the apiary at persephone
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to spend some with Meghan, the beekeeper at Persephone and take some fun promo photos for the new hard seltzer the farm released this summer. Our main goal there was to make some promo video reels for Instagram, but I got some fun photos so I wanted to share with you.
My friend Ola came with me to shoot the reel. Because this was all my crazy idea, I let Ola take the bee mask even though I was low-key terrified. I just thought she might be getting all up in there more than I was, and I would feel terrible if she got stung. Eventually the buzzing around my head, stray honey bees landing on my shirt and accidental bee punches became my new normal, and I was only mildly terrified.
I think the funnest part of beekeeping is the super cool suit you get to wear. Are we going to space? Nope, just protecting life on earth by way of bee keepership. I think both are equally important jobs.
I am going to mention that at the end a bunch of the bees were really ticked at Meghan for making them child stars and they did seem to attack her face when she took off her astronauts helmet. Apparently, this isn’t normal, thank GOODNESS. I had begun to come up with some pretty dystopian storylines akin to the Orca Rebellion, bee version.
The first layer of the bee box / hive / condo was the scariest to open. Mostly because of my fear of the unknown, because actually the lower box, where the queen was living was BUMPIN’. At one point, Meghan noted, “you can sometimes notice the sound in the hive changes”. I had noticed this and simultaneously, I had already begun backing up toward the electric fence and was contemplating which would be worse: death by a thousand stings or death by a thousand volts.
A little side note: here on the Sunshine Coast, we need to have electric fences here around apiaries because we cohabitate with black bears and if the stereotyping of bears on the big screen is any indication, bears love honey, and, of course, pic-a-nic baskets.
I also fell in love with this smoke doo-hickey that I am certain has had the same design since its inception. I love functional items that’s design has just never really changed. One day I will get to design my own house to have that same vibe, I digress. Back to the bees, Meghan said that the smoke indicates a wildfire to the bees and they start eating like crazy. On one hand, I totally understand the behaviour because I stress eat too, though, I would like to believe that if a fire was imminent, I’d be running.
Meghan had a wealth of knowledge and she was definitely sharing it, but because my attention was split, I feel like I forgot a lot about what she was saying. I am going to lobby for some Apiary 101 demonstrations at Persephone next year so I can learn more.
But I will just spew some random facts that I learned right here:
the bee boxes hold a colony of bees with one queen
when they get too cramped, they swarm (the Persephone bees have swarmed)
then you give them a whole new hive with a whole new queen
there is a cool mesh that keeps the queen away from the yummy honey (or else that jerk will lay nasty eggs all up in there)
bees sting Meghan’s partner more than her because she is “less nervous” (not sure how I left unscathed)
2 colonies of bees will yield about 40lbs of honey!?
also a mason jar is approximately 2lbs of honey
the little bee babies are in capped off honeycombs that are raised up a bit and queen be laying like crazy in there
I am sure my take away leaves something to be desired, but that just means you should find your local apiarist
Anyways, that’s all from me.
Please excuse the spelling and grammatical errors, I am not in a season of my life that I am partial to proof-reading.