Over the last few years my husband and I have become rather fascinated with the amazing, tiny, yet highly important member of our ecosystem, know as the honey bee. We have bought books, watched documentaries, and YouTube videos on these wonderful little critters. To say they are important to our food supply is kind of an understatement. Bees are responsible for about 70-80% of the pollination performed on over 100 cultivated crops. Add in their super food gift of honey to us and I’d say that makes them rank as VIP. But the truth is our honey bee friends have been struggling in recent years. Reasons behind this are still debated by the powers that be. The good news is that there is more awareness and more people are now getting into bee keeping. We decided to give it a go as well.
In April of 2019 we ordered and received our very first hive of honey bees. I was nervous and excited when the post office called and informed us that our hive was ready to be picked up. I didn’t know what to expect. Were they going to be angry and aggressive? Would I be afraid of them? Was the container secure enough to be driving around with them in my car without incident? When I arrived at the post office and saw them sitting in their little box on a shelf, I couldn’t help but to smile. If a honey bee can be cute…they were! They were all huddled together around their queens separate container. And they were almost silent. Not angry. Not aggressive. Chill. Calm. And so cool! We couldn’t wait to get them into the new bee box we bought for them which would reside on my brothers 30 acres of land.
When we took the “girls” (my husbands term for them since nearly the entire hive is female…drones, the male bees that mate with the queen but do no work, get kicked out for not pulling their weight…LOL) to their new home in the country, we hoped that it would go well. Sometimes the hive does not accept the queen. And sometimes the whole hive decides they don’t like their living arrangements and up and leave for better accommodations. Lucky for us everything went smooth. So we let them be and they immediately went to work building their hive up in numbers.
Throughout the Summer and Fall we would check in on our “girls” to see how they were doing. All seemed well with the hive and the honey bees had filled their home so much that we had to add an additional super box for them to expand upwards. The boxes were heavy with delicious, nutritious raw wildflower honey. We were so happy with how our first experience of honey bee keeping was going. We left the honey bees all of their honey for food through the Winter to make sure they would survive our crappy, cold Michigan weather. We made sure to not disturb them until Spring this year.
When we finally came to check in on them, all seemed well. The honey bees had made it! I was happy because I had known of other people who had lost their hive over the Winter. My husband and I were pretty excited about the first bit of honey we would be collecting! However, when we returned a few weeks later we made a grizzly discovery. An animal had gotten into our hive, damaged the bee box, and our bees had died. We were so devastated. We felt like we failed our “girls”. I had actually grown fond of them and watching them was truly fascinating. Now they were gone! We couldn’t believe it. While we were still able to salvage the honey from our bees, it just wasn’t the same.
We chose not to order more honey bees this year. We cleaned the boxes and stored them in case we decide to give it another go in the future. With what we know about the importance of the humble little honey bee, I sure would like to have more of them someday. I sincerely urge you to take a closer look at the amazing life and mind-blowing facts about these tiny little creatures that are so important to our way of life.
Thanks for stopping by!