Bees! Bees!

This past winter, friends, my family suffered a great loss. For the third year in a row, we lost our bees up in Michigan. These wussy buzzers cannot even make it through a measly Michigan winter without dying all over the damn place.

So once again, we contact Phil, our kind of crazy beekeeping guru, and he says what the hell, people, fine, here's another hive. And then, being the disorganized people that we are (that THEY are. I was at school and had no say in the matter) we fail to pick up the bees. So, Phil shoves them in a hive at his place and promises to bring them over just as soon as we procure a pick-up truck.

Right.

So it is now July (you start hives in April/May) and we are noodling around in our meadow and my mother realizes huh, there are some bees going in and out the side of our hive. Freakin scavengers. All stealing our dead-bees' honey.

Finally, my dad and I suited up and went out to take a look. And, you will ALL be pleased to note, WE CAN HAS NEW HIVE! I guess a swarm took it over, what they call a "volunteer" hive. We checked all the boxes and found brood and the queen. (I found the queen. Then I danced, as you can see.)

This is very exciting, so in celebration we dragged out all our old honey-filled supers and got two huge buckets full of harvested honey that we got like a year ago and just never processed, so heart-broken were we to discover our bees dead AGAIN.

Anyway. If anyone wants some home-grown honey, be sure to let me know. I will send some!

(Also home grown pickles. I mean, they were cucumbers first, but then my dad made them into pickles. I hate pickles, so I fight for the lives of the cucumbers.)