On The Moraine, Part XIV

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

Then, there were the bees. As I have stated before, with the back-and-forth living arrangements, it was impossible for us to have cattle or hogs on the McNary farm during those days. But we could have bees!

Dad had raised bees as a young man, and he enjoyed it. Bees can lead to all sorts of interesting adventures.

Dad bought the bees from Sears & Roebuck, and they were shipped via U.S. Mail. They were in a light wooden box with two sides made of screen wire. There was a can of syrup inserted in the top of the box for nourishment, and the queen was in her own special little box inside the larger box.

One Sunday afternoon, we got home to Troy from the farm and the phone rang almost immediately.  Remember, these are the days of land lines and no answering machines. The caller was the manager of our local Sears catalog store. He had three hives of bees for us. He would like to deliver them immediately.  

Turns out they had arrived at the post office early Saturday morning and the postmaster chased down the Sears manager since he couldn’t find us at home. It seems as though the bees were a “hot potato” to those who were not excited about raising bees.

When you have bees, you have to have an extractor and decapping knives. The knives are used to cut the tops off the honeycomb full of honey and the extractor is a cylindrical machine in which you place the decapped frames in order to spin the honey out by centrifugal force. It has a hand crank and bevel gear arrangement on top which imparts the force applied by the cranker (me).

The first time we extracted honey, we did it outdoors. Big mistake. The bees found us within 15 minutes and wanted their honey back. It would have made quite a movie with the whole family dancing around the bees and trying to extract honey.

What was enjoyable was watching the bees when they had found a source of nectar. They would set up pathways to the field that was blooming. It looked like the flight paths to today’s Atlanta Airport.  

There would be one or two flight paths out from the hives and one or two flight paths back to the hives. The bees would be about one to two feet apart one after the other. It was an amazing thing to watch.

A worker bee lives about 30 days. I forget how many pounds they carry during that time, but it is phenomenal, given their size. When they are near death, they choose to die away from the hive so as to not clutter up the hive with dead carcasses.

If you have two weak hives, you can combine them if you follow this procedure. You have to find the queens in both the hives and kill one of them. You can only have one queen. Then you place the two hives atop one another with two layers of newspaper in between. By the time they chew through the newspaper, they will be used to each other’s odor and won’t kill each other. Put two hives together without the newspaper and they will go to war and kill each other off.

My grandmother used to say, “A bee swarm in May is worth a stack of hay, a bee swarm in July ain’t worth a fly.”   

A May swarm has enough time to build up a store of honey to get through the next winter. A swarm in July does not.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.