Bee Keeping
Steven, a slender, long-haired Jewish fellow with a young baby, Ezekial, took it upon himself to give Dante jobs to do. Steven's quiet, dull wife followed behind him, holding the Ezekial. Steven seemed to be bored with his wife and jumped on the opportunity to boss this pliant teenager around. With Steven's guidance, Dante dabbled in milking goats and cows. He cook a few meals, including a chicken dinner that involved catching, plucking and roasting the chickens on a fire pit. Steven put him charge of working with the bee hives. Dante painted the hives lively colors from spare cans of paint in the workshop. An older German neighbor enjoyed teaching the hippies about his passion, bee keeping.
The first step in harvesting honey was pulling the combs out of the hives. Dante was covered from head to toe in thick pants and shirts. He was wearing a bee-keepers mesh mask but still got freaked out by the intense buzzing sounds and bees crawling on his clothes and mask. The German wore no protection and just smiled as bees stung him. Dante hadn't mastered the smoker, a can filled with burning burlap and bark attached to a bellows with a hole on the top for smoke to come out. Puffing smoke near the hive entrance was supposed to calm the bees down by kicking some survival in a forest fire instinct. Maybe the wood that Dante had burning in the metal canister of the smoker should probably have been allowed to burn down a bit more. When Dante squeezed the smoker bellows actual flames came out of the hole. This seemed to upset the bees quite a bit. In fact, a large number of them swarmed out of the hive and angrily buzzed towards Dante, who freaked out and began to run. He ran to a muddy little watering hole that the cows and goats drank from and tried to submerge himself in the two feet of mud and water. On his back, Dante could see up through the water that angry bees were still buzzing around waiting for him to give them some flesh to sting. Dante held his breathe until they left. After that, Dante refined his smoker technique enough to successfully be able to extract a lot of combs from a lot of hives. The extraction process involved heating a cabin room up with a wood stove, shaving the wax lids of the combs and spinning them around in a contraption the allowed the honey to flow into jars.