Sunday May 14, 2006 – Winnie the Pooh Wonderland

Yesterday, I was invited by Nichos (partner) along with his wife and two year old daughter to his parent’s farm to assist in the spring honey harvest. Nichos has about 25 hives that he has slowly amassed over the past 4 years or so. After donning the top half of a bee suit and jerry rigging up something to keep bees from flying up the bottom of my pant legs, I was fairly confident that there was going to be few awkward bees in my pants incidents.

The first step in the process of harvesting honey is giving the bees a little dose of smoke, which triggers a feeding instinct in bees. Following a few puffs of smoke from the smoker one hive at a time, a majority of the bees instinctively focus entirely on gorging on honey in the combs. However, there were still a few irate bees bzzzzzing around my face attempting to sting me through the mesh - needless-to-say that took a bit of adjusting to. Nichos scanned each hive looking for indications of disease or problems before selecting the honeycombed frames that were filled with honey. After amassing a pickup full of hive frames, the next stop was to a centrifuge contraption (about 3’ across) that separated the honey from the honey combs. The days work yielded a Winnie the Pooh wonderland vat of honey about a foot deep that was quickly filtered through a screen and into about 20 or so mayonnaise sized jars. We pretty much worked non-stop from about 10AM to 8:00PM with a short break for lunch. Grandma made us a fine lunch of from the farm chicken, potatoes, salad, olives, bread, wine leaves wrapped around a mixture of rice and ground beef, all followed by a fruit salad and ice cream.

Besides being Bikram yoga sweaty and tired from lugging hives around, I was surprisingly stingless at the end of the day. Throughout the day of toiling , I kept thinking of the movie Tommy Boy…”there’s bees, bees in the car…” and smiling to myself. My hard days work was rewarded with two jars of honey, two bags of oranges, and an invite to next weeks Saturday activity of orange tree grafting.