A is for Apiary

I went and did it.
I started yet another blog challenge.
I know! I might be insane or I might just like driving people crazy with me.
In this challenge I asked folks to play for 26 weeks. Each week they are supposed to write a blog post using a different letter of the alphabet, starting with A and ending on Z. That’s 26 weeks of wonderfully alphabetic based blog posts.
So, this is my A post.

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A is for Apiary

I was just saying to the husband the other day that I thought it would be neat to keep honeybees. I was, of course, just flapping my gums in passing because keeping honeybees is real work. Setting up the hives. Bringing in your colony. Maintaining the hives. Feeding the honeybees. (yes, you have to feed your honeybees!) Harvesting the honey.

Honey is just bee spit. Think about that for a moment.

Mmmmm, honey …

I admire those who keep honeybees. I have a friend that keeps them so I have seen it done first hand. Well, second hand. I mostly hear her talk about her honeybees and look at photos of her hives, and of course eat her honey.

Mmmm, honey …

 I once made some candy for her honeybees. A fondant. It should’ve been called a fundant because we had hella fun making it. Get it? Fondant. Fundant? Get it? Hello? *taps mic* Is anyone home?

Okay, bad pun. *slaps own wrist*

Back to the honeybees.

It's me! Feeding bees the candy I made!

So when you keep honeybees you call the hive an apiary. Weird isn’t it. An apiary. Sounds like it should be full of apes. Though in truth a group of apes is called a shrewdness. A shrewdness.  Which sounds like a group of shrews. Funny enough, a group of shrews is called a colony. Which sounds like a bunch of honeybees.

Ain’t language strange?

Oh, here is something interesting about honeybees. They can recognize faces. Yup. Honeybees have the same facial recognition intelligence that humans use. They put all the little bits of faces together and stores that info for later use. Pretty cool, huh?

To make one pound of honey honeybees will have to visit two million flowers, fly over fifty five thousand miles, and will be made by about seven hundred and sixty eight honeybees. An average hive can make four hundred pounds of honey a year. That’s a lot of honey.

Mmmm, honey …

Bees!

A box of bees is called an apiary. Neato!

Sorry, I got distracted by honey again. Wow. Honeybees are pretty cool. They are the only insect that produces food that humans can eat. The honeybee will only travel about three miles from their hive. They are real home honeybees. Home honeybees. Like me. I have been known to travel no further than three feet from my laptop.

Honeybees. Honeybees. Honeybees.

The more I think about it, the more I wished I had the discipline to keep honeybees. But, like I said, honeybees are a lot of hard work. Like real work. I mean there is a real reward too but so much work. Work, work, work… hello girls!

Work, work, work. Hello girls!

If you want to learn more about honeybees, here are just a few sites you can visit for just that information:

The American Beekeeping Federation http://www.abfnet.org/

Brushy Mountain Bee Farm  http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/

Beginning Beekeeping http://www.beginningbeekeeping.com/


Oh wait, did I just make my A post about Bees?
I rather think I did. HA!