Starting out

This is my first experience not only with beekeeping but also with blogging and hopefully I’ll become much more proficient at each as time goes on.  The bees were my idea, the blogging my sister Laurie's suggestion so let’s get started.


The idea of keeping bees has been in the back of my mind for several years and I was finally ready last spring only to find that I was too late to enroll in my local (Norfolk County) bee association training.  While I waited for the next session, I spoke with one of my co-workers who kept bees and the more I learned the more interested I became. The 2011 NCBA enrollment became available and my husband and I signed up.  Our instructors and mentors were fantastic-we had a class of 100 students from all over the Greater Boston area, from Jamaica Plains, Attleboro and Quincy to Wrentham, Franklin and Hopkinton.  A couple of the students had a little bit of experience-they’d either had a beekeeper in the family or had kept bees in the distant past but most of us were “newbees” (sorry!)The course ran for 10 weeks and culminated with all of us receiving a diploma and being assigned a mentor (usually a resident of our town). Our bees were on order-we decided to start with two hives-and were scheduled to arrive on April 9th. In the meantime we ordered and received the equipment needed to assemble the two hives as well as gloves, hive tools, bee brushes and all of the other paraphernalia we’d need to take care of “the 20,000 women working for us” as my husband called the bees. Assembling the hives went well until I realized that I’d diligently painted all of the recommended equipment but had also painted the inside of the hives which was a huge mistake as the bees should never come in contact with paint.  I sent off a panicked email to one of the instructors and pounced on my husband when he came home thinking that I was going to have to replace a few hundred dollars worth of hive parts. Both instructor and husband talked me in off the ledge and my husband spent a few hours with an electric sander and face mask ridding the hives of the paint, restoring them to their pristine condition.  At the next class the instructor announced to the class that he’d gotten an email from a student who had inadvertently painted the insides of their frames and if others did it not to worry as sanding them down was an easy (?) solution. I was pleased that he hadn’t revealed my identity and foolishness to the class until my husband turned to me and in what he thought was sotto voce (but not so much) asked, “Was that you?” Needless to say, my table mates gave me that “Boy, I wouldn’t do anything that stupid” sympathetic look!The spring weather in the south worked against us this year in receiving our bees. The original date was moved to the 16th, then the 23rd and finally to April 30th. We were scheduled to be in New York City on the 30th but the people at the aviary graciously agreed to hold our “girls” until the following afternoon and once our train got into Providence we jumped in the car and sped to Holliston.