Light 'Er Up!

"... and then you take your hive tool and KILL THE QUEEN!"

Today in my Beekeeping class we learned that you
a.) don't exhale when bees are mad, so very mad.
b.) when you have a "bad" hive (meaning they're just plainly evil little buggers) you kill the queen and
c.) when you light something on fire starting at the bottom of whatever it is, you then rotate your hand so that it's not above the flames that are slowly licking their way towards your easily cooked flesh. Genius.

We started our first day by looking at the bees in their little wooden hives, then we got to put on the safari hats covered in netting, then we got to take them off, and then we got to play with the smokers. A beekeeping smoker looks like a french press and the Tin man from the Wizard of Oz got together and started a steamy little family. What you do is you find about a 4in x 5in bit of burlap sacking and you loosely roll it up. Then, holding the roll in your hand you take a lighter and begin to light the bottom on fire.

The whole object is to make an ember that'll last for a while. However, this is where my special genius comes in. So I'm holding my quickly blazing piece of burlap sacking, watching the flames get higher and higher and I'm getting more and more worried. Jake (the beekeeping teacher) looks over and says something along the lines of "Oh, you haven't really been around fire, have you? Huh." and then tells me to drop what had become a ball of flame. He scoops it up and says slowly, "Now, when the flames get that big, you rotate your hand so that the flames are going upwards... AWAY from your hand. I think we need to start with basic wildlife survival." Star, meanwhile is laughing her head off and then proceeds to do the exact same thing I did.

Silly Star.

It was sort of cold and pretty muddy out there, but very cool. The bees had just come in yesterday and were a little groggy but the chickens were very much awake. I think next time I'll take my camera so I can show you all the chick chick chickens!

Oh, and I managed to burn myself on the smokers. I can't be expected to remember EVERYTHING. I mean, I have way more important things to remember, like the exact time it takes to microwave a bowl of oatmeal to perfection, than that metal gets hot when it's been on fire for a while. Sheesh, who needs wilderness survival when you can just make the same mistakes a couple of times and then learn your lesson (or do I learn my lesson? I've been burning myself on things for the last 20 years, so that makes for a pretty poor learning curve).