HONEY I LOVE YOU

By Hilary Prendini Toffoli

Photographs by Diane and Christophe Heierli

The honey you get from a hive in your garden is purer than supermarket honey. And the secret life of bees is an awesome thing to behold.

The more you talk to beekeepers about bees, the more you appreciate that what you’re dealing with is a highly-evolved - and highly-strung – small force of nature you mess with at your peril. It has such obsessive loyalty to the hive and such a well-developed sense of smell that any odour it regards as a threat makes it jittery. Strong perfume. The smell of cut grass. Your perspiring body.

Initially it will swoop down and keep bumping you as a warning. If you ignore it, this tiny suicide bomber will plunge its barbed lance into your bothersome flesh, in the certain knowledge that its soul will immediately wing its way to bee paradise, where presumably the queen has promised that male bee virgins will be waiting….

Even if you get the sting out quickly with your fingernail, and manage to avoid squeezing the poison sacs further into your flesh, you’re not out of the wood. The rest of the gang, attracted by the pungent smell of the venom, will come zooming in as fast as a fleet of heat-seeking missiles.

Ideally there will be a nearby pool to jump into. Or you will have put on your pale-coloured beekeeper armour - veil, hat, gauntlets, overall and boots – and taken your anti-histamine tablets. If not, you could end up looking like a sumi wrestler with chicken pox.

Nor is it much consolation that those stings will do wonders for your arthritis, causing your body to produce its own anti-flammatory agents – or so say the apitherapists, who use live bees to sting their patients and say they get remarkable results.

None of which is the reason why there’s a shortage of honey in South Africa. Thanks to immutable factors like drought - which affects the flowers’ production of pollen and nectar - we just can’t produce enough, so we have to import it from the most unlikely places. China for example. It’s blended with our own honey in a process that kills off some of its famously healthy properties, which is why a lot of people buy their honey fresh from the hive in health shops. Or keep a hive or two at the bottom of the garden. 

Without fail, beekeepers will tell you that the discomfort of a few stings is a small price to pay for the joy and satisfaction of gathering your own precious buckets of honey. “There is nothing more soothing than the sound of a contented colony of bees, and the wonderful scent that emerges from a flourishing hive,” according to Jenny and Dominique Marchand, Cape Town-based authors of the comprehensive guide Beekeeping, published by Aardvark.

The Marchands have kept bees for decades, and run courses throughout summer at their Honeybee Foundation in Maitland. Jenny, a slight, fey blonde, puts on informative shows for children in the foundation’s small puppet theatre, and is also a practising apitherapist. She started as a lone woman beekeeper on a farm in Bredasdorp, after leaving the film industry, and then met Dominique. “He became intoxicated by the intensely interesting social life of the honeybee,” she tells me. “And I was happy to have a willing helper. It’s hard work. The honey is heavy when harvesting and so are some of the hive parts.”

An electrical engineer and mechanic, Dominique makes a lot of the equipment available at the Honeybee Foundation. You can get the entire bee kit, everything from recycled beeswax and protective clothing, to the smoker, the swarm and the wooden hive itself. Your initial total outlay will be under R 2 000.

Used by beekeepers all over the world, the Langstroth moveable frame hive, invented in 1851, is a square pine box about half a metre high, containing up to ten moveable frames in which the bees make honeycombs, and underneath them a brood chamber where the queen lays her eggs.

You need to be able to put the hive in a quiet place where the bees are protected from sweaty gardeners with noisy lawnmowers that will provoke them to attack. Not too hot, or they’ll spend their time air-conditioning the hive with their wings instead of collecting nectar. Not too windy or they won’t be able to land with their nectar and pollen loads. And not too cold because they’re fragile creatures.

Boat-builder Pete Adamo has about six hives in his large garden in Hout Bay, and gets 40 to 50 kilos of honey a year. “We’re in the fynbos and eucalyptus, so the honey has one helluva flavour,” he says. 

He did a course in Stellenbosch about three years ago and bought his first hive and swarm from Dominique. “We got the hive in December, and honey only the following year. Often you don’t get honey the first year. The bees take time to settle.”

I watch him help Margaret Moore, another Hout Bay resident, harvest her first batch of honey. She has one hive, in dappled shade in a smallholding.

Unlike the San, who hold a smoking stick between their teeth that leaves their arms free, Pete uses a mechanical smoker. This little metal affair attached to a bellows is supposed to blow dense, cool smoke into the hive so the bees will start gorging on the honey, prior to fleeing the fire, and be less aggressive.

Togged-out in their yellow gear like space travellers, the two beekeepers treat the swarm with respect. Margaret pumps the smoker gently - excessive smoking can give  bees diarrhoea - while Pete lifts out each frame with its honeycomb full of honey, and brushes off the bees. Margaret takes the frames into the kitchen, scrapes off the honey caps the bees seal the combs with when they’re full, and drains the honey through a sieve, getting it all over the kitchen in the process. But it’s delicious, a beautiful amber colour.

There are as many different colours and flavours as there are nectar-producing plants, ranging from the almost black thornbush honey and the dark buckwheat honey used in bread and muesli, to the clear, yellowy honey you get from orange blossoms.

One day when South Africa finally produces enough of its own, some bright spark will organise a Honey Festival. You will taste what bees can create across the spectrum, as well as quirky items like honey flavoured with ginger, which I found recently at Cape Town’s Olive Fair, at the stall of Marc Farah of Honey Guide.

Like all beekeepers, Farah waxes lyrical. As a child he was transformed by what he calls “a sacred experience” with a swarm in the roof of his parent’s house, and now has about 250 hives.

No pesticides come near his bees. They are never fed on sugar water or hired out as pollinators to fruit farmers, a service that provides a lot of beekeepers with a significant amount of their income. “I think that’s abusing the bees,” he says. “How would you like to keep moving house throughout summer? Happy bees make better honey.”

Keeping your bees happy is not as easy as it sounds. Steve Lovemore lives in Constantia and has had four hives on a two-acre garden ever since he tasted the honey a Knysna friend had collected from a wild hive.  “It was out of this world,” says this beefy builder.

But almost two years later, Steve and his three enthusiastic children - who all have bee-keeper outfits, including Katey the nine-year-old - haven’t seen any honey. Their enthusiasm remains undampened however, even though Steve and 12-year-old Jeremy got seriously stung recently, moving the hives at the end of winter.

“Ideally you should wear two layers of clothing,” says Steve, “but it was a hot day so we had shorts under our overalls. In the midst of it, the smoke machine dies, and my son is yelling ‘Dad, they’re stinging my legs through the overalls!’ while I’m trying to get the bloody thing to work.”

Their gardener Jantjies was chased but chose not to dive into the pool because of the electric weed-eater strapped round his neck. His enthusiasm also remains undampened, says Steve, in spite of his balloon face. That’s the effect honey has on people.

“I love them,” says Neville Spencer, a swarm remover who has been a beekeeper for 16 years, regularly stung, last week on the nose. “You can be totally stressed, but when you go down and watch the bees going about their business, you totally relax.”

He gets about two tons of honey a year and supplies four outlets. A furniture maker by trade, he manufactures hives you can put together yourself with nails and glue, half the price of readymade hives. His company Desking Concept is in Maitland.

His tips: “Paint the hive a light colour and put it where it will get some sun, especially in winter. Smear the inside with a herb like Melissa and you might attract a swarm. Don’t buy a mickey-mouse smoker, and don’t try beekeeping unless you love nature. You have to have a rapport with the bees.”

Of course there are always beekeepers looking for places to keep their hives, and they’ll give you some of the honey. It might be your first step towards a deeply rewarding relationship.