We are just a few weeks away from moving out of our home here in California.
Before we leave, I want to share a story with you about one of the most bizarre things that happened during the 23 years we lived here!
Gardening has been my thing for a long time…
And over the years I managed to transform our back yard in to a very green…
Very relaxing place to spend time.
And one of the small elements of the overall gardening plan…
Was to attract bees, and butterflies, and birds to our backyard.
So I built a birdhouse from scratch…
And set it on a pole in my backyard above a little platform I kept full of bird seed…
In hopes of attracting birds to nest in the birdhouse.
But the birds never did care for that birdhouse I built.
And it sat empty for a long time.
But oddly enough, the bees that loved all the flowers and blossoms in my yard…
Ended up taking over that birdhouse.
I noticed bees coming and going from the birdhouse…
And upon closer inspection, I could see hundreds of bees inside…
And I could even see that they had honeycomb in there.
I found this so fascinating that I started researching bees.
And I learned that it’s actually not that hard to become a beekeeper.
In fact, the son of a good friend of mine was one.
Since I have a lot of fruit trees that need to be pollinated by bees...
I decided I should help this colony of bees that had decided to call my backyard home…
By getting them out of my birdhouse and in to a proper beehive.
So, how do you get a colony of bees out of a birdhouse?
Well, that’s where this story gets interesting!
You’re going to be amazed at the lengths I went to in order to get these bees settled in to a hive that would allow this colony to reach its full potential!
Getting everything I needed was easy. It was all at Amazon.com
I ordered a beginner’s beekeeping setup that included a pre-assembled bee hive…
Plus all the things like the gloves and that special head garb you need to handle bees.
It even came with a smoker, which beekeepers use to calm the bees down...
And get them to stay inside their hive.
At the smell of smoke, bees assume there is danger and just hunker down in their hive.
To get the bees in to their brand new home…
I was first going to have to get them out of that birdhouse.
And that was a lot easier said than done!
I was going to have to disassemble the birdhouse piece by piece…
While all those bees were in it…
And I didn’t have any prior experience with bees…
So I didn’t know, once I started tearing apart that birdhouse…
If they were going to attack me, or what.
But here’s the thing I learned. These were not the so-called “Killer Bees”…
Or to use the proper term, Africanized bees…
Which is a variety of bees that is much more defensive than most other varieties.
Lucky for me, the bee colony in my back yard was just a very gentle colony of regular old honey bees.
In fact, in the sequence of events you’re about to see… I didn’t get stung, not even once.
That is quite an intimidating sight right there…
When I lifted the roof off the birdhouse and looked down in to that!
It was fascinating to see.
I had never seen real honeycomb before.
And never seen so many bees!
Now getting the roof off the birdhouse was only the beginning.
I was definitely glad to see that when I did it, the bees didn’t immediately swarm all over me and attack me.
That was a relief.
And that gave me the courage to continue with tearing apart the birdhouse.
I popped the other half of the roof off…
And then I took a few minutes to just look at all those bees inside…
And all that honeycomb that they had constructed themselves.
It was really impressive.
But what was bothering me was that I had been told that it was important to identify the queen bee of the colony and to move her to the new hive...
And that if I didn’t do that, the colony might never accept the new hive.
That turned out to be really bad information.
In the end I really didn’t need to find the queen at all. I just needed to move ALL the bees.
But at the time I was hung up on having been instructed to locate the queen.
And I was looking down in to that swarm of thousands of bees.
I don’t know… maybe tens of thousands…
And they all looked the same to me.
And with as many of them as there were…
I just couldn’t imagine how I was going to identify the one queen among all those bees.
I used big rubber bands to keep the honeycomb contained within the frames.
And it just took some time to meticulously remove one big piece of honeycomb at a time…
And move each one over to a frame within the new hive.
Eventually, I got to the point where all the frames of the new hive were full of honeycomb.
I dropped in as much extra honeycomb as there was room for in the new hive…
And then I just worked at getting as many of the bees that were still clinging to the birdhouse…
And to drop them down in to the new hive.
Finally, I put the two top pieces on to the new hive, and that was that.
The bees were in their new home.
There was some honeycomb that wouldn’t fit in to the new hive.
So, I brushed the bees off of all of it and brought it in to the kitchen…
And my wife was able to squeeze the honeycomb and harvest a whole lot of delicious honey.
A nice little reward for all the work.
So, that was it. My brief personal experience as a beekeeper.
That happened back in 2015.
It’s just an interesting story and a lesson about what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it…
In spite of the kind of natural fears that I think we all have about bees.
But it turns out honey bees are actually very gentle…
And my fears of what might happen if I messed with their hive were just ignorant.
I have a much better understanding of bees now.
Well, I’m sure you’re wondering if the bees are still with me today.
No, they are not. It turns out that it’s not legal to keep a colony of bees inside the city limits here where I live…
Without obtaining the written permission of every adjacent neighbor.
And while most of my neighbors are really great…
There is one really uncooperative one who I knew better than to even ask. So…
I turned the entire colony of bees over to a friend of mine who is a professional beekeeper…
And they are happy and healthy to this day.
They get moved around to various orchards in our county to pollinate the trees…
And they have been producing lots of honey for my friend’s business.
My move up to Washington state is just a few weeks away. So, I’m going to be pretty busy over the next month or two.
I won’t be doing any model train videos or cruise ship videos for a little while, but…
I’ll be doing little videos like this one about things that I find interesting…
Until we get settled in to our new place… And I can make some new videos about our new life up there in Washington.
And you can be sure that that will include videos of model trains going all through the new house…
As well as all around our big half-acre property.
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I’m Jim Zim. Thanks for watching!