Description of a Setting: The Honey House

Photo @tup_s

The back of the honey house still looked like it did when Mr. and Mrs. Johnston were keeping bees.

There were benches all around the perimeter of the room for setting things down or picking them up. And in the middle of the room was a large extractor, right in front of which was the sump. The extractor is like a centrifuge, only instead of spinning blood, it spins honey. It’s a large cylindrical tank with a slot for each frame that comes out of the hive. The frames themselves are just a sheet of wax, caged in by small strips of pine, and held in place with chicken wire. The frames get loaded up, just like in a centrifuge, and the extractor spins them round and round until all the honey just flies off them. Some honey is left on the frame, of course, but that’s the stuff that gets cut up and sold as honeycomb.

Some folks find it exotic, honeycomb. They can suck the honey right out of the cupboard the bees stored it in. At a really simple level, honey is just vomit. Nothing exotic about that. Honeycomb is wax, all covered in puke. But still, it’s a hot seller.

After the extractor spins out all the honey, it has to be filtered to get all the little pieces of dead bees out of it. Anything not belonging in the filtered honey gets dumped into the sump. The sump is a pit of dark liquid that smells of death and heaven all at once. It exudes the most intoxicatingly sweet smell, golden and earthen. It’s filled with honey and bees and propolis and whatever else happens to fall into it. Usually, it doesn’t get cleaned out very often, being just a sweet refuse. On occasion, a curious animal will fall into the sump, cats usually. They’re attracted to the smell, the warm, sweet smell of fermenting honey. They usually get an idea like they’ll just bend over the side and try to get a lick, but it’s too deep they lean too far and fall in. If you know what happens when a cat falls into water, then you can almost imagine how the same cat might feel covered in sticky tar and bee guts. Takes them days to feel like themselves again, and even after that, they’ll try to sneak back in for another taste.

Of course, animals aren’t allowed in the honey house, strictly speaking, but they can smell what goes on in there from miles away. They’ll spend all day sitting in front of the door, just waiting for their chance to run in past someone’s distracted feet and steal a taste of that sweet mead. Mr. and Mrs. Johnston, on numerous occasions, have woken up in the morning only to look out their front window and see a row of little creatures (cats, dogs, skunks) scratching at the door to the honey house. And that’s saying nothing of the bears that Mr. Johnston has found in his bee yards over the years.

One of the saddest sounds in the world is the painful sobbing of a large brown bear that has raided a hive, desiring nothing more than a taste of honey, only to have the insides of his nose and mouth stung by a swarm of angry bees.

It’s a sound that will stay with you for your entire life, the sound of a bear crying.