Bee Keeping

The other day, Paul showed us his bees. He has said that you really only need to check on the bees once a month in the warm months and any time there are changes that need to be checked (like starting a new hive). Besides that, the only work will be in removing the honey in the fall.

Apparently, unless allergic to bees, a person can only be seriously hurt by a bee sting if it stings you in your eye. He always wears the hat thing to cover his face. At this time of the year the bees are pretty happy though. They have lots of flowers to explore. Just to be safe, he puts smoke in the hives. The smoke makes the bees think that there is a fire in the hive and they start loading up with honey in case they need to evacuate. When they are filled with honey, they move much slower.

When we first went to check the bees I was nervous. It is not often that a person chooses to stand so close to so many buzzing bees. Every itch I had to examine in case a bee was on me. We did get somewhat used to it though.

We were checking the hives. In the biggest one, we checked a few of the levels to see how the honey production was coming along. It seemed that this hive was ready for another super added so the bees would have more room for more honey. We also checked the two new hives. Paul started a new hive with a couple of slides from the biggest hive about a month ago. Because he did this, there were baby bees in the cells and when put in a new hive without a queen, the nurse bees fed a female baby bee the “royal jelly” to create a new queen. At this point, we were checking to make sure that there were new eggs in the cells. New eggs means that a queen was created and laying and the hive is starting to grow on its own. There probably will just be enough honey for the bees to survive the winter months — so no honey for the taking from those hives. However, if they survive the winter, these hives should flourish and be able to make extra honey next summer.

So I like the bees a lot. I think they are really cool. I've been reading one of Paul's books on beekeeping and it's really interesting. I think I'm going to try to convince dad to let me get bees to keep up in Sandwich. I don't know how everyone else would feel about it though! But if it's really just a once per month commitment, I think I could handle that. Especially if dad was interested in helping me out a little bit. One thing that was really surprising though was how heavy the full boxes are! Empty, it's just wood, but full of honey and water, they are really heavy. I'd need some help from dad or Pramod for that reason.