in the winter. Honey is also stored here for the bees’ winter consumption, but is not taken by the beekeeper. The upper chamber contains removable frames in which the worker bees create a honeycomb, fill with honey and seal with beeswax. The holes between the upper and lower chambers are small enough that the queen cannot pass through them, so the upper chamber is merely a honey storage area, and doesn’t contain bee eggs or larvae. When the frame is filled, the beekeeper can remove the frame and extract the honey with no harm done to the bees, or hopefully to the beekeeper.
Two funny stories came out of my Dad’s amateur attempts at doing this.
First, he was really curious about the process, and liked to check on the bees to watch how they built the honey combs within the frames. One day when some of my cousins were over, he took all of us kids out to look into the hive. The bees didn’t swarm us necessarily, but apparently they weren’t properly distracted by the smoke, and there were some stings. I actually have a memory of this, of us kids running into the house and being picked up by our mothers who put us in the sink to run cold water over our stings.
Second, there was the issue of getting the honey out of the honeycomb. Apparently you should use a centrifuge, but during this first year neither Dad or Jerry had acquired one. They thought they could soften the beeswax by putting the honeycomb on a cookie sheet in the oven, running a knife over the front of the comb to open the chambers, and then draining the honey out. Their first attempt at this resulted in hot honey spilling all over the floor of the kitchen. They did manage to properly harvest some, and honey was used a sugar substitute for a while in our house. Sadly though, the Viele backyard apiary only lasted for a year. He was glad that he tried it, but said he’d never do it again.
00:05 1 comments
Comments:
When I was a kid living in Saginasty, my neighbor/friend's dad kept bees in their backyard (on the patio surrounding the pool - how appropriate!) I can very much envision this contraption you just described, and there was always an abundance of honey and beeswax candles.
Also, your friend's objection to honey reminds me of something - I assume you've seen Notting Hill? Remember when the friends are trying to set up Hugh Grant, and one of the women is a Fruitarian? "Those carrots? Murdered."
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Also, your friend's objection to honey reminds me of something - I assume you've seen Notting Hill? Remember when the friends are trying to set up Hugh Grant, and one of the women is a Fruitarian? "Those carrots? Murdered."
