The Bee-ginning

So what gave us the idea to turn the lifestyle we love into a livelihood as well?

It all started with a swarm of bees... 

Who in their right mind would want to be a beekeeper right? I can't think of anything worse than being stung on a regular basis, voluntarily!

That pretty much summed up my thoughts on bees before I learnt about the amazing world of apiary. My attitude started to change when I was reading one of my favourite self sufficiency mags and read with fascination about an ordinary couples adventure into the world of bee-keeping. 

More reading suggested that eating honey produced on your own property could help reduce a persons allergies to the point where they might not even need medication anymore. With a daughter who suffers terribly with hayfever my interest was more than peaked. So I began to toy with the idea of becoming an apiarist.

It was late October 2012 when the wild hive next door split and swarmed. After three days of circling our orchard and hanging from various trees, they disappeared and all went quiet again. Then my husband went to get some chairs from the carport where they were stashed next to an old wardrobe filled with tins of paint. To his surprise the wardrobe was 'humming' and when he opened the door he soon found out why...

We were no longer just toying with an idea - we were becoming apiarists and NOW.

Moving the swarm was not pretty, We attempted the manoeuvre at night as we had been advised by our bee mentor but the bees were not happy at the thought of moving so soon and pretty soon Jamie's glove had about 400 stingers buried in it and blobs of bees were all over the floor of the carport. So much for neatly sweeping them into a pillowcase - It was not the smooth operation I had been imagining.

We relocated the bees to the orchard and soon made the discovery that bee babies were not that different to normal babies - at bedtime each night nobody was where they were supposed to be!

Each night we would play 'find- the- bees' who would be hanging in a clump off a tree not too far from their hive. Then we would kidnap them with a pillowcase and put them back in the hive and do it all again the next night. By the sixth night I was anxious, Jamie would be on shift the following night and I would be putting the bees to bed by myself. Fortunately that was the night we discovered all our babies snoozing in their hive. 

Hive Number One - The Bee-ginning