BEES!

Two weeks ago today we got our first bee colony!  We've been attempting to get these bees for a couple of months now, but circumstances kept pushing our time back.  But now we are the proud owners of our first hive full of bees.  If you don't know much about bees (which we don't, but are slowly learning), they are truly amazing creatures.  Honestly we really don't have to do much to take care of them.  They are quite self-sufficient.  We go into the hive more out of curiosity than necessity, just to see how much comb they've built, how many eggs the queen is laying, how much honey there is, etc.  We're not sure if we're going to get any honey this year since we got the bees after the heavy nectar flow was over, but we'll see how hard they work and maybe we'll get some.  We have to leave enough honey for the bees to eat over the winter, but anything over that we're going to steal from them and enjoy ourselves.  I just finished reading a book called "Robbing the Bees" by Holley Bishop.  It was a good read about bees, if you're interested.  So many things about bees are amazingly fascinating!  

We have the hive very close to the house and we can see it from the window above our kitchen sink.  We haven't had any stings yet.  There is a bush behind the hive, so when they fly out of the hive they are flying away from our house.  There were about 10 kids in the back yard last week chasing our chickens around and acting crazy and the bees didn't pay any attention to them.  You don't mess with them, then they won't mess with you.  Actually even when we mess with them (go into the hive) we use smoke (which calms them) and do things very gently and they don't seem to mind a bit.  Okay, enough about bees.  But, come over to visit them and we'll tell you more! 

Opening up the hive and smoking the bees

Holding up a frame and looking at the new comb the bees have built