The Bee Chronicles: Part 6

My intention was to leave the bee subject alone for a while, but today there were some exciting developments. ---------Bad Assed Husband (BAH) went on his rounds to check and see how the new bees, installed last week, were doing. He was not gone long before he returned, agitated, saying something like, ---------"Panic panic panic! Work together! We need to work together and fast! The bees are swarming! The bees are swarming! We need a box! Panic panic panic! Do we have a cardboard box? We need a cardboard box! We need a roof for the bees! We have enough pieces to build a hive, but we need a roof for the hive! I go collect the bees and you go build the roof for the hive!" It was, you know, panic! ---------I was to go build the roof while he went and caught the bees who were swarming and put them in a cardboard box. Easy, right? ---------I did as he said. I built a roof for the hive. I never built anything for a hive before. I did the best I could. The basics were that it had to be waterproof, it had to be removable, it had to be of a particular size, and it had to have insulation. --------I worked it out in the garage while Little Z rode around in circles in there on her tricycle. --------This is what I came up with:

--------The rock was BAH's addition (to keep it on, of course). --------The real problem lay in getting the bees into the hive and wanting to live there. --------All over the place is this method of laying a sheet out, putting the bees in the box in front of the entry to the hive, and then the bees are supposed to march right in, easy as you please. --------This is what BAH went to great lengths to do. He thought everything had gone fine, until I went out to take a picture of the hive, and this is where the bees were living:

--------They were living in the darn cardboard box! I opened up the hive, and there were no bees inside. I stood and contemplated what to do next for several minutes. I was wearing a head net, but no other bee garb. --------I finally picked up the box of bees, dumped as many into the hive as I could, cast the box aside, put the lid back on and ran like hell! --------Once the bees stopped following me, I went back and took this picture:

--------Angry bees! --------I walked home and showed BAH the pictures, and he was not amused. He was convinced that we needed to remove the box completely, or they would never move into the hive. He was very mad at the bees for not moving into the hive. We had a brief discussion over who would evict the rest of the bees from the cardboard box, and I volunteered. I put on some actual bee garb and drove the truck out this time. It's maybe a quarter mile. --------You know, angry bees are really frightening! But I did it. I got rid of their box. I had to bang it against the side of the truck to get many of them unstuck from that box. They really didn't like that! --------In the end, it worked. It worked. And I felt like queen of the world! --------We walked out there one last time this evening, and this is what it looked like:

--------Most of the bees are somewhere. Are they inside the bee hive? Who could say? --------Bee keeping is fraught with fear and ambiguity. --------By the way, the queen I bought is dead. The old queen came back and killed her.