Happy Bee Dance

​About a year and a half ago my friend began playing around with the idea of bee keeping.  He and his wife live on a rural 2.5 acre wooded lot with two huge gardens and a lot of flowers, an ideal setting for bees.  He found a groupon for a beekeeping class based in an urban area.  His wife wasn’t interested in beekeeping so he asked if I would be interested in attending the class with him.  He said it would be no risk to me; he would pay for the class with his groupon coupon.  What’s to lose?
We attended a four hour class that was well taught and at the close of class donned our protective wear and went to inspect six bee hives.  Anyone with an interest in gardening or eating is likely aware that the bee population in America is plummeting and no one seems to understand why.  I like to garden and have always had plants for pollinators like honey bees, bumble bees, butterflies and even hummingbirds.  It was a small step to beekeeing.
My friend is the one with the scientific mind so he borrowed several books from the library on beekeeping and we went to another class on beekeeping at the local library.  We decided to take on beekeeping as a team and split the cost.  We bought all the equipment including the bees so that we could each have a hive to tend.
The bees arrived late, in May.  The honey flow usually occurs in July in southern Wisconsin so we had to scurry to make our bees comfortable and have them start building comb and having babies to be worker bees and drones.  About two weeks after we set up our hives we noticed that my hive wasn’t thriving – there didn’t seem to be many bees and for weeks no comb was built.  That meant only one thing – the queen had failed and been rejected and was cannibalized.  I ordered another queen and carefully introduced her to the brood but then went on vacation to France.  My friend checked on the queen every other day.  When I returned from vacation he reported he had looked but couldn’t find my queen.  We checked his hive to make sure we knew who to look for when searching for the queen.  We found his queen lickety-split, there was no doubt.  Then we checked my hive – vacant.  It was too late in the season to try to add a third queen to my hive. 
We decided to merge the two hives.  His bees accepted my bees and all appeared to be going well.  It was June by now and our bees were still working hard to make brood.  We didn’t add the special box to collect honey in (called a super) until mid-June.  Everyone in the Dane County Bee Association was reporting collecting honey on a regular basis.  Our box remained empty.  The bees used all their energy to make honey for them to get through winter and ran out of time to share their golden liquid with me and my friend.
The last obstacle was winter.  In our Bee Association meetings we learned how to construct a sleeve around the hive with house insulation which we did, taped together with duct tape (I’m too embarrassed to share an image).  We then constructed a wind barrier for the hive.  We then began a series of prayers to the bee god.
This past weekend the temperature soared to 55 degrees F.  Bees will fly out of the hive at 45 degrees.  I received a text from my friend with a brief video of bees flying in and out of our hive BEES! His text exclaimed.  I rushed over to his house.
We slid into our protective gear for the first time this year.  The bees were swarming around the hive and weren’t too pleased with our visit.  We pried off the top and found they had devoured about half the sugar we left for them as a supply to get through winter.  We lifted the lid for the top box and were greeted by thousands of bee’s busy making wax and protecting the queen.  BEES! we shouted together.
We put the hive back together and danced the Happy Bee Dance.  Members of our been association reported losing from half to all of their bees last winter.  We had been successful in wintering over our bees in the first year.  I am now bubbling over with hope, looking forward to pounds and pounds of honey and all the wax I need for candles or lip balm or whatever.     
P.S.  We had 5 inches of snow yesterday.  Oh no!!!