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The easiest way to harvest honey is to get your hands on an electric centrifugal extractor, a metal canister into which you insert the frames of honey. Flip a switch, the frames spin around, and the honey flows into the tank and down through a spigot into the waiting jug. Lacking an extractor, I harvested our honey the old-fashioned way: I turned on the stove, stuck the blade of a large knife into the flame until it was hot, scraped all the comb off the frames into a large strainer, and crushed it with a pestle. The honey flowed abundantly from the wax, sticky and slow. Our honey was the color of cognac and we got almost three gallons from that first—and last—crush.

I melted the wax in an “old” pot, as directed by the Honey Handbook. It was scummy and dirty and I scraped out roughly a half pound of greasy wax, which is still sitting in a plastic bag in the cupboard. Perhaps one day I will make soap with it. Perhaps not.

The next year I got more bees and watched them closely. One hive failed within weeks. The other failed after six months. Until we move, or until the buckeye falls over in a storm, my beekeeping career is on hiatus.

HONEY

Make it or buy it? Don’t get bees for the honey. You can buy honey. Moreover, flavors vary widely from region to region and when you buy honey, you can choose the flavor you like best. The honey from our hives is rich, robust, and a bit heavy, derived from eucalyptus, Himalayan blackberries, sage, lavender, buckeye, and all the sundry plants that thrive in our Mediterranean microclimate. It’s good, but if I could choose I would choose the straw-colored alfalfa honey from the high plains of Utah and Wyoming.

You also have to ask yourself: how much honey am I really going to eat? In a bad year—a year when all our bees died—I harvested three gallons of honey. That could last us a decade, and doesn’t begin to pay for the hives. I spent about $1,200 on our bee folly. That works out to $25 per cup of honey.

Here is why you should consider getting bees: they are strange and wonderful creatures and they are good for plants and trees and crops. And although our beekeeping experiment was an expensive catastrophe in the end, I’m not at all sorry we tried it.

HONEY CANDY

A few years ago I became infatuated with a brand of imported Italian candies called Honees—hard amber drops that taste, as the name suggests, like honey. But they don’t taste as much like honey as my grandmother’s honey candy, which I hadn’t made or tasted since I was a child. Spray the measuring cup with oil and the honey will slide right out.

Make it or buy it? Make it.

Hassle: A short, simple project—fun and tactile.

Cost comparison: Sweet deal. Honees cost about $0.86 per ounce. Homemade: about $0.18 an ounce for a superior candy.

Butter, for the pan and your hands

1 cup honey

1 cup sugar

1. Generously butter a 9 by 13-inch metal baking pan.

2. Pour the sugar and honey into a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Over high heat, bring to a boil. No need to stir. Let the mixture boil until it registers 300 degrees F on a candy thermometer, at which time it will appear to be nothing but a mass of frothy golden bubbles. Immediately pour the hot mixture into the buttered pan.

3. Let it cool just enough that you can handle it—about 10 minutes. It should still be quite warm and malleable. Butter your hands well, and keep a little butter ready to re-grease as necessary. Scoop the mass of warm honey into your hands and begin to stretch and fold it. Stretch and fold the candy and watch as it turns pale and begins to glisten. It’s beautiful—the color of a palomino horse. Keep stretching and pulling until the candy is cool and starts to stiffen.

4. Now, working quickly—you don’t want it to harden before you’ve cut it—put the honey on a clean work surface and roll it into a skinny rope, 4 to 5 feet long. With a clean pair of kitchen shears or scissors, snip it into pieces about ¾ inch long. Let cool completely now.

5. Store the candy, the pieces not touching, in a cookie tin or plastic