Buddy the Bee Man

Since we are on the topic of characters, I thought I would tell you a little about Buddy the Bee Man.  Remember how I mentioned that James and I attended a bee school? No? Ok. James and I went to bee school. We decided to go when we first started looking into bee-keeping. There were classes at the agricultural center near his parent's farm.

We registered for class, bought our books and went. It was two nights, stretched out over two weeks. Not too bad, but it was about 4 hours a night. We figured if we were going to learn about bees we might as well do it right.

So there we sat, in bee school, a room full of people who were all there for the same reason. We surveyed our fellow bee-keepers. There were plenty of older couples, who wanted to keep bees as a hobby. There were a lot of farmer-type men, with overalls and flannel shirts. There were some really old people, who had been bee-keeping for years but wanted to come to bee school for shits and giggles, I guess. Then there was us. We were the youngest people by there by at least two decades. It also sounded like we were the only people there who didn't already have a hive up and running.

We opened our workbooks and got settled in for the lecture. I told you, this was legit bee school.  Our teacher introduced himself, Buddy. Buddy had to be approaching his 90s, had on his farmer uniform, and a little trucker hat with a bee on it. He walked us through the material and told us all of his personal stories. He drug in his bee equipment and showed us how it worked.

As newcomers to the bee world, attending this bee school has already proved invaluable. There are so many things that we would have screwed ourselves doing without this instruction first. If you are thinking about beekeeping I highly recommend you get in touch with your local agricultural extension, college, or bee-keepers association to see if they offer similar training.

Now, I have mentioned before that James and I are very analytical planners. When we first started thinking about bee-keeping we invested in as many bee books as we could get our hands on. We read over them and did the research online. We wanted to make sure that if we invest our time and money into something, we know all about it.

However, as much research as we've done, we learned one main thing from bee school. Buddy repeated this throughout the classes: "The bees don't read the books."

The bees don't read the books. They don't do the same thing every single time. You can't read something in a book and expect everything to go as planned. All apiaries are different. Sure enough, we've learned, they certainly don't read the books. At least not the same books we're reading, anyways.