Our father kept bees. The hives were the square, timber box sort, painted white, that stacked on top of each other. He had two stacks of two. I thought they looked like apartment blocks—which were something I'd only read about.

The bees were there to pollinate the citrus trees. The hives sat solidly in their stacks in a quiet little grassy patch between our packing shed and the homemade orchard gate.

The grassy patch was there because it contained a disused mine shaft, which had become a well in my grandfather's time, and was now in the process of being filled with farm debris, such as old fencing.

The position of the old mine shaft made the bees a double hazard. We were doubly forbidden from going near them.

The hives came from our farming cousins at Oakabella. They took their bees seriously, moving them around on the old green Bedford truck, to feast on paddocks of Paterson's curse, then later in the year, on eucalyptus stands. I thought a truckload of bee hives was one of the most picturesque sights in our district.

Little colonies of white hives appeared just behind roadside vegetation, or even in our own paddocks for a few weeks, and then moved away again, like gypsies. I was a dreamy child, and wondered if our bees wished they could go too.

Our cousins had a proper setup in a shed for processing their honey, then selling it to shops. In those days we bought our milk powdered, in one-kilo tins.

For retail sales new tins were bought in bulk, but in our large extended family, there was always a refill and a swap being enacted—pie melons for citrus, honey for marmalade, jars for tins.

Dad's bees had a very settled life by the orchard gate, in reach of blossom all year. It was not a commercial operation. The bee numbers built up slowly, and we were not processing honey very often. When the hive was getting full and the bees needed more space, it was a family affair to extract the waxy frames and drain the golden gift inside.

Dad never bought a thing he could make.

The extractor was made from an old washing machine tub, with a welded frame holder working from the fixture that normally held the agitator, and a handle attached on the outside to gently turn it. Dad had a special blade for slicing off the waxy coating over the honeycomb, down the length of the thin frame. We spun it slowly in turn until our shoulders hurt, and all of the honey was in the container below the frame. The whole process took place at the hives and in the laundry.

Our father wore clean, white overalls to rob the bees—for hygiene I think, or maybe it was easier to see where the bees were. He wore a dark net hat covering his face and shoulders. It was not long after the moon landing that Dad first robbed the bees, with me in attendance

holding and passing things as needed—matches, gloves, smoker—I thought he looked like an astronaut.

Rags were lit and quickly covered to deny air. The handle was a kind of squeeze box. Each squeeze blew a puff of smoke from the smouldering rags. He lifted the top off the box, puffing smoke from his hand-held smoker at every step, to keep the bees sleepy, until the whole lid was lifted and gently placed on the ground. We never took out all of the frames, and we never took our eyes off them while they were being lifted. Things unravelled pretty quickly if the smoker failed.

En plein air paintings, with any sign of produce or a smudgy hive—like those of the Heidelberg School— take me straight back to the company of our strong, patient dad in white overalls, giving us a go on all the

different devices he made and used.

How sad I feel in the supermarket to find honey has an ingredients list, including rice syrup. That even natural honey may be from bees fed sugar water. That bees are considered a threatened species.

I don't think a child could have looked up to a man more than I looked up to Dad, in his astronaut whites, controlling fire in one hand and frames of honeycomb crawling with stinging bees, in the other.

 

 

 

© K. T. Downs. From Ourselves: 100 Micro Memoirs, edited by Laura Keenan and Casey Mulder, and published by Night Parrot Press, 2024.

 

 

K. T. Downs is a Geraldton writer of the Coral Coast in WA, on Yamatji Country. She writes short stories, and memoir, published locally. She was shortlisted in Big Sky Writers Festival 2021 and is currently working on a novel. Micro memoir is a recent discovery.

 

 

www.nightparrotpress.com