Driving With Bees

“Oh no! How are the bees getting out?” Hubby says as he drives up the hill toward our house.

I twist in my seat to look at the hive body we have nestled in the back seat of our extended cab pickup. Sure enough there are bees flying around in the cab with us. As I watch another one crawls out from under the cardboard lid. Damn. I Get up on my knees, butt facing the windshield and try to figure out how to close their escape route without squishing any bees. Most people, when faced with sharing the inside of a vehicle with agitated bees, would not be focusing on how NOT to harm the bees. We are not most people. We are beginner beekeepers and these bees represent hope for our dying hive.

Another bee squeezes out as I watch. As soon as she takes flight I gently press down on the escape spot, praying there isn't another one between the cardboard and wood. There is no resistance, no feel of squishing bug body. I switch to praying nobody I know sees me riding butt-first up the road. Our pickup with it's beat up body and tall, rattly wood racks is distinctive and the butt, now prominently displayed, is not small.

Big Red is instantly recognizable

We arrive home with no further incident. Now we are faced with how to capture all the bees without hurting them before we open a door. Every new little worker bee is a precious gift and we don't want to lose a singe one.

It's the end of June and we've lost our queen. We didn't realize it until it was too late. Now we have a hive with no eggs and no brood. We lost most of our hive over the winter to condensation in the hive so our numbers were already low. Now most of the few remaining bees are drones so we don't have enough workers to create a new queen from an egg or care for her once she hatches. The drones have been eating what honey stores there are because apparently drones are pigs if there aren't enough workers to keep them in line. Our go-to bee guy has lost multiple queens this spring and doesn't have anything to spare us. He tells us our only hope to keep this hive alive is buy a frame of brood with workers on it from another beekeeper and hope they can make a queen.

Empty brood frame

They tried to make a queen but failed

I put out a cry for help on our local facebook classifieds group. A first-year beekeeper with three hives responded and offered to give us what we needed for free, but he needs us there between 5:30 and 6:00 today. We rush home after our last customer leaves. Hubby quickly rigs up a bottom and lid for our unused second hive body out of cardboard so we will have a place to put the new frame. Then we drive ten miles to meet our bearded angel and his beautiful healthy hive.

That, my friends, is how my husband and I found ourselves doing weird gymnastics in the cab of our truck, trying to coax bees onto leftover fast food napkins and transferring them to an empty juice container. We finally catch every one of the thirteen escaped bees and carry the buzzing hive body into the house where the bees will sit until they calm down. It's the same corner we used to stick the children in when they needed to calm down. The bees don't cry or talk back, so it's a step up in my mind.  

By now I'm late for my writers' group meeting and haven't had dinner. In the rush, I've left my vehicle at work so Big Red is the only vehicle available. We decide to drive through Burger King then have hubby dropping me off at the meeting. We hurry back out only to find that in all the gymnastics of bee catching someone has managed to bump the lock button and the keys are still hanging in the ignition.

The only advice I can scrape together from this incident is: If you're afraid your life has gotten too boring, get a hive of bees.

The Red Horse Demon and I

It has finally warmed up enough to til the garden. I asked Husband of Handiness to make sure the tiller ran. In our relationship it is his job to fix and maintain anything with a motor and it it my job to take care of anything that pertains to computers or the internet or children with emotions. He fiddled with it a bit then made a single pass in the garden.

"Ok, it's all yours," he said. "I'm going to go help a friend with a project. I'll be back later."

I knew then that the tiller and I were going to have problems. It behaves reasonably well for him, but it lives to torment me. I think it is still angry about the time I lost control and ran it into a cinder-block wall and ripped its muffler off.

I made it three feet before it died the first time. I fiddled with all the levers and knobs my husband says need to be fiddled with. I swore. I finally got it re-started and made it another three feet. I swore louder and more colorfully. We danced this dance, the demon tiller and I, around the perimeter of the garden. Finally it refused to start regardless of the creativity of my lever fiddling and swearing. I retreated to the house for a sulk and a large bowl of defeat ice cream.

A few hours later my husband returned and started the tiller with ease and tilled the entire garden for me. It never died once.

I am grateful for his help but for the sake of my waistline and blood pressure it might be time for a new tiller.