This spring, I attended a party at the house of Shanda Blue, a poet I knew slightly from school, and her husband, Bob. They live on six acres in a small Michigan town called Sturgis, and among the landscaped gardens and wild forested paths, the shining lake and the lilied stream, Bob keeps 3 beehives he inherited from his father. Some of the other party guests were a bit apprehensive about this last feature and would approach no further than 20 feet, and that under duress. I was drawn to the wooden boxes, and crept up behind them, spying on the bees flying in and out of the hive only inches from my face.

I realized then that it was a lifelong dream of mine to put on a beekeeper’s costume and harvest honey. I knew I must use my subtle craftiness to elicit an invitation to do just that.

"Gee," I said aloud, to no one in particular. "I’ve always been fascinated by bees. I sure would like to watch honey being harvested. I sure would like to learn how that works." Granted, this was neither subtle nor crafty, but the result was instantaneous.

"We can always use some extra help," Bob told me. Shanda concurred, with the sentiment that if someone else helped, she wouldn’t have to. I marked my mental calendar for Labor Day weekend, and when the date drew close, I e-mailed Shanda a few times, to make sure that the invitation was solid and not something I had imagined in my desperation for strange and unusual experiences.

Thus it is that on August 30, 2003, when a blackout on one side of the country and a pipeline breach on the other has driven gasoline prices to record highs, I am cruising south out of Kalamazoo through rural Michigan. The city disappears behind me quickly, and I am soon passing fresh produce stands and being held up behind slow moving farm equipment. Irrigation structures stretch beside the road like long, segmented dragons, and, as I turn off route 12, I pass not 1, but 2 horse-drawn buggies. From there it is only a few minutes to the hidden road and the long driveway up to the house.

I find Bob in the garage, where he is rearranging sawhorses, paint cans, glass jars, and various other workshop detritus to make room for the operation. He tells me that Shanda has gone to the bakery, and that his daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law will also be arriving. I help with the rearranging, carrying a wooden picnic table from a side porch into the garage, and hosing off a number of rubber mats. Bob shows me a box of medium-sized gourds. He calls them birdhouse gourds, and indeed, a number of them have holes drilled into one side. These have been painted, and he assures me that birds like to nest in such gourds. He suggests that there are myriad art projects waiting to happen in these excess gourds, and I am persuaded to take 3.

There is also time for me to wander down to the hives and observe the pattern of working insects. The bees seem to leave the rectangular wooden hive in an orderly fashion, shooting out one by one like the multi-ball in the world’s most disconcerting pinball game. Their return is more complex, the dance of the particles within an atom. They circle and circle, never interfering with other bees, leaving or returning, and always finding their way back into the slit at the bottom of the hive. They hum softly to themselves.

Bob hitches a trailer to his tractor and drags a number of wooden frames, all hung with spider webs heavy with egg sacs, up to the garage. He proceeds to clean them by means of a small propane torch. Homemakers take note: this is an effective way to eliminate spiders.

He shows me a small wooden box, which I had noticed earlier. It is less than a foot long, with two sides made of wire mesh. This is a shipping container, with the post office’s stickers still on it, made for mailing bees. This spring, 2 of the hives had been sickened and killed by bee mites, and so, in May, he had ordered 6 pounds of bees to replace them.

"They just send it like that, without any outer packaging?" I ask.

"Sure," Bob says. "Then they call me at 6:30 in the morning to please come and pick up my bees."

Each box contains 3 pounds of bees, including 1 queen, sequestered in a tinier cage set in the larger one. The queen’s box is plugged with a piece of hard candy. The larger box holds a can of sugar water punctured with tiny holes sufficient for the other bees to feed from. Occasionally, one or more bees, loath to leave their hivemates, will cling to the outside of the box and come along across the country for the ride.

Shanda returns from the bakery and Bob asks me if I want to put on a beekeeper’s jump suit, which is, of course, the reason I’ve come. As if fate has decreed this moment would arrive, I am given a stylish denim number, which matches the rest of my wardrobe. A pair of child-sized gloves are a perfect fit. Bob deems my own socks too thin and lends me a second pair to wear over them. Shanda helps me tuck the legs of the suit into the socks, then arranges the hat and veil over my face. The veil is tied down to keep bees from crawling beneath it although, as Shanda points out, they can sometimes still crawl in from above, since the veil only rest on top of the hat. It is not attached in any way. Still, I have high hopes about not being stung today. Bob’s veil is even more bee-proof: it zips onto his suit.

The trailer is loaded with the beekeeper’s tools. First there is the smoker, a metal can with a spouted lid, something like the Tin Woodsman’s head in The Wizard of Oz, attached to a small bellows. This has been packed with a mixture of paper, cedar, and burlap. There is a small pry tool with a flat, scrapey side and a rounded hook-like side. There is a spring-loaded metal gripper and a few wooden boxes. I follow the tractor down to the hives, and we take a moment to admire the bees again. Bob points out that many of the bees are returning to the hive with full saddlebags, and when I look sharp I can indeed see the bright yellow lumps of pollen clinging to each side of the insect. Bob lights the kindling in the smoker with the propane torch. It catches on the second try and he pumps the bellows, sending out clouds of sweetish smoke, redolent of the fires of my overnight camp days.

Although I had always supposed that it was the smoke that made the bees slow and dopey, Bob explains otherwise. The smoke actually tricks the bees into believing their home is in imminent danger of being destroyed. Worried that their food supply is about to go up in flames, the bees gorge themselves on honey. Then, just as you or I would find ourselves heavy and drowsy after the Thanksgiving meal, the bees drag around the hive with full stomachs, less concerned with theft and home invasion than they would be in a more alert state.

Using the pry tool, Bob pulls the lid off the first hive. It is sticky and doesn’t want to give at first, but it comes up to reveal the contents of the box: 10 frames of man-made honeycomb, most of which are empty. A few logy bees fly drunkenly out of the hive as Bob uses the gripper to pull each frame out and examine it. The lack of honey on this level is not a complete surprise to him. I wonder if it is due to the cool spring. He admits this is a possibility, but explains that May is late for a hive to start, and also that the wetter-than-average summer inhibited the bees’ ability to collect pollen.

These frames are in various stages. Most of them have been "pulled". Humans create the hexagonal tessellating comb as a labor-saving device, so that the bees can put their energy into honey production instead of creating wax. The bees have further prepared the wax by stretching it up so it can hold more honey. Some of the cells are wet with the golden syrup and some are empty. Only a very few are capped with the white wax that shows the cell is full of honey that is good to eat. We examine each frame. Some go into a pile of empties, which will be reused. Others are deemed acceptable. Bob uses a soft brush to knock the excess bees off, and then uses the flat end of the pry tool to scrape off excess orange wax, called propolis. Bees, it turns out, make several different kinds of wax for different jobs. The job of the propolis appears to be to stick the frame to the hive and make it more difficult for beekeepers to remove them.

We remove only the top two boxes of each hive. The bottom two, which contain a great deal more honey, are for the bees to live off of during the winter. A full hive, I learn, houses about 80,000 bees in the summer time. As the weather cools, the drones are kicked out of the hive and about 20,000 bees winter over, eating honey and buzzing around to stay warm. Bob shows me a metal grate between the top and bottom two boxes, a queen excluder. Since he considers himself an amateur beekeeper, he takes extra precautions to make sure that the queen does not venture into the combs he plans to harvest. This prevents him from inadvertently "harvesting" cells that contain larvae.

The second hive is equally disappointing in terms of yield, but the third hive, the established one, is nearly full. The frames are packed, and almost all of them are completely sealed with white caps. Some of the caps are a darker brown, a sign of older wax. A full frame weighs about 10 pounds, meaning a full box of honey should tip the scales at 100.

Whereas the bees in the first 2 hives were fairly complacent as we took the nearly-empty comb from them, these bees have much more to lose, and refuse to be placated with a little smoke-induced overeating. I am suddenly aware that clouds of bees are coming out to defend their home. Hard little bee torsos are dive-bombing my hat, making heavy thudding noises against my head. Other bees are crawling on the mesh face plate of my mask. Bees are clinging to Bob’s back and legs as he struggles with the full comb, holding it by one hand with the gripper as he uses the scraper in the other hand to scrape off the propolis. Periodically he casts around for his bee brush to wipe off the buzzing carpet that now blankets each comb we take.

At this point, Bob’s son-in-law Javier stops by to say hello, but keep a respectful distance. He leaves and a moment later Bob’s daughter, Kerry, comes by. She also stays back, but the bees are riled up. The volume of their hum has increased. I am now manning the smoker, clouding the air with furious pumping, which seems to have no effect. They keep flying at us, frenzied and persistent. Bob looks up and calls out, "You have a bee on your head," to Kerry. "Just stay calm." She follows this advice as best she can, walking slowly away from the swarm. "Try to walk under a tree branch," Bob suggests. "That will brush it off and confuse it." She complies, but the bee persists. Suddenly, her head bobs and jerks; her hand comes up to her ear.

"I can’t be calm when it’s in my ear," she says. She claims to be all right, but Bob is worried she’s been stung and send her back to the house.

"Shanda will put some ammonia on it," he says. It turns out that ammonia is the best remedy for bee stings, providing immediate and permanent pain relief and keeping down the swelling.

Soon, the 6 top boxes have been emptied and the lids replaced on the truncated winter hives. We brush the bees off of our suits by walking beneath leafy bowers and head back for the garage, where Javier helps me to extricate myself from the complicated lacing of the veil. We shut the honeycomb up in the garage and go inside the house for lunch.

Kerry is inside, playing with her long-limbed and adorable 5-month-old, Lydia. She has, in fact, been stung on the ear, but the ammonia cure has worked. The ear is only a little red, and there is no swelling and no pain. We eat sandwiches on the screen porch, where bee-themed ornaments decorate the table, before returning to the task at hand.

Everything has been set up in the garage. First, the comb capped with white wax must be scraped with a little hand-help device bristling with a dozen 3-inch spikes, like something you would use to scratch an extremely large cat. This opens the sealed comb and frees the honey. Combs are set into the extractor, a large metal drum with a hand-crank on one side. The crank spins 4 honeycombs at once, and centrifugal force sends the honey out of the wax form. A spout at the bottom opens smoothly, and honey flows out in a golden river, through a metal sieve, and into a clean glass jar. Each large jar, I learn, holds 13 pounds of honey.

The garage is hot and I briefly wonder why Bob has closed all the doors and windows, but the answer immediately occurs to me. Given full capacity in all the hives, we have just made 240,000 small but pointy enemies. We have stolen something that belongs to these hordes of bees, each and every one of whom is willing to die in defense of their property. Bees have a range of several miles. They will seek out their honey and do everything within their power to bring it home, exacting vengeance where they see fit.

The boxes holding the combs have been covered with wooden boards, and when we lift these lids, a few stunned bees drift out and begin humming around the garage. Javier, armed with a shop vac, hunts these unfortunate zealots down and sucks them into oblivion. Bob points out that the drones would be kicked out of the hive anyway, and that the other bees will do it even sooner than they would otherwise now that we’ve harvested the honey. At any rate, he did his best to discourage stow-aways with the bee brush.

I cannot resist scooping up a gob of dripping wax and popping it into my mouth when no one is looking. I am fairly certain that honey need not be pasteurized, but am still happy when Kerry comes out and, with a complete lack of surreptitiousness, does the exact same thing. "Mmm," she says, as I take a second lump. "You know we’re eating bee vomit." She is eager to get things going and takes hold of the crank while her husband steadies the wooden frame on which the extractor rests with one foot and both hands. She gives it 10 or 15 good turns, and the device begins to shake wildly as Javier struggles to hold it in place. Then each honeycomb is flipped over and spun again.

It’s a slow process, not because the scraping or the spinning is time-consuming, but because the drum is quickly filled with honey, which pours out in a languid stream. It moves at its own thick molasses pace, and the sieve is soon clogged with wax particles. Expressing the honey is easy. Transferring it from the drum to the jars is more complicated. The spout must be watched. The sieve must be steadied. The jar cannot be overfilled. Sieves and jars must be swapped around and cleaned. We lose some time when we discover a live bee still hiding inside one of the cells. Things become more complicated when we remove the wriggling insect and learn that this is (with deference to Monty Python) a half-a-bee. We search for a bit, but the other half of the bee is never found. Suddenly, the metal sieve straining the honey takes on a greater significance.

This has been a small harvest. It takes only a few hours to work our way through the combs and fill 9 13-pound jars. The scrapings from the caps will be cooked at in a slow oven, separating the wax from the last bits of honey. Bob reckons he will get the better part of another jar from these scrapings. The wax goes to a woman who uses it to make goat’s milk soap. Kerry expresses a desire to use some comb to make hand-rolled candles. The rest of the clean-up is relatively easy. Honeyed water used to rinse the sieves is pitched out the back door. Honeyed tools are hosed out and left in the sun. The bees will do the rest of the work. Bob has mentioned several times that the bees will reclaim what honey they can, but it is only now that I come to understand what this means. The wet spot on the grass where I threw the water is swarming with bees eager to take back their own, as are all the implements drying in the driveway.

Down at the hives, the bees are still angry about this disturbance, and they will be, Bob explains, for the better part of the week. As he hauls the wooden boxes back to the hives, he is inundated with indignant insects and tells us that he was nearly stung. Luckily, he is able to use the low-hanging foliage trick to confuse the interloper and escape unscathed.

At last we can all wash our hands and retire back to the screen porch for angel food cake, peaches, whipped cream, and 2 flavors of ice cream. Kerry shows me her father’s collections: animal pelts, most of which he prepares himself from road kill; and exotic feathers, used to make unique fishing flies. It is 5:30 before I collect my day’s wages, a "small" jar of honey, which probably weighs about 5 pounds. Briefly, I wonder what I will do with 5 pounds of honey, but the answer is inevitable. I will eat it. Honey, after all, never goes bad. Shanda also presses me to relieve her of some of the cherry tomatoes she grows in her garden. When I protest that I’m not a big tomato eater, she suggests that I might have friends who are. I ask for a smaller bag, and receive one that contains approximately 2 fewer tomatoes than the numerous other bags.

I am tired and sticky, my clothes are covered with honey and my stomach is full to bursting with sugar, but at least I haven’t been stung. Kerry presses me to stay, but the ride home is long and I can’t trust my eyes when I am sleepy. I stop several times, once to buy gasoline 16 cents cheaper than in Kalamazoo. The second time I stop at a farm stand and buy a melon. The third time I brake too hard at a stand selling peaches, and my melon rolls off the seat and crushes one of my bird house gourds. In the long run, this turns out to be a good thing. Laden with the day’s acquisitions, I nearly drop the 5-pound jar of honey in my own parking lot, but my reflexes surprise me. The jar is caught and catastrophe is averted. Finally, the gold is deposited safely in the cupboard. Neither gravity nor vengeful bees will steal this treasure.