Harvesting The First Honey

 

New Albanian vocabulary: shkolla e mesme (secondary – literally ‘middle’ – school, for students aged 15 to 18)

 

 

We had had a call from Adem for help. Mirlinda had finished her final term of ‘primary’ school the previous month and she and her parents wanted her to continue in the specialised equivalent of the British sixth form. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to get a place at any of the schools she’d applied to. Adem had explained this last time we were with them, and asked Rob, ‘could you get the Prime Minister to write a letter?’

I felt myself stiffen every time I found myself in this situation; this kind of bid for patronage wasn’t new to us. Adem wasn’t being particularly daring in the suggestion that a Prime Minister might write a letter on behalf of a bee farmer’s daughter whom he had never met. If he were in the UK or the US he could go to ask his MP or Congressman to write a letter; Kosovo has no artificial patronage structure of this kind. It’s actually possible that if Rob were to ask Çeku to write the necessary letter, the Prime Minister would do so. It’s even possible that if the head teacher of the school which Mirlinda wanted to attend were to receive such a letter, she would give Mirlinda a place. It might even be that if that process were to work, none of the people involved would see anything problematic in it, or think any the worse of us. And Mirlinda would get the education that might give her the edge in the fierce, desperate Kosovo job market. It might give her and her parents a reason for her not to marry early, produce children soon afterwards, and spend the rest of her life making fli and serving tea with honey stirred in it to her husband’s guests. Dardan said, ‘this could be the biggest gift you ever gave that family.’

But for us to play our part in such a process would undermine all the democratic structures that we believed we had been contributing to building in Kosovo. We had protested faintly to Adem that the Prime Minister was a bit busy.

 

 

I had suggested the only thing that I would be able to do in the UK. Perhaps I could go with Mirlinda to the school. As I suggested it, I had realised that it was a very British way of showing the pressure that you might be able to bring to bear. I didn’t suggest I would speak a word to the head teacher, and certainly no documents would change hands, but the foreign lady (with who-knows-what connections) sitting next to the borderline student might just swing it for Mirlinda’s school future. Thinking it through this way, I wondered whether Adem’s might be a more honest approach.

And then he called us to come over for lunch at the weekend.

In the end, the discussion about Mirlinda’s future was mercifully short. I opened with a reiteration of the offer to go with her to the head teacher. I tried to show I was really ready to help – I told them what days I was free the following week. It was agreed that they would call me when they had decided on which day they could make the trip into Pristina.

‘Hajde,’ summarised Adem, ‘let’s go and see how the bees are doing. There might be enough honey to harvest today.’

This was big news! My pulse quickened.

‘I’ll take the smoker,’ I offered, with a quaver of assertiveness in my voice. Adem smiled and handed it to me.

Now there were even more butterflies – or some other insects – in my stomach. What if I didn’t keep the stream of smoke consistent enough? What if the bees tried attacking Adem. Even him having to correct me would be embarrassing.

I held the smoker steady and made sure the aromatic woodchip smoke was trailing evenly over the frames. Occasionally I glanced at Adem’s face, softened by the mesh of his veil. But he was concentrating on his own work. He lifted the frames up and squinted at the dripping cells. The wax starter sheet was hardly visible now – the bees had built honeycomb over all the sheets, and from there had built upwards to create tiny repeated six-sided vats which they were filling with honey.

Adem was less awed than I was. ‘S’ka mjaltë – there’s no honey,’ he said, thrusting the first frame back in the hive. He was exaggerating: I could see the trickles of liquid seeping out as he held the frames up. But they weren’t full.

He picked up another, and repeated himself with a kind of despair.

It was true that Kosovo had had less rain this summer than in any year in living memory; no-one could remember the Mirusha waterfall having dried up before. But Adem’s despair upset me. Was the lack of honey something I’d done, or not done in caring for these bees? I sensed that Adem felt he’d let me down.

And then another thought struck me. Was there a metaphorical meaning to his words? A reference to the limited help I’d offered his family’s future. I squirmed a bit more.

Eventually we removed two frames from my hive. The bees were understandably even less impressed than Adem at this, and swarmed up to us angrily. I felt my vulnerability as I tried to fend them off with a puffing Billy can; it was the most frightened I’d been by them.

In the absence of any more full frames of honey in my hives, we took more frames from a couple of Adem’s and they were slotted into an empty box for transport, and covered with a cloth to hide them from any nearby bees. I knew that we needed to move fast – the honey should be extracted while it’s still warm. I carried the golden coffer, swaying with sweetness, back to the house.

By the time I got there, a plastic tablecloth had been put on the floor in the main room of the house where we had eaten, and where the food preparation is done. In the middle of the tablecloth was the new 35-euro centrifuge. I was excited – I had read about this magical process. In the Albanian book on beekeeping, For You who Keep Bees, I had read that ‘the beekeeper’s real poetry is the sound of the centrifuge and jars filling with honey.’ The machine seemed disappointingly like a cement mixer to me – the size and shape of a dustbin. But the next- door neighbour had come round to watch, and Xhezide, Mirlinda and the younger son, Lavdim, were all there too. There was a sense of expectation, of a piece of theatre about to begin.

Before we put the frames into the centrifuge to spin out the honey, we had to skim off the wax that had sealed each filled honeycomb cell. For this there is a special tool, like an afro comb, or tuning fork, which Lavdim was using, and after I’d watched him for a while, I had a go myself, scraping at the delicate skin until I was told off by the nosy neighbour for going too deep and scooping up the precious honey as well as the covering. What the hell, at least I was doing it!

I tried to be more careful. When I’d finished, the centrifuge lid was lifted and the frames of skimmed honeycomb set in the brackets round the edge of the centrifuge drum. We took turns at working the handle to spin them. Lavdim was just getting to the age where he cared about the muscles on his slim brown arms; he would have preferred that the rest of us weren’t there.

You could lift the lid while the machine was centrifuging and see the threads of honey shuttling out like a golden weft. It was even more beautiful than watching candyfloss being made.

When I had a go, the whole machine started screeching – as if there was an enormous unhappy bee inside; or maybe as if it itself was an enormous unhappy bee. I thought of For You who Keep Bees; if this was any kind of poetry, it was rap, and it didn’t scan.

Adem was silent at my side. He watched the operations with dismay.

‘S’ka mjaltë,’ he repeated, rubbing his hand over his chin.

The machine seemed badly designed – the spout from which the honey was supposed to flow started a couple of inches up from the base of the centrifuge hopper. So until we generated a two-inch depth of honey, nothing came out, and there would always be two inches of honey left in the centrifuge.

The spout which allowed the honey to run out had been positioned over a sieve with a bowl underneath it. All eyes were fixed on the spout, which, despite my desperate turning of the centrifuge’s handle, was dry as the Mirusha waterfall.

And then the first little golden tongue licked out of the spout. The honey was coming!

The stream thickened, tilted over the edge of the spout, and started spooling into the sieve. There was something sexy and luxurious about this languid, intense amber drool. I was transfixed by the beautiful fairy columns of gold transparency it made as it streamed through the sieve, by the molten golden food spiralling and settling into its jar.

And it was all mine! I could feel the Midas touch of capitalism grip me as I sat watching the precious flow. From those silent bees hibernating on my first visit, elusive despite my knocking, through all the visits to check, medicate, tinker, clean the colonies, this was the result.

It required much scooping of the honey from the bottom (Mirlinda and I up to the armpit reaching into the centrifuge) and tilting of the whole machine by the men, but in the end we got five jars – one per frame. I felt like I had been present at a display of alchemy. And this time I really had played my part. I was grinning as we wiped down the jars and screwed on their lids.

Before we went, Adem wanted to show us the family’s well. All around, the ground was dry and yet on Adem’s abundant land there was a cool place where you could dip your zinc bucket in the ground and from deep, deep below, bring up sweet cold water. This must be how the bees had managed to produce the stores we had seen trickling into the jars earlier, despite the drought.

We were saying our goodbyes but Xhezide took my arm and steered me into the temporary polythene greenhouse they had set up to grow peppers and cucumber. The vegetables were blood temperature from the unnatural warmth, and she cut some down. She presented me with a bag as heavy as a small child, for me to take home along with my – my own – jars of honey.

I really really hoped Mirlinda could get a place at school.