Bees. Knives.

Dear all,

My friend, John, is working on his master's degree here at USM, but when he's not figuring out how to help developing economies (his degree focuses on community development and microeconomic stimulation), he is a beekeeper (!).

I think that's pretty swell. Thus, I've been after John for a long time to take me down to his beehives (he keeps 'em on the coast, where he and his wife are from originally). Last week, he told me that he was making a trip down--however, it's been so cold lately that the bees weren't making much honey. (They were all just clustered in a ball at the bottom of the hive for warmth.) So I didn't go, but he did bring one of the hive boxes back up with him to collect what little honey there was.

This was probably a good thing. After all, I am allergic to bee stings. He's got a bee suit, though, so, if I ever go down to the hives in the future, I'll probably don the bee suit and seal all the seams with duct tape. (Bees, he informs me, are very good at finding the seams in a bee suit, no matter how small the hole or seam may be.) And I'll bring my shot of epinephrine.

Anyway, the hive. I took some pictures of us trying to collect what little honey there was:



Here's the hive--you can see all the individual slats where the bees build their honeycombs. (Don't worry--there weren't any bees left in the hive by the time I saw it.)



There's John, the happy beekeeper, cleaning out a honey jar. Yes, that is a Napoleon Dynamite shirt he's wearing.



There's Kenny, another friend of ours, inspecting one of the slats. He has lots of guns.



After removing a slat from the hive, Kenny puts it over a clean receptacle to collect the dripping honey. Usually, if the weather is warm enough and there's enough honey in the comb, the honey just drains right out. This time, however, it was too cold, and there wasn't much honey, and so John tried warming the honey with a hair dryer...



...we still weren't getting much honey, though.



John's wife, Shelley, watched over as we were working, since we were playing with fire when we weren't collecting honey. (John was using the beeswax to make candles, and that meant that there were matches lying around, and then we had some powdered paraffin, too, which burns really well, and if you dip a match in beeswax and then coat the matchhead in paraffin granules...) Shelley is very pregnant.



Here's the candle-making setup. Beeswax is an interesting material for candles, because it creates a flame that burns very low but very bright. (This was before the burns happened.)



Since the hairdryer wasn't working too well, we were forced to manually press and scrape the honey out of the honeycomb.



M. got into the act, too. You can see the puddle of honey collecting at the base of the slat. This isn't the best way to extract honey, though, because tiny bits of beeswax break off in the honey, and the honey must be strained to get the wax out. (Otherwise, when you eat the honey, you get little bits of inedible wax stuck in-between your teeth.)



If you get a big chunk of honeycomb, though, you can eat it, and the wax forms a ball in your mouth, which you can spit out. The honey wasn't as strong-tasting as it was during the last harvest--last time around, the honey was incredibly potent, since the bees had really been working hard--but it was still quite wonderful. John's bees collect pollen from native wildflowers, and they also pollinate a nearby squash field. This honey doesn't taste like your standard, store-bought clover honey. It's very floral, and just a dab is enough to flavor an entire piece of bread.

After collecting honey, we were sitting around, shooting the proverbial breeze, when John pulled out a throwing knife. (*Cue big grin.*) And then he showed me two more throwing knives. (*Cue bigger grin.*) So we went into the backyard, where he had some boards set up...



...and we had at it. It was dark...



...but we had fun. (I hope the neighbors didn't think we were nuts, throwing knives in the dark, the knives hitting the board with a loud thwack.)

Ah, Mississippi. I like this place.

-J.