Chapter 3. Hit the ground buzzing

Where Max meets his new Guatemalan family

Note: Author commentary at the end of the chapter. This commentary is exclusive to the Cacao Muse; you won’t see it on Amazon, my author site, or printed inside the wrappers of my favorite chocolate bars.

The 52 kilometers that stretched comfortably before them would take the Hammonds to the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Selva Maya, the “Maya Jungle,” a tropical rainforest second in size in all of the New World only to the magnificent Amazon jungle further south. Spreading over 13.3 million acres, it stretched from northern Guatemala to Belize and Mexico’s mystical Yucatan Peninsula, holding within its vast expanse a number of biologically critical areas, including the 4.5-million-acre Maya Biosphere.

It was here, nestled in the rainforest about eight kilometers south of the imposing ruins of the Maya city of Tikal, that the K'aax Itzà Forest Garden Initiative was headquartered. The organization was the brainchild of Don Francisco himself, a humble but determined Maya beekeeper, forest gardener and aj q’ij-in-training, or Daykeeper of the sacred Mayan Calendar, who came from a noble line of Itzà Maya reaching back centuries. The Itzà were long known for their agroforestry practices and their quiet stubbornness. They were the people who, in the year 1697 A.D., became the last of the Maya to surrender to the Spanish. Don Francisco had all but stalked Dr. Jim Petros of The Nature Conservancy for years with his vision of a traditional Itzà forest garden to serve as a model of sustainable living for local populations throughout the Petén region. But he achieved his dream: Dr. Petros left his post and became K'aax Itzà’s co-director.

This, then, was where the Hammond family would spend the next several weeks. Dr. Hammond’s plan was to shadow Itzà Maya beekeepers in an effort to understand their philosophy and practices of beekeeping. He would study the bees, their health, their environment, and the honey they produced while Jane recorded the research with their camcorder and took detailed notes for the reports they’d send back to the university.

Once in the field, Dr. Hammond was like a hummingbird: highly specialized for his job function and with an ability to imbibe information and data at a pace far too brisk for him to stop and produce the kind of thorough reports university officials and his funders expected to see. Jane’s own background as a journalist for the financial and business sector had preened her to play this role perfectly. In fact, that’s how she had first met Val Boer, but that’s another story for another time.

As for Max, given certain conditions his parents had made very clear, he would be free to discover the wonders and mysteries of this faraway yet soon-to-be familiar land.