Buzz

Wow,
Written Saturday
Today was a long day. My day started today at 5:45. I spent four hours this morning hacking the lilacks I choped down yesterday into smaller peices. Then I hit parkour class.
After class I went over to the house of one of the guys I had met through COBA. He showed me around his bee yard at his house. Then we got some supplies and took off to his other bee yard. He's second yard is acutally just about a mile from my house, as the bee flys. The bees he keeps there are probably the one pollenating my  community garden. There we installed three packages of bees.

Written Monday (I wrote yesterday but it didn't save)
That picture is one package. Its a box about 18 inches long a foot high and four inches wide. Inside are a few thousand bees a queen and some sugar water. To install a package of bees we broke off the top door and pulled out the can of sugar water. At this point about 50 bees get out and start buzzing around us. Then we pulled out a small cage with the queen in it. That cage has a quark in it. You can either leave the quark and come back in three of four days and release the queen. Or what we were doing was replacing the quark with two or three mini marshmallows in three or four days the bees eat through those and release the queen. At this point in the process about 200 of the bees have wandered out and are buzzing around us. After marshmallow quarking the queen we broke off the whole top of the box and shake the box over the new hive. Here there are now 1000 bees all buzzing. Last we took the can of sugar water and put it over the frames hole down. Then we put another hive box over that to protect it and placed the lid on. After all that I would step about 30 feet away and take some deep breath. All that was one hive. We had three. Most of the day there must have been 10,000 bees less than 20 feet from me.
I wouldn't say I have a fear of bees. I was stung as a child and I have always kept a healthy distance. This was a nerve racking experience. By the end I was very comfortable. I was wearing sweats and a tee shirt the whole time, no hood, no gloves. I did not get stung even once.

This is some poorly focused honey on my fingers. I have never tasted more delicious honey. 

There were some bits of honey comb that had broken off one of my friends hives that he gave me and I tied them onto some of my top bars. This will help my swarm get started when I find some.