Extraction

Colony

Chapter 21: Extraction

The uncapping knife was electric, a heated blade that melted through the wax cappings like a hand through warm water, the wax curling away from the blade in thin ribbons that fell into the uncapping tank below, the ribbons pale and fragrant, the beeswax that the bees had secreted from their abdominal glands and shaped with their mandibles into the thin lids that sealed each cell of ripe honey, each lid a construction project completed by a bee that had eaten six to seven pounds of honey to produce one pound of wax, the metabolic cost of the capping being the metabolic cost of preservation, the energy spent to seal the honey at eighteen percent moisture so that it would not ferment, would not spoil, would remain stable for years, for decades, for millennia, the capping being the warranty, the biological guarantee of shelf life.

Meg drew the knife down the face of the frame. The cappings fell. Beneath them, the honey, the cells full, the honey glistening in the warm air of the honey house, the color of it varying from cell to cell — lighter where the clover nectar predominated, darker where the blackberry contributed, the frame a mosaic of ambers, a gradient that told the story of the foraging, the bees' indiscriminate collection from whatever was blooming, the flowers of the valley blended in the cells the way the valley's colors blended in the light, the individual sources inseparable in the final product, the honey being the valley, the valley being the honey, the equation complete.

She turned the frame and uncapped the other side. She placed the uncapped frame in the extractor basket. The extractor was a radial model, stainless steel, capable of holding twenty-four frames, the frames arranged like spokes in a wheel, and when the basket was full Meg closed the lid and engaged the motor and the basket spun, slowly at first, then faster, the centrifugal force pulling the honey from the cells, the honey flying outward from the frames and hitting the interior wall of the drum and running down the wall in rivulets, the rivulets merging into streams, the streams pooling at the bottom of the drum, the pool deepening as the extractor spun and the frames emptied and the honey accumulated, the extraction being the conversion, the conversion of the season from solid to liquid, from frame to flow, from the bees' architecture to the beekeeper's product.

The sound of the extractor was a whir. A mechanical hum that was different from the biological hum of the hive but that reminded Meg of the hive because everything in the honey house reminded her of the hive, the honey house being the hive's extension, the next stage, the place where the product of the colony's labor was processed for human consumption, and the processing was a translation — from the bees' format (hexagonal cells of capped wax on a wooden frame in a dark box) to the human format (glass jar, label, price tag, shelf) — and the translation was lossy, the way all translations were lossy, the honey in the jar being the same honey that was in the cell but being different because the context was different, the cell being the context of the colony and the jar being the context of the market, and the difference in context was the difference between the thing as it existed for the organism that made it and the thing as it existed for the organism that consumed it.

Luz worked beside her, uncapping frames at the second station, the two of them developing the rhythm of the extraction day — Meg uncapping and loading the extractor, Luz uncapping and stacking the uncapped frames in the queue, the frames moving from the supers on the shelf to the uncapping station to the extractor to the stack of empty frames that would be returned to the hives for the bees to clean and refill, the cycle of the equipment matching the cycle of the season, the frames going out full and coming back empty and going out full again, the repetition that was the heartbeat of the operation.

The honey flowed from the extractor's gate into the strainer. The strainer was a double sieve — a coarse mesh over a fine mesh, the coarse catching the larger pieces of wax and propolis and the occasional bee part that survived the uncapping and the spinning, the fine catching the smaller particles, the honey passing through both meshes and emerging clean, clear, the strained honey running from the sieve into the bottling tank, the five-gallon stainless steel tank with the honey gate at the bottom, the gate that Meg would open when she was ready to bottle, the honey flowing from the gate into the jars, the jars filling, the lids going on, the labels going on, the finished product appearing in the sequence that was the honey house's assembly line, the one-person (now two-person) manufacturing operation that converted the raw material of the hive into the retail product of the market.

The honey was warm. In the eighty-degree air of the honey house, the honey flowed freely, ran like syrup, poured like liquid amber, and the warmth brought out the smell, the smell that was the smell of the valley converted to aroma, the clover and the blackberry and the wild aster and the unknown flowers that the bees had visited and that contributed their nectar to the blend, the blend that Meg could not reproduce and did not try to reproduce because the blend was not a recipe but was a landscape, was the specific combination of flora that the bees had access to from the specific apiaries where Meg had placed them, the combination unique to this valley, this year, this season, this weather, the combination that would never be exactly replicated because the variables were too many and the bees' choices were their own, the foragers deciding which flowers to visit based on the dances they had followed and the concentration of the nectar and the distance from the hive, the decisions that produced the blend, the blend that was the honey, the honey that was the product, the product that was the year.

Meg opened the extractor and removed the spun frames. The frames were empty — the cells cleaned out by the centrifugal force, the wax comb intact but hollow, the architecture preserved, the honey removed, the frames ready to be returned to the hives where the bees would inspect them and clean them and refill them if there was nectar to be had, which there was, a little, the August dearth not yet complete, the goldenrod not yet blooming, the gap between the main flow and the fall flow being the lean time, the time when the colony consumed more than it produced and the beekeeper's feeding would begin.

She loaded the next batch. Twenty-four frames. She closed the lid. She engaged the motor. The extractor spun.

The honey house was a converted garage. Meg had converted it herself in 2015, the year after the kitchen remodel, the year of construction, the year she and Gavin had spent money they had saved for years on the improvements to the property that would make the business more efficient and the house more livable, the improvements that represented their shared investment in the place, the shared future that the improvements implied — you do not remodel a kitchen in a house you are planning to leave, you do not convert a garage into a honey house on a property you are planning to abandon, and the improvements had been the evidence of commitment, had been the tangible expression of the intention to stay, and the intention had been real, had been genuine, had been the intention of two people who were, at the time, still intending, still planning, still operating in the future tense of a shared life.

The honey house had a concrete floor with a drain, essential for cleaning. It had a stainless steel sink. It had fluorescent lights that Meg had replaced with LED panels because the fluorescent flicker bothered her in the way that all unnecessary flicker bothered her — the visual equivalent of static, the noise in the signal, the thing that was not information but that occupied the channel where information should be. It had a thermostat-controlled heater that maintained the room temperature during extraction. It had shelves along two walls for the supers, floor to ceiling, the shelves built by Meg from two-by-fours and plywood, the construction functional, the finish unfinished, the shelves being equipment rather than furniture, built for load-bearing rather than aesthetics.

Gavin would have built better shelves. Gavin would have designed the shelves with the eye of the landscape architect, would have considered the proportions and the materials and the finish, would have made the shelves that were both functional and beautiful, the shelves that expressed the care of a person who believed that the way a thing looked mattered even when the thing was a shelf in a garage, even when the thing would hold forty-pound boxes of honey and would be splashed with wax and smeared with propolis and would never be seen by anyone but the beekeeper who used them. Gavin would have cared about the shelves. Meg did not care about the shelves. The shelves held the supers. The supers held the honey. The honey was the thing. The shelves were the structure. The structure served the thing. That was enough.

She thought about Gavin's shelves — the hypothetical shelves, the shelves that would have been — and the thinking was not nostalgia, was not the longing for the thing that was lost, but was the recognition of the thing that was different, the recognition that she and Gavin had been different in this way, in the way that mattered to Gavin and did not matter to Meg, the aesthetic care that Gavin applied to everything and that Meg applied to nothing except the bees, the bees being the one area where Meg's attention to detail matched and exceeded Gavin's, the brood pattern being her design, the colony's health being her architecture, the operation's efficiency being her landscape, and the attention she gave to these things was the same kind of attention Gavin gave to his — total, absorbed, the attention of a person working in their medium, in their material, in the thing they understood and that understood them.

They had been the same kind of person applied to different materials. This was the thing Meg understood now, in the honey house, in August, in the third year of Gavin's absence, the understanding arriving the way understanding arrived — not in the moment of the thing but in the aftermath, not in the living but in the looking-back, the retrospective clarity that was useless as prevention and useful only as comprehension, the comprehension that said: we were the same, we were both people who gave everything to the thing we cared about and had nothing left for the thing we shared, and the nothing-left was the depletion, and the depletion was the ending, and the ending was the thing.

The extractor stopped. Meg opened it. She removed the frames. She loaded the next batch. The rhythm continued.

By the afternoon they had extracted a hundred and twenty frames. The bottling tank was full — twenty gallons, a hundred and sixty pounds of honey, the first run, the first batch, the first of what would be twelve or fourteen batches over the next week, the extraction being a process that could not be rushed because the extractor held twenty-four frames and the uncapping took time and the straining took time and the bottling took time and the cleaning between batches took time, and the time was the time, and the honey came at the speed the honey came, and the speed was the speed of the honey house, which was slower than the speed of the flow and faster than the speed of the winter, and the speed was right, and the rightness was the rhythm.

Meg opened the honey gate. The honey flowed. She held a jar beneath the gate — a one-pound hex jar, the classic honey jar, glass, the shape that said "honey" the way no other shape did, the jar that she had been using for fifteen years, ordered in bulk from a packaging company in Portland, the jars arriving in cases of twelve, the cases stacking in the honey house through the winter, the jars waiting for the honey, the honey waiting for the jar, and the meeting of the honey and the jar was the completion, the thing becoming the product, the liquid becoming the commodity, the season becoming the sale.

The honey filled the jar. The honey was amber. The honey was warm. The honey smelled like the valley. The honey was the valley. The honey was the clover in the McKenzie field and the blackberry in the hedgerows and the aster on the hillside above Miller Creek and the unknown flowers in the fence rows and the gardens and the wild places where the bees went and Meg did not, the places the bees found by their own initiative and from which they brought the nectar that became this, this jar, this amber, this warmth in Meg's hand.

She set the jar on the table. She filled the next one. And the next. And the next. Jar after jar, the bottling the most meditative step of the extraction process, the filling being a simple act — hold the jar under the gate, watch the honey rise, close the gate, set the jar aside, pick up the next jar, open the gate — and the simplicity was the meditation, the repetitive action that occupied the hands and freed the mind, the mind drifting the way minds drifted during repetitive physical work, the thoughts arriving and passing without the urgency that active work imposed, the thoughts loose, associative, the thinking of the honey house.

Luz was labeling. She sat at the table with the printed labels and the jars and she peeled each label from the backing and applied it to the jar, centering it, smoothing it, the label that Meg had designed with Gavin's help years ago — Hollis Apiaries, Willamette Valley Wildflower Honey, the font clean, the layout simple, the information sufficient: net weight, ingredients (honey), producer address, the mandatory information that the Oregon Department of Agriculture required and that Meg provided and that the customer barely read because the customer was not buying the label, the customer was buying the honey, the customer was buying the amber and the aroma and the taste and the idea of the local, the handmade, the small-batch, the real, and the real was real, was not marketing, was not branding, was the actual honey from the actual bees from the actual valley, the real that was indistinguishable from the marketing because the marketing was the real, the label an accurate description of what was inside.

"We should update the label," Luz said.

"Why?"

"It's been the same for years. It's fine. It's clean. But you could add something — the apiary locations, or the primary nectar sources, or a QR code that links to information about the bees, the process. People want to know. People buy local honey because they want a connection to the producer, to the landscape, to the story. The label is the story's first sentence."

Meg considered this. Meg had not thought about the label as a story's first sentence. Meg had thought about the label as a label — the thing that went on the jar so the jar was labeled, the regulatory requirement satisfied, the product identified. But Luz's way of thinking was different from Meg's way of thinking, was the thinking of a person who had come to beekeeping from teaching, from biology, from the world of communication and explanation, and Luz's instinct was to communicate, to explain, to share the thing she knew, and the instinct was the instinct that had made her a teacher and that was now making her a beekeeper who wanted the product to teach, wanted the jar to say something beyond "honey," wanted the customer to know what they were eating and where it came from and who made it and how.

"Maybe," Meg said. "After the season."

"After the season" was becoming the phrase. "After the season" was where Meg put the things she was not ready to do now — the label update, the conversation about Luz's future, the signing of the divorce papers, the decisions that required the mental space that the season did not provide, the space that would open in October when the hives were winterized and the honey was sold and the equipment was cleaned and the year was done, the space of the off-season, the space of the winter, the space that Meg had spent the last two winters filling with nothing, with television and beer and the frozen waiting that was not rest but was avoidance, and that this winter might fill with something else, with the things she had been putting after the season, the things that were accumulating like supers on a shelf, waiting for extraction.

They worked through the afternoon. The extraction continued. The jars accumulated. By evening they had filled two hundred jars, the jars standing in rows on the table, the amber catching the light from the LED panels, the light refracting through the honey, each jar a small window into the season, a lens of amber through which the world looked warm and golden and sweet, the illusion of the honey, the illusion that the world was made of this, of warmth and gold, when in fact the world was made of weather and labor and biology and loss and the slow accumulation of days that produced, sometimes, if the conditions were right, if the rain came and the sun came and the bloom came and the bees came, if the beekeeper was present and attentive and the mites were managed and the queens were strong, if all of these things aligned in the specific combination that the season required — if all of this, then this, then the jar, then the honey, then the amber in the light, then the thing that the season made.

Meg cleaned the extractor. She ran hot water through the drum, the water washing the residual honey from the stainless steel, the honey dissolving in the water, the sweet water running down the drain, the loss that was the cost of cleaning, the small amount of honey that could not be recovered and that was the overhead of the process, the inefficiency that every process contained, the gap between the total and the yield, the difference between what was produced and what was captured. The gap was small. The extractor was efficient. But the gap was there, and the honey in the drain was the honey that would not be bottled, the honey that the customer would never taste, the honey that was the cost of converting the season from the bees' format to the human format.

She dried the extractor. She covered it. She cleaned the uncapping station and the strainers and the bottling tank and the sink and the floor. The cleaning was the discipline, the daily closure, the end-of-work routine that Meg performed with the same attention she gave to the extraction itself, because the honey house's cleanliness was the product's quality, and the product's quality was the business's reputation, and the reputation was the thing that brought the customers back, the customers who had been buying Hollis Apiaries honey for fifteen years and who trusted the label because the label had never lied, because the honey had always been what the label said it was, and the trust was built on consistency, on the reliable quality of a product made by a person who cleaned the extractor every evening and who strained the honey through two meshes and who did not cut corners because cutting corners was not what Meg did. Meg did the work. Meg did all of the work. The work was the thing.

She turned off the lights. She closed the door. She walked across the yard to the house. The evening was August evening, warm, the light going from gold to copper to the deep amber that was the color of the honey, the sky matching the product, the sky the color of the year.

Inside, the kitchen. The two hundred jars were in the honey house. The divorce papers were on the table. The phone was on the counter. The house was quiet. The house was always quiet.

But the quiet was different. The quiet of the honey house had been the quiet of work, of two people working in proximity, the quiet of the extraction rhythm, the uncapping and the spinning and the straining and the filling, the quiet that was not silence but was the absence of unnecessary speech, the quiet of concentration, the quiet of the meditative act, and the quiet had been shared, had been Meg's quiet and Luz's quiet together, the two quiets merging into a single silence that was not lonely, that was companionable, that was the silence of two people doing the same thing in the same room for the same purpose, and the same was the thing, and the thing was the thing.

Meg sat at the table. She looked at the divorce papers. She looked at the pen on the table — the queen-marking pen, the white pen, the pen she had used all season to mark queens with the dot that said: I see you, I know you are here, I know when you arrived.

She picked up the pen. She did not pick it up as a statement. She picked it up because it was the pen on the table, the pen in reach, the pen her hand found when her hand needed a pen. She looked at the papers. She looked at the pen. She set the pen down.

Not yet. But soon. The extraction was not complete. The season was not over. The honey was on the shelves and the honey was in the jars and the honey was the year and the year was not finished and the finishing would come, would come when it came, would come the way the honey came — by accumulation, by the slow filling of the cell, by the daily addition of the small amount that became the large amount that became the full frame that became the capped frame that became the extracted jar that became the product that became the sale that became the season's number, and the number was the season's truth, and the truth was the thing, and the thing was coming, and the coming was the season, and the season was not over.

She went to bed. The honey house was dark. The jars stood in their rows. The amber waited for the morning and the market and the customer and the table and the toast and the moment when the jar would be opened and the seal would break and the honey would pour and the season would enter the world, would leave the honey house and the apiary and the valley and the beekeeper's care and would become what it had always been becoming — food, nourishment, the thing the flower made and the bee transformed and the beekeeper harvested and the world consumed, the cycle complete, the honey in the jar, the jar in the hand, the hand at the table, the table in the kitchen, the kitchen in the house, the house in the valley, the valley in the season, the season in the honey, the honey in the jar.