How many lifetimes in a jar of honey?
My friend Sharan confessed that when she flew home to San Francisco last fall with a jar of honey that I had given her from my first harvest, it was confiscated by TSA. My heart sank. Of course it was confiscated: honey is considered a liquid and the 12 oz jar I’d filled for her was way over the limit for a carry-on.
“I felt so stupid,” she said. “I never thought about the fact that they might take it. It was wrapped up in my backpack.” “I’m sorry,” she added plaintively.
I knew she was sorry. We’ve all been there. I’d recently watched a stranger tear up at the airport when TSA forced her to surrender an unopened jar of homemade jam that she had in her purse. The woman hadn’t thought of the jam as a liquid or a gel when packing, she told the security agent. Still, Sharan’s story made me feel a little sick to my stomach.
It wasn’t simply that the honey had been part of the precious dozen or so jars from my first harvest. I’d started with two hives at my friend Victor’s bee yard in 2017—let them overwinter without taking any honey—then added another hive for 2018. By the fall, one hive died, one swarmed and, as a result, was small and unproductive. With Victor’s guidance, I managed to filter nearly a gallon of honey from my third hive.
It was the wasted labor of the bees that I found distressing. Given that one foraging bee produces 1/12 a teaspoon of honey during its six- to eight-week lifetime, I was reacting to the fact that approximately 864 bees gave their life’s work for that jar, and that it ended up in an airport security garbage bin. Even that 1/12 teaspoon measure is misleading. Everything about the labor of bees is communal. Honey gets made—incrementally—through a collective process called trophallaxis.
A bee extracts nectar from a flower by poking and sucking with the tip of her probiscis. A probiscis is a bit like a curling tongue…and the nectar is taken inside her honey sac, which is like a temporary stomach. Here it mixes with enzymes as she moves around until, on her return to the hive, a worker ‘begs’ the nectar by drumming on her antennae. This prompts her to regurgitate it, passing it to the worker, who presses it into the underside of her own probiscis, drawing some of the moisture off before passing it on. Like this the nectar is passed around the hive from one bee to the next in a process of communal digestion known as trophallaxis. With each transfer, a little more moisture is extracted, and the humidity inside the hive increases—the workers have to fan their wings to keep it ventilated. When the nectar has been converted into a supersaturated solution it is ready to be stored inside the comb cells and sealed with a thin layer of wax, until such time as it is needed. At this point it becomes recognizable to us and also harvestable as honeycomb.
Scientists who’ve radioisotope-tagged incoming morning nectar from one foraging bee found that all hive workers were tagged by the end of the day. Through trophallaxis—the collective magic that results in honey—my 12 oz jar represents the labor of thousands of bees.
I’m talking honey in January for two reasons. The first is that my second harvest of honey—nearly six gallons taken from three hives this past September—is still going out to family and friends. Much of it went out during the holidays, but I’m also still bottling the remaining few gallons and distributing it. This week, I got together and shared some with my friend Ann, who designed the label, based on Audubon’s drawing of the bobolink, a meadow bird, and the Emily Dickinson stanza that is this farm’s namesake. Ann even found a font that mimics Emily Dickinson’s spidery handwriting!
The second is that I’ve just finished reading Helen Jukes’ lovely A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees. The description of trophallaxis above is from the book, p. 91. A young British writer, Jukes describes her life (initially, through a soul-rending office job) through the unfolding of her first full season of keeping bees in her yard in the suburbs of Oxford, England. She’d previously tagged along with an experienced beekeeper in London, but had never managed her own hive before.
I can identify. Though, technically, I’ve had my own hives for three years, they’ve been located offsite from where I live, and I’d always tended them with Victor. This season, my third, I built a bee yard on my own land and moved hives here. Victor goodheartedly fielded my questions, offered suggestions and even came over to visit to see how my bee yard turned out. He graciously gave me time on his honey extractor in the late fall, but my bees stayed alive and productive through, or possibly in spite of, my own efforts.
My first year on my own with the bees changed things. Yes, I did the practical work: donned my bee suit and opened the hives to inspect every couple of weeks, added supers and frames as needed, and treated for mites before winterizing the hives at the end of the season. But there was more. Alone with the hives, I observed my own movements anew, and noticed whether and how the bees responded. I saw things at the hive that I had never seen while I was with Victor—not that he didn’t point them out—just that I truly saw them now that I was on my own. My awareness shifted. Also, nearly every day, I walked out to the meadow to visit them. I sat on a rock and watched them trafficking in and out on glorious sunny days. I lingered to watch their behavior on windy and rainy days, too. I even made note of the colors of pollen on their legs as they re-entered the hives—gold, pale yellow, red or rust, mostly—and tried to correlate those colors to what flower resources were available at those times. Then after the honey was harvested, I stumbled upon a memoir that echoed some of my own feelings. Like when Jukes wrote of her own experience alone at the open hive: “those precise and careful movements that were not unlike tenderness, not unlike a kind of intimacy.”
Fundamentally, what I loved about Juke’s book—along with all the perspective and history on bees and beekeeping woven through her reflections—was the ongoing exploration of the meaning of “feeling,” “seeing” and “keeping.” With regard to the bees and her hive, but also in terms of seeking something else:
Last year I was also feeling blocked, caught in a culture and state of being that seemed to be short on care and have little patience with sensitivity. The hive, for me, was about escaping the site of difficulty; or the hive was not about escape at all, but about the upwards thrust of my own hard-fought belief that something else was possible—a different kind of perception, of relation—within this less-than-perfect range.
Not just feeling better, she explains early on, but exploring whether or not beekeeping might be an avenue to feeling better: “An approach to beekeeping focused on paying attention, becoming more attuned to the world around us, perhaps even adjusting how we sense and see.”
Seeing bees as strange, and not necessarily easy to observe, Jukes takes a deep plunge into the writings of Francois Huber, the eighteenth century Swiss natural historian, who, though blind, gave us new insights and advice about bees and beekeeping that lead to the practice of multiplication of hives and moderation of honey harvest, and the conception of the modern hive—eventually proposed by Langstroth. The crux was that Huber was the first to notice “bee space”—the 3/8” gap that honeybees consistently create between their comb. In the process, Jukes asks of herself: “what kind of looking—what kind of scrutiny, which quality of attention—should I be aiming for? What kind of gaze is good?”
Finally, since it’s called beekeeping, Jukes probes that idea as well. What she finds, through a season with her bees, and with the help of her friend who works at the OED updating words, is that the verb, keep, is multi-faceted.
…the entry for the verb keep is long, and its etymology curious. While over time keep came to imply (with increasing intensity) an effort to retain, its earliest meaning is likely to have been something closer to lay hold, with the hands, and hence with attention, to keep an eye on, to watch…perhaps it’s no surprise that I’ve been feeling uncertain about how to keep if even the dictionary isn’t sure of a right meaning for it. But then isn’t our whole mode of keeping—our capacity to keep—undergoing a major crisis of confidence at the moment?
This grappling with the concept of keeping is the existential heart of Jukes’ book. And the more I read, the more I appreciated that what started off feeling a bit like millennial vexation running counter to my gen x world weariness, ended up feeling instead like common ground, a place of mutual creative construction. To be sure, Jukes and I are at different places in our lives, but both her book and our respective decision to keep bees mark life shifts, both real and hoped for.
I finished her book thinking way beyond lost honey and labor, and instead, of the many lifetimes of observing, recording, and keeping that has brought us—me—to bees and beekeeping.
The bees are a path, a gateway, to the natural world that give us that shift in perception that Jukes’ describes. Still less than perfect, but perhaps, improved.
