Earlier this month, I posted about etsy shop Chez-Sucre-Chez and her dear embroidery. I started following her blog and all the fun crafty things she manages to get into.
She just posted about an experience in helping a beekeeper extract honey. I wanted to link to this story because it’s how I spent my childhood as well. My father used to raise honey bees and we would do the exact same process in our basement… which still smells like honey to this day.
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Matt and I were just talking about honey bees the other night. Specifically, the rapid decline of them. How do you get started with raising bees, is it a difficult process?
Oh the bees disappearing is crazy! In Asia, pear farmers are having to collect pollen by hand and then with the tiniest feather brush, they climb hundreds of trees and pollenate each individual pear blossom by hand. Insane.
I think it’s all been narrowed down to pesticides, a fungus and some other type of bacteria/viral illness.
Raising bees is really easy actually. There’s significant cost though. My father used wooden beehives with the wood frames like these – http://www.franciscanhermitage.org/images/beehives.jpg . You buy the wax foundations and get them in the frames and then the bees build on top of them. You have to keep the hives maintained and painted and there’s all sorts of tools and equipment like smokers (to hypnotize them so they won’t sting you when you have to check on them – my favorite). There’s a lot of nuances to bees that I didn’t understand but my father seemed to know when they needed things. Sometimes their diets needed to be supplemented and whatnot.
My dad would get called from random people that they had a swarm in their yard. He would take a hive over on his flatbed truck and gather as many of the bees into the hive as he could but if he missed the queen, it’s pointless so, sometimes he would have to go buy a queen from this bee place in town. They would come in these tiny wooded boxes with a metal screen stapled on top. I would hold it to my ear until it was time to release her into the hive. We would get drones too if the hive was unproductive, to fertilize the queen’s eggs. They were neat because they didn’t sting and I got to play with them for a second.
The extractor machine is a major expense, then there’s the bottles and lables and knife and the MESS! OMG the mess! It sure was a lot of fun though.