Minding Our Own Beeswax

Before Dave’s surgery, we got a lot of things done that we had been putting off.  You know how it works.   In an effort to avoid reality, you suddenly find time to organize your sock drawer the day before your term paper is due.  It was the same kind of thing.

One of the things we had to do was evict about 10,000 bees from our house.  We have to do this yearly.  For some reason the bees really love us.  And, I really love them.  Well, except for that whole might sting my child thing.  And the depositing of 70 pounds of honey and honey comb in our second floor soffit.

One day when Cooper was outside on his swing, a swarm of bees landed on our pine tree about three feet away.  The swarm was the size of a basketball.  We knew then they needed to leave, but had put it off until we found out we were going out of town for Dave’s surgery.

I didn’t want to kill any of them if possible, so we called a local beekeeper.  He comes and steals the queen and babies and starts a new hive.  It is much better than the seek and destroy pest control mode.

I begged him to let me take pics through our second story window during the process and to save as much of the edible comb as possible so I could collect the honey.  He was way cool about it.   Dave called me a hippy.

Here they are geared up as aliens and climbing the ladder.  They had to remove a huge chunk of our trim and second floor soffit.

Here is a pic of the part that holds the honey.  Yummmmm.  Notice the rich honey color.

This is a pic of a portion of the comb that holds the babies.  Notice the chocolate color.  They took all of the eggs with them.  They removed about three garbage bags of comb.

I drained the honey and collected it in a mason jar.  I chewed a lot of the comb, too.  It was delish.

We already have another hive forming underneath a building on the back part of our acreage. Maybe I will start my own apiary.  Yum.