What do six pounds of bees look like?

I'm glad you asked. Lookee here.

Also included in each cage is a can of sugar syrup that the bees feed on during travel. This can is probably 24 oz. or so, but I'm not sure if that's included in the weight. I believe 3 pounds of bees means somewhere between 10 and 15,000 bees.

Here the cage is opened, and the can is removed, just prior to shaking them all out. Yes, I wrote "shaking." You shake the bees out, but their bodies have been sprayed down with my own sugar water concoction to limit the flying around.

The queen cage is outside of the shipping cage sitting on top of the frames. It's the bee-covered shape with the white, plastic strap hanging off of it.

Here's what it looks like after about 1/2 of the bees have been shaken out onto the open super.

After a sweaty and nerve-wracking job (Crap! Are they going to be gentle or pissed when I shake them out?) here's the hive shut up tight with some grass plugging up the entrance to give them some time to adjust.

Here's to a sweet season!

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Worth Quoting

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property. --Hilaire Belloc The Servile State

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During breakfast today I was reading an excerpt from a play in The New York Times Magazine (I know, I was a day behind and read Saturday's edition yesterday) entitled Rust . The play, written by a professor at Grand Valley State University, here in Michigan, is a nonfiction drama about the closing of a GM plant in Wyoming, MI. The play itself sounds interesting and I enjoyed the excerpt, but what caught my eye was something a character said. The character is "Academic" and plays a historian and guide to the playwright, also a character. He is explaining the rise of the automobile factories and the effect of the car on American culture. He says, "Women became independent, they go from producers of food and clothing to consumers of food and clothing." This was meant as an earnest, praiseworthy point. I would counter with "How far we've fallen." To say that a woman (or a man) is independent because she has moved from producer to cons

I Am Not Hamlet

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