The beehives are here!

We opened two of the three boxes

They are in many, many pieces, of course. Which I expected, but I’m still daunted by the number of slats and chunks and slices of wood. Bob fished out a couple and began to snap them together even though he’d never seen a picture of what the finished product (an inner hive cover) is even supposed to look like. He’s fluent in these structural languages, while I struggle to cope with even the basic grammar.

Now the livingroom smells resiny and wonderful. Western Bee Supplies is in Montana, and they make all their woodenware from Ponderosa Pine, which is surprisingly aromatic. Maybe having honey stored in these hives will give a certain slight undertone of flavor, like when wine is aged in oak casks.

The metal thing in the photo on top of the wood came in a fourth box. It’s a smoker, which is used to emit puffs of cool smoke so that you can open the hives safely once they’re full of bees. The smoke is said to “calm” the bees, but I’m not convinced. Apparently it makes them think the hive is on fire, and they react by ignoring any human beings in their vicinity because of the imminent crisis of losing their home. Once they perceive the smoke, the bees start consuming as much honey as they possibly can, to store up energy for starting a new hive somewhere else. They just don’t have any spare time or energy to be aggressive, and they aren’t concerned with defending a hive which they believe is about to be burned up.

Anyway, I did buy the smoker because almost every beekeeping instruction says I’ll need one. But I really hope to minimize my use of it.