“I read everything I could about bees,” my mentor said to me last year, while I was helping him place queen cells in the boxes across his beeyard.
“The bees just do not read the same things I do.”
I love reading. I have been reading about bees for what seems like forever. And I keep finding myself unable to predict behavior.
I started the journey to beekeeping in 2002, at the surprising end of a hot day of survey archaeology where I was working as part of the Atlas Yucatan project, when one of my workers invited me to help him ‘castrar’ a hive.
When he opened the lid, and that blast of cool, sweet-smelling air hit me, I was hooked.
Fast forward a few years, and I live in a tiny house in New Orleans, with a tiny wife and a tiny yard. Despite my suggestions of a tiny hive, the space was just not big enough for both wife and bees.
When we moved to Mississippi, however, I made as a prerequisite that the place we would buy would have space for me to keep bees.
And thus began the journey.
Every time I open the hive, I get hooked back in. Every time I open the hive, I have a different problem to solve.
Every time I open a hive, I learn more.
I love doing it. I love figuring out how to help my girls. I even love helping people solve their own bee problems.
I am an anthropologist, and so I have recorded my impressions as I learned about the community I have joined (participant observation FTW!) This blog is the result of that learning. Some entries were published on another blog, and I have tried to be as faithful to the original as possible (some pictures are lost forever) and I have resisted the urge to correct information that was misunderstood or outdated.
I love the journey I am on. I hope chronicling mine helps other people on their own journeys.
Company Bee Blog 