Fall is my favourite time of year. It's the time to reap what you have sown, to give thanks to Mother Nature for her bounty, and learn your lessons for next year. This year, I had especially high hopes for my tomatoes. Sadly, Mother Nature - that witch - cursed me with tomato blight. The leaves on my plants shrivelled up and died, and the crop was pretty much a bust. Now I know why my great-grandparents fled farm life as soon as they could.
The bees came through, however. They've been cranky for the past two summers on account of the lousy weather, but this year was great for honey-making. You can always tell when it's time to take the honey off: You wait until the leaves start turning and the cluster flies start dropping dead by the millions on your window sills, no matter how much you've sprayed. (Why did God make cluster flies? Beats me.)
My husband is a partner in a four-man bee co-op. They call themselves the Bee Boyz, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they are now in their 60s. Every week or two throughout the summer, the boyz get together to tend the bees and engage in male bonding. Every fall, they enter their honey in competition at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, a contest they regard with utmost seriousness. One glorious year, they placed fourth. My husband swears that once they got as high as third. Unfortunately, the third-place ribbon has somehow been mislaid.
The Bee Boyz have faced down many crises - dead hives, crooked judges (so they claim), over-the-hill queens and rebel bees that occasionally hive off to go elsewhere. One of them once got stung on the jugular, and they had to call an ambulance and jab him with an EpiPen before he passed out.
But this year, they faced a brand-new challenge: women. Two asked to join the co-op, throwing the boyz into a tizz. They didn't want to seem like sexists. And yet …
"We had to put our foot down," says Jamie, who happens to be the father of one of these women and married to the other one.
"It wasn't because they were women," my husband explains. "It was because they were relatives."
But really, it was because they were women. The bee co-op is like my husband's poker group, who have played together every other week for 25 years. They know all each other's moves. Every so often, they let a woman join, but it never really works out. In retaliation, the aspiring female apiarists have vowed to form a she-hive.
All the boyz have different personalities. Jamie is precise and neat, and also highly romantic about the bees. Norm is impetuous and hot-headed. David is the beemaster. He knows everything there is to know about them, and brought in the rest of the Bee Boyz a few years ago when the work became too much for him to handle by himself. David is a polite, reserved and dignified man of 85 who, according to the others, has a bottomless reservoir of ribald stories from his navy days.
"I've learned you've got to respect everyone in the hive," Jamie says.
This year, they took the honey off in mid-September. A couple of weeks later, they got together in Jamie's kitchen to do the bottling, which involves gently heating the unfiltered honey and straining it through a nylon cloth to get the wax and bee bits out. When I dropped in, Norm was trying to pour a large bucket of honey into a small measuring cup and spilling it on the counter. "Without me, they'd be slopping honey everywhere," Jamie grouses.
Last year was a heartbreaker for the boyz, competitively speaking. They entered their honey in the wrong category. They thought it was Golden, but the judges decided it was White. They got five marks off for that, and came in fifth.
"You learn by experience," Jamie says philosophically.
"Someone mucked it up," Norm says, only he doesn't say mucked. In order to avoid mutual recriminations, they've decided to blame a nameless bureaucrat instead of each other. This year, they aren't taking any chances. They have acquired a highly scientific instrument known as a honey spectrometer, which consists of a bunch of plastic colour strips. They bought it on the Internet for 40 bucks.
"It's definitely White," says my husband, licking honey off his fingers.
Despite whatever the judges say, they know their honey is better than any other honey you have ever tasted. Why?
"We don't pasteurize it," my husband says. "We put love in it," Jamie says. Norm doesn't care about any of that. He just wants to know how many litres they've got.
The boyz have learned a lot from their experience as beekeepers. They've learned sensitivity, camaraderie and historical perspective. They're awed that honey has been found in the tombs of Egypt and that it never goes bad. Jamie often reflects that the bees do all the work and then the humans take it all away. "We rob them because of our greed," he says. My husband calls him a self-hating apiarist.
The hives David started 30 years ago will probably outlast him. He likes that thought. He has passed the keeping of the bees to a younger (relatively speaking) generation, and they in turn intend eventually to pass it on to others (maybe even women).
"Our lives are blessed," Jamie says, cleaning up the honey drippings. They all nod.