Happy World Bee Day!
I'm loving all of the spring flowers that are attracting these beautiful little buzzers. This particular privet just started blooming last year. We did not plant it (we've lived here for 20 years!), but all of a sudden, it bloomed with these beautiful honey-scented blossoms last spring. I'm so glad for a repeat performance this spring.
Honeybees are precious jewels, and I hope they get the respect and appreciation they deserve. I have learned a lot over the past year about these hardy little workers (and drones, and queens...but I digress). One of the best interviews I've had so far this year was with the NYPD beekeeper, who lives locally and has his own apiary at his house where city swarms are re-homed. I even earned a jar of his luscious honey (don't be jealous)!
Look for a story about him in the July issue of Hudson Valley magazine. I won't reveal much, except that he harvested 80 pounds of honey his first year, and this year expects to reap 1,000 pounds of honey. And if you're picturing an acre full of hives, you'd be wrong. These bees are super-productive.
Speaking of beekeeping, I talked with my Dad yesterday - he lives an hour south of here, and luckily is doing well. No, he's not a beekeeper, but when he was growing up on Mountain Road in Valley Cottage (Rockland County) in the 1940s-early 1950s, his friend across the street was a beekeeper. Let's let Dad tell the story:
"He had the suits and everything," Dad said. "I'd put on a suit, and help him take care of the hives. It's amazing: You'd put in a frame, it looked like a sheet of cardboard but it was wax, and after a few months, you'd pull out the frame and it would be four inches thick with honeycomb on each side."
"We'd take knives and cut off the caps that held in the honey, and put the combs in an extractor, which was like a big container with a handle that you turned to make it spin. It would spin out all of the honey down to the bottom, and that's where we'd fill the jars."
"I remember his mom would make homemade biscuits, and we'd have warm biscuits with butter and honey. They were the best."
My Dad didn't have an easy life: Born the last of five boys and a girl, he grew up during the Great Depression. His only sister, seven years his senior, caught rheumatic fever as a child and died of a bad heart at age 14. His mom never really recovered from the heartbreak.
But he has great stories to tell, despite the hardships, and his stories almost make me yearn for those days of swimming in Tallman Pool (now Tallman Pool Club - well, la-dee-dah) until his hair turned green from chlorine, walking the mountain that once covered the state Thruway's Exit 10, watching his brothers having an elephant-dung fight over the fence from the backyard of the Central Nyack home in which he was born (Pierre Bernard, the father of U.S. yoga, had a menagerie in Central Nyack)...and oh, yeah. That friend in Valley Cottage? He had a pet alligator - but it really was only for one summer, Dad explained. "He kept him in an old bathtub that was sunk into the ground," Dad said. "We'd go to the nearby pond and catch frogs to feed him. Those poor little frogs."
Here's to great storytellers, old memories, sweet honey, hardworking honeybees, and stories that never die. May they all live forever.
Bye!
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