Attracting Attention

I’ve had my share of honey/beekeeping blunders and shared those on my blog in this post and also here.

This year we had a few mishaps while extracting honey but nothing serious. A full four pound glass jar of honey slipped out of the hands of one the grandkids and broke spilling lots of sticky honey on the garage floor. It was one of those times that I was glad my hubby and stepson have had experience with disaster restoration.

Later, something fell into a five gallon container of freshly filtered honey and so all of that honey had to be filtered again. No matter how hard we try, we still track honey into the house and the doorknobs get sticky but basically we had an uneventful smooth extraction day.

It was evening on Saturday and we were tired and glad to have the clean-up mostly completed. Kevin and Hubby loaded some “wet supers” into the bee-mobile to return to the beeyards after church on Sunday. Unfortunately, they neglected to notice that the back window air vents were open.

Early Sunday morning when we went out to leave for church, we had a surprise waiting for us. This is what we found:

Listen closely and you can hear the excitement of this find.

The bees had discovered the vents and were having a feeding frenzy in our car—a Free Honey Party. There were lots of bees. Since we were on our way to church, I moved the car to the street because I did not want our next door neighbors to panic when they went out on their driveway—which is right next to our driveway.

We try to be somewhat discreet about our beekeeping hobby because some people are very frightened of bees. In our city, there is no ordinance about beekeeping except that if even one neighbor complains or is disturbed by the bees, you are no longer allowed to keep the bees at your home.

While we were at church, the bees told other bees about the party and so when we arrived home, there were lots of bees swarming our car. On our answering machine, four panicked callers left messages informing us of the bees on/in/about our car.

It really was not a large problem, Bob drove the bee-mobile around with the windows open to lose some bees and then delivered the supers to our beeyards. Because our car still smelled like honey, the bees continued to be interested for a day or so but we just kept the car in our garage with the garage door shut. The bees soon got the message out to the other bees that the party was over—the food was gone.

However, it did take a few days to calm some neighbors’ concerns. We passed out jars of fresh honey to our helpful callers. We’ve also sold a bit more honey in the neighborhood. However, we do not recommend this method as a marketing tool.