Bee Keeping

Many months ago our good family friend, who happens to own/run the local nursery, told us he was buying his own bees instead of renting them - and for a hobby. I dislike wasps and hornets as much as anybody but bees are pretty cool and I immediately propositioned him for a field trip. He wanted to let his new hives get settled, and then summer was busy as it always is, and the idea went on the back burner until September. I saw a day without any plans that would also work for Larry, and I invited my friend Katee and her kids to join us.

We hiked back behind the nursery storefront into the middle of Larry's orchards, where he keeps his bees during the dry months. Each stack of white boxes is a separate hive. The queen stays in the bottom box, the very top box has the honeycomb. Larry used a smoker to get the bees to hunker down in the hive. He says the bees don't sting unless you're really agitating them and he hardly ever wears his full bee-keeper outfit. Now is a good time to mention how pleased I was that Samuel, who had been terrified of bees and didn't want to come, approached just as close as anyone and probably asked the most questions to boot!

There's a very full honeycomb! This is Larry's first year having his own bees and it will be his first time gathering the honey. He has a friend with a centrifuge made for spinning the slats to remove the honey without damaging the comb. Soon he will use a forklift to move the hives under a shelter to keep them dry. In the winter, the male bees are kicked out of the hive and all the rest will sort-of hibernate, their body heat keeping the box (I can't remember exactly, something like) 80 degrees Fahrenheit!

Larry has three hives he purchased (you can just buy all the boxes and equipment obviously, and then purchase a queen and a few pounds of bees). He has another hive he keeps in a separate location that was gathered from a wild swarm. After the kids exhausted all the bee questions they could think of (which was a lot), and we extricated Hyrum's sandal from the mud he'd been playing in, Larry took us to see the chickens. That area of the nursery is more familiar to my family so I lost Charlie for a while as he chased one of the feral kitties. Katee had the great idea to visit our local honey store for a grand finale to our field trip.

I should have brought my camera inside because it's pretty neat to see all the shelves of honey of all different kinds, as well as other honey products they sell. Katee bought each child a flavored honey stick and I purchased a small pot of creamed local wildflower honey and a bear of specialty blackberry honey. Mmmm. Gotta love bees!