The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  “You’d better put on overalls,” he said.

  He went back to stabbing his pancakes as if the earth hadn’t just tilted off its axis. I tore out of my pajamas and changed into overalls in record time. I didn’t know why Grandpa had changed his mind and decided to let me in the honey bus, but I wasn’t about to ask any questions lest he reconsidered.

  Before the honey bus was the honey bus, it was used by the U.S. Army to transport soldiers from the Fort Ord military base, just north of Monterey, to other outposts along the California coast. Ford Motor Company built it in 1951 as part of its F-Series, its first postwar truck and bus redesign, and sent the twenty-nine-passenger bus to Fort Ord to fulfill a government purchasing order made during World War II. As new equipment kept arriving despite the end of the war, the base became overcrowded with a glut of vehicles and began selling off some of its barely used inventory. A friend of Grandpa’s in Big Sur bought the bus at auction to cannibalize its six-cylinder engine for his own truck. He put a lighter duty engine in the bus, and sold it to Grandpa in 1963 for six hundred dollars.

  Grandpa was inspired to build a portable honey house after reading a story in his beekeeping magazine about beekeepers who installed honey spinners on the flatbeds of their Ford Model A trucks, so they could drive up to their apiaries and harvest right on the spot. But Grandpa thought that was silly because if you harvest outdoors, the bees will find the honey and go into a robbing frenzy over it. With a bus, he could drive to his bee yards and extract honey in a closed environment, without getting stung. He ripped out the bus seats and gave them to friends, who installed them in the backs of their pickups, and built his honey factory inside with parts from his sprawling collection of spare junk.

  He was mighty pleased with himself, until he tried driving the one-and-a-half-ton honey bus into the steep Big Sur canyons and nearly got it stuck on the switchback dirt roads more than a few times. After that, he steered clear of his more remote apiaries and drove the bus strictly to the bee yards he kept close to the highway.

  Also, he didn’t figure how expensive it would be to keep a bus running. His F-5 sucked down gas, and he had to fork over several hundred a year just for insurance and registration. So, to Granny’s utter horror, he parked the green monstrosity behind the house in 1965, removed the engine and gave it to a friend. Back then, Carmel Valley was still a country place where real cowboys hunted wild boar and scooped crawdads out of the river, before the tourists started demanding espresso at the Wagon Wheel breakfast counter, and according to Granny, stinking up the place with their cologne and talk of race cars and golf swings. It was a time when people could leave sputtering buses in their backyard, and no one blinked twice.

  I followed as Grandpa cut a path through waist-high foxtails to the bus. His dusty Levi’s kept sliding down his butt, and he didn’t bother with a shirt, revealing a barrel chest that was a shade somewhere between cinnamon and rust. His sinewy arms ended in two bear paws that were covered in cracks, pockmarks and scars from work. The top half-inch of Grandpa’s left pointer finger was missing, and his nail had grown all the way around it, like a helmet. An accident during high school shop class, he said, when he was cutting metal to make air raid sirens for the war. We weaved around small middens of pipe fittings and broken pottery, and stopped before an old wooden highway sign propped against the back of the bus: Pfeiffer State Park: 5.1 miles, with an arrow below it and the words Lunch This Way.

  My anticipation swirled as he climbed atop the staircase of wooden pallets at the back door, and felt around for the piece of rebar he kept out of my reach on the roof. He inserted one end of the bar into the hole where the door handle used to be, twisted and popped the lock. The door opened with a soft sucking sound, and he lifted me up and put me inside the bus. He followed and quickly slammed the door to block the handful of honeybees on our tail. They were attracted to the honeycomb that Grandpa had stacked inside the honey bus, giving off an aroma of vanilla, butter and fresh dirt that I immediately recognized as the scent of Grandpa’s skin. It was like the air inside the honey bus had its own flavor.

  Inside I saw white hive boxes stacked in towers along the wall opposite the machinery, reaching almost all the way to the roof. I started counting and reached thirty-seven and stopped. We were going to make buckets and buckets of honey, I figured. Grandpa took the lid off the nearest hive box, and pulled out one of the wooden frames of honey and admired the delicate hexagon cells sealed with a thin layer of yellow wax. He held it up to the light, letting the sun illuminate the amber nectar like a stained-glass window. He let out a long, low whistle of satisfaction.

  “That’s a goodie,” he said, handing it to me so I could feel its weight. It felt like a heavy dictionary, easily three pounds of honey.

  Grandpa took it from me and eased it back into the box with the nine others just like it. He walked down the narrow walkway toward the front of the bus, his footsteps making sticky sounds on the black rubber floor like he was walking on human flypaper.

  “Does this thing work?” I said.

  I reached for the rope pull, gray and frayed with time, and a bell clanged. Grandpa shot me a look from behind the driver’s seat, where he was pouring gasoline into a lawn-mower engine that he’d rigged to power the honey spinner, and I let go of the rope. The motor whined and wheezed as he yanked a pull-cord to start it, but eventually it caught and steadied to a pounding rat-a-tat that vibrated beneath my feet. The whole bus shimmied. To keep exhaust fumes out of the bus, Grandpa had drilled a hole in the floor and fed a metal pipe from the lawn-mower engine to the outside.

  “Now c’mere, let me show you something,” Grandpa shouted over the din, waving me toward the spinner. I peered inside the waist-high metal tank at a flywheel with a rectangular cage dangling from each of its six spokes. The cages were just the right size to accommodate one frame of honey. When the flywheel spun, the honey flew out of the honeycomb and dripped down the insides of the extractor. The honey was then pumped up a pipe, and directed through a network of smaller pipes suspended from the ceiling handrails with fishing line. The honey poured out of the pipes into two storage tanks.

  I gave the flywheel a push, but I didn’t realize it had a lock switch. Grandpa gently moved my hand away.

  “Rule number one. Don’t touch stuff. And especially don’t put your hands in the spinner. Unless you don’t like your hands very much.”

  I glanced down at his shortened index finger and instinctively backed away from the spinner. I had to be careful not to get myself kicked out of the honey bus. I stood quietly, hands in pockets, so I wouldn’t be tempted to touch anything else. As Grandpa prepared our workspace, moving jars and boxes out of our way and greasing the gears, I scanned the bus and to my delight discovered two grab bars running the length of the ceiling. This was excellent, my own monkey bars to practice on so I could do tricks on the playground with the other girls. Forgetting my vow of just a minute ago to be good, I hopped up and grabbed the two bars and swung back and forth, gaining momentum until I was able to get my legs up and over one of the bars and dangle upside down by my knees. Grandpa saw me and grabbed the opposite handrail, lifted his feet from the ground and hung opposite me.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. Then he reached out and tickled my armpit, making me scream until I couldn’t stand it any longer and swung myself back down to the floor.

  “You ready to get to work now?” he said.

  I followed him toward the back of the bus, to a long metal basin littered with wax curls and dead bees. He handed me a double-edged knife, its foot-long blade blackened with layers of burnt honey. It had a hollow wooden handle, and two rubber hoses inserted into it and secured in place with clamps. The hose trailed through a hole in the wall of the bus, outside to a copper pot of boiling water atop a propane burner.

  “Careful, that’s steam in that hose,” Grandpa warned. “That’s why they call it a hot knife. It’ll burn you good.”


  I held the weapon in front of me with straight arms, like a knight with a saber, and waited for instructions. As the blade heated up, the crusted honey on it began to glisten and smell like caramel, and a curl of smoke wafted off the tip. I held it as far away from my body as possible, while Grandpa placed a honey frame on its short side on a nail protruding from a crossbar over the trough, and held it upright with one hand. He put his other hand over mine and guided the hot knife from the top to the bottom of the sealed honeycomb, holding the blade at a perfect angle to slice the wax seal, revealing the gleaming honey underneath. The wax curled away from the honeycomb and fell into the catch basin. It took a gentle touch to remove a thin layer of wax without carving into the honey.

  “Now you try.”

  He let go of the handle and the knife became unwieldy in my small hands. I was afraid of it, and let it slip out of my hands into the trough, where it started smoking on the spilled honey. Grandpa fished it out, and used a wet rag to clean the honey off the handle. Maybe Grandpa had been right; I wasn’t old enough to harvest honey.

  “Use two hands.”

  It was getting so hot in the bus that my hands were sweaty, and I couldn’t keep a good grip on the knife. I tried to steady the blade just like Grandpa had done, but I ended up poking it into the honeycomb and gouging out a big chunk of honey.

  “Here,” he said, reaching to guide my hands again. We uncapped several dozen frames together with his hands over mine, until I learned to feel the give of the wax and could slowly apply the right pressure to slice on my own. It took me a long time to uncap both sides of one frame, but Grandpa waited patiently, praising me and taking over when I got frustrated. Eventually I could remove a thin layer of wax and leave most of the honey inside the comb.

  It was sweltering now, but we couldn’t open the windows because there weren’t any screens to keep the bees out. Grandpa turned on a rotary fan near the driver’s seat, which helped circulate the air, but added to the cacophony inside the bus. Then he stepped out of his jeans so that he was wearing only his tighty-whities and Chuck Taylor sneakers.

  “Much better,” Grandpa shouted over the ruckus. He reached into the uncapping trough, and pulled out a piece of sticky wax and popped it in his mouth.

  “Chewing gum.” He grinned.

  He was always trying to convince me that the most disgusting things were downright delicious, like liver or blue cheese. He offered me a piece of honeycomb, and I tore off a tiny piece and tentatively bit down. It tasted like every candy I loved mixed together—I first sensed coconut, then red licorice and a blast of butterscotch. The texture was like a warm marshmallow melting on my tongue, and I couldn’t believe I had had no awareness that a pleasure such as this existed. I chewed until the wax turned cold and then mimicked Grandpa, removing the wad from my mouth and tossing it back into the tub and grabbing a new warm piece. Grandpa took a few steps back and then winked at me. Then he spat his wax into the air like he was launching a watermelon seed, landing it in the basin. I took his cue and shot my wax into a big arc just as he had done.

  “Two points!” he said, going all the way to the opposite end of the bus for the long shot. He spat and missed, the wax ball landing at my feet. He retrieved it, and as he stood back up, he leaned toward me as if he were going to tell me a secret.

  “How’s it going with your mother?”

  I shrugged.

  “Are you getting along?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “It might take her a while to get better, you know,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Sealed away inside the bus, where he could speak his mind out of Granny’s earshot, Grandpa’s personality changed. He was talking to me as if I was his equal, and it took me a moment to adjust. I could sense he was trying to tell me something important, searching for the right words yet not wanting to upset me or tell me more than I could handle. He turned back to slicing wax, but kept talking to me in this new, grown-up way.

  “She can’t help the way she is.”

  His words hung in the air. What way was my mother, exactly? I knew that sadness followed her into every room. I knew she had to stay in bed because she had so many headaches, and that she really didn’t like her father. By listening to my classmates, I had figured out by now that other moms went to work, came to school, cooked dinner. Mine slept through Christmas and left my brother and me personal checks, instead of actual gifts, under the tree. Our mother was different. But now Grandpa’s words poked at me. Why was Mom “that way,” and why couldn’t she help it? What was wrong with my mother? Grandpa had admitted something to me, maybe something that I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  “She can’t help what?”

  Grandpa turned an empty hive box on its short side and sat on it like a stool. He wiped his brow on the back of his arm and faced me. I could tell he was choosing his words carefully.

  “Your mother loves you.”

  I waited for him to continue. He tried again.

  “Sometimes it’s hard for her to show it.”

  “Why?”

  Grandpa looked up toward a spider spinning a web in one of the oblong windows at the roofline. I could tell that I’d asked one of those questions for which there is no answer. In the silence that stretched between us, a heavy sadness pressed down on my chest, and suddenly I needed to sit down. I pulled an empty hive box near him and made my own stool.

  “Have I told you about scout bees?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Scout bees are house hunters. If their home is not right—too crowded, too damp—they go searching for a better one.”

  I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this, so I waited for him to continue.

  Scout bees are the risk-takers, the ones that convince a hive to swarm, he said. Days before the bees pour out of their hive in a massive cloud, scout bees investigate the neighborhood looking for a better place to live, exploring tree cavities, insides of chimneys, even the walls of houses. They wait for a nice, sunny day and then race through the hive, shivering their wing muscles against other bees to motivate them. Their excitement is infectious as the temperature rises inside the hive and all those flapping wings come together like a drumbeat. The bees get louder, and louder, and when they are at a roar, on some hidden cue the swarm pours forth from the hive entrance, whirling into a horde up to thirty feet across with the queen somewhere in the middle.

  I imagined a firework of bees in the sky, tens of thousands of black dots swirling and then coming together as if through an invisible funnel.

  “How do they decide where to go?”

  “They dance.”

  By now I’d learned that Grandpa was never kidding when he talked about bees, no matter how unbelievable his stories seemed. He had me convinced that bees could do anything. I knew bees communicated by scent, sound and touch. So, why not movement, too? Now he was saying that foragers will dance inside the hive to tell the bees where to find nectar-rich flowers. The scout bees dance right on top of the clustered swarm to tell it where to relocate.

  “The dance is like a map,” Grandpa continued. “The dance steps tell the bees the address of their new home.”

  “Can I see?”

  “See what?”

  “The bees dancing.”

  “If you’re lucky, we’ll catch them doing it sometime.”

  Grandpa stood and began getting ready for the first spin. He reached into the uncapping trough for the honeycomb frames we’d unsealed with the hot knife, and slid them, dripping with honey, into the cages that dangled from the flywheel inside the extractor. Once he’d filled each cage, he unlocked the flywheel and paused before setting the spinner in motion.

  “I don’t want you to get too upset about your mother. You’re smart like a scout bee. One day you’ll find your own way.”

  I decided right then and ther
e that the scout bee was my favorite bee of all.

  “Go ahead, flip the handle,” he said, pointing at the lever near the lip of the spinner.

  The flywheel spun and picked up speed, whining until the cages below blurred. The honey flew out in thick cords at first, thinning with each revolution until it became glistening gossamer threads, signaling it was time to crank the handle protruding from the top of the flywheel the other way and reverse the spin. It took a few minutes per side, give or take, depending on how full the honeycomb was.

  Nearly a foot of honey collected in the basin, so thick and shiny that we could see our faces reflected in it. The pump kicked in and gulped at it, sending languid bubbles to the surface as it pushed the honey up through the pipes. The plumbing reverberated as the pump forced the honey up a main artery leading from the spinner’s basin, all the way to the ceiling, where the tube branched off at a Y-joint into two smaller conduits. From here the honey was channeled past the passenger windows and toward two fifty-gallon storage tanks behind the driver’s seat. The honey pipelines came to an end just above the openmouthed tanks, and were suspended in place by metal wire Grandpa had secured to the ceiling handrails with heavy-duty plumbers’ tape. I kept vigil over those spouts, bewitched.

  “Here it comes!” Grandpa said.

  The first rivulets of honey bubbled out of the pipes, and cascaded into the holding tanks. It was pretty, like a girl’s blond hair undulating in the wind. I remembered Grandpa told me once that one bee makes less than a thimbleful of honey in its whole life. So much was spilling out now that it must have taken a million-million bees to make it all.

  We worked all day, until the sun started to sink behind the Santa Lucia Range, turning the mountains from dark green to gray, until we had nearly one hundred gallons of honey. I lost myself in the movements of lifting frames and slicing wax, and imagined we were worker bees inside our own hive. The whir of the extractor sounded like the hum of a colony, drowning out our voices so we had to communicate mostly by hand gestures. We nudged each other in this direction or that, shaking one another by the shoulder to convey something important. If we were at either ends of the bus, we had to wave and dance like a bee to get the other’s attention.