Читать книгу Bees Make the Best Pets - Jack Mingo - Страница 13

Who knows for whom the doorbell tolls? Actually, a brown-uniformed guy with heavy boxes knows: it tolls for me.

The boxes on my front porch have come from a beekeeping supply house, Dadant, the country's biggest and oldest. As I move them into the house, they make the sounds of wood rattling together like the top notes of a marimba. I'm expanding my bee yard, adding another hive, and adding some honey supers to the others. But first there's a lot of pounding and painting to do.

Opening the cardboard boxes, I'm greeted by the sweet smells of pinewood and fresh beeswax. Even devoid of mental associations, they smell wonderful, but throw in a few weeks of anticipation and a few years of memories and I'm nearly knocked over as I begin the process of nailing together the hive boxes, then the ten frames that go inside each one. Those frames each consist of four pieces of pre-cut wood that need to be nailed together into a rectangle. Into that frame, I need to coax a sheet of fragile, thinly pressed beeswax and nail a long narrow strip that theoretically holds the wax in place. Most of the job is not hard, but it is repetitious. It is hard to mess up the frame too badly, but it is easy to wreck the wax sheet. Barely thicker than construction paper, it can crack by accidentally flexing it a little too far while laying it into the frame, or clumsily punching a hole through it with the hammer while pounding in the tiny nails, poking out just a millimeter or two from the wax, that barely hold the thin strip of wood that barely holds the wax in place, hopefully long enough that the bees will cement it into place before it falls out.