Talk at Henderson Mill Elementary School

Today I visited Henderson Mill Elementary School in DeKalb County to talk to their 5th grade garden club about bees. I had a great time. The students took me on a tour of the two large garden areas that they manage with their teacher who is a Master Gardener. They wanted to learn how bees and beehives work. I talked to them all about bees and then let them taste some of my honey. Here they are with popsicle stick tasters, sampling the honey.
They also explored the comb in frames that I brought. The comb was in various stages of being made - I had some partially filled frames. The kids at this table are looking at a frame in which the bees had just started to store honey at the end of the nectar flow.

To get ready for this talk, I found two marvelous children's books on bees and beekeeping:
The Life and Times of the Honeybee by Charles Micucci
and
The Honey Makers by Gail Gibbons

Both of these books are well-illustrated and give simple reasonable explanations about life in the beehive.

I did wish that I had large pictures of the worker bee, the queen bee and the drone. I also wanted a picture of bees with pollen baskets full that was large. I have some good photos that I have taken, but they are not large (poster like) so I'm going to look at the bee supply companies for some resources.

I had a great time at Henderson - I hope I get more opportunities to speak about the bees - it's always fun.!

There's a bee in the house tonight

There's a bee in the house tonight and I feel both sad and hopeful.

I'm sad because she will die. She has been throwing herself up against a ceiling light and she will wear herself out and die. Even if I were to try to rescue her, she's probably a lost cause.

I have no idea how she got in. The glass doors are closed between the sunporch and the house so coming in through some secret opening in the sunporch windows isn't how she got here. Probably she came in on the back of one of the dogs.

I'm hopeful because her presence to me means that spring is really just around the corner. In bee season, I have a bee or two in the house almost every night. With my hives just feet from the door to my house, it is hard to prevent the arrival of a bee in the house. The inside bees don't sting - they are much too frantically trying to kill themselves on the lights.

Note: The bee book I am reading for February is Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop. My sweet daughter gave it to me for my birthday and I am enjoying reading this "biography of honey."

Sue Hubbell and A Book of Bees

I decided to read a bee book a month in 2008. My January 2008 book is A Book of Bees by Sue Hubbell.

As a commercial beekeeper in the Missouri Ozarks, she takes us on her own journey from winter through the year with her bees. The book is chatty and feels like a conversation in the author's kitchen.

In the course of the book, we are carried through all the intricacies of her thoughts about raising bees, building bee equipment, managing the queens in her hives. I love the way she writes because it reflects the way I feel when I manage my bees. She talks to her bees, even though they can't hear biologically. I find I often also talk while I am working with the bees.

Note: Hubbell says in the book that bees can't hear and that probably was based on the knowledge at the time she was writing, but as a result of a comment below, I found the research that honeybees can hear by way of an organ at the pedicel of the antenna.

She talks about the peaceful way she feels in the presence of the hive. I feel comforted by the slow pace that we have to use as beekeepers to avoid increasing the intrusion on the hive. And I love to sit and watch the bees from my sunporch - the amazing life and activity of the beehive are intriguing to observe from that vantage point.

Some parts of A Book of Bees make me laugh out loud. She quotes EB White's poem, "Song of the Queen Bee" which is funny from start to finish. I'd type the whole thing for you, but you can find it on one of my favorite bee blogs by clicking here.

As a side note: I bought my copy of the book used and it came with a 4X6 head shot of Antonio Banderas tucked in the back. I assume the previous owner had used it as a bookmark, so I have also marked my place with the picture. I'm sure the former reader simply liked to look at him, but I found myself wondering if he were in any way linked with bees. A Google search resulted in finding two things:

• He escaped being stung by a swarm while pruning a tree (doesn't sound like swarm behavior, but that is how it was reported). To his credit, he called a beekeeper to come and capture the swarm, rather than poisoning it, and
• He is the voice of the yellow-jacket looking "bee" in the Nasonex commercial!

Bees, Books and Honey

I am in a women's book club that meets monthly. At our meetings the hostess generally serves food that fits the book - either food that was mentioned in the book or food that relates in some other way to the book.

Last year in my first year as a beekeeper, I had chosen (pre-my own bees) Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as the selection for my turn in October. There's a wonderful passage in the book about bees, as it turns out. Janie, the heroine, has spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree. Here is the passage (it's rather seductive):

"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!"

a little later:

"Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?"
So in response to this part of the book, I gave all of the women who came to the meeting jars of honey to take home.

This year I wanted to do the same thing - give the members honey to take home and I wanted to have a book for which bees played a significant part, so that I could make food that all had to do with honey. Everyone had read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and just about everyone has either seen or read Fried Green Tomatoes (although wouldn't that be fun to have fried green tomatoes!) so I couldn't suggest those titles.

I searched Amazon and ordered a number of books:

The Beekeeper's Apprentice - by Laurie R. King
A good book but has very little actually about bees. It's based on the premise that Sherlock Holmes retired and became a beekeeper. There's a wonderful passage right at the beginning about bee-lining, but other than that the bees are like wallpaper for the mystery and play a very side-line role.

The Honey Thief - by Elizabeth Graver
I liked this book about an unhappy little girl who befriends a neighborhood beekeeper. Early on we learn that the child takes things that aren't hers and this applies to her beekeeping relationship as well. Somehow it didn't quite work for me as the book for this year's book club.

Beeing: Life, Motherhood and 180,000 Honeybees - by Rosanne Thomas
This is a nonfiction book about a woman who learns a lot about life and herself when she becomes a beekeeper. She sort of fell into beekeeping so I identify with her and her struggles parallel some of my own with the bees. While I loved reading this book, I thought my book club members who were not actual beekeepers would not particularly find it as intriguing as I did.

A Hive of Suspects: An Irish Village Mystery - by Sheila Pim
This wonderful little book has been republished by Rue Morgue Press. It is about a murder, closely linked to bees. The victim was a beekeeper and for a while, it looks as if the bees may have murdered their keeper. The author, who was also a fabulous gardener, weaves so much interesting knowledge about beekeeping into the fabric of the story that I thought even the non beekeeper would find it fascinating. The beekeeping while always playing significantly in the background does not dominate the plot. I thought it would be perfect.

The meeting is on Tuesday night, and I've had some feedback from a few members that they liked the book, but we'll see for sure on Tuesday.

I'm serving all honey based food. We're having:

Honey-baked Chicken from Kim Flottum's The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 129)
Honey Carrots (also from The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 142))
Apple Salad from The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 148)
Biscuits with my own cut comb honey from The Gourmet Cookbook (p. 596) - which despite the terrible yellow unreadable titles for the recipes is one of the best cookbooks I own, and this is the best biscuit recipe ever - better even than my southern mother's recipe.

My daughter gave me for Mother's Day a cake pan that bakes a honey skep cake from Williams Sonoma that came with its own recipe for Lemon Beehive Cake - so we'll have that for dessert.

I'll take pictures and let you know how it all comes out.

The Joys of Beekeeping

I spend time every day just standing on my deck, watching the bees. As they take off in the sunlight, the sun catches them in its rays and they shine like golden streaks leaving my porch. I was reading The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor.

Listen to his description of the beeyard activity:

"One of the joys of a woodlot yard is to look skyward in the spring, through a break in the foliage, to see the thousands of bees cascading in like a waterfall and rising in equal numbers to scatter over the countryside for miles around. How they do this without constant collision I cannot imagine. They stream upward and downward without any interference whatever, threading their individual irregular paths with such speed that it would be difficult to follow them if there were not such numbers. They are oblivious to me, even though I may be standing directly beneath the break in the foliage that is their entrance to the yard. They swoop past me on every side, then each to its own hive, which is indelibly fixed in its memory from among the twenty or more hives that are there.

The spectacle is greatest in spring, when each bee seems to feel that the destiny of the race depends upon its wings. I may stand directly in front of a hive, into which the bees were pouring a moment ago until I obstructed the approach, but they do not dream of attacking. They are driven by the need to forage, gather and bring home. But when I step aside, restoring the familiar sight of the hive, they descend upon it in a cloud. They display every color of the rainbow, for they are carrying large and colorful pellets of pollen on their hind legs, gathered from dandelions, willows, rockets and other spring flowers. This pollen is the "bee bread," as beekeepers call it, intended not for themselves, but for their rapidly developing larval brood. It is an inspiring spectacle."...The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor, pg. 31



His description far surpasses anything I could say, but he depicts my experience exactly as I stand on the deck with the bees and the hives.