Bee School

So, tomorrow is the start of "Bee School" and yes, you gotta go to school to become a beekeeper.  This is my, hmmmm, 5th year? Or 4th? as a beekeeper ...I dunno.  Anyways, I'm off to Bee School tomorrow to help teach the next generation of beekeepers.  I still don't really know what to do when I open a hive.  I wish I was like George, my precious mentor (I miss him), he could get outta the truck and know pretty much from the way the beeyard smelled, what was going on.  He showed me some pretty amazing stuff my first few years and I was simply wowed by his strong connection to the bees.  One time he told me I could help him with a hive that was fixin' to swarm.  It was about 4 or 5 boxes high (brood chambers, heretoafter) of brood (that's fancy talk for eggs and larva) and had oohhhh, maybe 30 queen cells drawn out.  He said he was gonna create a "false swarm" and I was just glad to be invited.  Being a fairly new beekeeper (and still not too fond of getting stung) I suited up.  George laughed at me and said I looked like an astronaut as he stood there in short sleeves, no veil and no gloves.  I actually think he liked getting stung.  The task was to cut out all the queen cells, then shake about 60- 70 thousand bees onto the ground so that they could crawl back into the hive.  When you shake those bees out, they just pile up on the ground, then you take a stick and make a sort of ramp for them to crawl up to get back into the hive.  You have to search for the queen to make sure she gets back in and if she isn't marked, it's like playing to hardest game of "Where's Waldo" you've ever played.  The strangest thing is they don't fly back into the hive - it's like they have forgotten they can fly.
     I was kidding when I said you have to go to Bee School to become a beekeeper - don't get me wrong, it helps, but the real education comes from actually doing it (kinda like parenting, except this time you have 60,000 kids -mostly girls) Oh, and having a mentor is a MUST!  Just don't ask me - talk about the blind leading the blind!
    So, this new blog is for my new beekeeper friends and my old ones too (who can sit back and laugh at me "pretend" to know more than I do) and for anyone else who just thinks what I have to say is interesting.  And, that's about it for today - check back tomorrow and I'll let you know how the first day of Bee School went.