Harvesting Honey for Mead and Magic

For the last several years I have been attempting to become a beekeeper, which to me means encouraging bees to stick around and live healthy productive lives within the little house I have provided for them, so that I might share in their bounty. As a witch from a Dianic tradition, I love that almost all of the bees from the Queen to the nurse bees, to the workers and the guard bees are all female. They act as a wonderful reminder of female empowerment for me, even if they are a totally different life form. Plus they provide an abundance of honey, elixir of the gods and prime ingredient of mead, and for that I am motivated to find a collaborative coexistence with these tiny amazing creatures.

There are many ancient and magical traditions that connect bees and the honey they create to the goddesses Demeter and Aphrodite and the god Zeus (who was fed honey as a baby). And honey is incredibly magical and special in that bees tranform the nectar from flowers into honey within their bodies, just as they also make the wax that stores it. They then fan it to the perfect consistency so that it will not spoil or ferment and will keep for centuries. So for all these reasons I have been excited to connect with bees.

Bee magic is powerful. To connect more deeply with bee magic spirituality check out the late Layne Redmond’s bee priestess work. Throughout her album Hymns from the Hive bee the sounds of bees swarm in and out of the songs. You can buy the album here.

Although Layne is gone from this life, the impact she made on women and drumming lives on through her books, such as When Women Were Drummers, and through her music. I especially like this video of her song Bee Priestesses:

I was excited to delve into the magic of bees, but it turns out beekeeping is much trickier than I had first anticipated. As most people have heard, honey bees have had some major struggles in the last number of years due to varroa mites and pesticides, among other things.

And then there’s the fact that in the spring their population will often grow in number to the point where half of them decide to strike out into the unknown with the older queen leading the charge (once the scouts have found some good possible digs of course), while leaving a new queen, newly born to take her place. This new queen must duke it out with any other new queens that were also created just in case one didn’t work out and then go on her virgin flight, to find the hundreds of male bees called drones in one place in the sky to mate with over several hours. She can then return to her new hive and lay the eggs that will reproduce the female bees needed to keep the hive going for quite some time.

This last spring my hive was big and bountiful and then it swarmed. I hope the bees who left found a sweet and nourishing new home, but sadly the bees who stayed behind did not make it. I am not sure if the new queen died or what, but there were no eggs laid to replace the workers as they completed their 6 week summer life cycle and the hive dwindled down to only a few bees who couldn’t survive on their own. Honey bees require a community to survive and without that and a queen to lay eggs they just can’t make it. So I lost my hive, but fortunately they left quite a bit of honey behind! And so I harvested it.

Harvesting honey is a project, a sticky messy project, but one that is well worth it! Since I am just a backyard beekeeper with one or two hives at a time I have not invested in a honey extractor that spins the frames to force the honey out of the comb. So instead, I cut the honeycomb out of the frames, put it in a sieve and then crushed it with a pastry cutter in order to release the honey from the cells. I then let the honey drain into a bucket for several hours and then stored it in glass jars where it will keep indefinitely. That’s it. I also harvested the wax which involved melting it and separating it from the other stuff in the comb, but that’s another story.

Several of the Crow Women are mead makers; you can read our mead-making articles gathered together on our mead page, including my post on a plum mead I made last year for Lughnassad. I hope to make another batch of mead soon with the elderberries that will soon be ripe and the honey I collected. And I will sing my favorite Crow song about mead and honey bees, Sing Ho! For the Mead, while I do it.

The goddess sends the bees to fly
They distill the flowers’ love
Into the honey we’ll put by
For baking and cooking and brewing mead!

from Sing Ho! for the Mead music & lyrics © Alane Susan Brown (ASCAP) 1998, recorded by the Crow Women on Crow Magic

And maybe next season I will try again to live with bees.

Header photo of bee at flower by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Melanie and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.

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