From Hannah, a writer/artist friend who had some fascinating experiences growing up in rural North Dakota…

What would you do if you were a fourteen year old and every time you walked out into your front yard there were five or six bees flying around your head?  Would you run into the house, slam the door and arm yourself with a fly swatter?  Would you continue on your way and ignore them?  Or would you go find yourself a can of Bug-Be-Gone?

These were the questions I had to ask myself when my father decided to start raising bees. 

My father loved honey so much that he decided to replace all the sugar in the house with it.  Anyone who has tried to buy honey in bulk knows that it is a lot more expensive than sugar.  He decided that the best way to get his hands on that much honey was to buy bees.  He had only four hives at the peak of his operation, which didn’t last more than a few years.

But in that time I learned a lot about bees.  I learned that the worker bees are all female, and these are the bees you see around flowers.  They are the bees that care for the eggs and the young ones.  They feed the queen and the drone.

I learned  that drones, the male bees, are lazy and thier only job is to breed with the queen.  Then they are instantly kicked out of the hive where it gets cold and the food supply runs low.

I learned there is only one queen  bee in the hive, and her only job is to lay eggs.  She is the single most important bee in the hive.  Without her, the hive would die. 

At the entrance to the hive there are workers guarding each and every door to stop any bee from another hive from entering.  They go by the smell, and it is their job to protect the food supply…although I was told that any worker comng in with a full load is allowed in.

To keep the bees making honey all summer long, we had to feed them.  Somewhere, though I have no idea where, my father got his hands on some old candy packed in twenty pound metal crates.  We had to cut them in half with a hack saw to get them open.

The candies themselves were about the size of a tube of lipstick.  They were leftovers from World War Two, so needless to say they had passed their expiration date.

The bees loved them.  They ate the sugar and took it back to their hive, where they turned it into honey.

Which we ate.