Because You Demanded It: The Latest News On Our Bees!

Yesterday, I asked “What do you want me to blog about?” The #1 answer by a landslide: bees. “How are your bees, Ferrett?”
The problem with bees is that they’re just not that exciting during the winter. They go dormant for months at a time; you crack the top very quickly, so as not to let out all the heat and kill them, and then nothing happens. Fortunately, I do have an official announcement:
Our bees survived!
Witness:

This was quite gratifying, seeing them all flying about, because when we went to a beekeeping conference last fall, a legendary Detroit beekeeper told us: “You’re a first-year beekeeper? Oh, yeah. They’re gonna die.” But our bees have survived, mainly by dint of us not getting in their way. We didn’t really make any special preparations, didn’t medicate the hive, just let nature take its course. And they live!
(The mild winter probably helped, admittedly. As well as us deciding not to harvest any honey so our bees would have the best chance of making it.)
Now that the weather is warming up, it’s time to start feeding our bees – and the number out there was a little terrifying. Last year, we started with a box of 10,000 bees – which seems like a lot, but isn’t. Now that hive probably has about 60,000 bees, and you can see them swarming enthusiastically. They’re starved, as witness the fact that they went through two full containers of sugar water yesterday.
They also went for my bright green Yoshi pajama pants, which apparently looked like green fields with flowers. They were quite fascinated. This was distressing, especially given that I unwisely ventured outside sans protective underwear.
In any case, this is all the bee news I have to give. There won’t be much for another month or two, but at the end of April we’ll be getting our second hive. That’s right; two boxes of bees in the back yard.
We are crazy, crazy people.