The sweet sting of success: My first go at honey harvesting

THREE days, 18 hives, half a million bees and not a single sting – I was surprised on a number of levels.

Some weeks ago when my father, Kieran asked if I would give him a hand to take in this year’s honey harvest, I jumped at the chance. I’d only ever worked with his bees on a handful of occasions and even then, the jobs lasted only a few minutes at a time. As an ardent fan of his unique Casorna Honey, I was eager to see the magic up close and personal and even pre-harvest comments about how, “That’s quite a cross box of bees,” didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

I was also eager to experience the hands-on aspect of the role. I mean, I eat plenty of his honey but if I’m to have bees of my own one day (a prospect which is becoming ever more likely seeing as how I have an expert on hand to gift me some), it would make sense to know what I’m doing.

So there I was, being zipped up into his spare, uber-protective bee-suit. This was getting real. Could I realistically expect to help take honey off the hives and not turn into a pin cushion of stings? God knows, I’d been stung plenty of times growing up; it’s a pain that doesn’t lessen with experience.

“Any more than two stings and you’ll feel a bit rough,” he said. “But you’ll be grand – that’s a good suit.”

You know the way you’d be sitting in the sun enjoying a cuppa and a bikkie and a wasp comes buzzing around your head? You might rise and flee or you might swat at your sudden adversary. But sporting my astronaut-esque bee-suit protection, I felt ready for lift-off as much as for bee-keeping. I was also strangely confident that all would be well.

My father then relayed a story from some years ago when he’d been taking in the honey harvest and hadn’t noticed a hole in his suit. After being stung a dozen times in the space of a few minutes (the cross box?), he spent the rest of the day sweating on the sofa.

Still, surprisingly, I wasn’t one bit deterred. I was more curious than anything.

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Part of this particular bee process involved learning about the harvest as much as carrying it out. That meant every tool and technique was detailed and explained and every few minutes he unveiled another secret: The vaporiser replacing the smoker, the tell-tale signs of Himalayan Balsam pollen, the wax-sealed combs that meant the honey was ready – there were a thousand and one new things to learn, the vast majority of which I knew I’d forget.

“A man asked me one time if there was much work with the bees,” my father said at one point as he passed me a frame laden with pristine honeycomb. “I hesitated for a moment before I spoke and then the man said, ‘I suppose if it was handy everybody would be at it.’”

This, I was only beginning to appreciate.

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The crux of our harvest mission, I soon discovered, was a methodical approach to removing the honey from the hives. After we’d set up tool-bearing tables beside the hives as well as boxes with which to transport the frames of honey into the house, we started on our first hive. The lid was delicately removed and quietly set to one side.

“The whole idea is that we do this as calmly and as gently as possible,” he explained. “That means we try not to bang or knock the hives.”

He further explained that, as “light is a bee’s god,” we had to keep the hives as covered and dark. To that end, once the first section – or the ‘super’ – was lifted from the top of the hive, a towel was deftly laid thereupon. The idea is that the bees in the bottom section – the ‘brood box’ – wouldn’t become too agitated whilst we stole away with the amber loot.

“If you were to put bees in a bottle and stick that bottle to a window, the bees would all clump in a ball at the window,” he said. “They follow the light at all times and they would die before they flew out the bottle at the other end.”

After that first super was removed from the first hive and I looked in, I couldn’t help but gape at the vastness of the population inside.

“That’s only a fraction of them,” my father said. “There’s far more in the super below and the brood box below that. What we don’t want is the ones in the brood box coming out, so get that towel on good and quick – but gently does it.”

And thus the process began. After each frame was coaxed out of the super, using a funny little tool with different points – like a bee-keeper’s Swiss army knife – the bees were gently brushed off in front of the hive and then I stacked the frame in a separate box waiting nearby – one with a lid.

The first hive – or box, as he would call it – was dealt with and the honey-heavy frames were transported into the house where they were again stacked and covered.

“That was handy enough,” I didn’t say – mainly because I had no idea of what was handy and what wasn’t.

The rev (for want of a better word) off the bees in the first hive had been something akin to a desk fan buzzing in summer – muted and without any timbre of menace.

But by the time we made it to box seven on day one, the ‘rev’ was more like a petrol strimmer – raw and dangerous.

“They’re going mental out there,” I said to my mother back in the house, as I dismounted from the bee-suit and gratefully received a cup of tea.

“That’s nothing,” my father assured. “I’ve seen them ten times worse than that.”

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Day two and it was time to tackle more hives and this time I was afforded the job of removing the frames from the hive. However, even this job required several stages. First the super was coaxed open a crack using a different tool and the Apisolis vaporiser was puffed into the frames. Then the super was lifted clear and two towels were immediately applied, one over the super removed and the second over the open top of the hive. Then the bee-keeper’s Swiss army tool was used to prise each frame from the removed super and then the bees were deftly brushed off in front of the hive – and said frame was placed in the box with the lid for later removal to the house.

Phew!

By the time I went to bed after day two and closed my eyes, all I could see in my mind’s eye were buzzing bees bombarding the veil section of the suit. I think I dreamt about bees that whole night.

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Day three and now it was time for the fun part, the extraction of the honey from the frames. I had already tasted some of this brand new honey after finding errant pieces of comb stuck to the frames. However, after the special centrifuge had done its job and the pristine honey had been decanted into a jar – and that jar attacked with a spoon – that is a special kind of eye-rolling, goose-pimpling satisfaction. And if it was special for me, the Johnny-come-lately, imagine how special it was for the man who’d toiled throughout the year to make the honey harvest possible – the person second only to the associated queens in their respective hives.

For all its stickiness, day three was a cinch compared to the previous two honey hunting expeditions. Frame after frame was relieved of its honey and jar after jar after jar was filled with the most fragrant, deeply satisfying, liquid heaven. With floral notes and the sort of sweetness so sharp it burns the throat, this truly is the distillation of sunshine.

Way too much of this special bounty was consumed of course, dipping spoons and licking fingers – so much so, that I started to feel a little buzz-y myself.

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And then it was all over for another year, bar the shouting.

As I took my leave (armed with a veritable bounty of fresh honey of course), I stepped through the front door of the house and the last thing I expected happened. A bee stung me square on the forehead.

In a sense, whilst I wasn’t immediately overjoyed at the sharp pain drilling into my temple, I wasn’t overly disappointed.

After three days of blatant honey burglary, a little payback seemed only fair.

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