Adventures in Beekeeping

Saturday I picked up my three-pound package of honeybees. My heart was fluttering in my throat at the prospect: I've been planning on starting this hobby for months now, since last summer. It's a tradition: my grandfather did it before my father, and I've just learned today that even my great-grandfather raised bees. I'm even using my grandpa's equipment, though freshly painted and cleaned. A few families of mice and lots of spiders were living in the beehives when I got my hands on them. Needless to say, it's been a few years (a decade?) since they've been used. Now it's my turn.

My friend rode with me to pick my bees up. The sound of a thousand bees buzzing in unison in the backseat agitated Alex, but the noise was oddly soothing to me. Like a lullaby. I found them fascinating. The box contains the queen bee hanging in her own personal miniature box. The other bees form a solid mass around her, holding onto the box and then each other until they become one entity. When I arrived home (alone, my friend gone home) and the bees had time to settle as it was getting cooler, they became silent, but their overwhelming presence remained.

Let me tell you: Bees are INTIMIDATING. In a clump that size, they could inflict some serious hurt if they decide to swarm. And I messed up royally as I was setting them up in their new home. When you go to move the queen bee into the hive, you're supposed to smack the box hard on the ground or something so all the bees move off the queen and the top of the box. I forgot to do this. I pulled the queen out with a mass of bees attached; Their weight pulled her down through the hole... It was one of those moments where you just want to close your eyes and see that it didn't actually happen when you reopen them. It did, it did. So I flipped the box over, shook her out and about half the colony with her.


I managed to do what needed to be done without getting stung once, amazingly. My dad says that honeybees will only get really aggressive when there is honey in the hive to steal. Plus they are much more mellow in the evening and early morning when it is cool out. There were several times when a chunk of bees would fly at me and land, but I would just stand calmly and wait for them to leave. It seemed to me the bees were just curious as they crawled up and down my arms, on my red pants, along my veil, like a dog smelling your hand before you pet it. Pretty amazing, especially after I had been jarring their box, brushing them in all different directions, stealing their queen, etc.

Soon I will have to go back in and remove the cork from the queen's little nest because the bee suppliers forgot to give me the sugar-cork that she's supposed to eat her way out of. I am prepared to be stung, to be nervous, and mostly to learn lots of new things by trial-and-error. I'll keep you posted!