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Gathering Honey in the Early 1900's

Told by Walter Metzger to Larry Stern

During the spring months when I was boy growing up in Yulan, I would find a bee flying around in my back yard .

What I would do is put some honey in a box to attract the bee, or bees. The bees would gourge themselves until they were fat with this honey. Since the bees were loaded with the honey, they would fly much slower than they normally would.

Bees looking for pollen, normally fly around in circles until they find what they are looking for. Once they have what they need and are full to capacity, they would fly in a straight line back to the hive to deliver their load.

I would follow this slow flying bee until it reached a dead pine tree, where the hive would be located.

I would nail my name to the tree so other people would know this tree was mine.

Sometime in November or December, I would go back to that tree and cut the tree down in sections and bring it home.

At the house, I would remove the honeycomb. The honeycomb consisted of cells, each cell having its own cap. After a cell was full of honey, the bees would cap it off so they wouldn't lose the honey.

I would take a real sharp knife and slice off the caps to reveal the honey.

Then I would take the honeycomb to a warm spot on the house and tilt the honeycomb so the honey would drip out into a container.

This is how we got fresh honey from the hive.

Notes from Larry:
This sounds like this would have been a common practice for gathering honey if you had to nail your name to a tree. I'm sure back then, you would have spotted other trees with other people's names on it.

This is a method that had to have been passed down from older generations.

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