So, about those knees.
They are completely and utterly
functional. Michael and I have watched them for hours this summer carry all
sorts of pollen—meaning blue, orange, yellow and white—back to their new home.
This past May, we added a two-story condo to our property: a bee hive. Michael
had been wanting to do it for years, I was a bit nervous. You know, bees. And,
bee stings.
Turns out, my love of gardening
and bees are quite compatible. Plus, doing your part to save the world feels
pretty cool, too. Sure, a bit of hyperbole, but if you do any reading on the
subjects of hive collapse, pesticides and our food supply you may just end up
with a hive in your backyard.
We read books, looked online,
watch a great MPT special from approximately the year I was born. Not much has
changed with beekeeping though so other than the clothes and hair, the show was
as relevant today as then. But, what really got us moving was a colleague of
mine who has been keeping bees for 20-plus years.
We had a bee mentor. She shared
her passion, her knowledge and great bee stories with us. She took it from
somewhat of an alien thought to introducing us to her hives. Her calm nature
and her stern warnings were just what I needed (remember, Michael was sold on
it already) to commit.
We placed our order for four
pounds of Russian bees, and one Italian queen. We heard the Russian bees were a
bit more hardy and a bit more aggressive than Italians. Given we were going to
take bees born in Georgia to overwinter in Maryland, we thought hardy made
sense. Nature didn’t agree, however, we ended up with three pounds of Italian
bees in the back of my car. Technically, we had six pounds of bees plus two
queens in the back of my car. On a beautiful farm north of Baltimore, we picked
up two “packages” of bees–one for us, one for our bee mentor to add to her
collection of hives.
We watched a live demo at the
farm of how to move the bees from their travel cage to their new home. The demo
guy would never be my mentor, and he had the scars to prove that shortcuts
equal stings. Somehow I managed to watch him aggressively shake a three-pound
screened in box of bees into a hive without hyperventilating or running away. I
wasn’t the only newbie at the demo. I was pleased, however, that I wasn’t the
newbie that swatted at the bees. That was the random guy next to me who hit me
in the head when a bee landed on my hair. I heard it, oh god did I hear that
buzz right next to my ear, but I didn’t want to overreact before I even left
the premises. He didn’t share my sense of self-conscious I can handle this
vibe, and hit me pretty hard. Tensions were high and bees were all about and a
random man hit me in the head. His wife said, “I can’t take him anywhere.”
And that, my friends, is how you
make two very nervous about-to-be beekeepers laugh. It then seemed totally
manageable to put six pounds of bees in the trunk and head for home.