Personal Bee School

I teach beekeeping to large classes or to individuals. I have a current student, named Alex, who just started her personal beekeeping school this morning. She is a really enthusiastic student and a very quick study. I went into some basics of beekeeping when she first arrived and soon moved to the hands on in hive experience. Alex picked up on some of the points I had made and made reasoned statements about the condition of a hive that were correct and used knowledge she had obtained to evaluate the evidence she saw. I was impressed.

She was ready to get her fingers into the hive without waiting and we did just that. I let her light a smoker and I lit mine. We both had a hive tool and just went into the hive to evaluate what we saw. In the first hive, we had a newly emerged queen and another which I just closed up and left alone for now. In the second hive Alex was impressed to see where the bees, which had been taken from a wall in a house, had attached the comb to the frames and were removing the rubber bands. The next hive found lots of drone larvae and a supersedure queen cell that had hatched. Other supersedure cells had been torn into from the side and I told Alex we were looking for a new unmarked queen. She almost immediately said, "There is the queen"! I was taken back, because I had not seen her yet. Alex pointed her out and I picked her up and marked her with a yellow dot. The next hive had a queen that was laying eggs and I had marked before with a red dot. The queen had lots of places to hide because the bottom of the comb had a space between it and the bottom bars of the frame. I was looking for her on a frame that seemed the likely candidate but not seeing her when Alex said, "there she is in the crack between the comb and the bottom bar. See how big her abdomen is? Sure enough there she was!

I am proud to teach students like Alex and I believe Alex will make a GREAT beekeeper. I am also pleased to hear she is going to keep bees without chemicals like I do. Best of all, I arranged for Alex to meet my friend Darrell, who is removing a colony of bees from a structure tomorrow morning. Darrell is giving Alex the colony of bees in exchange for her assistance! I loaned her a bee suit and some hive equipment to put the bees into. This time tomorrow, the hum of happy bees will be heard at Alex's house, just one day after her first beekeeping lesson. Talk about hands on!