Three Kinds of Buzzing Insects

THREE KINDS OF BUZZING INSECTS

I don’t know why I thought I would be a good beekeeper. But once I read the classified ad that offered a complete beekeeping setup for one hundred dollars, I was hooked.

I plunked down the money and got bee boxes, a bee suit, and a beekeeping helmet. Now all I needed was the bees. Believe it or not, you can order bees through the mail, and you pick them up at your local post office. It was a small box filled with bees, and a special holding area just for the queen. I picked it up at the post office and started my beekeeping adventures.

It really isn’t hard to do, since the bees do all the work and you can harvest the honey of their labors. However, gathering the honey is something that was beyond me. Every time I tried to get to some of the golden nectar, I was repeated stung.

As secure as you try to make the outfit, the little stingers find a way in, even if you have tried to quiet them down with a little smoke.

I guess smoke makes them worried about a fire close buy, so they hunker down and act a little less frantic. I wish I had video footage of me running from the backyard to the front slapping myself in the various places I was being stung.

I finally was able to harvest some honeycomb, but had no idea how to extract the honey. I kind of sucked some honey out of the waxy honeycomb, and even chewed on a little of the sweet wax. But that was the only production from my beekeeping efforts, and I was such a bad beekeeper that either all the bees died by the next year, or they got tired of stinging me and left for sweeter pastures.

Another stinging insect I encountered resided in the hills behind my home. I have admired the mountains behind Springville for several years, and they have a beautiful ruggedness that calls for someone to climb them.

I was only wearing jogging shoes, and I guess I was thinking there would be a beaten path all the way to the top. But surprisingly few people have ever climbed any but the most popular mountain trails around here, and I doubt fewer than a hundred have climbed where I went. The top of the mountain is called Mt. Buckley, but I went sideways up the mountain from the subdivision above us.

This route probably added miles to the hike, but it allowed me to go up the mountain through a wide pass I had been looking at for years from my backyard. From my house it looked like there was a five foot tree in the middle of the pass, but when I got to it I realized this tree was more than 30 feet tall and about 50 feet around. I have no idea how long it had to be growing there in that dry wash to reach that size.

As I climbed the ridgeline looking for places to climb higher which didn't require scaling cliffs, I passed by an amazing hillside. The dirt had sloughed off onto the mountain below and there was a wide and a long bar of dirt facing south. It must have been fifty to seventy-five feet tall, and over 200 feet long.

But the most amazing thing about it was that it was completely inhabited with thousands or perhaps millions of wasps. We have had wasp problems at my house for years, and I used to try to eliminate them. Now I just tolerate them unless they are building nests on the porch. There is no way we will ever be rid of wasps there, because buzzing in front of me was the mother lode. None of them bothered me, and I determined not to bother them by hiking up a little higher before I went farther north.

Along the way I encountered a beautiful meadow full of yellow flowers and one huge plant with hundreds of bumblebee-like insects buzzing around it. They were huge, and I was seriously tempted to touch them, just to see if they were real. I couldn't resist, and so I put my hand up to the plant and the bees climbed on my hand and flew around my body. They didn't seem threatened, since I doubt they had ever had many encounters with humans at all. We were two hours away from the nearest other human, and all they did was buzz around me and crawl on my hands. I don't know what I would have done if they had stung me and I had suffered from an allergic reaction.

I think I like wild flying insects better than the domesticated kind.

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