We strive to eat locally here in California Hot Springs. Up to this point, our honey has come from about 35 miles away, in the San Joaquin Valley, near all of the orange groves. We don't produce honey ourselves so we never imagined that we might end up with some on our own property.
In fact, it's better than just honey. Back in March, author David George Gordon nominated the larval honey bee as a nutrient-dense depression-fighting food. They are high in vitamins A and D. You can't buy larval bees just anywhere. I have yet to see them stocked in a grocery store, so I never imagined that we could have them for dinner. Until now, of course.
We have a local source of both honey and larval bees, right here on our property. I was just inches from the hive the other day. The only thing that separated me from those nutrient-dense bees was some of the only remaining original wall paneling on the property.
We live in an historic craftsman. It is historic in part because it was designed by a famous architect, because apparently it was one of the first home-based, woman-managed businesses in the area (some called her "madam"), and because just about everything that could be removed was removed between the 1930s and 1960s. There are few original windows and doors. The only original paneling is in "The Little House," a small structure built for servants.
These bees have a great sense of style.
From the structural perspective, it's a very bad idea to source your honey from your bedroom wall. The hive grows. Honey seeps through the paneling. And bee hives in walls simply begin to stink. We probably would have noticed the hive sooner had we been using the Little House.
So we need to work on creating a bee-free wall. The easiest way to do that is to call an exterminator. That's the recommendation of the local Ag Extension Office and the Farm Bureau.
"You want to move the hive?" They asked. "Call an exterminator."
An exterminator would spray and then we would move the dead bees and honey out of the wall. It really would be very simple. But then we'd have a house that had been sprayed and we would lose the primary pollinators of our fruit trees. We all like fruit.
My mom is in charge of this particular issue and she announced the other night:
"We're going to move the hive."
The devil's in the details and we have about six months before this thing is going to go down, but she tells me it involves luring the bees out of the wall into a stronger hive and then smoking out any remaining bees.
We have some specific plans on how to do this but it is all so crazy, I hesitate to make the plan public yet.
From the plan came the now-famous quote:
"I'd rather get my foreskin caught in a zipper than mess with those bees."
I probably should not give up who made the quote, but I will say that it was neither my mom nor me.
There were some other comments along the lines of:
"Don't you two have anything else to do?"
"Aren't there other sources of Vitamin A?"
"You're going to eat what?"
And so Bee Balooza begins.
Comments, advice, zipper quotes welcome. :)
Comments (2)
So, first of all, I'm jealous you have your own honey on your property ... not so sure about the larvae though. LOL But, reading your mom's rough plan on how to move the hive brought up images of the beginning of Piglet's Big Movie ... they have this grand scheme of moving a colony/swarm/very large group of bees from their real hive to a fake hive so Pooh Bear could get the honey out ... and you guessed it, in involved smoking them out and luring them to the new hive. You have to check it out if you haven't seen it before. I can send it up to you for all of your viewing pleasures.
Posted by Brit - a bee-keeper wanna be | July 9, 2007 10:04 PM | Reply
Brit -- I will put that movie in the Netflix queue ASAP. That sounds like a hoot.
We will have a decent supply of honey for a while if this all works out, that's for sure. But we don't plan on farming the bees in the future. We'll probably just move them and let them do their thing.
Amanda
Posted by Amanda Rose | July 9, 2007 10:15 PM | Reply