A few weeks ago, I was a guest of honor at one of the fund-raiser dinners celebrating the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse. As a farmer, I couldn’t stand the thought of arriving empty-handed. I dialed the host. Could I bring apples from my urban farm? Duck eggs? No, no; I was told that the guest chef Chris Kronner (formerly of Tartine) had all he needed. How about flowers? I had some beautiful Day of the Dead marigolds! “Novella, just bring yourself and Billy,” the host, Jane White, ordered. She already had delicate baby yellow roses on the table. I hung up the phone, despondent. What kind of farmer would I be if I showed up empty-handed to a dinner party?

I looked out my living room window and caught sight of my honeybee hive, busily working, out in the vegetable garden. It was late summer, and they had filled many supers, which are the extra boxes that stack up over the colony’s brood. It had been a good year for my honeybees — the wet spring made for lots of flowers, which meant there was plenty of nectar for them. But a surplus of honey had just piled up, and I still hadn’t harvested it. I had a good excuse — I’m seven months’ pregnant. It’s hard work to carry the heavy boxes, cut off the top of the sealed honeycomb with a knife and then spin the honey through the extractor when you’ve got a pulsating fetus in your gut. I just didn’t have the energy. But honey, I knew, would make the perfect gift for the Chez Panisse dinner hostess.

Then I remembered that I had out-of-town guests coming over. In the style of Tom Sawyer, I hinted that I had some beekeeping work to do, that I usually do it alone, but if they were in town maybe they could help? My friends took the bait: “Of course, we’d love to harvest honey!”

On the day of the dinner party, my honey-helping friends — T’s Sally Singer, the photographer Todd Selby, Pascal O’Neill, David Byrne and his daughter, Malu — arrived at my apartment near downtown Oakland. We had a little tea, a quick visit with the goats (I have two newborn Nigerian dwarf goat kids on the farm to show off) and then got down to business.

In short order, I put David into my beekeeper’s suit and showed him what he had to do: Carry the extremely heavy honey-filled box from the garden up to my second-floor apartment. Don’t worry about the bees, I told him, we’d smoke them to calm them down. I actually didn’t know these bees that well, as I hadn’t had them for that long. My other hive had died last winter from an onslaught of ants and excess moisture. In March, a friend who knew about my loss called to alert me about a swarm in his backyard. We carefully collected it into a fresh box, and those bees have since thrived in my garden. But I had never worked with them before — or stolen their honey (which is how the bees might see it). Luckily all went well. The bees proved to be docile and friendly, even as we unloaded a bunch of their hard-earned honey. No one was stung or bothered.

David carried the heavy super up to the apartment and we went to work uncapping the honey from each of the 10 frames inside the box. The bees had done a marvelous job — the amber-colored honey filled almost all of the frames perfectly. Using a serrated knife, I demonstrated how to cut just the surface of the comb to free up the honey inside. Bare white wisps of sawed-off comb piled up like waxy proscuitto, the smell of honey filled the apartment. We licked our fingers and got a little high.

Next we loaded the stainless steel extractor and spun the honey out using centrifugal force. We had to put an old yoga mat under the machine so that the loud vibration wouldn’t bother my downstairs neighbors. After spinning the frames, we opened the gate and filled jar after jar of golden sweet honey — two gallons, in the end. Sticky from our hours of work, everyone then went home to take showers and get ready for the night ahead.

That evening I was proud to present my hostess with a quart of our freshly harvested honey. “For you,” I said, “A sweet reward.” Then we got caught up meeting all the guests, eating appetizers — herbed pork-fat-smeared crostini and uni toasts — and finally sitting down to an epic, two-hour-long dinner. The night passed in a pleasant blur and ended with a walk up to Chez Panisse where all the people from the different dinner parties got to hang out. The restaurant was abuzz with activitity, the food scene gliterrati spilled out onto Shattuck Avenue like, yes, a busy hive. It takes a community to make a food movement, all of us doing our various jobs for the good of the whole.

The next morning I imagined my host Jane would face the massive clean-up from the past night’s debauchery. She would find, among the dirty plates and discarded morsels, a jar of sweet, perfect honey. Though she wouldn’t know the back story — that it was harvested among friends with intent and love — I knew it would make her glad.