EarPods and Honey

 Most mornings my oldest daughter calls me as she walks her dog. We always have fun catching up with each other. I imagine she's really calling to see if her OLD mother is still alive and breathing, but I love our time together as we each get ready for the day.

I am usually in the middle of the NYT Spelling Bee when she calls so I get out of bed, get dressed, and multitask while we talk, using my EarPods so I can be hands free. Today was different. The housekeepers were arriving at around 8:30 and I wasn't quite ready for them so I was up and organizing my kitchen to be able to get out of their way.

Yesterday I harvested honey from my top bar hive. My kitchen still had the large honey pot and other leftovers from the day's adventure.

I've not harvested from the top bar with bees in it. Once my top bar died and I harvested the honey still in the hive, but yesterday the hive was full of active bees. It's a great hive that I got as a swarm in early May so I only planned to harvest one or two bars just to taste their honey. We are in the middle of the dearth so I expected angry bees. Instead they were calm and I got away without a sting.

I recorded the inspection so I didn't take still photos but here are a few from the harvest:

Brushing off the bees.

Cutting off the wax from the top bar.

I literally put the top on my stew pot, brought it home, and that's what was sitting in my kitchen as the housekeepers arrived while Sarah and I were on the phone.

It only made sense to quickly crush the honey and put it into the filter bucket so that's what I did while Sarah and I talked.

I'm leaning over the pot, crushing the honey, when my left EarPod fell out of my ear into the crushed wax.

Horrors! I didn't take a photo because those things are expensive and I didn't have the option to wait and see whether it would sink or swim. I grabbed it off of the surface of the crushed honey.

Moment later, I said to Sarah, "This is delicious honey." 

She said, "Mom, are you licking the EarPod???" 

"No, my fingers," I replied.

I grabbed a paper towel and tried to wipe all of the honey off of the EarPod. I put it back into my ear to dead silence. Sarah reassured me that it probably just needed a break. I took the EarPods, wiping the honey-ed one one more time, and put them into their charging case.

The end of the story is that the honey is absolutely delicious and the EarPod recovered from its honey shock and is just fine, working as if it hadn't had the luxury of almost drowning in honey.