Pulling Honey

Colony

Chapter 20: Pulling Honey

August. The word itself was heavy, was the weight of the month, the month of heat and harvest and the turning that August contained, the turning from the season of building to the season of taking, the pivot point of the beekeeping year when the beekeeper's role shifted from provider to harvester, from the person who fed and treated and managed and protected to the person who took, and the taking was earned, the taking was the covenant, the taking was the agreement between beekeeper and colony that was as old as the practice itself: I will tend you through the year, I will give you boxes and frames and foundation and sugar syrup and mite treatments and the physical labor of my hands and my back and my attention, and in return I will take the surplus, the honey you made beyond what you need, the excess that your productivity generated, and I will take it because the taking is the exchange, and the exchange is the relationship, and the relationship is the thing.

The fume board smelled of almonds. Benzaldehyde, the chemical compound in the fume board liquid, a natural substance — found in bitter almonds, in cherries, in the stones of drupes — that the bees found repellent, that drove them down and away from the scent, down from the honey super into the brood boxes below, vacating the super so that Meg could lift it off the hive without bringing ten thousand bees with it, the evacuation that was the first step of the harvest, the clearing of the population from the product, the separation of the maker from the made.

Meg sprinkled the fume board with the liquid. The felt pad on the underside of the board absorbed it, the almond smell rising in the morning air, the air already warm at seven, August warm, the kind of warm that would be hot by noon and that made the early start essential, because pulling honey in the heat of the afternoon meant working in a suit in ninety-degree air and carrying forty-pound supers with hands slippery with sweat and propolis and the sticky residue of honey that leaked from the uncapped cells when the frames were jostled, and the combination of heat and weight and stickiness was the physical reality of the honey harvest that no pastoral image of beekeeping captured, the pastoral image being the jar on the kitchen table, the golden liquid in the morning light, the image that was the end of the process and not the process itself, the process itself being labor, being August, being the fume board and the truck and the lifting and the carrying and the driving and the stacking and the sweat.

She placed the fume board on top of the first hive's honey super. She waited. The benzaldehyde worked in minutes — the bees smelling it and moving down, the superorganism contracting away from the repellent the way a hand contracts from heat, the collective withdrawal, and within five minutes the super was mostly clear, a few stragglers remaining, the bees that had not received the chemical signal or that were too committed to their work to abandon it, the bees that Meg brushed off the frames with a bee brush, a soft-bristled brush like a wide paintbrush, the bristles moving the bees gently from the frame surface, the brushed bees flying off or falling to the ground or returning immediately to the frame, the persistence of bees being one of the qualities that made beekeeping difficult and that made bees admirable, the refusal to be easily displaced from the thing they were doing, the attachment to the work that was not attachment in the emotional sense but was the behavioral expression of the neural program that said: this is where you are, this is what you are doing, continue.

Luz was at the next hive, applying her own fume board, working in parallel, the two of them moving through the apiary in the coordinated efficiency of two people who had been working together for four months and who knew the choreography, the sequence of steps that the harvest required — fume, wait, pull, brush, stack, carry, load, drive — the sequence that they had discussed the evening before, sitting on the tailgate of the truck after the last inspection of the pre-harvest round, Meg explaining the process to Luz the way she explained everything to Luz, with the combination of practical instruction and accumulated wisdom that was the teacher's compound, the alloy of the how and the why.

"We take the surplus," Meg had said. "We leave what they need. The distinction between surplus and need is the beekeeper's judgment, and the judgment is the thing you get wrong at first and get less wrong over time and never get entirely right because the variables are too many — how much honey will they consume between now and spring? How cold will the winter be? How long will the dearth last? How quickly will the queen resume laying in February? You can't know these things in August. You estimate. You estimate based on experience, based on the colony's current population, based on the weight of the brood boxes, based on the honey stores in the lower boxes, based on the feeling in your hands when you lift the hive — the weight that tells you full or light, sufficient or insufficient. And you leave enough. You always leave enough. Because leaving enough is the covenant. You break the covenant, you lose the colony. You take too much, the colony starves in January, and the starving is your fault, not the winter's fault, not the cold's fault — your fault, because you took what they needed, and the taking was a betrayal."

The word had surprised her. Betrayal. She had not meant to use the word, had not planned the sentence, had been talking about honey and had arrived at betrayal the way her mind arrived at the personal through the professional, the passage from the bees to the self that her mind made without her authorization, the connection drawn by the subterranean logic that linked the taking-too-much to the giving-too-little, the beekeeper's covenant to the marriage's covenant, the agreement to provide and to not take more than the surplus, and the failure being the failure in both cases — the failure to leave enough, to ensure that the other party had what they needed, to not strip the reserves in the pursuit of the harvest.

She had not stripped Gavin's reserves. Or she had, but not intentionally, not by taking but by not-giving, by the withholding that was not deliberate but was constitutional, was the Hollis family's particular trait, the retention of self that looked like strength and was strength and was also deprivation, was the colony that stored too much honey in its own brood boxes and did not release enough to the shared super, the metaphor imperfect as all metaphors for marriage were imperfect but the feeling accurate — the feeling that she had been a queen whose pheromone reached the colony but not the man at the edge of it, the man who was allergic to the sting and who therefore stood outside the apiary and who received the diluted signal, the weakened pheromone, the signal that said: I am here, I am present, I am laying, but that did not say the other thing, the thing the signal needed to say to the person who was not a worker bee and who needed more than the pheromone, who needed the words, who needed the speech that Meg did not make and the approach that Meg did not offer and the smoker she did not carry into the kitchen.

Meg lifted the first super. Forty-two pounds — she could feel it, the weight that experience had calibrated her body to read, the way a grocer's hand read the weight of apples by holding the bag, the practiced estimation that was close enough, that was within a pound, that said: this super is full, this super is capped, this super is ready. She carried it to the truck. She stacked it on the pallet in the truck bed. Luz carried the next one. Stack by stack, the harvest grew.

The bees objected. This was the thing about pulling honey that the pastoral image did not include — the bees' resistance, the bees' defense of the honey they had made, the honey that was theirs by the labor theory of value, the honey that they had produced from the nectar they had gathered from the flowers they had found and flown to and extracted from and carried home in their honey stomachs and transferred to the house bees and processed through the enzymatic chain and fanned to the proper moisture content and capped with the wax they had secreted from their own bodies, the honey that was, by any measure, theirs, and that the beekeeper was taking, and that the bees did not want taken.

The objection took the form of bees — bees following the supers to the truck, bees landing on the stacked boxes, bees circling the truck in increasing numbers, the robbing instinct activated, the scent of exposed honey drawing bees from the hive and from neighboring hives, the bees investigating the scent, finding the source, trying to access the honey in the stacked supers, the frenzy of bees around the truck that was the visual and auditory signature of pulling day, the sound and the sight of the colony's protest, and the protest was real, was the authentic response of an organism whose stores were being removed, and Meg respected the protest and was not deterred by the protest because the protest and the taking were both part of the covenant, both part of the relationship, the bees protesting and the beekeeper taking and the taking stopping at the surplus and the surplus being the line, the line that Meg did not cross.

She weighed the hives after pulling. Each hive, she tipped from behind, lifting the back of the bottom board an inch, the weight in her hands the indicator — a heavy hive had sufficient stores, a light hive needed to keep its honey. She left honey on the colonies that felt light. She pulled from the colonies that felt heavy. The felt-heavy was the subjective measure that thirty years had made reliable, the body's scale more trusted than any mechanical scale because the body's scale incorporated not just weight but context — the colony's population, the time of year, the expected duration of the dearth, the average winter in the valley, the thousand variables that a mechanical scale could not weigh but that Meg's body weighed because Meg's body had been weighing them for thirty years and the weighing was calibrated by the outcomes, by the colonies that had survived and the colonies that had not, by the lessons of the deadouts, the lessons written in frozen clusters and empty stores, the lessons that said: you took too much, you left too little, and the too-little was this weight, this feeling in the hands, this lightness that you should have felt and did not feel or felt and ignored.

She did not ignore it now. She left enough. She always left enough.

By noon they had pulled from three apiaries. The truck was loaded — forty-eight supers stacked on pallets, wrapped in tarps to prevent robbing, the tarps tied down with bungee cords, the load heavy, the truck's rear suspension compressed, the load riding low on the county roads as Meg drove to the honey house, the converted garage behind the house where the extraction equipment waited — the uncapping knife, the extractor, the strainers, the bottling tank, the apparatus of conversion that would transform the frames of capped honey into the jars of liquid honey that the farmer's market expected, the apparatus that was the final stage of the chain that began with a flower's nectary gland and ended with a customer's kitchen table.

They unloaded the supers into the honey house. The room was warm — Meg had turned on the space heaters that morning because warm honey extracted more easily than cold honey, the viscosity decreasing with temperature, the honey flowing more freely from the cells when the room was seventy-five or eighty degrees, and the room was eighty now, the air thick with the smell of honey and wax, the smell that was the smell of the season concentrated, the smell that visitors to the honey house commented on and that Meg no longer noticed because the smell was her life and you did not smell your life.

They stacked the supers along the wall. They would begin extracting tomorrow. Today was pulling day, and pulling day was physical, was the lifting and the carrying and the driving, was the work of the body rather than the work of the hands, and by the afternoon Meg's shoulders ached and her lower back ached and her arms ached and the aching was the aching of a fifty-two-year-old body that had been lifting eighty-pound boxes since she was twenty-two and that would continue lifting eighty-pound boxes for as long as the body could lift them, which was a duration that Meg did not calculate because the calculating would have been the acknowledgment of the body's decline and the acknowledgment was not something Meg did, the acknowledgment being in the same category as the examination of feelings and the discussion of emotions and the other things that the Hollis women did not do, the not-doing being the exoskeleton, the hard exterior that bore the load and did not show the wear.

But the wear was there. The wear was the shoulders and the back and the knees and the hands that stiffened in the morning and that took an hour of work to loosen and that would someday not loosen, would stay stiff, would become the hands that her grandmother had held up in the last years of her beekeeping, the hands that could no longer grip a frame, the hands that had ended her grandmother's career not through choice but through biology, the body saying: you are done, the lifting is over, the hands that held the frames for forty years are closing now and will not open again, and the closing was the ending, and the ending was the thing her grandmother had accepted with the same absence of ceremony that the bees accepted the supersedure, the queen that was done being done without drama.

Meg stood in the honey house. She looked at the stacked supers — forty-eight of them along the wall, each one containing ten frames of capped honey, each frame containing four to five pounds of honey, the total yield approximately two thousand pounds if the estimates were correct, the two thousand pounds that was the season's number, the number that would determine whether the year was good or average or poor, the number that was the conversion of the season into its arithmetic, the year's work reduced to a weight.

Two thousand pounds was good. Two thousand pounds, at the retail price she charged at the farmer's market — twelve dollars per pound jar — was twenty-four thousand dollars, the honey income, the income that combined with the pollination income to produce the annual revenue of Hollis Apiaries, the revenue from which Meg paid the expenses and the apprentice's wages and the mortgage and the truck insurance and the equipment and the feed and the treatments and the everything, the everything that a small agricultural business required, the everything that a single person funded and managed and executed and worried about.

She did not worry about it now. She worried about it in February, when the expenses were accumulating and the revenue was months away, when the winter stretched ahead and the colonies might or might not survive and the pollination contracts might or might not fill and the season might or might not produce. In August, with the supers stacked in the honey house and the harvest in hand, the worrying was suspended, was the one month when the beekeeper could see the year's work in tangible form — the boxes of honey, the weight on the shelves, the evidence that the season had produced, that the bees had done the thing, that the flow had been sufficient, that the taking was justified because the surplus was real, was measurable, was here, in the honey house, in the warm room that smelled of the year.

Luz stood beside her, looking at the supers. Luz had pulled honey before, at her hobbyist scale, two or three supers from two or three hives, the backyard harvest of a person with a few colonies and a kitchen extractor and a jar for the neighbors. This was different. This was scale. This was the commercial harvest, the forty-eight supers, the two thousand pounds, the truckloads and the pallets and the space heaters and the extraction equipment that could process a hundred frames in a day, the infrastructure of a business that existed because a woman had decided thirty years ago that she would keep bees and had kept them and had built the thing from the keeping.

"This is what it looks like," Luz said.

"This is what it looks like."

"The whole season. In boxes."

"The whole season in boxes. The weather and the bloom and the bees and the work. All of it. In boxes. On shelves. In a warm room that smells like honey. This is what it looks like."

They stood in the honey house and they looked at the supers and the looking was the looking of two people at the end of a harvest, the looking that combined satisfaction and tiredness and the particular feeling of standing in the presence of the thing you worked for, the tangible result, the honey in the frames, the season made physical, the abstract — the sunlight and the rain and the pollen and the nectar and the bee's flight and the enzyme's action and the wax's construction — the abstract made concrete, the invisible made visible, the year in boxes.

Meg turned off the space heaters. She closed the honey house door. She and Luz walked across the yard to the house. The afternoon was hot and still. The apiary was quiet — the pulled hives adjusting, the bees regrouping, the colonies assessing the loss of their supers, the sudden lightness of the hive, the space where the honey had been now empty, the frames that the bees had spent months filling now gone, taken, loaded onto a truck and driven away, and the colony responding to the loss the way colonies responded to loss, which was by beginning to fill the space again, the foragers already bringing in what nectar was available, the house bees already processing it, the cells already receiving the new nectar, the colony already starting the cycle again, the cycle that was the colony's response to everything — loss, disruption, change, the taking of the stores, the removal of the queen, the destruction of the comb — the response being: begin again, fill the space, build the comb, store the honey, continue.

Meg made iced tea. She poured two glasses. She and Luz sat on the porch in the afternoon heat and drank the tea and did not speak for a while because the not-speaking was the rest, was the body's and the mind's pause after the day's exertion, the pause that was necessary the way the dearth was necessary, the pause between the flow and the next flow, between the production and the next production, the pause that allowed the organism to gather itself before the next effort.

The tea was cold and sweet. The porch was shaded. The apiary was visible from the porch, the hives in the afternoon light, the hives that had been harvested and the hives that had not yet been harvested, the pulled colonies and the unpulled colonies side by side, and the difference was not visible from the porch because the difference was internal, was the weight, was the stored honey that was there or was not there, the fullness or the emptiness that the exterior of the hive did not reveal, the box looking the same full or empty, the painted wood giving no indication of what was inside, the exterior uninformative, the truth available only to the person who opened the lid and looked, or who tipped the hive and felt the weight, or who put her ear to the side and listened to the hum that was different when the stores were full and the hum that was different when the stores were gone.

"Thank you for today," Meg said.

She said it because the day had been the hardest physical day of the season, the pulling being the peak labor, the most lifting, the most carrying, the most demanding work of the beekeeping year, and Luz had done it beside her, had lifted every super she had lifted, had carried every box she had carried, had worked the full day in the August heat in a bee suit and had not complained and had not slowed and had not suggested they stop or rest or wait until tomorrow, had worked at Meg's pace, which was the pace of a woman who had been pulling honey for thirty years and who knew that pulling day was pulling day and that the pulling happened on pulling day and not on the day after.

"I want to do this," Luz said. "Not just this summer. Not just the apprenticeship. I want to do this."

The statement was simple. The statement was the declaration that Meg had been waiting for without knowing she had been waiting for it, the statement that said: this is not a phase, this is not a detour, this is not the hobby that the dentist wanted or the Instagram content that the young man wanted, this is the thing, the actual thing, the life's work thing, the thing I am supposed to do, and the knowing that I am supposed to do it is the knowing that has been building since I answered the ad and drove out here and stood in the apiary and watched you find the queen and felt the feeling that said: this, here, this is where I am supposed to be.

Meg drank her tea. She looked at the apiary. She felt the feeling that was not the feeling she had felt in February, the deadout feeling, the frozen-cluster feeling, the feeling of a woman alone in a house that smelled of honey and tasted of nothing. This feeling was different. This feeling was the feeling of the pulled hive — lighter, yes, lighter because something had been taken, something had been removed, the surplus extracted, the excess harvested, but the lightness was not emptiness, the lightness was the lightness of space, of room, of the opened frame that could receive what the next flow would bring, and the next flow was coming, the next flow was already coming, was in the goldenrod that would bloom in September, in the asters that would bloom in October, in the small late flows that would supplement the colony's stores before winter, and the stores would build, and the colony would have enough, and the enough was the covenant, and the covenant was honored, and the honoring was the thing.

"Okay," Meg said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. We'll talk about it. After the season. We'll figure out what that looks like."

"Okay."

The okay was the word. The okay was the sufficient word, the word that did not promise and did not refuse, the word that opened the door without walking through it, the word that said: the future is a possibility and the possibility is acknowledged and the acknowledging is enough for now, and the now was August, and August was the harvest, and the harvest was the thing, and the thing was here, in the honey house, in the supers on the shelves, in the season that was not over but that had passed its peak and that was moving now toward the next phase, the phase of extraction and bottling and selling and feeding and preparing, the phase that would take them from August to October, from the harvest to the winterizing, from the taking to the giving-back, the covenant's two halves, the ancient exchange that was the relationship between the beekeeper and the colony, the relationship that Meg had maintained for thirty years and that she would maintain for as many more years as her body allowed and that she was now, for the first time, considering the possibility of sharing.

The sharing was the thing. The sharing was the new thing. The sharing was the super added to the top of the hive, the additional space, the room for something to grow that had not had room before, and the room was new and the growing was beginning and the beginning was August, which was the month of the harvest, which was the month of taking, which was also the month when the beekeeper assessed the year and decided what had been produced and what would remain and what would be carried into the next season, and Meg was assessing, and the assessment was ongoing, and the season was not over, and the honey was in the house, and the bees were in the hives, and the evening was coming, and the evening was warm, and the tea was cold, and the porch was shaded, and Luz was there.

Luz was there. And the being-there was the thing.