for maren and christalee

two people (that's TWO) told me on the same day that they miss my blog. it's a sign. i'm not going to go into what it is a sign of (my pathetic need for affirming words?)(or something else even more heinous?), but i will say that it worked.

i have blogged here about monarch butterflies, eggs and caterpillars, composting red worms, cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, and vacuum cleaners (well, the one about the vacuum cleaner was a lie), but i have a new passion for:

yes, our little pollinating, stinging friend, the honey bee. bees are our friends, right? didn't your first grade teacher tell you that? they're sweet and fuzzy. they make honey for us. they have the most complex social orders among living creatures, including humans. i'm surprised you don't know this.

tuesday night i had to interrupt my mountain trip to come home and hive bees. wednesday morning we picked up the bees in "packages," which are little flimsy wooden and screen boxes full of very ticked off bees. if you look up close (if you CAN look up close), you see thousands of little antennae, feet, and stingers sticking through the screen. you say, "WHAT was i thinking?"

then you bring them home (we got about 45,000 of them), open the top of the "package," and start dumping the bees into the hive. when you can't dump any more, you bang the package on something to get them to all fall down to the floor of the cage, and start dumping again. you thought they were ticked off before? i could actually hear them all humming "kill. KILL. KILL!" this is why you swath yourself in yards of canvas bee suit with a helmet on top, so they can't kill you. there was a little tag in my bee suit that said, (and this is really the truth) "these high-quality bee suits are sting-resistant but not sting-proof." NOW you tell us?

at the end of the bee hiving, i have to admit, there were no human casualties but about three or four dozen bee casualties. when i poured them in they all started climbing back out again, so i set the box on top quickly and squished all the ones who were making for freedom. i've got to get quicker with a bee brush.
and this is me practicing a new trick i'm teaching the bees. yes, i DO look younger. a shout-out to my new mary kay consultant, marie edmund.