Beekeeping circa 1950

"You can't go home again", so said Thomas Wolfe in his novel by that name. The more I realize that physically that is true for me, the more I head down there in my mind. Logistically, it's less than 100 miles away, but emotionally and chronologically it's much farther.

When I was a boy, that forlorn looking apiary had some 2oo+ hives, each one made from scratch by my dad and his dad. I remember standing on an empty hive body, turning the honey extractor while my dad did the uncapping. It was an old-fashioned way of doing the bee work. Just getting the frames of honey into the bee house was back breaking work. Nowdays they use a potent chemical to drive the bees out of the upper hive body where the surplus honey is stored. We would use a bee smoker to placate them while we opened up each hive, took the honey frames out one at a time and shook and swept the bees off. This had to be done in the heat of the day when most of the bees were foraging for nectar. The uncapping was done with a long- bladed, double-edged knife. Two such knives were used, one hand held and the other in a pan of hot water to be used whenever the first one cooled off. There are now automatic uncapping machines that all you do is turn them on and feed the frames into them. But the most archaic step was the extracting itself: we used a hand-crank, two frame, reversible extractor. Its modern counterpart is the electric radial, which can take 50 or so uncapped frames at a time and spin the honey out without having to reverse the frames midway through! The last step, getting the honey into a "settling tank", uses a "honey pump", whereas we strained the honey into a 5 gallon can and lifted and dumped it into the tank.

Our honey was truly organic. No chemicals used, no "flash heating" to prevent it from granulating, and no mixing of different types of honey.

I bought some honey at Costco recently and thought it tasted terrible. It really didn't, but my expectations weren't met. Don't even get me started on "locust blossom" honey! It's to honey what Maker's Mark is to bourbon.

P.S. At no point in the gathering of a honey crop is a buffalo used!