Schadenfreude

Jack wasn't always uninvolved in my leisure time. Sometimes he was very involved.

He'd choose my hobbies for me.

One of the hobbies he chose for me was beekeeping. I didn't like honey back then. I'm not much of a fan of the stuff still. Give me jam for my biscuits any day. So this wasn't the most satisfying hobby for me.

But beekeeping was an interesting activity. It let me see what is the rather miraculous process of little insects gathering nectar and pollen and turning it into more little insects and wax and honey.

We got hives from Sears that we had to put together and paint. We filled the frames with sheets of foundation for the little bees to build their combs on.  Jack got me "The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture." We had the jumpsuits, gloves, and hoods that would let us work with the bees without getting stung.  Much.

We ordered the bees from Sears (is there nothing you can't get from Sears?). They came in the mail in wooden boxes with screen sides. Each box held three pounds of worker bees and a few drones and a little box with a queen and a few attendants. There was a can of sugar water that kept them fed for the days they were in the mail.  The queen's box had a plug made out of sugar that the bees would eat through to release the queen. The time it took to release her gave them time to accept her as their leader.

We'd don our protective clothes, open a box of bees, shake them into their prepared hive, hang the queen's box between two frames, put the lid on and wait.

A week later we opened the hives to remove the emptied queen's box. The bees had started building combs! This was fascinating.

My career as an apiarist had begun.

Each year we'd harvest the honey. We didn't have the equipment to spin the honey out of the combs so we'd just hack the combs into squares and put them in plastic boxes. These would get sold at work much like Girl Scout cookies. But better...people got their money's worth. I don't think I was involved in the marketing of the honey. Whew!

Those bees terrorized me for years. The hives were set up in the back yard near the gate that took us to the parking spots behind the house. The bees' flight path took them across the walk up to the gate at low altitude. Now and then one would get caught in someone's hair. Ouch.

When you're a good beekeeper you don't need the protective clothes. You know how to handle the bees without getting them riled up. We never got good at it.

My happiest day at beekeeping was when Jack was doing something with the bees by himself. He got into his jumpsuit, zipped on the veil and went to work. He didn't get the veil completely closed.

The bees found the weak spot in his protection. He got a face full of stings. He was quite the dancer while this was going on.

Finally, a bit of a comeuppance for all the terror he had brought upon me.

Schadenfreude, it's human nature.