The Bees Have It

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.

Robert Frost

One of my favorite mystery series is Laurie King’s modern re-telling of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The books are riveting exploits without gratuitous sex or violence—unless you count the bees. In the original stories, Arthur Conan Doyle informed his readers that in retirement, Holmes cultivated hives and even wrote his own expansive study of the small insects–Practical Handbook of Bee Culture with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. I am not as erudite about the life cycle of bees as is Mr. Holmes, but I have literally walked in their sticky footsteps.

I’ve always been fascinated/revolted by bugs. My husband assures me that in the next life, Heaven will be six feet deep in billions of insects who “filled the measure of their creation” and were awarded with eternal life. His certainty has always made me a little leery of being too righteous for fear of having to machete my way through a host of creeping, buzzing, flying, stinging critters at the Pearly Gates. Ewww!

Once my husband secured his teaching certificate, we bought a house on the growing west side of Salt Lake City. We were joined by about 10,000 other families, and practically overnight, our area was filled with fresh-out-of-school young people, all living on starter incomes. It wasn’t long before our area was organized into an LDS stake. Stakes do things: lots of things—meetings, dances, banquets, service projects, genealogy, sports programs. And welfare.

Most every stake has some kind of project which contributes in some way to the general good. I lived in a stake that owned an apple orchard, and members volunteered hours to cultivate, weed, spray, and harvest thousands of apples, which were then distributed to those in need nearby. I’ve also helped bag flour and sugar, and can macaroni and spaghetti. One of our closest friends managed a huge church owned cattle ranch in Florida, which provided beef for hungry families all over the world. Every stake is responsible in some way to ease the burden of those less fortunate.

There was a good deal of discussion about how that goal could be reached in our area. Socio-economically, we were light-weights in the world of welfare, but we all wanted to do our share. In some meeting somewhere, someone said, “What about beehives? Hives can be located anywhere. Honey is a universal staple. Doesn’t take a whole lot of investment. It’s perfect!” (I’m guessing there weren’t a lot of women at that meeting.)

Conveniently, we had a couple of long-time farmers in our stake boundaries, and they actually knew something about beekeeping.  A little knowledge and a whole lot of enthusiasm later, our stake bought hives and began finding volunteers to house them in backyards and open fields. There were some failures, a frozen hive or two, and a few hives that had to have new queens inserted, but overall, the bees were happy to be part of the project. I can’t remember for sure, but I think we had about 50 hives.

The bees ignored us and went merrily on their way, providing pollination for neighborhood gardens and producing honey at an impressive rate. In the end, the real problem was how to extract the honey from the hives? Considering that on average a single hive produces about 25 pounds of the sweet stuff, that is A LOT of honey. We had some smart folks in our stake, and they started reading. Small hand-cranked extractors could manage 4 or 5 hives, but it became obvious that the stake needed a commercial extractor.

Then the difficulty became where to put something the size of an above-ground swimming pool? My neighbors across the street had a double garage–the biggest one in the area. “Sure,’ they said. “You can put an extractor in here for a few days each fall when we harvest the honey.” The first year–before they knew what they were getting into–the offer was generous. The following years qualified them for sainthood.

Our welfare committee rented an extractor and organized around-the-clock teams to extract honey for the 48 to 72 hours they figured it would take. Once it was collected, it was ferried to a local welfare facility where it was bottled and labeled, then shipped where there was a need. Hallelujah! The first year was a smashing success! Except for one small detail that no one had really considered. Clean up.

There was honey everywhere. Volunteers had to traipse through the house to use the restroom; my friend’s kids were in and out of the house watching the process. Floating molecules of honey stuck to clothes, hair, walls, tables, chairs, and counters. Outside, we used pressure washers to clean surfaces off; inside, it took hands and knees labor. At some point, my friend called me and said she was planning to cut up her kitchen carpet–now thoroughly saturated with honey—and stack the pieces on shelves to use in her own food storage.

Then there was still one formidable issue to resolve. The extractor walls and floor were a couple of inches thick with dead bees, wax, and honey—a nauseating combination which nobody wanted to tackle. “We need some sisters to climb in there and clean all that stuff out.”

“Why, sisters,” I asked.

“Because you’re smaller and not as heavy. We’re all just too dang big.” I knew there was a fallacious argument in there somewhere, but nothing came immediately to mind, which led to me climbing over the edge into the giant metal bowl with a bucket, a scraper, and a sponge. I’m claustrophobic. It was a confined space. I took a deep breath and started scraping muck off the walls and the floor and handing buckets of the sticky sludge over the side to the brethren below. Every time I moved, one foot or the other stuck to the floor. Little bee bodies clung to my hair and my clothes; a few live bees were attracted to my honey-infused scent, so they landed on my shoulders and arms. Fortunately, they were still dizzy from being spun around at Warp 10 speed, so I didn’t get bitten, but I did do a good deal of gagging. That night it took three complete showers before I was clean enough to fall into bed.

Sherlock Holmes claimed that he studied bee culture because it was reminiscent of the gangs he once investigated in the London underworld. Apparently, both bees and crooks are experts at cooperation. Now that I think about it, welfare brethren aren’t so bad at collusion, either.