Bees

28 Feb 2014

Thanks to a contact passed on by a good customer, I am about to have a long held ambition realised. For reasons I can't fully articulate, I have always wanted to have bees. There is something about the process by which bees go about pollinating plants and then creating honey, that has long held me fascinated, and I've always thought that with the land we have here it would make sense to have a couple of hives.

An idea held in check by the fact that I know little about the practicalites of managing a hive, and getting it wrong seemed to have the potential for some rather dire problems - so like many of the other good ideas in my life, that I've had over the years, I may have mentioned my desire once or twice, but not done anything actually practical to further the possibility of it eventuating

I've read about the  growth of city hives in Auckland, where  apiarists rent out hives to local suburban properties, and look after them, finally sharing the annual honey crop  with the house holder. It seemed like the perfect solution to me, where you could have the hives, but not the ongoing responsibility of caring for them. So it was with genuine enthusiasm that I greeted the news shared by Sue at a cookschool last week, that there was someone local here in Tauranga following that model.

It turns out I know the gentleman in question, and he visited us last week, to decide where the hives should go ( we're getting two), and I now await their arrival towards the end of next week.

Perversely I got a bee sting for the first time in years last week,  ( a bee took offense to my foot suddenly, and quite unintentionally, squashing it in my gumboot!), and had forgotten just how painful those can be - but it hasn't dampened my enthusiasm.

I'm keen to learn as much as I can, and Alan so far has been very good natured about my queries - a process that I hope will be ongoing - although may need to kit up to poke my nose into the actual hives.

Quite what the dogs will make of these new additions to their backyard remains to be seen - I'm reasonably sure that their desire to investigate will have some painful consequences, so we're hoping they'll get the message pretty quickly.

All a learning curve...

This documentary was on TV last week, and had been mentioned to me by a number of people, so I"ve just watched, and its served to confirm that any little bit we can do to aid the bee population, is something I'm very happy to do...

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