Every February My Kitchen Floor Turned to Honey

The week the house belonged to the bees

The first sign that February had arrived in our house in Pietermaritzburg was never the heat. It was the sound of Derek's socks.

He would come in from the garage in the late afternoon, step onto the kitchen tiles, and there would be a small wet peeling noise, like someone pulling a plaster off slowly. Then a pause. Then my name, said in the particular tone a man uses when he has been married to a beekeeper for twenty-six years and still has not made peace with it.

"Lindiwe."

"I know."

"It is on the kettle as well."

"I know, Derek."

I started keeping bees when I was forty-three, after a swarm moved into the old compost bin at the bottom of our garden in Clarendon and a retired man from the beekeepers' association came to collect them. He let me hold the frame. I remember the weight of it, the warmth, the way the whole thing hummed against my palms like a living engine. I went home and read everything I could find, and by the next spring I had two hives of my own. By the time I turned fifty I had eleven, spread between our garden and a friend's smallholding out towards Howick, and I was selling jars at the Saturday market and to a few delis who liked the eucalyptus honey that came in late summer.

What nobody tells you, when you are standing in a garden holding your first frame, is that the honey has to come out somewhere. And for nine years, that somewhere was my kitchen.

How a kitchen becomes a crime scene

Harvest week went like this. I would bring the supers in from the hives, heavy boxes full of capped frames, and stack them on old towels by the back door. The extractor, a hand-cranked stainless drum I bought second-hand from a man in Hilton, would sit in the middle of the floor where the table usually stood. The table went onto the stoep. The cat went to my sister's.

Then I would uncap. I used a heated knife and a plastic tub, slicing the wax off each side of the frame, and no matter how careful I was, it dripped. It dripped onto the counter, the floor, the cupboard handles, my forearms, my hair. Once I found a strand of wax in my eyebrow at church. The buckets stood in a row along the wall with muslin cloths tied over the tops, and the honey ran through so slowly you could watch it for an hour and swear nothing had moved.

And the wasps. Our kitchen window faces the jacaranda, and by the second day the glass would be crawling with them, drawn by a smell I could no longer even notice. I kept a fly swatter on the windowsill and a wet cloth in every room. Derek took to eating his supper standing up in the lounge.

It was not just untidy. It was beginning to be a problem. A health inspector friend of mine, half joking, asked me over tea one day where exactly I processed the honey I sold, and I laughed and changed the subject, and then lay awake that night thinking about the dog hair, the onions, the toaster, all of it sharing a room with something I put a label on and handed to strangers.

The February I gave up

The year it all came to a head, we had a very good season. The gums flowered heavily, the rain came at the right time, and the bees filled every frame I gave them. I brought in nearly three hundred kilograms over two weekends. It was the best harvest I had ever had and I spent most of it close to tears.

On the Sunday evening, Derek came in from the garage, took two steps onto the tiles, and stopped. I waited for my name. Instead, very quietly, he sat down on the floor, right in the honey, and started laughing. He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes on his sleeve, which was also sticky, which made him laugh harder.

"I cannot do another February," he said, when he could speak. "I love you. I love the bees, mostly. But the bees need their own house."

He meant it as a joke. I lay in bed that night and realised he was right.

Looking at little houses

The obvious answer was to build on, but a proper room with plumbing and plastered walls was far more money than a market stall makes. Converting the garage meant losing the only place Derek's tools had ever lived peacefully. So I started looking at the bottom of the garden, the flat patch near the old compost bin where my very first swarm had arrived, and thinking about something smaller.

I had always thought of wendy houses as things for children, little painted cottages with a window box and a plastic slide. But when I started actually looking, I found people using them for everything. A woman at the market had turned one into a pottery studio. A man from church used his as an office after his company stopped paying for a building. One of the beekeepers in our association, a quiet man called Pieter who keeps hives near Merrivale, told me he had done his extraction in one for six years and would never go back.

"You want a solid floor you can mop," he said, "a door that shuts properly, and a window with a gauze screen. That is all. The bees do not care what it looks like."

I spent a few evenings on the laptop with a cup of rooibos, reading about sizes and timber and foundations, and eventually I found myself scrolling through a page of every wendy house for sale within delivery distance of Pietermaritzburg, trying to picture an extractor and twelve buckets inside each one. I measured the patch of ground three times. Derek measured it twice more, because he does not trust my tape.

Building the honey room

We chose a modest one, about three metres by three, with a single window and a door wide enough to carry a full super through without turning sideways. It arrived on the back of a truck on a grey morning in late winter and went up in a day. I stood on the stoep watching the walls rise and felt something I had not expected, which was a kind of shyness. It felt like a very grown-up thing to do, giving my hobby an address.

Derek did the rest over a few weekends. He laid vinyl flooring that runs a little way up the walls so the honey cannot creep into corners. He fitted a fine mesh screen over the window and a strip of brush along the bottom of the door. He ran an outdoor extension lead out for the uncapping knife and a small fan. I painted the inside a pale cream so I could see every drip, and I bought a cheap steel table from a restaurant that was closing down in town.

The first time I stood inside it, empty, with the door closed and the light coming in green through the jacaranda, I nearly cried again, for better reasons this time.

February, in its proper place

This year's harvest was smaller than the big one, and it did not matter in the slightest. I carried the supers down the garden path in the early morning, before the wasps were awake. I uncapped and spun and strained in a room where nothing else lived, where I could leave the buckets standing overnight and close the door on them. When I was done I mopped the floor with hot water, and it was finished. The kitchen stayed a kitchen. The cat stayed home.

The wasps still come, but they come to a window with a screen on it, and they knock against it for a while and give up.

I think about that a lot, actually, the way something that felt like a crisis every single year was really just a thing in the wrong room. I had spent nine years believing that the mess was simply the price of loving the bees. It never occurred to me that I was allowed to give the work a space of its own.

On the Sunday evening after the harvest, Derek came in from the garage, walked across the kitchen tiles in his socks, and did not say my name at all. He just put the kettle on. It was clean.

I have started calling the little room at the bottom of the garden the bee house. Derek calls it his wedding anniversary present, which is not strictly true, but I let him have it. When people at the market ask me where I do my extracting now, I tell them about the wendy house under the jacaranda, standing roughly where the first swarm ever came to me, and I have stopped changing the subject.