Back to Basic Living

Remember I told you spring came early up here? And remember I told you we’ve had swarms?

Well it did, and we have!

And recently we saw a bunch of bees going into the old shed next to the old cabin we have at the front of our property. When we went into the old shed, the first thing we noticed was that there were bee hives in there!

Dangit! We completely forgot about those bee hives. They’ve been in there five years. Five whole years. And they were a complete mess.

Five years ago the last of our six hives died off. We were so heartbroken and disgusted we put those hives in the old shed, with the intention of moving them into the sea container when we made some room for them.

Only we forgot about them. Completely forgot about them.

It’s dark in there, and we removed the top boxes on each hive and didn’t see any bees – so we decided the bees we saw going into the old shed must have smelled the small amount of wax left and come in to check it out.

Only a few days later Bernie noticed that the bees going into the old shed had full pollen baskets. And those pollen baskets were “glowing with pollen”. That’s exactly how he described it….. “glowing with pollen”.

So Bernie casually mentioned to our Bee Guru, Si, what he had seen. And he told Si that he was going to go into that shed and find those bees. And Si, being our local Bee Guru said “What do you plan to do with them when you find them?” And Bernie said “Give them to you.” And Si said “Let me know when you do that. I’ll be there.”

Well, today was the day that Bernie decided to do that. I had to work, but Bernie took my old camera.

And when he and Si went into the old shed, this is what they saw:

There are a couple of things about that picture that I should mention……

To the left is a stack of old bee hives. And notice the snake skin hanging above where they decided to build their hive. And finally, they chose an old lawn chair hanging on the wall to build their hive around.

Aren’t honey bees just the most awesome things ever? They don’t care anything about following rules or being scared of stuff. They just do what honey bees do.

Lordy, how can you not love honey bees????

So, anyhoo, these girls built their hive ALL around a lawn chair. A simple, redneck lawn chair.

We raise up our honey bees right around here, ya’ll.

They appreciate the simple life.

Just look at that beautiful comb.

Those clever little girls.

There was brood, pollen, and honey in that comb, too.

Si gently removed the lawn chair.

And he was gonna put it in this box.

Only he quickly realized that box wasn’t big enough. So he got a brooder box – only Bernie didn’t get a picture of that. So just imagine a much bigger box. Because it was. And he put them in there.

Oh, and please notice something else. To the left is the cabin porch. And on that porch we needed some seating. So our buddy Tex supplied us with seats out of an old van. Complete with seat belts. If you look closely you’ll see one of them.

Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t know how to party around here.

Because we do. And we’ll even strap you in when the riding gets rough.

That’s just how we roll on this homestead.

When we’re not catching bees. Which we are right now. So…… Si went back and got the comb that was stuck to the wall.

In this picture you can even see the uncapped honey at the top of the hive.

And then Bernie and Si put a lid on the brooder box and left it inside the shed. In the hopes that they actually got the queen and the remaining honey bees will join the hive in that brooder box by nightfall. By which time Si will be back down at the shed to see if he can seal up the brooder box and take it home with him.

So…. I *think* we caught a swarm.

I sure hope we did.

I’ll let you know…….

Tags: swarm

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2012 at 3:35 pm and is filed under bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.