Summer Reading Wrap up

After Labor Day I generally try to squeeze in a few last novels to tide me over until winter break. I can feel scholarly articles and heavy scientific tomes creeping up on me and I'm diving for one last refreshing deluge of fiction. Oh sweet fiction.

With that in mind, I just finished a really moving, beautiful and too-quickly gone novel called Little Bee by Chris Cleave. It's part of the pact of the book that I can't tell you what it's about, except it did make me briefly rethink my plan to head to Africa next summer. I can also tell you it has nothing to do with honeybees, although that IS why I picked it up. I can also tell you it made me laugh out loud, and cry out loud too. In my opinion you cannot ask more of the written word.

So we have about two weeks left before school starts again. Maybe you have less? Make a little time for this one before Autumn is too far upon us. It's worth it.

Titans of Industry

Returned to the apiary to check on the proletariat. They are hard at work cleaning out the supers we left them, the first being nearly half remodeled with tons of honey being stored, and the top one still largely untouched. It may have been a bit optimistic on my part that they would have a chance to get to all 20 frames in my absence, but I'm told there will still be another big pollen push in a few weeks as the ragweed and other flowers open wide for fall allergy season.

My thoughts on status so far- there are a LOT more bees than when we started, and those supers are getting heavy. No stings since the fateful Bad Hair day.

Baby bees!

Today when I arrived at the apiary the parking lot was full- very unusual. A bunch of older men who have some kind of proprietary interest in the little field the apiary occupies were preparing to shoot some film for a PBS show about local beekeeping. They were really nice, and were kind enough to ignore me mostly while I asked Dr. Drone lots of questions and generally got in the way.

The bees didn't seem to mind all the extra company- they were working diligently, coming into the hive with yellow, pollen-laden legs. We crack open the hive and pulled out some of the frames and found something wonderful! Bee worms!

Well, they're not really worms, they're eggs. Or larvae. Not sure on this part exactly, my 3rd grade science is pretty rusty. I will look into it and make some more accurate explanations soon. Whatever they were, it means new baby bees, and soon new adult bees who will join our hive! I have never been so thrilled about finding insect larvae.

We dug through this incredibly stinky storage unit (think of sticking your head right into heavily used litter box) and got some extra deeps and some totally gnarly frames and put together a workable addition to the neighboring hive. Apparently bees love a little DIY home reconstruction. We'll see what they do with in in the coming weeks.