My coworker, Doug, keeps bees.

Naturally, he and I have become friends over the past few months, and we have been talking often about bees and their keeping.

Well, he invited me and Katie over to his house to give us some on-the-job experience before our bees arrive in two weeks, so on Saturday we packed up our bee gear and headed up to Liberty Hill!

He and his wife Debby live on 22 beautiful acres that include a stream, a big pond, hills, and lots of cedar trees. They built their house all by themselves, from the ground up, which is quite amazing.

Doug and Debby helped us with our bee suits, lit up two smokers, and then took us down to their hives. Here are the pictures we took:

Katie holding the hive tool with Debbie getting geared up.

Doug lit his smokers and got ‘em going well before we went down the hill to check out the bees.

Three of the four hives: The one on the left is called “El Diablo”, and with good reason. We worked on those bees last, and they were very aggressive. Doug opened up the top and at first they were okay, but then he used the bee brush to wipe some off the frames, and suddenly the alarm was sounded! The buzzing of the bees became loud and they started flying all around us, trying to get at us to sting us. Fortunately our suits completely covered us, so none got in.

Once we finished with El Diablo, we walked 50 yards up the hill toward their house, but the mean bees were still following us. It took about 15 minutes of walking around before they finally gave up and left us alone.

Overall, it was a great experience, though I must admit it did sober me up a bit, seeing all the bees and having them fly around and crawl on my suit.  There were a lot of them, which is obvious when you think about it on an intellectual level, but quite another thing to see from up close.
Katie and I asked St. Ambrose, whom we learned from our sister Courtney is the patron saint of beekeepers, to pray for us, that we get a docile hive like Doug’s other three, and not one like El Diablo.