Less Than An Hour From Now

The big milestone birthday is here and in less than an hour I will have lived on this earth for a significant amount of time. Well, significant to me but completely inconsequential in a cosmological sense. So, I'm having a cup of tea in the "Warning! Today you are as young as you will ever be for the rest of your life" mug that was a birthday present from a friend. It's nice to have a reminder that every day I'm young!

Lynxter is taking me out of town this weekend for a birthday surprise but until we leave this afternoon I have more time to write in my blog, say thanks on social media for all of the birthday wishes, and to read.

You see, in addition to the soul-searching that I have been doing about my purpose in life, I've also been obsessing about bees. I know. So much obsession in one little head, right? This is how my brain works. I get interested in something and then devour as much knowledge as I possibly can about the topic. As a result, Lynxter might very well find me maddening to live with, but she handles it graciously. And as maddening as that might make me to live with, you should try being inside my head.

When I first read about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), I thought that keeping bees was a good idea for the sake of trying to help pollinate and re-populated bees as pollinators. It didn't go beyond the thinking stage because I thought I'd need a lot of space to keep bees. That thought went back into cold storage like so many others.

Then I went to Huckleberry's sixth birthday party.

Huck's parents are good friends of ours and they throw great parties, which we are always grateful to be invited to. At the party, one of their neighbors mentioned her husband's beehives and I started asking questions because less than a week earlier, I'd run into someone I hadn't seen in years who has a beehive that she said she was having to feed sugar to. That seemed odd to me in the middle of summer, so I discussed it with my friend's neighbor. Learning in the course of a week that two people with very small, very urban yards were raising bees yanked that thought right out of cold storage and right into the part of my brain where obsession thrives.

I learned a fair amount about bees from my friend's neighbor and came away from the conversation wanting a hive of my own. Knowing that I already live in a house filled with way too many pets to care for, I wanted to research how much time and effort bees would require before I committed to them, but I was already thinking about where in the yard I could put hives that bees would want to live in. If I got a little honey in the process, so be it, but for me, this was all about the bees. So I started reading on the internet and almost immediately discovered Warré hives and natural beekeeping. This is my kind of beekeeping. You mess with the bees about twice a year - once to harvest in the fall and once to add hive boxes when winter is over. Other than that, you leave them to do what they do best - not interact with humans unless absolutely necessary.

There is a ton of information on the internet. I even found plans to build my own hive. I emailed one of my closest friends who lives out of state because she's a wood-worker and I wanted to know if she thought the Warré hive plans I found would be difficult to build. She emailed me back that she'd built one of them already and that she thought I could certainly do it, especially with the right tools. Too bad she decided she had too much on her plate and gave the hive away or I could also pick her brain about keeping bees in this kind of hive.

I remembered that a longtime friend's father has kept bees for years and I learned that the local beekeepers association meets at the same location as my caving grotto (but on a different night). On their website I learned that a caver I've met who lives the next town over is a beekeeper and he said he'd be more than happy to answer any questions about beekeeping that I might have.

Lynxter said that before I put up the hive, I need to build and install the bat box we've been talking about for a couple of years. We might have too many trees for the bats to feel safe, but I'll do it. And building a bat box will be good practice for building a hive. The construction isn't very similar except it will involve measuring, cutting and attaching wood to create boxes. I found a bat box plan on the internet too - one that looks a lot easier than the one I gave Lynxter's son for his Eagle scout project.

The timing for this is perfect. I'm getting started while I'm young.