Back to the Bees

by Rene Allen



This morning when a UPS driver knocked at the door and my husband answered (he’s home today because he has a cold) she didn’t even try to hide her smile. There were eight boxes of honey bottles to haul out of the truck and plunk down next to the front door and he volunteered to help.

Of course, the boxes are in front of the potted gardenia that will need water in the morning and dangerously close to the ficus that will also need water. This is a problem because Dwight is getting up in the wee hours to accompany his bee buddy Jerry to requeen his hives and will no doubt forget about the honey bottles.

You’d think I’d bee used to this kind of thing. Over the past six months we have accumulated an extractor the size of a Jacuzzi, a decapper, a bottler, half a dozen bee suits, frames, supers, strainers . . . all of which are supposed to spontaneously migrate to Mesa where we built a honey house onto a storage garage at my parents’ house.

I’m wondering if things have gotten out of hand. My husband goes to Florence where the hives are every other weekend to do some kind of bee business which might include putting hubs on the trailers the hives are on, pulling the pollen traps, or just standing amazed watching these fascinating little creatures. He loves it. Is this weird?

Dwight’s day and night obsession with bees has made him a target for poor puns like “Dear, do you realize how bee-headed you are?” (Think about it. Do you ever use beheaded with the present tense? Example: You will be beheaded at noon – future tense, but do you ever say you are beheaded?) Turns out there are lots of “be” words in the English language: bee-fuddled, bee-muddled, bee-twixt and bee-tween.

Actually, we’ve all been bee-witched by the bee business. Am I, for example, really looking at a glop of wax, dead bees and propolis and thinking about making chapsticks? Are we turning into a Mom and Pop Bee and Honey store?

Stay tuned as we climb the learning curve. Its sure to bee an adventure.