Harvest Time

Fall is when we harvest our bees' honey.

Here are the gals in the spring and summer time. Busy, busy, busy. As bees, of course. Out gathering pollen and nectar, which they will bring back to the hive and turn into honey, and store in cells of beeswax that they built on frames inside. Which they will use for their food supplies -- especially over the winter, when they will not be outside gathering more. Because it will be too cold, and they need to stay inside, to keep the queen and her eggs warm.

Here is Clarke, bee-keeper of our family, starting the fall's honey harvest. Which we refer to as gathering "taxes" or "rent" from the bees.

Out of those smaller boxes on the top, Clarke pulls out the frames on which the bees have stored lots of honey. (There are more frames in the deeper boxes. But he leaves all of those for the bees to use for their winter food. We are not slum lords around here.)

Then he takes a big old serated knife to the frames, and cuts the "caps" off of the honeycomb, to let the honey start pouring out.

Here is our little baby hand-crank extractor. We are a small scale operation :) One frame slides into each of the two spaces inside. Then you close the lid and turn the crank to spin the whole thing. A lot.

Voila! You remove the frames -- and find honey on the bottom, which the spinnings' centrifugal has spewed out into the bucket.

After all the honey is in the bottom of the bucket, you pour it through a series of mesh strainers and jar it up. And another voila! Honey for the next year.

* * * * * * * * * *

The rhythmic efficiency of honey bees' lives is astounding. Their little bee DNA has developed an incredible system for the ways they spend their time on the planet -- usually, about 6 weeks worth. For "worker bees" -- the vast majority of those in the hive (all female), along with a queen and the very few drones (the male bees, whose purpose is to mate with queens -- no other tasks, and ironically, no stingers) -- the days of their lives are prescribed by activity. First days of life: cleaning the cell from which you emerged. From then on, specific tasks based on time of life . . . such as feeding the queen, tending to larva, being an undertaker to the sister bees who've passed on . . . until the final three weeks of the six are spent out in the field, flying and gathering, coming home and depositing, going out again. (The bees who live in the hive during the winter, keeping it warm and keeping the queen and eggs alive, have slightly different time and tasks span.)

I love bees for so many reasons. Honey alone would be enough. But really, it is their time-management that resonates most.

I think about time the way most people think about money.

In my brain and spirit, time registers more for me than money ever has. When I've had no money or when I've had lots, it never felt any different. Time, on the other hand, is always ripe with feeling, preciousness, a pregnant tension. As in, IT MATTERS. And just like the verbs we use about money, time can be wasted. And spent. And saved.

My mom passed away when she was in her early 40s. She was a terrific artist. Right after she passed, I found several of her sketchbooks -- and was bowled over by the realization that in the instant she died, it became impossible for any more of those sketches to be fully-manifested by her. BOOM. Just like that, I received a gift that I do not think many people have received: a visceral sense that, in fact, our time is limited . . . and therefore, what we do with each minute counts.

Which is likely why I have developed my "off days" strategy of time-management. My own time has become bee-like -- because I, like them, have figured out what is a pretty darned efficient and effective way of getting stuff done. (Which, apparently, matters to me.)

It is why, for example, I do not go on Twitter on Tuesdays, and I am completely off of all computers and mobile devices on Saturdays. Because it works better to be all the way on something, or all the way off. When you are out being a forager bee, you are not also inside being one who takes care of the queen. Because that would be completely ineffective. Bees know that when you are doing something hard, it works best when you are really doing that thing. Not trying to do several different hard tasks at once. Nope. "Do the thing that you're on," say the bee girls.

And I say, "You are right."

And thank you for the honey.