You Know You Really Love Your Bees When...

    My sweetie left yesterday to go to China for a five week stay as a volunteer at the Starfish Foster Home. So here I am a alone on Valentine's Day.  What better way to spend the evening than at a bee club meeting. Amazingly enough there were over 50 other people who must have felt the same way.  I expected there would be a light turnout tonight due to the special day but it was just the opposite.  It was the best attended bee club meeting in the last four 4 months.  I don't know if that means most beekeepers are so obsessed with their bees that they have no love life at all or if they just love their bees more than their enabling spouses.  We do have some beekeeping couples in our club and I expected to see them at the meeting.  I describe them as being co-dependently obsessive beekeepers.  However, I did not expect to see so many people who I know are married and had left their spouse alone on Valentine's Day to attend a bee club meeting. I guess you know you really love your bees when you still go to the bee meeting even when its Valentine's Day. I hope all of these people realize that its okay to love your bees just as long as you don't expect them to love you back. In my experience honeybees aren't very good at reciprocating the love of their beekeepers.

    I did find the meeting to be very interesting.  Ron Babcock, an experienced commercial beekeeper, talked about trapping pollen and the most important features to look for in a good pollen trap.  Ok, maybe you had to be there, but I found it interesting.

   Speaking of Linda, I still haven't heard that she and Rachel have arrived safely at the Starfish Foster Home.  Sarah told me that she had arranged for them to be picked up by a taxi at the airport. Hopefully they arrived safely and are sleeping off their jet lag. I have had numerous occasions in the past week or so to explain to people why my wife was going to china for 5 weeks. I had our bee club secretary in tears tonight when I told her how Amanda collects children with birth defects from the dying rooms in the state run orphanages.

   I am planning to actually take an few hours off tomorrow morning so I can start chipping away on my monster "honey do" list.  I need to disassemble the old deck stairs and remove the concrete pad from the old stairs before we can start work on the new deck.  Tomorrow I'm just going to take the old stairs apart. I'm planning to rent a jack hammer next Monday to bust up the concrete pad in order to recycle it into the goats' rock piles.  One reason I don't have to trim their hooves more often is that they have several large rocks they can climb on. Then we also have a youth temple trip scheduled for tomorrow evening.  So far, staying busy doesn't seem to be a problem.