Busy as...

 Yup.  We've got bees.  Joseph has been wanting bees for years, and I guess this was the year to finally do it!  They are absolutely amazing!  Joseph ordered 3 bee boxes and all their odds and ends, along with a smoker and a suit and a veil thing.  He got them back in February or March, and eagerly awaited the arrival of his bees (Did you know you can order bees by mail?  We actually found a local-er source, so we just had to go up to the city to procure ours, for which I'm sure the post office was grateful!)
In April we got about 500 little worker bees and one queen.  She was kept in a little cage in the middle of the workers so they could get used to her pheromones and want to stay with her always and take care of her.  It worked!  (I wish that would work for me....  I could use 500 little workers...)

 This is some renegade honey comb they built while Joseph's back was turned for a week or two.  Those little white things on the edge are little bee eggs! (We had to murder them when we cleaned out the unwanted comb - it was kind of tragic, actually.  But I was there for moral support and picture-taking, so Joseph got through it alright, and we didn't squish the queen, so all's well that ends well.)

All the closed up cells have bees that were in the final stages of development.  Sad!

 Mmmmm... honey!

This is a boy bee.  There's a special frame that has a slightly larger framework for the bees to build up the bigger honeycomb, and the queen lays the male eggs in it, since they are larger.  I'm not sure how that all works, but apparently it does, cause I watched this guy push off the top cover of his incubator cell and hatch out of his extra large honey comb, and he was BIG.  It was utterly amazing.  I took off my camera lens and flipped it around for a wanna-be-macro, and thoroughly freaked myself out by the size of this man-bee.

There he is learning how to use his legs on the big-fat-man-bee-honeycomb-frame.  But his life was cut short.  In the beehive, the boy bees are just loafers.  No bringing home the bacon - no, they just eat the honey the ladies are working hard to make.  So they've got to go.  Joseph flicked him off and stomped on him (I kind of gasped - I mean, I'd watched his miraculous birth just moments before!)  Then Joseph wrapped up the whole frame in a trash back and stuck it in the freezer to kill them all off.  Right next to the apple juice concentrate.  Makes me shudder, but, hey, it's for a good cause.  (cause:  honey and a happy husband)

Right now we have 2 bee boxes full of bee eggs and honey and the queen and stuff, and another box on top that's full of honey.  There's a little wire frame separating the top box from the bottom two - it's big enough for the workers to get up and make the honey, but too small for the queen to get through and lay eggs.  That top box ss HEAVY, so there must be lots of honey.  The bees need the two bottom boxes to survive through the winter, but we get the top one.  I'll let you know how the harvesting goes.  I imagine it will be messy.  :)

This poor blog has been so neglected, and I have so much to post, but I'm overwhelmed by how far behind I am.  So we'll see what happens.  I'm entirely noncommittal about any future regularity of posting, but I will try to update.  I still have stuff from April.  Ugh.  But I have learned that if I don't put it on the blog, I'll most likely forget it within a year, so I guess I'd better blog it!  Some sort of incomplete record is better than none at all!  Wish me luck. :)