The wind was from west-north-west, staggered like a troubled heartbeat. The temperature was borderline, almost too cold. Regardless, I had to proceed: time fleeting, other chores on deck. Prioritize. 

 

I could hear the children playing soccer across the shallow swale: far enough away that the wind was a muffler and I felt the privacy of space. The park was otherwise empty. The oaks on the border held their oxidized rusty leaves. I parked near the split rail fence and looked up the code for the lock on the gate. “I have to find those pruning shears,” I thought, looking at the rogue wild mulberry bush and the multiflora rose that, since my last visit to this small stash of hives, had grown like something atomic. 

 

Elephant grass grew near the foot of the galvanized fence, close enough that it could not be mown. The big grass gave the bees shade in the full low sun of the late fall and acted as wind break against the declining highs. Today the bees were inside because of the cold, but on a warm day they could skeet between the fence with the grass and the face of the hive and drop down to their landing board like helicopters into Manhattan. 

 

I started the RedMax and did some weedwacking inside the little, four-post bee yard. Mary’s mentor had taken her hive out and only my two hives remained on the hive stand, uncared for and neglected since mid-summer, well, since before my surgery.  I was curious as to whether the upper boxes contained any honey or were empty. From the top of the first hive, I lifted the two stones used as weights against the wind. I popped loose the outer cover, the roof, and was pleased to witness as good number of guard bees surrounding the central hole of the inner cover. This was an early indication that substantial work had been done by the bees in the upper box -- a good sign there was honey.

 

The guard bees were not flying because of the coolness of the air but they had their stingers up as a warning. I gave then a shot of smoke from my smoker. My smoker was stuffed with the dried, rolled cardboard of overused berry boxes, and with oak shavings from my twenty-inch planer in the cellar. With my hive tool, I snapped the inner cover loose from the bees propolis seal of the inner cover to the honey super box. Visual and sound indications signaled that the box was stuffed full of honey. I can’t hear the sound of “full” quite as well as I can hear the sound of “empty,” but I didn’t hear the hollowness of empty, and whatever cells that were visible on the frames, were capped with a fine layer of beeswax, indicating what we desired to find was right in front of us -- just dig deeper. 

 

With my hive tool, I pried up a frame from the honey super. (A “super” is just a name for a particular size box, usually used for the honey collection part of the hive. There are medium supers, and shallow supers – most commonly reserved for comb honey: but nothing is exclusive in this business. The larger boxes on the bottom of the hive are called “brood boxes” because that’s where the queen lays her eggs – if she is contained to the lower boxes by a queen excluder, which prevents her from climbing into the supers. Got that?) Oh man, it was loaded, the cells of honey capped side to side with a thin wax. 

 

I took off four and one-half boxes of honey from the small apiary. Each box is around forty pounds. I left a box of partial honey and uncapped nectar for the big hive. I treated each hive with a formic acid product, an organic treatment against the devastating varroa destructor mite. The mite lives on the fat of the unhatched bee larvae and transmits viruses to the bees. I try to treat minimally, not more than once a year, hoping the hives will develop natural defenses like grooming and uncapping contaminated brood cells. 

 

I put the outer covers back on the hives. I keep notes on blue painter’s tape on the top of the lids. I write my notes with black magic markers. I catalogue the date and the condition of the hive. I note the day of treatment and other noticeable facts, like is the queen marked? How old is she? I noticed the big hive on the right was a combination of various cast-offs I had made before my Westchester time. The hive had lost it’s queen. There are ways of telling. I’m not going to get into that now. But I had a captured swarm in a box on the axillary stand inside the apiary. The swarm came from a fence post on the backside of the community garden. I am sure it was a swarm from Mary’s hive. (Her mentor, asleep at the wheel.) So, as beekeepers do, by email, I offered her a pound of honey. 

 

I packed up my truck. All the soccer players were gone. The wind had died. The sky had lines of pink, sunset clouds. I headed home with a good haul. I drove slowly through the park.