Baldar: honey from the Kara-Buura hills

Today is 23 July. This year I went up with Papa, with the other families from the old Sary-Say. Papa was twenty-one in 1973. He had come down to Kara-Buura for the dipping of the sheep and he stayed two nights. When he went back the village was not there.

I did not know all this. He never told me in all my life, and I did not ask. Today, at the debris fan, a priest said the Qurbana and an old woman read the names, a very long list, in a thin voice. Papa read one name aloud, his cousin Aigul's, and put a small jar of honey on the stones. Then we went down. In the bus he said: "Now you know what is under there."

I won't write more. This is only to say that on this day every year there is someone from our family at that place.

The bees sleep in the winter house, a half-underground room with thick walls, and they need quiet and cold but not frost. This year the electricity goes off for most of the evening, and I thought: the bees do not care. But Papa cares. He sits up with a thermometer and a candle, and every few hours goes down to listen to the hives.

"If you press your ear to the box you hear a hum, like a far-away road. If the hum stops, there's trouble." The hum has not stopped.

It is minus twenty. We eat honey with hot milk before bed. We are lucky to have it.

This year: 27 kg a hive! The sainfoin was good and the mountain flowers were good and the rain came when it should. Papa did not say a word for two days. He walked around the yard and touched the honey cans.

We harvested for nine days in the shed: the frames in the extractor (a drum that spins by a handle, with a bicycle chain), the honey comes out through a sieve into the cans. My brother's boys were turning the handle, and they got honey on their heads. Cholpon came to help also. In the end we were all sticky and happy.

Fresh bread, fresh honey, a bowl of tea. Lunch on the first day of the harvest.

Since the 17th of March the dollar costs 8.40 som, not 5, and everything from outside costs more. Papa feeds sugar syrup to the bees in spring when they are hungry, and the sugar costs 40% more. The new frames from the city also. He says: "A bee does not know the exchange rate, but I do."

He will raise the price to 26 som in the autumn. We will see if the people agree.

In winter Papa melts the old combs in the big pot in the yard. The wax floats on the water, yellow and clean, and the dirt stays at the bottom. He makes sheets for next year's frames, and candles. The candles burn slowly and smell of honey. The house smells of honey until March.

We have 30 candles. A neighbour wants 5.