Our Honey Bees

Brandon has talked about wanting to have bees for a few years now and as excited as I was for him to start this new adventure, I just really wanted chickens and thought we should probably choose one or the other to begin with. Last year I took a class on how to have an urban chicken coop and was about as excited to get my little ladies as I could be until I found out our HOA doesn't allow poultry......dun dun dun. Chickens (for now) are a no go. So this year Brandon got his bees. He has put so much work into them - hours and hours on building their "top bar" hives (we have two hives), and tons of time learning about how to care for them. The more I learn the more I'm amazed. Bees are seriously amazing! Everything they do blows my mind - they are about the most industrious little critters I've ever seen. B put these nifty little windows into the sides of the hives so we can open a little door and watch them work through a window. They're amazing. It's a little bit mesmerizing to sit and watch them work. I really really love it and can't say how excited I am to be able to harvest our first batch of honey. The little Queen only mates once in her life (there are male bees called "drones" and their whole purpose in life is to mate with the queen, then at the end of each season the ladies of the colony literally drag them out of the hive so they don't spend the winter eating the worker ladies precious honey) and then stores the "spermoteca" for the rest of her life and uses it every time she needs a new fertilized egg - and she can lay up to 3,000 eggs a day! Amazing. Just one of the little tid bits B has taught be over the last few months.

Our cute little bee houses that B made

So Grady looks a little like will smith from the movie "hitch" here. He got stung..... I was actually really relieved he finally got stung - he loved to go out and pester the bees and didn't seem to understand they could really hurt him, regardless of what we said. He was with Brandon when it happened - and luckily he only got stung once. One little sting to teach him an important lesson. I was pretty glad - until the next morning when he woke up and his ear was about 3x's it's normal size! It stayed that way for almost three days! Every time I looked at his cute little mug all I could see what that huge huge ear!


I can't wait to see how great our little garden boxes are going to do with all those bees humming around our yard pollinating every little flower in site. I think I'm most excited about our raspberries - Brandon put the bees right next to our patch. Hopefully we'll have honey in a few more months.