“There aren’t many bees in here,” Jim says. I gulp. His wife and honey-marketer, Amy, did tell me to wear long sleeves and long pants, but where is my beekeeper costume, with the fancy netting-draped hood? I start to feel tiny pinpricks down my arm, as though I am already being stung.
I am not being stung. Honeybees bear no malice. Unless, of course, they are born of a sociopathic queen who then makes angry babies. Then the bees attack at every chance, and you have to worry about the mortality of the Amazon delivery guy. This happened to my friends, Jim Dietz and Amy DeVault, some years back. Hearts broken, time and money wasted, they finally had to set fire to the hive.
Since then, everyone has been peaceable. These guys were just a little ticked off (a small entomological pun) last Sunday, though. It rained, hard, and Jim was disrupting their hive in the middle of the rainstorm to pull out the frames. You know how it feels when you are wet through and through and you just want to go home and get comfy? They snuck into the honey-making building and drank all the dripped honey from the bucket.
They like their own honey. On a dry day, Jim would have salvaged some of that honey first, then put the bucket, filled with peeled-off sheets of wax, outdoors. They would have neatly licked off all the honey and cleaned up the mess.
Tidy, these workers. Not the drones, though. Roughly double the size of the worker bees, they live in larger, bullet-shaped compartments, like snazzy bachelor pads. They have no stinger; they are made for love, their only job to impregnate the queen. A virgin queen, overcome by urgency, will mate with more than one. Spent, the drones stick around until fall, when they are kicked out of their roomy cells to starve or freeze to death alone. Polyamory often ends badly.
While I muse, Jim is plugging in a heated knife. “This is what they call capped honey,” he says, gesturing toward bumpy whitish stuff on one of the wood frames. With the knife, he slowly slices off this top layer of wax. “The bees did that,” he explains. “When the nectar reaches a certain water percentage, usually 18 percent, it is honey, and they know to cover it up.” He holds up something called a refractometer to show me the blue-shaded band: yep, 18 percent.
I am here to watch because all I have ever done is stir honey into peach tea or drizzle it over baked Brie. How that happens because of a bee was a mystery to me. Yet honey is such a rich source of pleasure and metaphor. Consider the milk and honey of the promised land. Abe Lincoln’s observation that “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” The sweet hedonism of Winnie the Pooh.
I wanted to know more.
We live, after all, in a world that worries about the hive mind; that uses drones to kill; that vilifies women with the epithet “queen bee.” Poor queens, I think. No doubt they do their best. They are stuck with the age-old imperative of the female: spend all your time and energy laying eggs and improving hive morale.
A queen usually only lives two or three years, in which time she might lay as many as two thousand eggs a day. When her reign ends, so does her life.
“The bees tell her when she’s done,” Jim says.
“Vote her off the island,” Amy adds over her shoulder.
If she begins to falter, the bees induce her replacement, as political parties have been known to do. If she dies, the entire colony realizes it can no longer smell her scent, and a “queenless roar” goes up, an agitation that triggers the raising of the next queen.
“So how is a queen, er, crowned?” I ask.
“The bees pick the egg, and they feed that bee lots of royal jelly during the larval stage,” Jim explains. “But if there’s more than one queen cell and they all hatch, then the first one out will go to the other queen cells, poke holes in them, and kill her rivals.”
My God. This could be Game of Thrones.
The bees, who live a comfortable distance from Jim and Amy’s house, fly around all day sucking nectar from flowers and storing it in their honey stomach. When they get back to the hive, they regurgitate the honey. “But it’s not barf,” Amy says quickly. “It’s in a different stomach.” Which does come as a relief. Anyway, they cough up the goods and spit them (you have heard of bee spit?) into another bee’s mouth. That bee chews the nectar for a while, like a good plug of tobacky, then passes it on to the next bee. They are breaking down the nectar’s complex sugars and reducing its water content, which starts at about 70 percent.
All along, the bees assume they are storing honey for their own winter. Jim always leaves them enough, but they are productive little workers and he sneaks out the excess—winding up with about fifteen gallons (120 jars) of raw honey from his eleven hives. “I don’t know if they think we just destroyed all their work or what,” he says, his brow furrowed with genuine concern. He checks his hives regularly and protects them from pests. He even stopped buying “marked” queens, which are painted with a colored dot. The dot’s color changes with every batch, so beekeepers can easily spot a particular queen. But Jim noticed that he was just identifying the queen and, assured that she was alive and well and laying eggs, moving on without paying enough attention to the rest of the hive. Like the humble worker bees who sweat for their queen, dance just a little, and die. The average life span of these smart, complicated creatures is only thirty days.
The honey-gathering starts with a bright yellow plastic mold whose tiny octagonal compartments mimic a honeycomb’s cells. “There are some frames with just wire across them, and the bees build they honeycomb off that wire,” he says, “but that’s more sophisticated than what we do. Some beekeepers also melt the wax from the comb; you can make candles or lip balm. But there’s never enough time in the day!”
He and Amy both work demanding fulltime jobs—and also raise chickens and cattle as well as keeping bees. I could never manage their schedule—the sheer amount of daily chore-doing dizzies me—but it has a rhythm and momentum that, in their hands, feels calming.
Once Jim has sliced off the wax, Amy slides the long, wood-framed panels into a stainless steel vat that spins them, using centrifugal force to fly the honey out of the combs and let it drip down the sides of the vat. Out it comes, through a spigot into the waiting strainer and bucket. “Feel how heavy this frame is,” Jim says, handing me the sticky, glowing amber panel. I nearly drop it. Once it is spun, I test again: light as a feather. The frame itself weighs about as much as an apple; all the rest of that load was honey.
He reaches for another frame, its amber glaze sparkling in the low light. It could be melted caramel, or liquid topaz, or dark molten gold. Treasure, by any description. Honey has healed and sustained us for millennia. What better alchemy than blossoms spun into pure, swift energy?
Amy slides the dial on the spinner to increase the speed, whirling it after a slow start. I feel a bearlike stirring of excitement. Slowly, the honey is dripping into the bucket, clear and golden, ready to be jarred. Jim lifts another bucket and lets me fill a jar with this magical substance that never sours or spoils. A pot of honey, ostensibly still edible, was found in the tomb of Tutankhomon, buried around 1323 BCE. And meadow flower, berry, and linden honey that was 5,500 years old was unearthed in the country of Georgia.
“This would be called ‘raw honey,’ right?” I say, holding my jar to the light to admire it. “I’ve seen that word on some of the jars at Schnucks.”
“Some of the stuff sold in grocery stores isn’t even honey,” Amy retorts. “It’s mainly high-fructose corn syrup.” Or brown rice syrup, or beet syrup, or jaggery. They call the practice “honey laundering,” and it is tough to detect, because ultra-filtration processes that remove pollen also allow makers to add sweeteners without proper labeling. In 2018, the alerted USDA defined honey as a single-ingredient product and warned that anything adulterated should be called a “honey blend.” But laundering often skirts the labels, and far more publicized testing is being done in Europe than here. The FDA did test imported honeys last year—and found that 10 percent had “economically motivated adulteration.” A report from the European Commission in 2023 found that 46 percent of 147 honey samples tested were likely to have been adulterated with cheap plant syrups. Scientific journals are thick with efforts to find workable ways to identify the scam.
The simplest, grandest gift from nature, and we insist on fucking it up for profit.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
