habit owns me

The other day, after much hemming and hawing, inventorying and calculating, I pressed Submit on an online order of over $200 in beekeeping supplies.  None of what was ordered was unnecessary -- we'll use every single bit of it, especially now that it's highly likely we'll be bringing home Hive #4, an all-time high for us.  We shopped smart, compared prices, but when it came down to it, traded $200 for supplies the habit requires.  I am delighted but also have this persistent thought:  

Damn, that's some expensive honey.

Especially since, when we harvest, we give it all away.

The other day I announced that, in fact, perhaps our community should be paying us not for the honey but for the presence of oh, roughly 150,000"extra" honeybees, pollinators who might not otherwise be here to ensure that crops for miles around (5, in fact) benefit from our little hobby.  Joe nixed me on that.  Anyway, I didn't really mean it. 

The money doesn't matter. What matters is bees.

We might be a little weird that way.  Really, we haven't spent an excessive amount of money over the years, but it hasn't been without cost.  And we're  lucky: we can buy everything unassembled and Joe can put it all together in a jiffy.  If it were just me, or me + someone less handy, we'd have to trade a whole lot more greenbacks for all the stuff we need.  Stuff like hive boxes and frames with wired-honey foundation, so we can ensure that our bees have enough space for their business, enough space for babies and honey and pollen.  Luckier still, we've been gifted bees and caught swarms, so have procured some of our livestock for free. 

Beekeeping's become a habit, like growing food and composting, one I can't imagine my life without.

It's pervaded so many aspects of my life now, all the way into the kitchen.  So yeah, this morning's fridge purge was partly to make room for groceries and the big bowl of Memorial Day potato salad I made, and also because I couldn't stand the mess in there (a further expression of my mania for organization, down to the shelves of the fridge and pantry, a whole other topic), but mostly to support my honey habit.   In other words, I dumped the contents of 8 jars of quasi food just so that I can re-use the jars when we harvest next, which will be very soon, within the next few weeks.  All that honey has to go somewhere and I'm trying not to spend any MORE money on honey supplies, re-using what I already have.  And honestly, that Mango Butter that I bought at Trader Joe's last year that I thought I would love and which is OK but really not great, or that peach jam that someone made and gave us last fall -- those were all well-and-good but they were just sitting there taking up space, not being eaten and using room that could otherwise be allocated to food I'm actually interested in. Enough!  Now the content of those jars is feeding the compost, and the containers are washed and ready to serve as vessels of more delectable honey, something that never goes to waste ever.

The honey made me do it.

The bee-habit owns me, down to how long items in glass jars get to live in the fridge, if you must know.  When Joe goes looking (will he?) for the ginger-fig compote that had been tucked out of sight for ages at the back of a shelf in the fridge and asks me what happened to it, I'll just tell him that the honey made me do it.

Because that's the honest truth.  I'm completely in its thrall and will do anything in service of producing more honey, 'cause the habit of the bees in the yard, honey in jars, that habit totally owns me.

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