We got our bees yesterday! The Ebinger-White household, and Penelobee and the Lavender Ladies are pleased to welcome Queen Aphrodibee and the Pink Ladies!! (raucous applause!)
We picked Aphrodibee up along with new beekeepers Jill and Kevin (their queen's name is Lady Gaga). We paid our $80 for the queen and 10,000 of her closest companions and got to watch the bee installation demonstration we critically missed last year. We even got to do a practice installation, by "we" I mean Jill, who got stung. I felt much better about the installation this year, partly because I knew what to expect, and partly because I'm just more comfortable around bees.
We got them home, and the pink paint had just barely dried, but we set the hive up and put the girls in. For a mid-April day it was C-O-L-D. I was in charge of the queen this year (as I was last year) but I did much better. I very calmly took the cork out of the CANDY end of the queen box and stuck her in between two frames, candy end up. Yay! Success. There was some stress, mostly felt by Jon, since he didnt' get all the bees out of the box. In theory, they would all eventually go into the hive on their own (guided by the queen's scent) but since it was so cold, some of them hunkered down in their foodless, queenless dive of a home. I said "let em figure it out or let em die," but I'm sort of heartless, so Jon didn't listen to me (luckily). He devised some sort of convoluted contraption that quite possibly saved a good portion of them. Some are still being stupid, but whatevs.
Anyway, it looks like a little Caribbean village out there. See?!
Most of them seemed to settle in pretty well and they were out flying today, despite torrential downpours and biblical winds this morning. Jeez! I thought the house was gonna blow away!
The power went out so we headed to our home away from home, the Senator Inn Spa and went for a run, got a massage (a rather painful, but excellent one) and a sauna, and then met Mom & Dad for dinner at Cloud 9, the restaurant at the Sentaor Inn. I got the wild mushroon ravioli and the ever excellent gingerbread cake. Yum.
I also made lots of earrings, which I will no longer meniton here (or I will try not to anyway), but I have posted some pictures at earrings365.blogspot.com.
We also went to an interesting lecture at the Jung Institute in Brunswick about Goddesses. It turned into quite a fascinating discussion about who else but Lady Gaga! Imagine a bunch of 60+ scholars getting all excited about the Lady! Ah yeah... it was quite a scene.
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