Well, I definitely didn’t expect it to be so soon after we got bees that we’d have our first bee incident. Nor did I expect to have anything new to write in this blog the very day after I started it.
Yet, here we are.
We had planned a short weekend trip to my in-laws house, for which we had to leave first thing this morning. Since I work 10 hour days Tuesday through Thursday, I’d been preparing all last weekend and nightly through the week. My bag was packed Monday, our food was prepped, our weekly grocery list for the following week had been made and we had a game plan for animal care.
That is we HAD a game plan until 10:30 last night when we realized we had no sugar. Why is this problematic, you ask? Well the really important main ingredient for the sugar water syrup we were instructed to feed our newly acquired bees on Day 3 (today is Day 3) just happens to be, you guessed it, sugar. Of course, this apparently can’t be any old type of sugar… we checked. Our Midwestern Beekeepers Association Beginning Beekeeping Manual specifically states that you cannot use:
-Powdered Sugar
-Karo Syrup
-Molasses
-Store Bought Honey
-Brown Sugar
-“Other” sweeteners
Great… besides 1 1/2 cups of the white stuff… that’s all we had.
*Side Note… Did I mention that we needed 2 gallons of 1:1 sugar water? Yea, 1 1/2 Cups ain’t gonna cut it.*
Except…. hey we had Raw Sugar for our kombucha… maybe we could use that? Nope, think again. Apparently (from my frantic internet research) the particulates in Raw Sugar can actually give the bees dysentery. So unless we sadistically wanted to come home to two sick hives, that was a hard pass.
So I googled open stores.
We live out in the boonies people. It was 10:30 pm, and we had to be up at 4:30 am today to get everything done before we left as it was. The closest open store was 30 minutes away. So, I googled the closest convenience store. Closed, but happened to open at 5 am. Great, it’s only a 7 minute drive, that would work.
So at 4:50 am this morning I was in my SUV and on my way to the convenience store. I got there right at 5 and saw a head bobbing between aisles… yesssss. I get out of the car and go to open the door… Nope. Locked. So I got back in the car and called. They didn’t open until 5:30. Google lied.
Welp, I had things to do and wasn’t going to sit there for a half hour, so I turned around. I got home, changed into my muck boots ran food and water down to our chickens, ran back in the house, changed back into my prior attire, got back in the car, drove back to the gas station and arrived at 5:31. Success. I walked in and grabbed the last 2 sacks of sugar they had.
It wasn’t until I was on my way up to the counter with my 8 lbs of white sugar that I realized this lady is probably wondering what on earth I’m doin’ here at 5:30 in the morning buying nothing but sugar, in my sweats and moccasins. No gas, no breakfast, no coffee or other beverage, just all the sugar they had in stock.
Is she a local looney?
Nope, just your local crazy bee lady.
