The birds and the BEES and the flowers and the trees

Suiting up!

                         buzzz                                                         buzz
Phrase of the day: BEEEEE- careful! Alright today is not per say a crafting post but it is pretty awesome and therefore beelongs on the blog! Today I tangoed with a several thousand (end of the summer there can bee up to 10,000!) swarming, angry, honey bees. And yes, I did so voluntarily :-)

Space Aliens 

My step-dad Lou likes to juggle a bunch of different hobbies (horticulture, geology, dentistry, travel, learning different languages, pretty much anything that is interesting, and of course bee keeping).  So when my mother asked if I would help Lou open the hives for the season and rotate them, I thought, "What an exciting opportunity to blog about...I'll do it! It's safe, right?". The answer was "Huh? safe? Yeah of course...I did get stung 10 times one time though." (Awesome motivation Lou!) So needless to say, I did it anyways.                                  
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Open hive after smoke

So we suited up (in 80 degree heat mind you), ducked taped off our ankles and wrists and the bee-tastic adventure beegan! Now apparently we were a little too eager to open up the hives and somehow FORGOT to smoke em! Bees get frantic when they are smoked beecause they assume it is a forest fire. Now I thought the smoke made them docile because it asphyxiated them( silly me!)  but instead they begin to eat thinking that the fire will destroy the hive.(Little bit of bee knowledge for you!). So after the initial swarm we realized they needed to be smoked and we continued on our way with little to no real mishaps.

Bees forming a chain across a gap in the hive

Basically we just opened up the hives to check on
the health of the colony. We pulled out each rack to see if the bees had sufficient stores of honey and also to check the brood amounts(baby bees). If the bees were overflowing there hive we added a new level for them to inhabit or simple rotated the bottom hive to the top since bees move upward, not down (another smackeral of info for you!).
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Bear proofing: tacked boards and electric fence

Once they were all rotated and sufficiantly angry with us (we had 6 hives of bees swarming us by the last hive!) we were able to reset the Pooh Bear (bears just love honey in there tummy!) deterent fence and bee on our way.

Note: This was definitely something that you need to have some patience for. Moving slow and trying not to freak out when there are bees crawling all over your face mask is something that took more than a few minutes to get used to. The constant 'BUZZING' was just a tad unnerving. The real panic came when the hive began to literally growl at us. Lou had never heard the hive make that loud of a noise and was actually in disbelief that it was the bees making that fear inspiring noise. Fun fun fun :-) or buzz buzz buzz.

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Eat honey, craft some candles, 

and Beeeeee careful!

buzzz