The Bees Are Back In Town

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 13.266% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

Who is the most popular character on my blog?  If you think it’s me, you’re wrong.
Gini?  Nope.
Basing popularity on “How often people ask about them,” the most popular person on this blog is… my bees.
And I have good news!  Watch this video!

That’s right – the bees survived the winter.  Which was a very uncertain thing for a while.  We saw the bees doing cleansing flights a while back (bees do not poop all winter, instead waiting for spring to do their business outside the hive), but then we had several cold snaps again in March and didn’t see them for a month.  It was entirely possible that the bees had died in that chilly final stretch, which included four inches of wet snow on the final weekend in March.
Ah, Cleveland.  We love your weather.
Better yet, we know the queen survived, because these were new bees.  How can you tell?  Well, younger bees do an “orientation flight” around the front of the hive, zigzagging back and forth as they map what home looks like before venturing forth, and the hive was alight with lots of bees making sense of the place.  So the queen is inside, laying eggs – precisely what we want our queen to do.
But which bees are these?  Long-term readers will know that our original bees were the Good Bees – well-tempered bees that hardly ever stung, accepting of our constant novice intrusions.  The queen in that hive died off and our attempt to re-queen didn’t take, so sadly, the Good Bees all died.  We replaced them with the Bad Bees – very hostile suckers who stung every time we got near them, and chased anyone who got near the hive.  We didn’t feed those fuckers and they died off last winter, much to our relief.
So who are these?  These are the Mystery Bees.  We intended to take care of them, but we went on a trip to Hawaii in July and then Rebecca was diagnosed with brain cancer when we got back in August, so we pretty much ignored them from July on.  We don’t know their temperament.  Alas, thanks to crazy life-issues, we have become bee-havers, not bee-keepers (as they say scornfully at the meetings), and so we must learn to take care of these guys once we get better gloves.  (The mice ate the fingertips out of our gloves.)
We’ll be doing a hive inspection once the weather warms up a bit.  But it looks like we’ve got a hive in somewhat working order.  That’s a bit of nice news, something we’ve been short on lately.

1 Comment

  1. mollie
    Apr 7, 2014

    YOu keep crossing my path so I may as well give in and subscribe. And besides that, beekeepers (replace those gloves) fascinate me. I like your style. Yay, bees!

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