July 20, 2025 – The rain stopped just a couple hours ago, but the air in this residential neighborhood, a stone’s throw from Daffin Park, remains cool for early July, and we will not be working in the usual Savannah sauna.
Today, I’ll be helping Alec and Elle harvest honey from the “supers” — the boxes hung below beehives where the insects store the extra food they don’t immediately need. The quantities we’ll be working with don’t justify renting out the commercial space where Alec bottles his Wild Light Honey that he brings to market, so we’re working in a friend’s garage. Two days ago, he brought the supers and the “honey tumbler,” essentially a primitive dryer turned ninety degrees with a small battery-powered generator clipped to the side. The box fans have dried the honeycomb on the supers’ frames to a workable consistency. Alec got here a few minutes ago, and he’s configuring the setup for the most seamless workflow.
“We don’t look like much, but what we’re making here is good,” he quips as he moves around the garage, seeing where he can place the draining basin, the electric knife, and the plastic buckets to minimize the movements we will need to make.
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Alec’s thankful for the recent rain. Replete with water near their own hives, the neighborhood bees will not be searching for other sources. We can leave the garage door open and feel moving air as we work. As the local plants bloomed with flowers, the past three months have been relentlessly busy for Alec. Six days of the week, he wakes at 4 a.m., gathers his supplies, gets to one of his bee-yards by six, and works all day, placing shallow dishes of water for the bees to drink without drowning, removing filled supers, and replacing them with empty ones that the bees rapidly fill again. Once home, he builds more supers to place at the five other locations he’ll work during the week.
Lifting these boxes of honey, weighing eighty to one hundred pounds, has changed Alec’s body. His back bulges at the shoulder blades, and the chiropractor knows him well. Alec visits every late July, the end of the busy season, when the bees go dormant until the fall, when flowers bloom and the land isn’t dry. The pain he feels now brings him pride – not like the ache that brought him to this city seven years ago.
After dropping out of high school in the early 2000s, Alec became deeply involved in Atlanta’s punk scene. Working at the Plaza Theater when the sun was up and playing in bands when it was down entertained him. The days flashes of new faces and sensations, some wholesomely enriching and others not. In those early days, even with a burgeoning heroin addiction, he advanced his position, going from washing dishes at Fellini’s Pizza to baking at Alon’s in the Virginia Highland neighborhood. He learned fine dining techniques and married them with memories of flavors from Indian dinners with his cuisine-enthralled grandfather. His talents brought him to a chef de partie position at Rathbun’s restaurant in the swanky Inman Park neighborhood, with stints in the fine dining kitchens of his boss’s friends in Los Angeles. No matter how far he’d come, though, the needle called him back.
After his thirtieth detox in half as many years, Alec had grown tired of it all. On the recommendation of an old friend who herself had become a drug counselor after getting sober in a Statesboro clinic, he came down to Savannah as one of the inaugural patients of the Core 24 program run by Recovery Place. After a couple months of establishing trust between each other, the director of the program allowed Alec to walk, unsupervised, the three blocks to Sentient Bean on Saturday mornings for the remainder of his stay in the facility.
After drinking his coffee those four months of Saturdays, Alec visited long-time honey purveyor Readee, of Readees Bees, at his honey stand in the Forsyth Farmers’ Market. Their conversations brought Alec back to a time before life got complicated, to his weekend visits to Newnan, still rural then even though just thirty minutes outside of Atlanta, to the floral scent of nectar punctuated with a pleasant smokiness that filled his beekeeper father’s basement, and further back, to his family’s stories of his being in a “telling of the bees” ceremony soon after his birth, immediately after coming home from the hospital. Like all beekeepers, Readee was secretive and territorial at first, but allowed Alec to sell comb honey at his stand once he figured that Alec couldn’t be stopped.
So Alec went to work. In his time free of work as a carpenter at Southern Pine Company, he’d build bee boxes and outfit them with Readee’s old screens, stuffing them with feral swarms of bees he grabbed from the hollow Corinthian columns of the antebellum mansions around this town. Yet to have his driver’s license reinstated, he paid his friends to drive him around town to spots with unique nectar sources and he’d pay them again to go retrieve the boxes before harvesting the honeycomb and bringing it to Readee for sale. Batch by batch, he became able to pay his own way and to invest into capital for his own business.
Now able to drive, Alec can give even more to this occupation that he says “requires no less than 100 percent of the force I can bring to life.” His business is booming, and he can pay his bills while bringing a couple more people into the business, helping them pay theirs. At this point, he is ready to take a step back from the day-to-day operations and would like to devote more of his time to working on genetics, improving the chances of the bee’s survival in this part of Georgia particularly susceptible to the ravaging effects of climate change.
I use a serrated knife to scrape the honeycomb off of the super frame and into the basin that filters out the flies and other impurities before draining into a bucket, then Alec places the frames into the upright dryer that bangs them around to drain the rest of the honey inside. And the reasons why most spiritual traditions reference bees and honey become apparent. Like bees, we move through the world, collecting experiences along the way, and we store them in our mind. Sometimes, the memories are easy to access and can be tapped for quick inspiration to action, like honey during a wet season, when the nectar flows abundantly and the bees store it in a hurry, capping it only once. Other times, when nectar is scarce, the bees must cap it each time they find a small amount, with still so much space in the frame, and will continue to cap it whenever they find incrementally more nectar, until the cell is full. But through whatever process works for each of us, like Alec does with beekeeping and harvesting the fruits of it, we come away with something sweet and delicious and representative of everything we’ve been through.
At the end, you’ll have light in a bottle.
Recipe by Chris Underwood
Ingredients
- 1 good sized oblong eggplant
- ½ cup cake flour (least gluten-forming potential; bread flour is better than all-purpose)
- 1 egg
- 2 teaspoons cornstarch
- 1 teaspoon sumac
- Few dashes salt
- ¾ cup sparkling water
- 5 oz herbed goat chevre
- 1/3 cup cream
- 3 tablespoons honey
- 3 tablespoons hot sauce (e.g., yellow label Valentina or homemade with fermented peppers and roasted tomatoes)
Method
- Beat together the cream and goat cheese. Set aside.
- Combine the honey and hot sauce. Set aside.
- While preparing the rest, heat 2-3 inches of neutral oil (avocado or canola) in a wide skillet over medium heat.
- Cut the eggplant in half. Remove the green stem by cutting under the leaves. Slice into pieces about the thickness of a No. 2 pencil.
- Put the slices into a colander and toss with a few good pinches of salt. Let sit for 5 minutes.
- In a big mixing bowl, combine the flour, cornstarch, salt, sumac, and egg. Add sparkling water and whisk lightly just until no clumps remain.
- Dry the eggplant slices to remove the moisture drawn out by the salt.
- Working in batches, toss the slices into the batter and fry. The batter is thin, so work close to the skillet to avoid losing it. The oil should sizzle immediately. These cook quickly; monitor for browning. Flip with a wire fry colander. Remove to paper towels when done.
- Stack the slices artfully. Spoon dollops of goat cheese around the plate. Drizzle with hot honey. Garnish with basil if desired.
About the author
Chris Underwood is a Fayette County native who once happened upon a used copy of Kitchen Confidential while picking up his 9th grade summer reading at the Omega Bookstore. He’s been fascinated with food and the people who grow and cook it ever since. On Saturday’s, he’ll probably be at the Forsyth Farmer’s Market buying fresh ingredients for delicious meals he prepares and posts to his Facebook page.
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