15 May 2010
Acquiring 3 lbs of bees, or, how bees are like liquid nitrogen
Me: "I'm a BEEKEEPER!"
Dave: "Well, I'm a beekeeperkeeper."
Me: "..."
Him: "You can be a beekeeperkeeperkeeper if you want."
***
I ordered my bees through the Gotham City Honey Co-op, which had them ready for pick-up on May 9th. With my friend and her 7yo, I went to the bee pick-up location, rewatched this video on how to install a package of bees, got a bunch of advice from the folks organizing the order, and picked out our package.
The 7yo was super excited. At one point, she giggled and said she felt like she already had bees inside her pants. We laughed, and asked her what the anticipation felt like. “Like tickling!”
A few moments later, she cried out and pulled up her pants. We saw something sticking out of a little swelling near her knee, which I immediately scraped off. She was obviously in pain. A splinter? Could it be a stinger? Hard to tell… but oh, yes, the area was swelling and reddening a bit, and it sure looked like a stinger. The organizer asked if she had maybe kneeled on the floor and somehow gotten it stuck in her pants that way, and she had, so maybe.
The 7yo was a bit teary, but not much. She was really chill about the whole thing. She got up, looked at the stinger, and talked about it with great interest. No problem.
A few moments later, it occurred to me that perhaps we should shake out her pants in case anything else was stuck in there. And what did we find? Oh, the dying bee inside her pants that had stung her!
MORAL: When a kid laughs and says it feels like there are already bees in her pants, there ARE already bees in her pants!
Apparently there had been a few strays, no one was really sure how, but so it goes. My friend and her 7yo took the pants!bee safely back to the tarp where the last few packages were waiting. As I asked the organizer all my remaining practical questions, they sat near the tarp and played with the strays.
I was very impressed - they just calmly hung out and encouraged bees to walk all over their hands. I told them they could go to the pharmacy and get some Benadryl without waiting for me if need be, but the 7yo didn’t feel like she really needed any, and was having plenty of fun.
Here she is, cheerfully showing off the place where she was stung:
So we loaded up in the car, the bees sitting in their cage in an open-topped box between me and the munchkin in the back seat. I fretted over the driving: “Please don’t get into an accident while we have 10,000 bees in the car! It would be the worst fender bender EVER!”
Really, it reminded me of the time Dave and I got some liquid nitrogen to make ice cream with up in Boston, back in 2005 or so. We carried it back to his apartment in a $3 styrofoam cooler we’d bought at the supermarket, sploshing around between us in the back seat of a cab. It was terrifying. Driving around with 10,000 bees humming in a box between me and the 7yo felt pretty similar.
(In the midst of making the ice cream, we experimented with safely sticking our hands into the liquid nitrogen with help from the Leidenfrost effect. If you go in slow and smooth and calm, an insulating pocket of vapor forms around your hand. If you move too sharply, you risk breaking out of that air pocket and burning your hand with the cold. Similarly, if you move calmly and carefully when opening up your hive, the bees won’t mind you. If you’re nervous and hasty, you’re more likely to squish and upset them, and get stung.)
Anyways, we finally arrived safely at the shul, where a couple of weeks earlier the Talmud Torah kids had helped us build the supers for the hive.
<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3581/4555453033_186ec5b68f.jpg".
Everything was set and ready for us. After all, we already spent a day weeks ago building all fifty of the frames I’d ordered.
Nothing left to do then but get everything up to the roof and install the bees into the hive.