My brother-in-law Bill, an accountant by day and tinkerer by night, came to town seven years ago. When he visits, it is like a New Age ancient bringing fi re to the barbarians: there is always something new in store for us. Plus, he fixes doors that won’t close, computers that run too slowly, and appliances that have lost a critical function. On this particular trip, Bill told us about his newest hobby: beekeeping. He had installed forty hives, which is more than an enthusiast’s pastime, but for us he espoused the benefits of having just one. Not only do these tiny creatures fascinate, he assured us, but the honey harvest in the fall is a sweet reward for their care. In addition, he continued, the relatively large, stingless male drones make wonderful, attention-grabbing specimens at show-and-tell and would be certain to transform our youngest child from an ordinary kid to, yes, a star.
Our impressionable ten-year-old son and I, his impressionable fortysomething father, were taken by these arguments and imagined the thrills that lay ahead. The wary ladies of the household, my fifteen-year-old daughter and my wife, were experienced in these episodes of whimsy. While they usually became willing accomplices to these schemes, they also were more questioning about such practicalities as “Who will take care of the bees?” Their suspicions about new pets were well grounded, as they recalled our recent misadventures with an escaped ball python (that my mother-in-law inadvertently found for us—but that is another story) and a seriously ill-tempered and stinky water turtle (Philbert) that my son and I bought while my wife was out of town.
Bill promised to make our entry into this new hobby an easy one. He would order both the hive and the gentle Italian honeybees. He would coach us through the preparation and assembly of the hive from afar and tell us how to handle the bees once we received them through the mail. Actually, bees go wherever the queen is, so getting them into the hive is easy. But my daughter and I had a mishap loading ants into an ant farm years before, so we had our concerns.
The parts to our hive arrived as scheduled, and we erected, painted, and placed it in a carefully selected, sheltered location in our backyard. As the delivery date for our bees approached, however, we realized that we had not notified our neighbors of our plans or properly gained their consent. We are fortunate to have kind and inquisitive neighbors to each side of us, but they had small children and we began to worry about how they would respond to the addition of fifty thousand members to our family.
As it happens, the neighbors greeted the news warmly and believed that having a hive in the neighborhood offered a great learning lab for the kids. One neighbor used this as an ideal time to let us know they were thinking of building a bat house on their roof. Well, our experiences with bats had not been very good since the night my wife nudged me awake to “something flying around the room.” Let’s just say the evening’s resolution involved a yellow raincoat, a racquetball racquet, a bewildered child, a leaping dog, wrong numbers, and the police—and leave it at that. None of the neighbors thought bats were such a great idea, but we got thumbs-up on the bees.
This time we got it right.