My new line of work....

Wow, I think I was just graced with the perfect spring weekend. The weather cooperated beautifully from Friday to Sunday, allowing me to spend maximum time outside with no discomfort. If there's a heaven, I'm pretty sure it is 72 degrees there.

I took the kids down to the lovely Spring City this weekend to install our new bee hive with my Dad. As novice bee people, we decided to place the hive down on my Dad's property in the very rural and very bee friendly countryside of Spring City rather than make a go of it in our traditional suburban neighborhoods. It was a nervous moment, for sure, loading up the car with 2 kids and thousands of bees.

To start a new hive, bees are delivered to you in "packages" consisting of 1 queen surrounded by her thousands of workers all humming and buzzing at you from the inside of a wooden box with wire mesh sides. Bee behavior is fascinating and the whole reason one can start a colony fresh from a package like we did is because of the highly organized nature of bee society. The queen bee is literally the head and the begetter of the entire hive. Her job is to make sure the hive never runs out of bees and she does this by laying thousands of eggs every day. (In just three weeks, the queen lays enough eggs to completely repopulate the hive with new bees.) Every single other bee in the hive is a worker bee, and, interestingly, other than a small percentage of male drones whose only job is to mate with the queen, the remaining thousands of workers are all female. Egads, a matriarchal society! Worker bees have a lifespan of a couple months and in this short time they hold a series of jobs within the hive that make bee society run. Worker bees clean the hive, feed the bee larvae, make wax cells which store the honey, care for the Queen, guard the hive, and others are the bees we see out and about foraging for the all important nectar that bees use to make the honey which sustains them.

The experience of opening up our bee package and releasing the bees into the hive was nerve wracking, but it was also really cool. It definitely helped that both my Dad and I had suited up in our bee outfits so our skin, faces, and hands were protected from stings. It ensured a false sense of confidence! It also helped that the goal of all those worker bees is to be near their Queen. As soon as we put the queen into the hive in her little cage (she is kept separate from the workers while in the package) the bees want to be near her. They want to free her and they want to get to work. We literally dumped thousands of bees on top of the hive and in front of it and in a few short hours, there wasn't a bee in sight. They were all inside getting down to business. The devotion struck me as beautiful. And that feeling, that humanizing thought, provided me with perhaps the best answer for why in the hell I would want to get into bee keeping. Sure, I like honey, but I certainly don't feel obligated to produce my own. I've been stung by a few bees in my time and can say it is an experience I'm not eager to recreate. But what I really loved, and what I think will make bee keeping addictive, is to see something lowly like the bee and realize that there is a whole world there within my world. Bees have their own jobs, their own family, their own rhythm and knowledge. They are a creature being as much itself as I am. To peer into that hive world, something so new and so hidden, was tantalizing. I feel hooked. I feel like a bee keeper.