Beeblogging
CRITICAL MASS BLOG
By Erin O'Connor
Our honeybees arrived last week, for our inaugural year of beekeeping. You build your hive over the winter, and then in the spring, you have a starter package of several thousand bees plus one queen (ours is named Latifah) delivered to you. You drop them into the hive, set them up with a store of sugar syrup, and let them settle in for a week.
You can visit the hive during that time, and see them coming and going. They are beautiful, and gentle, and so fun to watch. Honeybees have a bad rap because of wasps and hornets--but they are very unlikely to sting you. All they want to do is go about their business in the hive, and they don't mind you if you don't bug them.
They are very tolerant. You can get right up next to the hive, and watch the workers brings great blobs of pollen back to the hive. You can watch the guard bees protecting the entrance. Sometimes you see a bee sitting in the entrance fanning her wings like crazy to regulate the hive temperature. If you put your ear up against the hive, you can hear them in there buzzing around, building comb, storing pollen and nectar and water, tending the nursery, and making honey.
After a week, you open up the hive to make sure everything is going well in there -- the queen should be laying eggs, the comb should be getting built, and there should be the beginnings of honey production. That's what we do today, and I can't wait. |
