Well, I have a new hobby and I’ll give you one guess as to what it is:

Yup, I’ve decided to become a beekeeper in my spare time. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law are currently raising bees and love it. I thought it’d be good for a variety of reasons including fresh local honey (hopefully it helps with my allergies!) and pollination of my orchard (that’s where the hive is going to go). The hive was delivered today… I’m totally geeking out over it.

The hive came mostly assembled (thank goodness, because for as simple as they look, I don’t know that I would have gotten it all together). Here’s what the final product looks like:

The inside is a little more complicated – this hive contains ten frames, an inner lid, and an outer lid.

The frames have an artificial honeycomb built-in to encourage the bees to build theirs around it (and to keep them from building between the frames, making it hard to pull them out and access the honey).

Finally, there’s a very important piece of gear – the smoker. This basically makes the bees sleepy/lazy/less prone to sting when you want to either check the hive or harvest the honey.

Even Shadow got all excited about it:

I am seriously geeked out right now. I asked Mike if he thought it was as cool as I did… his reply was “It’s interesting…” At least he’s humoring me! The bees are scheduled to arrive tomorrow – between now and then I need to get the hive down to the orchard and up on cinder blocks (so it doesn’t get rot and isn’t as accessible to critters). Stay tuned for the next chapter of the Bee Chronicles!