Back Porch Farm

Papa and Isla work on Fred, our Jack-O-Lantern.

Ahhhhh….. the season of the honey harvest has arrived! Beeswax candles are solidifying in their forms on the counter. Golden honey drips from crushed comb in the colander. Pit pat, pit pat in the pot. The pints and half pints full of liquid gold continue to collect. And I spend the day following my child and husband around the house with sponge in hand. EVERYTHING is sticky! And what is not sticky is embedded with bees wax.

Randy cuts comb from a frame to crush and drain. In the foreground is the bowl of drained comb. We take this out to the bees and they do the first stage of wax clean up for us by removing the remaining honey to add to their winter stash. We are left with dry, clean wax!

I actually had to go buy a putty knife just for cleaning up in the wake of chewing, slurping family and friends. But is there anything better than crushing a freshly harvested honey comb between your teeth and letting the burst of sweetness flow slowly around your tongue? This comb crushing has such a satisfying feel as the perfect architecture of the hexagonal cells collapse under the pressure of your jaws. The wax warms with your body’s heat, slowly releasing it’s exquisite stash, which mixes with your saliva, and trickles thickly down your throat. The wax that is left behind congregates into a malleable wad as your chewing continues and every last drop of goodness has been swallowed.

A small bowl sits next to the stack of honey frames that are waiting their turn with the colander and potato masher. This sacred bowl slowly fills higher with teeth imprinted hunks of chewed wax. Next begins the task of melting all the chewed or crushed comb, all the scrapings from the hive boxes and frames, last year’s collection and perhaps even the year’s before. In the process, propolis is scraped off and set aside. This year I melted and cleaned 3 years worth of diligently collected bees wax. It amounted to an impressive quantity for only 1 hive.

Heating water to melt the wax in. There are several containers of collected wax scrapings in this picture as well as the bowl of chewed wax wads. This shows about a quarter of what we have melted so far this fall, as well as the disk of clean wax from 3 years ago.

We have also been collecting used pint sized 1/2 & 1/2 cartons for months. Today, Halloween morning, at our daughter’s Waldorf school, with 31 children aged 2 1/2 – 6 years watching attentively, I poured that cleaned and remelted wax into six 1/2 & 1/2 cartons. This hot wax included the chewed wax wads from every child who had sampled the comb that morning, while smearing sticky, happy hands across their Halloween costumes. One pillar candle remained behind for each of the Early Childhood classes. The remaining ones we took home to burn throughout the cold, dark winter on our dining room table.

The beekeeper smokes a worker bee at the Waldorf school to encourage her to gorge on honey in case of a fire evacuation from the hive.

Said worker bee begins the gorging process. This will make her docile and her abdomen too full to bend. She needs to bend in order to sting.

A brave knight and a quiet king wait in anticipation for their turns to gorge.

Most of 3 year’s worth of wax accumulation now in the form of 6 pillar candles. I plan to stretch out the remaining wax with goat tallow and see how that works as a back up.

I love pillar candles. I love the smell of burning bees wax. I am told that bees wax candles purify the air, and it’s easy to believe while watching a small puddle form around the wick like a moat around a castle. The smell alone has a calming effect on all present. Perhaps this is why the Waldorf school uses only bees wax candles – they too must be in on the secret.

And now, as my stuffy, hoarse 4 yr old heads out with Papa for trick or treating on the Plaza, I relax at home, gratefully alone and quiet. My legitimate excuse to bow out was that my bee costume had lost it’s buzz. My stripes were falling off from the 3 hours of beekeeping presentation that morning. After all, an hour with scissors and safety pins is not meant to create a family heirloom.

So I look out the frosty window at what is still left of this morning’s wet snowfall, and type. A small pot on the stove warms a pint of our honey, with 6 of our onions – diced, 6 of our garlic cloves – pressed, the juice of 7 lemons, the zest of 2 lemons, a palm sized hunk of fresh ginger – grated, 3 shakes of our XXX cayenne, 2 tsps of ground cinnamon, and about a cup of our recently harvested propolis. I call this concoction “MacMama’s Miracle Cold Syrup”. As spicy as it is, Little Isla always asks for more. Once strained and jarred, this batch should last us through the year. And hopefully it will get our wee lassie back on her fairy princess feet before the tea candle in Fred the Jack-o-lantern burns out.

A pot of MacMama’s Miracle Cold Syrup is brewing.

As a get-well compliment to the cold syrup, a second, larger pot boils up one of our recently harvested meat roosters for bone broth and chicken veggie soup. Soon I will add some of our carrots, turnips, onions, garlic, kale, boletus mushrooms from this year’s harvest, and fresh spices. I feel that cooking with food we grow on our farm, or food we harvest from Nature, gives a certain healing magic to our meals. There is a discernible life force in our farm meals that I do not detect from store bought food. With one family member down with the Halloween crud, I am doing my best to get my Nugget well while keeping the rest of us healthy.

I tear off the form of one of the fresh pillar candles. The glow of the white wick and the scent of sweet honey that this candle emits, brings me peace and tranquility. As Father Sun dips closer to the snowy horizon, Little Willie and Nico crow, Thomas gobbles and Molly barks. A hot bath is running. All is well.

The first candle is released from it’s form and lit. Heavenly!