Love of bees

Ok, so heres how this story goes: One day our Home Teacher comes to visit and states that he was thinking about getting a beehive to put on his fathers vacant land. Not a whole two minutes later, my husband is online and reasurching how to build one. talking about how great it would be to have natural honey and such.
I was not sold on the idea. Bees in our yard? Around our kids? What was Hubby thinking?
The days passed and Hubby became obsessed. Every day it was bees this and bees that. He would show me online video after video and even purchased a beekeeping book.
Still, my mothers instincts kept me hesitant- what about the safety of our child?
After a thousand times of saying "no", J went to someone he knew with property- his parents. Grandma H was even more against the idea that I, but Grandpa H, well, he was all for it. Grandpa H mentioned it to his home teachers and one of them goes "Oh, well have J and S come help me with my 30+ beehives!".
When J told me about this, my jaw dropped. "Seriousely?" I thought. "I can't beleive we are actually doing this."
The next day we drove to the home teachers house. I couldnt beleive where it was- right acrossed the street from Granparent H's house! All these years and I never saw any of the millions of bees that lived right acrossed the way in the 30+ hives. When we arrived, several hives were already dissasembled and in a room the size of a1 car garage. Oh, there was so much machinery. There was a machine to put the beehive racks on and that machine would scrape off the top layer of wax from the comb, and there was another machine that sqirled the homey out of the combs, funneling it into 5 gallon barrels, where we dumped the barrells into another machine that lightly heated the honey enough to make it funnel into jars.
Did I mention that we weren't wearing any gear? We didn't get stung once. Italian bees are amazing.
Wow, was it fun. After a while, I even brought my daughter into the room with us to see how she would react with the tons of bees flying around us (she was geared up, just in case). I was amazed at how docile the bees were. One even got trapped in the bag where the lids to the jars were and it completely ignored me the many times I put my hand in the small bag- it would even crawl on my arm. M got a kick out of the whole experience. She loved helping me and "playing" with the bees.
I was convinced. I wanted bees.
Sadily, we are pretty sure our HOA wont allow them- even though they would be pets, but it is understandable. I freaked out at the thought of bees in my backyard, and I can understand neighbors freaking out too.
But that wouldnt stop my Hubby. no, no...

You can imagine the joy Hubby got when a few days later one of our renters called saying there was a beehive in the side of the house. That night after coming home from work he reasearched and reasearched how to build a bee vacumm and bee hive.
That next day, Hubby was at Grandpa H's using scrap wood and such building a beehive and bee vacumm. He borrowed some gear from the home teacher, and he and his friend went to the rental to harvest our first beehive.
We got even luckier, because the bees that inhabitied the house were super docile- meaning they were Italian! Yay! That saves us buying a new queen and that whole process.
The renters got out chairs and drinks and sat around watching us harvest the bees and honey comb. It was fun for everyone.
Sadly, the bees didn't last. We were having one of the hottest summers, and our bees were already traumatized from the move, that their queen died and without hive at maximum capacity, the hive failed. Now we know what to do and what not to do.

Let me tell you about bees:

Naturally, bees are not aggressive. Ever here the parse "Africanized bees?" Sure you have, the news freaks us out about them every once in a while. Let me tell you what that means.

An African bee is stronger, bigger, and faster, but the problem is that they are mean.  Back some time ago, someone decided to bring over African bees and mate them with Italian bees in the hopes that it would make a docile bee that would work harder and live longer. That didnt happen. Instead the African bees would kill off the Italian queens and replace it with a new African queen. This is where you find the mean bees that attack people.

Now, when a queen dies, any bee larve can become a queen by the worker bees feeding the larve with a boat load of royal jelly. Every bee can make a very tiny amout of royal jelly, but only by all the bees feeding this jelly to one lave does it make a queen. The queen only gets the oppurtunity to get pregnant once- by drones. The drones litterally sting her and their stingers fall off on her which somehow gets her pregnant. The queen sends out hormones that control the hive. This little lady has to make a lot of hormone. If she has a hive that grows too big too fast, or gets old and produces less hormone, she looses control or has less control over the bees. This makes the bees very cranky and confused. They will attack anything too close to the hive at this point. That is why it is important to have new queen every 2-3 years and divide a hive that is too big.

All drones are male. The purpose of a drone is to get the queen pregnant and to follow her around and clean her. Other than that, they are useless and when it gets too hot the worker bees will kick the drones out of the hive leaving them to die or go to another hive- most likely they die though.

All worker bees are female. Boy, do those ladies work hard! From the moment they emerge from their larve stage out of their "cacoons", they work. First thing they do is flap their wings in the hive to cool the hive down. After a few days, they are graduated to going out of the hive and collecting necter and building/ sealing off wax caps, containging the honey. After a few days of that, their wings now tattered and torn, they become nurse maids to the larve. After a few days of this, they die. A bee's life span is 30 days. When the bee dies it is thrown out of the hive by the other bees.



I imagine a bee hive is just what the would would be like if we didn't have men :-P

Bees are extremely sanitary and are the most sterile creature I have herd of! I have a bunch of bee facts, but I will enter them in later.

Less than 0.01 people are allergic to bees. Yeah, it hurts when you get stung, but dont think your going to die from it like that kid in 'My Girl'. It's super rare.

Now, when you do get stung, it is important you go indoors or a good distance away and take the stinger out right away. Why? Well, when you do get stung, there is a hormone the stinger releases that is like a little beacon that says "ATTACK! THIS IS A PREDITOR!!" to the rest of the bees in the hive. So, then they come to sting you putting more becons out and more and more bees come, etc. This shouldnt be an issue if you are far enough from the hive, but if you are around itallian bee hive, you neednt worry. When we were removing the hive from the house, J and his friend both got stung maybe 10 times all together? now, that is them really agitating the hive but removing it strip by strip with a knife. Granted, they had gear on, but we found out that the stingers can still go through the gear, they just dont fully penetrate the cloth and "flake off" when the clothing is removed.

Surprise surprise! Beehive equipment doesn't keep you from being stung!!

So next time you see a bee, just ignore it. It isnt interested in stinging you. Yeah, it may get up in your face and follow you arond, but it most likely thinks you smell sweet or it smells water (sweat) on your skin. Just calmly walk away. Swatting at it just raises its red flag that calls even more bees out, and we don't want that do we?