"You take their winter food and call it a profit," Walt told him, "you'll be buying new bees next spring and wondering why the honey was so expensive."
They borrowed a hand-operated extractor from a beekeeper across the ridge and set it up in the clean utility room behind Walt's house. Dylan helped carry equipment, mostly because he wanted to see honey coming out of frames without opening a jar. Martha brought clean containers and a notebook for tracking quantities. Ellie was given the task of drawing sample labels, and she immediately covered a page with bees that had smiling faces and crowns.
Caleb worked through the afternoon, opening only the properly harvested frames and handling them with care. The extractor turned, the frames spun and a slow ribbon of amber honey began collecting at the bottom of the tank. The sound was quieter than he expected: a faint scrape, the rhythmic motion of a crank, the small wet movement of honey gathering. He watched for a long moment without speaking, then looked toward Walt as though asking permission to feel pleased.
"Go on," Walt said. "You can smile. It's not illegal."
Caleb smiled so hard his face hurt. Dylan dipped a clean tasting stick into a small sample they had set aside and declared it the best honey in Millbrook County, though he admitted that he had tasted only three others. Martha gave him an unimpressed look and told him that if he wanted to help he could start washing containers instead of delivering advertisements. The boys laughed and kept working until evening.
The harvest amounted to a few hundred pounds, far less than Caleb had imagined when he first pictured forty boxes brimming with honey. He had not taken any from developing colonies, and he had reserved ample stores where needed for winter. He calculated the costs of jars, lids, labels and market fees and learned that a surprising share of the selling price vanished before the money reached his hand. His first ledger showed a modest return against a much larger investment, which was accurate even if it wasn't exciting.
"You're not rich," Dylan observed while they packed jars into wooden crates.
"I never told you I would be."
"You did look like you were going to marry that extractor yesterday."
"It was the first time I'd made something I could put in a jar and hand somebody," Caleb said. "That's different."
At the Saturday farmers market, Caleb arranged the jars behind a hand-lettered sign that read VOSS VALLEY HONEY. He resisted Ellie's suggestion to draw a bee on every label wearing his own face. Customers came because they knew his parents, because they had heard the story of the abandoned hives, or simply because fresh local honey was appealing. One woman asked whether it cured allergies. Caleb told her he wasn't qualified to make health claims and that honey was food, not a medical treatment.