Three things

Three things I love about beekeeping so far:

1. Beekeeping smells really good.
The smoke that makes the bees calm while i poke at them (no not literally) smells amazing. The field where the apiary is smells amazing. Honey and the pine boxes of the hive smell amazing. It's intoxicating.

2. Beekeeping is far less work than I expected.
It has never before happened that a new undertaking takes less effort than I originally planned. Mr. Holt is quietly thrilled that I have not had to pitch a tent and move into the apiary to fulfill any midnight beekeeping duties. Turns out bees just kind of do their thing with or without my supervision.

3. Bees are completely different from children, cats and plants.
Most of my experience with keeping things alive comes from the latter three categories. Today I watched a new drone bee chewing his way out of a cell, saw bees eat using their proboscis, and learned that they can see ultraviolet light. I think they're really more like aliens than mammals.

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.