A Book of Bees

by Potthoff, Sam; Hubbell, Sue;

  Results so far indicate a boiled mixture of equal parts of honey and water to be far ahead of any other combination. This mixture gets slushy at 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit but does not freeze solid.

  Low grade honey was found to be just as effective as a high grade. The honey mixture need be put in the radiator only at the beginning of winter, water being added to fill the radiator when the mixture becomes low …

  This would work, of course, because honey doesn’t freeze; nonetheless, I was surprised at such an innovative use, even though I shouldn’t have been: people have employed honey for purposes other than eating for centuries—it has been an ingredient in the centers of golf balls, in shaving creams, shampoos, gear lubricants, chewing tobaccos and gum. It was used to embalm the dead in the Egypt of the pharaohs.

  “Hooni cleareth all the obstructions of the body, looseneth the belly, purgeth the foulness of the body, and provoketh urine,” said Charles Butler, who not only wrote about the keeping of bees in 1623 but was a melliphile as well. “It cutteth up and casteth out phlegmatic matter and thereby sharpens the stomach of them which by reason have little appetite. It purgeth those things which hurt the clearness of the eyes and nourisheth very much; it storeth up and preserveth natural heat and prolongeth old age.”

  Many claims have been made that honey lengthened life. An ancient Polish king once attributed his one hundred and thirty years to the keeping of bees and the eating of honey. Staunch old king.

  Honey ranks among the most astonishing of cure-alls: its antibacterial qualities have made it valued as a dressing for wounds and burns, and there are those who say that it increases the hemoglobin count, prevents anemia, contains an antihemorrhaging factor and aids the body in the absorption of calcium. Others swear it will allay coughs, relieve fevers and inflammatory infections and make an excellent gargle. Honey has been suggested as a cure for radiation sickness, drunkenness and hangovers, while in India it is mixed with beeswax and prescribed for ulcers. Farmers have been known to treat their cows’ mastitis with honey. (It should be noted, however, that certain melliphobes have whispered that “sourwood honey … is considered to have undeniable griping qualities.” They also say that it is the cause of crib death in infants less than six months old.)

  Notable mellivores include Caruso, who always downed a tablespoonful of honey before singing; Hindu males, who, according to custom, are fed honey at birth; athletes of all ages; racing pigeons; cows in need of an easier calving—and, of course, the Greek gods, whose original food, legend has it, was the honey of Hymettus.

  Unscrupulous vintners have been known to doctor improperly ripened wine with honey. From ancient times, mead has been brewed from honey, and buckwheat honey was used to make beer. Honey used to be smeared on salted meat to improve its taste. A mixture of milk, honey, salt and butter do honor to guests, and honey has always been considered an appropriate offering to the gods.

  Honey has also been used as a spray adherent, a cure for pipe bowls and as a plant growth stimulant. Honey will serve as a bait for houseflies. It is used to line petroleum storage tanks, as well as to preserve transplant tissues. Eggs in cold storage are sometimes kept in honey; in fact, its properties as a packing material are so good that it has been used for shipping plant grafts, seeds and birds’ eggs for scientific study, while boars’ sperm frozen and then stored in honey is said to possess greater motility when it is thawed.

  People who buy my honey use it for many unusual purposes: several insist that a teaspoonful mixed with the local pollen keeps them from sneezing during the hayfever season, and one very old Ozark hill woman takes a tablespoon along with two teaspoonfuls of black pepper every day. She says it keeps her free of arthritis. One young man tells me that for the past six months he has been living on nothing but my honey, distilled water and the juice of pressed clover leaflets. He praises the fine surge of energy that comes from downing a whole cup of honey at a time—he’s a regular mellimaniac. I have also been told that the replacement of honey by white sugar in the diet has been responsible for many human disasters, from the defeat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in Russia down to the generally spongy qualities of today’s television generation.

  Well, they are all my customers, bless them, and they can do anything they want with my honey in the privacy of their homes, but I work hard to help the bees make a fine-tasting honey, and it is rather a letdown to find it is being bought for its moral qualities.

  Here, for T. or anyone else who would like to try it, is a good pie to make with honey:

  Pastry for double-crust, 9-inch pie

  ¾ cup sugar

  1 teaspoon nutmeg

  Enough pared and sliced apples to fill a 9-inch pie generously

  1 ½ tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces

  ½ cup liquid honey

  1 tablespoon grated orange rind

  Confectioners’ sugar

  Preheat oven to 425° F.

  Prepare pastry sufficient for a double-crust, 9-inch pie. Roll out half the dough and line the pie plate.

  Combine sugar and nutmeg; pour over apples, lifting and tossing with two forks until well combined. Pile fruit into pie pan, heaping to make a nice fat pie, and dot with butter.

  Roll out remaining pastry and cut into ½-inch strips. Arrange strips lattice fashion over apples, pressing edges down firmly. Bake 10 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 350°F. Bake 30–40 minutes more, or until apples are tender and crust is brown. Remove from oven.

  Combine honey and orange rind, and pour mixture through openings in lattice; return pie to oven and bake another 5 minutes. Cool to lukewarm and dredge with confectioners’ sugar. Serve warm or cold.

  Oddly enough, bees are not as sensitive to sweet tastes as we are. Karl von Frisch discovered that they are unable to distinguish between pure water and a three-percent sugar solution, which tastes distinctly sweet to us. There is good reason they evolved as animals unable to detect low concentrations of sugar, however, for such would not be good provision for winter stores, which must be concentrated and compact. The bees’ excitement and efficiency in food gathering increases directly in proportion to the sugar concentration of the source. Foraging bees choose the sweetest nectar available, and ignore the others. Honey—one of the most highly concentrated of all sweets—excites them most. If a few bees from different hives discover an open super of honey in the back of a pickup, they will immediately fly to their hives and enthusiastically recruit their sisters; in no time the super will be filled with bees greedily ripping open the honeycomb cells and robbing the honey, even killing one another for the chance to get at it. There will be a veritable bee war over the spoils. And that puts the bees in a bad temper.

  During the honey harvest, when open supers are put in the backs of pickups, bees are often touchy and cross anyway, because it is a time of dearth. Honey is harvested at different times in different parts of the country, but whatever the month, it is when the nectar flow is over, which means that there is a full work force of perhaps 60,000 bees staying home in each hive, with little to do. There are often so many bees that they will not fit inside the hives, and they cluster dispiritedly out in front. They are mature bees with full venom sacs, and they are cross, easily provoked to defensive stinging behavior just at the time the beekeeper wants to steal their honey.

  The important thing is to take the honey from them as expeditiously as possible and transfer it speedily to an enclosed bee-proof place.

  There are a number of ways to take honey from bees and bees from honey. A beekeeper with just a few supers will have no trouble removing all of them from his hives quickly, even if he just sets them to one side and then, frame by frame, shakes the bees from them. But the procedure does stir up the bees, and if he has more than a few supers he will need another method. A bee brush will make the job faster and disturb the bees less. A bee brush is a wooden-handled brush with long, soft, yellow plastic bristles, which he may buy from a bee supply company. Using it, a beekeeper can b
rush the bees gently away from the combs. Bees do not seem to mind being brushed off nearly as much as being shaken.

  Bee brush and bee escape

  However, when a beekeeper uses a bee brush he still must take frames out of the super one by one. If he has a lot of supers, he will prefer to remove the bees from a super all at once.

  “Hmpf! Playtoys!” said an old beekeeper the first year I was keeping bees and asked him about bee escapes. Bee escapes are small one-way doors that can be pressed into the hole of an inner cover placed below the top super. The bees can go out of the bee escape but they cannot enter it. When a beekeeper uses bee escapes during the honey harvest, he must put the escape in an inner cover and place that under the uppermost super. In a few days the bees will have left. He can then remove the super and put the inner cover with the bee escape in it under the next super, wait a few days, take the super and continue the process until all of the supers on the hive have been removed. The method is not only slow but requires extra handling of equipment, and for that reason it is unsatisfactory to many beekeepers. I tried it one year on a couple of hives as an experiment, but it was so slow I did not repeat it. Yes. Playtoys.

  Fume board

  Bee repellent used on a “fume board” will drive bees from an entire super, but on hot sunshiny days only, manufacturers’ claims to the contrary notwithstanding. A fume board is a cloth-lined ridged cover cut to the dimensions of an open super. A beekeeper squirts a small amount of repellent on the cloth lining and places it on top of the super. The fumes are heavier than air, and the bees run from them. The beekeeper takes the cleared super and puts the fume board on the one below it, repeating the process until all the supers have been removed. This is a fast method but the chemicals do not work well on cold or cloudy days so it is a method that must be reserved for proper weather.

  Benzaldehyde, or artificial oil of almonds, and butyric anhydride which is sold under the name of Bee Go, may both be used as repellents. The bees dislike both, and I can see why—even to a human they smell terrible. Benzaldehyde is marginally less offensive to my nose but it is volatile and dangerous enough so that it cannot be shipped through the mails or by UPS, so I do not like carrying it around to my beeyards in my pickup. Butyric anhydride can be shipped, but it smells worse. One of my bee-supply catalogs refers to it as “pungent.” I should call it stinky. I once loaned my fume board and butyric anhydride to another beekeeper, who was unable to drive back over to my place to return it, so he mailed it, and when it arrived in town the postmaster phoned: “Don’t know what this package has in it that just came for you, but it stinks to high heaven! It’s driving us out of the post office. Will you come get it, please?”

  For several hundred dollars a beekeeper can buy a bee blower. A bee blower is a machine similar to the ones people living in the suburbs use to blow leaves from their lawns in the autumn or to the back-pack sprayers orchardists use to apply pesticides. It is a vacuum cleaner in reverse. Powered by a gasoline engine, it blows a strong blast of air down a length of flexible hose tipped with a narrow attachment that looks like a vacuum’s crevice tool. The narrow tool is used to direct the full force of air between frames in a super, to push the bees downward. It is effective in driving bees from the supers quickly, and does not irritate them overmuch: they regard wind, even strong wind, as one of life’s natural hazards and do not rush out to sting the beekeeper creating the storm.

  For some years I used a bee blower, but eventually I gave it away, with an enormous sense of relief. It is a fussy machine and requires constant carburetor adjustments to keep it running at full power, but, although irritating, that was not what made me give it away. No, my reason was an aesthetic one: I wearied of the noise of the engine, which is louder than my chain saw, louder than my brush cutter, louder than a lawnmower. It seems wrong, somehow, to make such a terrible racket in a peaceful, beautiful beeyard. It does not put the bees in a bad temper, but it puts me in one. I now use a pair of fume boards and butyric anhydride to harvest my honey. My harvest is in August, when the weather is hot and the chemical works quickly. By using a pair of boards, I can pry up the cleared supers from one hive and hand them to the young man I hire as a helper while the fumes are beginning to act on the second hive. We can usually work through a beeyard with ten or twelve hives in half to three-quarters of an hour. And, after using the blower, I appreciate the quiet in the beeyards enough to put up with the stench of butyric anhydride.

  Tony, the young man who has worked for me during past honey harvests, helped me again this year. He’s in college now, and I had feared he would have other things to do, but he likes working with the bees and arranged his summer vacation schedule in order to be free for the first few weeks in August, when I needed him. He grew up on a farm, is used to hard work and is comfortable and relaxed around all animals, including bees. Because he has worked for me before, he knows all the routines. He is cooperative, cheerful and calm. He is the best helper I have ever had. When I am running fewer hives, I hope I shall be able to handle the honey harvest on my own, but it’s companionable to work with Tony in the beeyards and in the honey house. We drive to the outyards together in my three-quarter-ton truck, which will carry a 5,000-pound load. He stacks the filled supers on the truck, and in the honey house he helps separate the honey from the honeycomb inside them. At first, we worked in the outyards, and after three days the honey house was filled with stacks of supers on pallets. We still had more to bring in, but the honey house was full, and so on the fourth day we began extracting honey.

  Even with just a few hives of bees, it is worthwhile for a beekeeper to make up some pallets the right size for honey supers and use a handtruck for moving them. For me it is absolutely essential. I do not know who invented the handtruck, but whoever he was I hope he led a happy life and was rewarded for his ingenuity. All over the world there are people who have been spared heavy lifting by his invention; I am one of them, and I often look at my three handtrucks and smile.

  Handtruck

  Tony stacks the supers in the back of the three-quarter-ton truck directly on to pallets piled six high if he is going to move them, five if I am. A stack five high weighs approximately three hundred pounds, and even with a handtruck that is my limit. But Tony is bigger and stronger, and he is usually here, so he generally sucks them six high. Back at the loading dock he uses one of the handtrucks to wheel them off the truck and into the honey house, where they stand until we are ready to start processing honey.

  Temperature and humidity are important once honey has been removed from the beehives, and the bees can no longer control them. Honey processors with bigger operations than mine have a hot room, where temperature and humidity are regulated while the filled supers are stacked. I don’t worry about temperature, because August is ordinarily so hot that the honey will flow easily from the combs. But I am concerned about humidity, so I do not like to leave the supers any longer than three days in the honey house lest the honey in them picks up moisture from the air.

  Whether a beekeeper has three hives or three hundred, as I do, or three thousand, extracting the honey from the combs is much the same job. In all cases, he needs to cut off the wax cappings from the frames of honeycomb so that the honey beneath them is exposed, to take the honey out of the comb and put it in something else. The equipment needed in any sized operation, then, are variations on a hot knife, to slice through the soft wax cappings on the frames of honey; a centrifugal spinner, to separate the honey from the comb; and a container to catch the free honey. Beekeepers with thousands of hives have fast and expensive machinery with which to do this, but a beekeeper with just a small number of hives can, for a few hundred dollars, outfit himself with a knife he can warm up in a basin of hot water, a hand-operated extracting machine and a couple of stainless-steel buckets. My own operation is an in-between size. I use a motorized, steam-heated uncapping knife, a motor-driven extractor that will hurl the honey out of forty-five frames in fifteen minutes and a series of stainle
ss-steel settling and bottling tanks connected by clear plastic tubing.

  When we start to process the honey, Tony wheels out the first stack of supers with the handtruck and takes up his position at the uncapping knife. At dawn I had lit the bottled-gas hot plate under the old pressure canner I use to generate steam. The steam passes down a hose into the knife, where it heats the blade so that it can melt the wax. The exhaust from the knife is captured in another hose, which is used to warm a series of copper pipes in a tank into which I dump the cut-off cappings. Melted down into creamy yellow blocks, I will sell this beeswax to a beekeeping-supply company for more money, per pound, than I ever get for the honey. Beeswax has many uses besides making fine candles. It is a base for ointments, creams and cosmetics. It is used for waterproofings and polishes. It is an ingredient in adhesives, crayons, chewing gum, inks, ski and grafting wax. But its chief value is to beekeeping-supply companies, which remelt it and mold it into new frame foundation to sell back to beekeepers.

  Once the uncapping knife is hot, Tony switches on its electric motor. This makes the knife move up and down vertically, and when he passes a frame lightly against it, the heat of the blade melts and neatly saws through the delicate wax cappings without tearing the honeycomb cells. Then he flips the frame over and uncaps the other side. The uncapped frames, oozing with honey, are placed temporarily in the tank that also catches the wax cappings. Honey drains from the frames and the cappings into another tank, which feeds into the rest of the system. When he has forty-five frames uncapped I load them into the extractor—a big circular tank fitted out with a slightly smaller heavy screen basket that is slotted to hold the honeycomb frames. When I turn on its motor, the basket starts spinning and the honey inside the frames is thrown out against the walls of the extractor, where it runs down and out through a series of tubes and baffled settling tanks into one of the three 1,200-pound bottling tanks. The baffles hold back most of the bits of loose wax that break off from the frames, but just before the honey runs into the bottling tanks, it is strained through a double layer of nylon mesh to keep it clean and free of any remaining wax particles.