They came a week ago—all 10,000 of them—in a screened box. Their queen was hiding in plain sight, inside a small screened box of her own. Michael poured our new honeybees into their new top bar beehive on Sunday. And by Thursday, they had eaten through the candy plug to release her, and get to work.
And I mean work. Their family is only one-sixth the size they will be. Yet in four days, they'd built four bars' worth of virgin beeswax honeycomb. When we checked in on them, they were clinging to the comb they had built in a catenary curve, and moving over and under each other with ease. There's nothing frantic or frightening about it: Michael and our great beekeeping friend, Winnie, naturally wore mesh hoods when they opened the hive. But the boys and I can open the hive's back window anytime (with no protection at all) and take a peek ourselves.
Bringing home a colony of honeybees is hard to describe in the way bringing home a baby is. We have been planning for the arrival of these delicate little ones for months. But they are not cuddly and sweet and completely dependent on you. (And they don't grow up and help you tend to projects you all love.) They're the opposite, in many ways. From the get-go, they know where they live. They're already collecting plenty of nectar. They're making their own home.
Yet watching an intelligent, cooperative community thrive, when it can live as nature intended, is kind of awesome. These acrobats hover around blooming honeysuckle and again right outside their one-inch wide front door—telling the others where the good eats are. Honeybees each have their role, and they work together to keep the colony healthy. They're so good at it all that their sweet honey feeds us, too.
Truth is, they give me hope: Another living connection to all that grows in the ground reminds me that life is good. And bees are great.
