Since company was coming at 7:30, bright and early, we needed to get up and get moving. There was the old cypress table Melvin Brewer made for us to move to the garage, the extractor to set up and the five-gallon pails to rinse out.
Saturday a week ago was honey extraction day.
Our guests coming to help were beekeeping newcomers, a retired teacher and from Mississippi State, an IT specialist and his wife a professor. The two backyard hives swarmed three times this spring, and we’d given them — and Harry Sherman at Plymouth Bluff — the swarms.
As the late Buck Hildreth once said, “People never get tired of listening when you’re talking about bees.”
In the early spring, swarming season — the first week of April, usually — when flowers are blooming — the queen mother leaves the hive with about half the workers. They attach themselves to usually a tree limb and ball up around the queen while the scouts figure out where they want to set up housekeeping. They may stay in this transitory state for 30 minutes or a day or two.
When bees swarm in our backyard, nine out of 10 times they fly to a Banana Magnolia about 15 feet from the hive. In that location, the ball of bees becomes one big chunk of low-hanging fruit.
The question I’m most often asked about beekeeping: How often do you get stung? If you suit out properly, stings are rare. I’ve been stung plenty; sometimes it really hurts (especially on the nose) other times you hardly notice.
The two hives in our backyard are the most docile we’ve ever had. I can work them wearing shorts and a T-shirt — I do smoke them.
Bee colonies have different temperaments. A friend, who is a former beekeeper, claims the bees come to know their keeper. Seems like it never occurs to these girls to sting.
Years ago I kept a couple of hives on a lake off Old Macon Road near the site of what was the Silver Spur because there were tupelo trees there and thus, the potential for tupelo honey. (There is a town somewhere north of here named for the tree and the Van Morrison song inspired by the honey produced from its nectar.) Those tupelo honey bees were so mean they would chase you all the way back to town.
The fledgling beekeepers seem to have adapted well to their new charges. Early on, the teacher was concerned by the dead bees at her doorstep — her hive is about 20 feet away from her back door. Turns out the bees had a fatal attraction for her porch light. Problem easily solved.
After all the helpers had been “paid” we were left with nine gallons of honey (108 pounds) from our two hives.
“Do you sell your honey?” is the second most asked question I get asked about beekeeping. Not really, I usually reply.
This year is different. We are selling the honey to help fund Imagination Library, the pre-school literacy program we co-sponsor with The Arts Council. The honey will come in cool little jars with a cork. Muth jars they’re called, and they each hold one pound of honey. We’re selling them for $15 — it costs $27 a year to mail a book each month to a child. “Honey money,” our Imagination Library coordinator Ashley Gressett calls it. It’s a sweet way to promote literacy. We’ll have the honey in The Dispatch front office Monday morning. Call 328-2424 or come by.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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