We got into the free bees program!  It's almost too late to order bees for this year, but we'll have three more groups of bees ("packages") arriving May 7 to join our previously ordered package arriving in mid April.

Meanwhile, we picked up all of the parts we'll need to get four new hives going.  Rather than ordering online, we found a local father-son operation an hour and a half down the road and spent a very pleasant 45 minutes bantering with the duo and soaking up their combined knowledge.

I'm so excited to have all of this new equipment.  Partly, it lays my mind at rest because now I won't have to worry that whatever killed the bees in our old equipment will kill our new bees.  Mostly, though, I think my joy stems from a childhood of hand-me-downs --- lunchboxes with cartoon characters I didn't care for and discarded library books under the Christmas tree.  I've grown up to believe in frugality and reusing, but something about the hand-me-down bee boxes hit an old nerve.  I wanted a fancy modern box with a screened bottom board so that I could monitor varroa mite populations!  Now that I have it, maybe I should paint Papa Smurf on it and lay all of those old anguishs to rest?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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