Sweet as Honey (16 page)

“Well, if you expect a smile from me,” Bitsy said, “you'll be disappointed. I haven't smiled for thirty years yet.” She wagged the hive tool at him. “And I don't smile at young men who get sneaky and try to hold hands with one of my girls.”

“So you're saying I shouldn't be
sneaky
about it?” Dan winked, actually winked, at Aunt B. He'd get a close look at the barrel of that shotgun for sure and certain.

Lily couldn't be sure under the veil, but it almost looked as if the lines around Aunt B's mouth turned upward and her eyes flashed with a glint of amusement. She shook her head and walked past the both of them, murmuring all the way. “Why did we ever feed him, Lord?”

Lily tried not to let her mouth fall open. She never knew anyone who could tease Aunt B without getting tossed out on his ear. She'd never seen anyone try. She glanced sideways at Dan and curled her lips. “
Cum reu
,” she said, motioning with her head. “Let's go find you a veil.”

He nodded eagerly.

“And maybe a muzzle.”

He chuckled. “If you think it will help.”

“Nothing will help.”

* * *

Dan's eagerness turned to amazement in a matter of minutes. “I can't believe you four do this all by yourself.”

Poppy, who led the horse and small wagon, stopped Queenie on the little path next to the orchard hives. “We're not altogether helpless, Dan Kanagy. And we've never needed a man to tell us how good we are at keeping bees.”

“Of course not, but I never knew how amazing you Honeybee Schwesters really are. I mean, I knew, because I know you, but I didn't really know.”

“You're not making any sense,” Bitsy said. She looked up to the sky. “Lord, if he's going to hold hands with my girl, at least give him half a brain to work with.”

Dan truly felt like he only had half a brain standing here with Lily and her beehives. It was as if he'd never even read the books. He had only a vague idea of what Lily and her sisters were going to do, and he had no idea how to help them. Still, he'd rather be lollygagging in the orchard staring at Lily than just about anywhere else in the world—except maybe sitting in his buggy holding her hand.

“But, Aunt B,” Lily said, giving him an encouraging smile. “He's going to come in handy when we move the full supers to the honey house.”

Dan took a step closer to the hive. “How many boys can say they're going to come in handy?”

Poppy eyed him from behind her veil. “He can probably carry two full buckets of honey at a time.”

Dan flexed his arms. “I toss calves and hay bales on a regular basis.”

Rose gazed at him in concern. “You toss calves?”

He winked at her. “Not far.”

“At least he'll be good for carrying supers and buckets,” Bitsy said.

Dan did his best not to stare, but he was trying to decide what that was on Bitsy's neck. She was covered head to toe for beekeeping, but he could see her bare neck beneath her veil. It looked as if a bee were resting on her neck just below her chin, except Dan knew it wasn't a real bee because it hadn't moved. The traveling tattoo was back.

Though Dan wanted to help any way he could, the sisters had their operation well organized. They were perfectly capable of handling heavy supers and angry bees all by themselves.

He knew from his reading that a full super could weigh eighty pounds.

Lily motioned for him to come closer as she pried the top super open with a hive tool. Dan expected to see bees everywhere, but he didn't see one in the shallow super. Lily pulled one of the frames from the super with a tool that looked like a pair of double pliers. She pointed to the rows of tiny white hexagons that nearly covered the frame. “This frame is full of honey. You can see how the bees have capped each cell for storage. We take it to the honey house, scrape off the caps, and spin the frames. The honey comes right out.”

“I'm surprised there aren't more bees on the frame,” Dan said. “The pictures show hundreds of bees.”

Lily lowered the frame back into the super. “The day before we pull honey, we put an escape board below the supers we're going to take. The bees can get out of the supers full of honey, but they can't get back in. So by morning, the supers are mostly empty of bees. This is where Dan is going to come in handy,” Lily said to Bitsy. She turned to Dan. “Do you mind some heavy lifting?”

He felt as if he were going to explode with happiness at the way she looked at him. He so wanted to be useful. “There's nothing I'd like better.”

“Can you lift this super and carry it to the wagon?”

“Of course.” Dan grasped the super by the shallow indents on either side and hefted it off the other supers in the stack. “Whoa. This is heavy.” He lumbered to the wagon and set the super toward the front. “Okay,” he said, glancing at Poppy and then Bitsy. “I don't mean to insult anybody, but how do you manage to lift these into the wagon by yourselves?”

Lily giggled. “Rose and I lift together.”

Poppy folded her arms and raised her chin. “I can carry one by myself.”

“Now, Poppy,” Rose scolded. “Sometimes you can.”

One corner of Poppy's mouth twitched upward. “If you must know, I only carry the lighter supers. Bitsy helps me with the heavier ones.”

Dan bowed in Poppy's direction. “That in no way diminishes your accomplishments, but I hope you realize how happy I am that I can help and make it a little bit easier for you.”

Poppy cracked a smile. “I guess I don't need to break my back when you are willing to break yours for me.”

“I'm not going to break my back. I toss cattle, remember?”

Lily smiled so sweetly, she could have been made of honey. “And we're very glad for your help.”

She pried the next super free from the one below it, and Dan picked it up and deposited it in the wagon. Once he removed the super, Lily pulled a thin board off the top super and pressed the lid on the supers that were left. She held up the thin board with a circle cut from the center of it. “This is an escape board or a bee excluder,” she said. “Bees can get out of the honey supers, but they can't get back in. We can take the honey without fighting the bees for it.”

“It was Lily's idea,” Rose said. “She's always coming up with improvements for our hives. The escape boards make collecting honey four times faster. We used to have to brush the bees off before we could take the supers.”

Dan gazed at Lily. He already thought so highly of her, her cleverness didn't surprise him at all. “It's pure genius, Lily. Pure genius.”

She didn't say anything, but he thought maybe she blushed under her veil. At least she didn't contradict him or try to deflect the compliment to one of her sisters. Paul might regularly tear her down, but hopefully she was starting to see what Dan saw—a smart, delightful girl, capable and talented, not to mention uncommonly kind and stunningly beautiful. There weren't enough
gute
words to describe her.

Bitsy rolled her eyes and propped a gloved hand on her hip. “If you stand there too long, the bees will find their way back to the full supers and we'll have to start all over.”

Dan realized he'd been staring dumbly at Lily. “Sorry. I'm awestruck at this whole operation. It's amazing, and you certainly don't need my help.”

“
Nae,
we don't,” Bitsy said, prying another hive open.

“But I'm glad you let me join you, all the same.”

Rose gave Dan a worried half smile. “Aunt Bitsy, how can you say we don't need Dan's help? Look at how much help he's been already.”

Bitsy grunted. “It's
gute
to remind the young men that they don't have to swoop in and save us. We can take care of ourselves.”

“I would never doubt that,” Dan said, smiling at the expression on Bitsy's face, as if she were taking him to task and egging him on at the same time.

“At least you're not one of those arrogant types who thinks a bunch of women don't know anything,” she said.

Dan took another super from Lily. She smiled and raised her eyebrows at him as if to reassure him that she truly did want him hanging around. It was the most beautiful sight he'd seen all day. Lily wanted him around, even if he was nothing but a nuisance to Bitsy. As long as Lily smiled at him, he'd be happy to annoy Bitsy.

Bitsy, Poppy, and Lily pried lids off the remaining hives and kept Dan busy toting full supers to the wagon. Rose, the only one not in a bee suit, scraped the thick and waxy amber-colored substance from the edges of the full supers with a hive tool and collected it in a jar. “It's propolis,” she said when Dan gave her a questioning look. “We sell it to health food stores. It's got dozens of uses.”

After she'd scraped the supers, Rose put a damp towel over each one. “So the bees don't come for it again,” she said.

“Is this all the honey you get every year?” Dan asked.

“
Nae,
” Rose said. “Once we've pulled the honey, we bring the supers back so the bees can fill them again. The bees clean the frames for us, and we do one more extraction in the fall.”

It took less than an hour to take twenty-three supers from the orchard hives. Dan had stacked the supers on the wagon two deep and the ten escape boards sat propped vertically between two supers.

Poppy led Queenie slowly down the rutted path to the smoother lane in front of the barn. The rest of them followed, peeling off veils and gloves and outer jackets as they walked.

They marched past the barn and its orange door, down the lane, and into the honey house, an ample shed that housed the equipment for extracting and storing honey.

Dan shooed Lily and her sisters away when they tried to help him lug supers into the honey house. Once he'd brought all the supers into the honey house and stacked them four deep against the wall, he clapped his hands together. “What now?”

An extra short wooden table sat in the middle of the room with a shiny metal can sitting on top of it. The can was about the size and shape of a galvanized metal trash can, with a spigot protruding out the side near the bottom. Next to the can sat a large white plastic box also with a spout at the bottom.

Lily grabbed his hand and pulled him forward. He nearly had a heart attack. “This is our honey extractor. We secure the frames in the slots in the extractor and then spin the honey out of the frames. The honey drips to the bottom of the extractor and out this spigot.”

Bitsy fit a stainless-steel strainer on top of a white plastic bucket and put it between the extractor and the plastic box so that both spigots would drain into it. “This catches and strains the honey at the same time.”

“How do you power the extractor? Or do you spin it by hand?”

“We use a generator to power the extractor and a battery for the uncapping knife.” Lily smiled at him as if she were pleased he wanted to learn. Of course he wanted to learn. Honey was a big part of Lily's life. He couldn't know her completely until he knew about this.

Poppy went to the long table and picked up a tool that looked like a long, thin spatula with a power cord attached to its wooden handle. “This is an uncapping knife. It heats up, and makes it easier to scrape the beeswax caps off the frames before we spin them.”

Lily pried the first frame from the nearest super and rested it on the wooden bar that ran across the top of the plastic box. She took the uncapper from Poppy and slowly sliced her way up the frame, skimming the beeswax caps off the comb and letting the wax fall into the plastic box. At the bottom of the box, a screen caught the beeswax and let the dripping honey pass through.

“That is about the niftiest thing I've ever seen,” Dan said.

Lily answered him with a twinkle in her eye.

Once she uncapped the frame, Lily slid it into the extractor and started uncapping the next frame.

“This is really a two-person job,” Bitsy said, as they watched Lily uncap another frame. “But we want you to see how it's done before we multitask.”

Dan wasn't even sure what “multitask” meant, but it sounded like they wouldn't be standing here watching Lily and Rose for too much longer.

Lily uncapped the last of the six frames and put it into the extractor. Poppy went outside and started up the gas generator, then Bitsy showed Dan how to turn on the machine. He watched as it spun and slung the honey against the side of the extractor.

“Don't stick your hand in there,” Bitsy warned, as if she feared he was regularly so foolish. “You'll lose it.”

“Don't worry, Bitsy,” he said, stealing a quick look at Lily. “I'll do it when you're not looking.”

Bitsy cocked her eyebrow. “Young man, I am not laughing.”

Their aunt might not have been pleased, but Lily, Poppy, and Rose smiled as if they were about to burst. At least somebody found him amusing.

They let the extractor spin for ten minutes, and when it stopped, a deep pool of honey sat at the bottom of the extractor.

Bitsy removed the cap that covered the spigot and golden, sweet-smelling honey began to flow from the extractor. The three sisters each pulled two empty frames from the extractor. Lily didn't hesitate. She pulled another full frame from one of the supers, rested it on the wooden bar on the plastic box, and picked up the uncapping knife.

Dan looked at the stack of full supers against the wall and did a few calculations in his head. It would take a full day to extract all this honey.

Bitsy picked up her veil and gloves from the table. “Now, Dan Kanagy,” she said. “Do you think you can manage the extracting with Lily? Poppy, Rose, and I are going to the clover field hives and put in bee excluders so those hives will be ready to pull tomorrow.”