“Harvesting honey completes a circle in your yard,” said Jacques, as he was guiding me through the process of taking honey from my hive of bees which he had helped me install three years prior.
He explained: You grow these plants that flower (strawberries, tomatillos, apricots, etc.). Bees visit the flowers to gather nectar and pollen, and they unwittingly pollinate the flowers so that the flowers become food for you to eat. But also the bees take the nectar and pollen back to their hive and turn it into honey. Since they make more than they need, you can open the hive and take some. And the bees will continue going back to your flowers to feed, pollinate, and make more honey.
I bought a hive box in 2020 and placed it out in my yard, and I thought that bees from elsewhere would eventually find it and inhabit it, but that never happened.
So I was grateful when, in June of 2023, Jacques called me and said, “I’ve caught a swarm. I can bring it over and install it in your box.”
Jacques had been keeping bees for many years. He drove over with the swarm, and I watched him put the bees into the box in my yard.
Would the bees stay? Would they find my yard a nice place to live?
They liked my yard so much that their population increased rapidly to more than my hive box could handle. On June 13, 2024, they split. That is, half of them swarmed again, leaving my box to find a new home because they had outgrown the space.
So I bought two additional boxes (“supers”) to stack onto the original, in order to give the colony more room to grow and stay in my yard.
Why did I want to keep honeybees, and more honeybees, in my yard? Really, I just wanted increased pollination of my fruit trees. I had no interest in getting honey from them in the beginning. I added the extra boxes because I figured more bees would mean more pollination.
Spring of 2026
But this spring I could see by watching the number of bees going in and out of the boxes that their population had again increased to fill the space. There might be honey inside that could be harvested.
On April 26, Jacques arrived. It was a foggy morning. I donned my bee suit, Jacques lit the smoker, and we opened the hive. The top box had seven frames full of honey to harvest.
Like a good teacher, Jacques guided me but let me do most of the work.
How much honey did we get? About 16 pounds. This much:
I was not prepared with enough jars on harvest day because I had no idea how much was in the hive. So I resorted to pouring into any glass container I could find. Later, I properly jarred the honey.
It was one day of work to get more honey than my family normally eats in a whole year.
I learned that harvesting honey is sticky work, and the easiest way to clean the sticky honey off your fingers is to lick it. So I ended up eating a lot of honey on harvest day just in order to clean my hands.
I also got to experience putting a piece of intact comb in my mouth and chewing to burst the honey out. That was new for me.
In the past few weeks since harvest day, I have grown to like eating honey more. It’s no longer just a product from a jar. I’m eating my honey.
And I know where it came from. This honey was made from an array of flowers in my yard: avocado, citrus, rosemary, cherry, apricot, broccoli, gilia, grape, poppy, elderberry, buckwheat, ceanothus, and on and on. There are even more flowers in my neighbors’ yards that the bees used.
My honey is light in color, and I might be biased, but it is the best honey I’ve ever tasted.
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