The bees strike back

Mid-september I donned my bee gear but didn’t bother with the smoker. I just wanted to take a quick look inside the two hives to see if there was extra honey for me.

Things looked good. Bees make a sticky substance called propolis they use to glue everything together, so I had to wedge loose the hive top and the insulating board with my hive tool, which is kind of like a small crowbar.

One glance told me there was plenty of honey. Great. Best of all the bees didn’t act agitated. Just a gentle hum. This was going to be a piece of cake.

I decided that the following Monday I’d take a vacation day and extract the honey.

The key when it comes to bees is move slowly and deliberately. Both hives are in a little gated garden area my wife Jennie has set up that we allow to go a little wild. I got my two smokers going to calm the bees, that’s perfect for bees. My bee garment has a ribbed structure that keeps the veil away from my face. Once I got the smoker going I put on my gloves I was ready.

Oof! It proved harder than I thought to remove the upper layer of the hive. And the bees weren’t docile like the day before. I tried to ignore the crescendo of buzzing.

What I couldn’t ignore was that three bees stung me on my chin right through the veil. The stings aren’t that painful, but once you’re stung the hive knows some of their sisters just sacrificed their lives to ward you off, and it’s game on.

That’s when I noticed that since I’d been hiking instead of going to the gym to lift weights these past six months because of the pandemic, I wasn’t quite as strong, and those bee boxes were heavy with honey. Like, are you sure you can really lift this heavy?

Using my legs, I lifted the box and staggered out to the wagon. I put the top lid back on, and dragged the wagon over to the other entrance of the garden.

Like shampooing, it was rinse and repeat.

Soon two hive boxes rested side by side on the wagon. As soon as I dragged them away the bees seemed to leave me alone. I used my bee brush to gently remove bees from the frames as I wedged them out of the boxes. I had laid out painter’s plastic on the garage floor because honey makes everything good and sticky when you’re doing this kind of work, and laid the frames out where I could work with them. I did the same in the kitchen where I’d set up the extractor. Using a hot knife, I sliced off the wax cappings that kept the deep, dark honey in the cells. I placed two frames at a time in the extractor, put on the cover, and turned the hand crank two minutes for each side.

All along I could feel my face swelling, especially my lower lip. Yup. They got me. They got even.

I had close to a hundred pounds of honey in the extractor when it was time to drain it into the bee buckets. I also put the wax cappings into a sieve and drained them into separate containers. That honey I will give back to the bees in the winter.

One more thing – bees have an extraordinarily keen sense of smell. I’ve noticed them hanging around the front door. Like they know something.

Or they’re looking for someone.