This story starts about fifty years ago. Not that I am that old, but I have to go back that far to help you fully appreciate what is going on now.
When I was in junior high school, my brother thought he wanted to participate in an extracurricular event that required all the members to plan and implement some sort of project that involved agriculture. Growing up in a county with an economy based on farming, where many of the students' families depended on either livestock or crops for their livelihood, most of the participants would have been raising some type animal. They would plan to procure and care for that animal until it was of the size and age to reach maturity, when it would 'go to market' (be sold for profit/processed for food). I honestly don't know what the other kids did for their year-long project, maybe growing and caring for chickens or beef. But for some reason what my brother ended up with was: bees.
The fact that there was a life-long beekeeper who lived a block away, readily available to offer advice, provide support, supervise, loan equipment could have been a factor in the choosing to become involved with raising bees. I don't know precisely how the decision was made - but I do know that my brother and dad got into the bee business... and long after my brother lost interest my dad was still tending the hives. Fortunately they are mostly low-maintenance, until it is time to go and and relieve the colony of some of that honey they worked so hard to produce. Then it becomes a Family Project... and not my teen-aged self definition of fun.
As most kids are thoroughly freaked out at the possibility of being attacked by insects of the 'stinger', it was excessively stressful to my young self when my dad would go out in the country to the tend the hives. Located in a field several miles from town, the upper part of the hive would have to be 'smoked' to drug the bees and allow the upper sections (called supers) to be removed, placed on the back of the pickup truck and brought into town where the Family Project occurred on the screened-in porch. Bees angrily swarming on the outside of the screens, doors constantly slamming as supers were moved to the porch, frames were processed, brought in to be un-capped with a heated knife, honey extracted, and returned back to the truck bed amidst fiercely protective insects. A sticky mess.
When it is all done, the brick floor was covered with footprints of gooey honey, meaning that even when we were finished with the honey extraction, the work was not completed. It was a great location for doing the messy work, but everything had to be hosed down to keep from tracking honey everywhere. And the stacks of supers, emptied of honey, but with frames that the bees would busily start filling again were returned to the pasture for the bees to start back to work.
Honey put into jars to be sold at local grocery stores, with hand-stamped labels, and absolutely no health department inspection. Just good, wholesome, home-grown honey.
So there is the story of my dad and brother sort of backing into the honey business. But the really interesting part comes when I just suddenly realized that both daughters are owners of hives as well - so: that makes them unsuspecting Third Generation Bee Keepers.
How cool is that? Very. After all these years, Papa would be so amused.
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