Never met a stranger: Celebration of summer in a jar

By T.W. Burger

I could not help but note that the man extracting honey from the combs in the Langsroth frames looked almost bearlike; solid and powerful, with dark hair and a great black beard.

“Taste that.”

The beekeeper pointed to a dollop of honey on top of a rack of honeycomb frames. Bees marched around it like sentinels.

It was the sort of command that brooks no argument about hygiene. A worker bee looks on suspiciously as I wallowed my index finger in the liquid and finessed it into my mouth, trying to keep the honey out of my tie.

My tongue felt like my brain does when I've read a good poem. The flavor was both sweet and smoky, like good blues sung by a woman.

Summer.

“They've started using honey in burn wards, to treat badly burned areas," the bear said."It's high in nitrogen, and germs can't live in it.”

I could believe it. I felt better myself.

It is harvest time in fruit country, at least as far as the beekeepers are concerned. Something there is magical, or at least alchemical, about honey, as though some hoary wizard had found a formula for distilling the fruit blossoms of spring, the heady wildflowers of summer and even the much-maligned goldenrod of late summer into that dark amber liquid, sweet as all the things you think you remember about your first love.

Summer.

In the air, one can sense the beginning of the end. Not in coolness, though that day had been cool enough to wring the haze from the skies, leaving the tail end of the Blue Ridge rumpled and blue, as advertised, in the west. More in a restlessness in the summer air, a new tone in the drone of the bees, a stirring of northern airs, fall leaving its first calling card.

The sky, all pewter blue, tangerine, peach, silver top-lit clouds almost purple as grapes underneath, showed sharp outlines not seen through the soppy hot air from the tropics.

No, summer is not done, but it has begun to pack its bags.

The beekeeper helped a bee find its way out of my hair, explaining that the worker might get entangled and sting me out of frustration. All if favor of calm bees, I stood still while he coaxed the insect out.

The bee stood on the tip of his calloused finger, resting.

“See how frayed its wings are?" he said, pointing at the nearly transparent v-shaped wings."That's what happens to them. They get where they can't fly anymore.”

He tossed the bee into the air, where it seemed to fly uncertainly. It flew back to the group of us, landing on each in turn, as though seeking direction. It was a worker doing field duty, hunting nectar, which meant it was in the last two weeks or so of its six-week life. It suddenly occurred to me that the summer that seemed to have rushed by me has been a whole string of lifetimes for the bees in the hive, tattered, working themselves to death, generation after generation, toward the distillation of a season.

The air from the north tossed the trees and stirred the dust. The bee wobbled through the air in the direction of the hives. I drove slowly home, a jar of dark summer beside me, an eternity of summer beginning to fray in orchard country.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.

Burger is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.