Bees, Bees, Bees

James (Shawna’s man) has had a hankering to become a bee keeper. Kelly sent him a magazine and Shawna got him a subscription to the Utah bee keeps society or something like that. He bought a colony of bees and have waited patiently for them to come. I wanted the bees to pollinate the fruit trees in our orchard. Now I will have an abundance of fruit if the frost doesn’t nip the blossoms. Finally the bees arrived. James and Shawna put the bees in the garage and we began to look for a place to put the hive. We found a place and made a protection from the wind out of plywood. Then we boiled three gallons of water and put twenty pounds of sugar into it to make food for the hive, until they could find flowers and food for themselves.
It was fun to watch James care for the bees, he was gentle and careful with each one, he did not want to hurt even one. We watched him spray the comb hangers, grab the queen and pull the cork out so that the worker bees could free her, and then dump the bees from the container into the hive. No one got stung except James and that was at the very end after we had closed up the hive and were leaving. We plan to have lots of fruit and honey for our bread.