This post has been about a year in the making. We've gotten to a point where, I think I can share it with all of you... Mom's Garden has bees! (although, I think maybe this should be filed under Project Adventure... )
Mom has been obsessing over bees for a long, long time. It's like her totem animal or something. I remember when I was about 6, watching Mom pet honey bees while they were busy working on the roses. Yes, I just said petting. "They're totally harmless, hon. They're too focused on collecting pollen to worry about what I'm doing." She'd even pet the big black carpenter bees and the super fuzzy striped bumblebees. With her finger outstretched and a serene zen-like expression on her face, petting the back of a bee while it had it's face buried in flower... this was my experience with bees. My friends were usually hysterical at the sight of one. They always thought I was nuts whenever a bee landed on someone's shoulder or blanket, I'd pick it up barehanded and toss it toward the flowers. What else would I do? That's what I knew. My grandfather had several bee hives when Mom was growing up. I even remember the white boxes stacked up in my grandparents backyard... so, maybe it's a family thing.
Mom has been dreaming of having her very own hive for who knows how long. She's been reading about them and befriending Backwards Beekeepers to learn all she can about keeping them and how to "acquire" a hive. About a year ago, low and behold, a hive swarmed into an empty wooden box in her back yard! It was late in the summer, so we decided to leave it there so it could establish itself (you don't really want to move a hive in the wintertime because added stress is hard on them when there's not a lot of food around). Meanwhile, Mom voraciously read up on beekeeping for real. The hive was there for over a year. The time came when we were ready to transfer the hive into a proper bee box. Then, literally 2 days before we were going to transfer the hive, it left (or, as beekeepers call it, absconded)! We were pretty bummed. As luck would have it, that very same weekend, someone dumped a swarm into a cardboard box at the end of our street. Victory!
Good thing we had prepared a bee box, so it was all ready and waiting for the new hive. {more on the DIY project later} Normally, what you do with a new hive is cut the comb into big pieces and tie or rubber band them into frames that slide into the bee box. We couldn't do that. These bees had twisted themselves up in a tight ball in a bamboo bush, so there wasn't much to work with. So with a little help from Backwards Beekeeper David, we decided to just give them room to make their own comb, then rearrange it later, once they were more settled.
So, we've had a hive chillin' in the backyard for about 6 months now. It's pretty cool.
Here's me and Mom looking pretty happy with ourselves after adding a second box on top of the original (that came later). More on harvesting our first bits of honey later on!
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