With a fresh bee sting on my cheek, I thought I’d tell you what I’ve been up to this morning. Specifically, this:
This is our first year with our own hive. I assembled the hive, but I am not ashamed to admit I am not the most mechanical person around. If I build something, I will invariably get something about it wrong. Something will be backwards, or upside-down, or otherwise screwed up so that I have to address it later.
And, sure enough, I just discovered my error this morning. I’m getting ready to harvest our first batch of honey, and the entire upper portion of the hive is backwards. Now, it would be a simple enough thing to just twirl it around and make it right, except for two things:
(a) Bees tend to fuse everything around them with something called propolis, which is kind of like their glue. And let me tell you, Krazy Glue has NOTHING on this stuff. It’s incredibly strong, so I’m having to try to chisel away the upper part from the lower part, which is extremely disturbing to my bees, and they are pretty much ready to kill me.
(b) If and when I finally do manage to swivel this thing around, I’ll inevitably kill a few bees who will get crushed. This makes me sad, because I don’t want to kill anything, but it also pisses the colony off even more, because a crushed bee’s last act is to release pheromones which tell everyone else Kill Whatever Is Doing This.
So I’m basically dealing with the consequences of my own screw-up. If this is my last post, tell the authorities to look for a dead body in my backyard covered with sting welts.
