Feast or famine. It never rains but it pours. The calm before the storm. There are others. Those pithy aphorisms that hint at one of life’s basic truths: that nothing will happen, then everything will.

I would think that by now I’d be used to it.

Since you tuned in last, much has been afoot at the micro-farm. And, to anticipate your smart-ass sotto voce editorializing, I am not trying to milk another fifteen-hundred words out of the predator/prey disaster-at-the-micro-farm shtick. No, this time there are things to report. Real developments. And all of a very positive nature.

First off, as you can see from the picture, the greenhouse is done. Well, at least finished. While a good two-inches out of true, it still managed to fulfill its primary mission which was to not fall down. It has accomplished this task in the face of three separate gales and me running into it with the micro-tractor. Don’t ask.

The only problem has been one of efficiency, as in too much. Despite some twelve square-feet of planned ventilation area and untold air leaks, improper joints, and other unplanned cracks, crevices, and places where something should be but isn’t; the interior temperature still managed to make it into the 90s on a sunny day. I might have to install a fan.

But now, at least, with some rough tables assembled from salvaged micro-pallets, the seedlings and newly planted seeds have a place they can call home; and plenty of others to talk with as they grow. The current census lists some 150 lavender plants, six home-cloned dahlias (with more to follow) along with twenty-two globe amaranth, twenty gerbera daisies, sixteen Stars-of-the Veld, ten of the very exotic sounding Jewels of Opar, ten marigolds, eleven coneflowers, and eleven Night Phlox, which so sounds like something you’d want to see your doctor about. These are, of course, accompanied by various vegetables and herbs as well. But the flowers, yes the flowers were all selected for one reason: Bees love them.

That’s the real big development this week, and one long promised to you: the arrival of the bees. To that monumental happening I will dedicate the remainder of the blog. First, I want to thank you for your patience. You were here last year when the bee stuff arrived, you were here when the hives got painted and installed, and now, you can be witness to exactly how badly I can piss off eighteen-thousand stinging insects. 

“Oh, look there goes the queen!” Thirty dollars of bug buzzed out of sight into the woods. This event was immediately followed by the remaining $46.02 of bees – the queen being more valuable by several orders of magnitude than the run-of-the-mill worker bee – which all flew off to find her.

The good news was that these weren’t my bees and the better news was that the loss of the queen wasn’t my fault. The bad news was that my bees would soon wish they would have taken a similar powder and chanced their survival on the vagaries of nature instead of my ham-handed management techniques.

But rather than force you to sit and read all about it, I decided to cut you a break this week and let you watch instead.

That’s right, for a change you won’t have to try and figure out if I really meant to say “whom” or “lie”, you’ll be able to see it all in living color. I’m joining the Now Generation and squeezing in between all the cute cat videos, the thousands of other beekeeping videos, and the millions of hard-proof documentation of things people do which they will regret at their next job interview, I will plant my flag in the flickering world of slow buffering and poor sound quality; on YouTube.

Here’s the Novice Bee-wrangler in Action.

I hope you enjoyed that.

So, that was day one. On day two, disaster struck in the form of, well, me. On the second hive – the one where I had to leave the queen in her little cage to let the other bees get used to her – I had to go in and remove the, hopefully, now-empty cage. This involved taking the hive apart to get back down to the frames. I had to move the bag filled with sugar syrup, which promptly started leaking. I was prepared for this with another bag and I tossed the original bag into the empty and quickly sealed it up. I finished my manipulations, extracted the queen cage, and reassembled the hive.

At which point the baggie started dribbling sugar syrup all over the bees. Did I mention that those bag feeders might turn out to be a bad idea? The really sad part about it was that I didn’t find out about for two hours by which point the ants had arrived on scene and were hauling off bees, still kicking, to their woody fortress. I got it all cleaned up and then ended up doing battle with the ants for two hours. I put packing tape around the stand legs, a surprisingly effective deterrent by the way, and then brushing them off as they tried to make their escapes. It just seemed like a better idea than blasting the ants with Raid.

Things settled down after that and now the bees are flying and collecting nectar. As you might have guessed they have not touched the sugar syrup. They are rapidly building honeycomb, none of which seems to be where it should be due to the baggie feeders, and are otherwise seeming to be very bee-like in their industrious activity. I’ll keep you posted.

So now three out of the top four projects are well underway. By the time you read this the fourth will have been put in motion and the micro-farm will finally qualify for the “farm” part of its description.

If only I can used to the incessant cheep-cheep-cheep.