A Memory of Bees and Heat

As I’m waiting for the traffic lights to change, a bee lands on my windscreen. I can see the nectar sacs on its back legs as it crawls across the glass. Its abdomen, almost translucent and the colour of honey, pulses rhythmically, the tiny segments like a telescope opening and closing, giving the impression that the creature is panting.

All of a sudden, I can smell hot beeswax. I’m back in the honey-extraction room of my father’s honey shed. My father stands over a rectangular metal tub, his shirt removed against its heat, wielding the knife with the heated blade that slices the wax caps off the honeycomb in its wooden frames to release the golden sweetness. Bees crawl all over his sweat-covered torso, but he ignores them. Either they don’t sting him or he has become immune to their stings. I wish I could feel so sanguine about the insects that fill the air with their whining buzz. Instead, I swelter under a protective layer of clothing, my head and face enclosed in a beekeeper’s hat and veil, thick gauntlets covering my hands and forearms.

The wax sizzles as the hot blade cuts through it, wax fragments falling into the heated tub where they are melted down along with any honey still clinging to them. Later, the honey will be separated from the wax, and the wax poured into tins to solidify. These will be sold to a business that turns them back into sheets of honeycomb that the bees can build on to create another store of honey.

As each frame is shorn of its wax capping, my father hands the frame to me and reaches for another. I man the extractors that stand against one wall of the room, metal cylinders fitted with slots around the perimeter for the frames to slide into. Once all the slots in one of these are filled, I turn it on and the honey is spun out by centrifugal force, running through an opening in the bottom of the cylinder into a tank on the ground floor. Later, honey tins and waxed-cardboard pottles will be filled from this tank - another of my occasional jobs.

Right now, however, my world consists of heat, the scents of honey and melted wax and the hum of bees and extractors. Extracting the honey is a summer-holiday job each year for me. This time of year is as busy for a beekeeper as for the bees that journey out each day to rob the summer flowers of their nectar. On a fine day, my father will take off in his old truck for one of the farms where he keeps hives. The white clover that produces the most prized honey is also an important feed crop, so farmers like to have beehives on their properties so that the bees will fertilise the crops while collecting honey. Later in the day, my father’s truck will turn in at our gate, piled high with boxes containing wax frames of laden honeycomb, surrounded by a buzzing cloud of bees. And I know the following day will be spent extracting honey.

Another of my jobs is to seal the honeycomb starters into the wooden frames that fit into the hive boxes. These frames, which my father makes up, are fitted with two fine wires stretched across their width, held in place by a small screw at each end of the frame where the wire pierces the wood. My job is to lay one of the wax rectangles, stamped with the hexagonal indents that the bees will later build up into honeycomb, onto each frame, then to touch the screws at each end with electrical conductors. These heat the wire so that the wax melts on to it. I have no idea who first invented this method, but it’s simple and ingenious. Once the honeycombs are attached to the wires, the frames are slotted into the rectangular boxes that, piled three or four high, will make up the hive.

One day, my father buys some bees from another beekeeper. He tells us they are pretty wild, as no one has tended them for over a year. When he goes out to tend them, the whole family – my mother, brother and sister and me - go with him so we can have a picnic in the countryside. We often do this, and it’s usually fun, with wild countryside to explore, sometimes an ice-cold stream to paddle in, and, of course, a picnic lunch. This time, however, we soon realise my father was right about the bees being wild. As soon as he opens up the hives, they are everywhere, buzzing angrily at being disturbed. There are only two things I remember about this day. One is having a bee entangled in my very curly hair, listening, terrified, to the buzzing that seemed to be almost inside my head. The other is losing my favourite, navy-blue knitted cardigan, which I had to take off because there were bees in it. I was simply too frightened to go back and get it.

After this, I become increasingly afraid of bees, and refuse to help out in the extraction room any more. My father is furious - his usual way of dealing with anything he doesn’t like - but my fear of the bees is greater than my fear of his anger, and I cannot bring myself to back down. It’s a pity not to be earning the money he pays me for helping out, but to me, at this time, the fear of being stung overrides all other considerations.

The lights turn green. As my car moves off, the bee clings to the windscreen for a minute or two, and then flies off. I thank the little creature for the memory she has given me of a time long past.