A Boy and the Beekeeping Bug

Men, if your wife is trying to tell you she’s pregnant, whatever you do, don’t turn to her and say, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

Not that I had three children already, I had three bee jackets. The fact is I didn’t have any children–my wife and I had been trying for years. Once you’ve been married for eight years, you start to resign yourself to the possibility that the only offspring you’ll hear in your house will be when you rediscover your long lost burnt CD collection in a storage box_¹ (sorry, if you didn’t get that joke, it was really very clever–you just weren’t a teenager in the 1990s. Please refer to footnote #1 for historical context). 

So I certainly wasn’t expecting to be greeted with life changing news when I walked through the door one Friday after a long day’s work. Still, I should have known something was up because on the kitchen counter was an envelope with my name written in my wife’s handwriting. That should have been a red flag because it wasn’t my birthday and, after a quick mental panic, I realized it wasn’t our anniversary either. My wife then handed me the envelope and told me to open it. 

“What’s this for?” I asked. 

“Just open it, and you’ll see,” I said. 

Well, I didn’t see. The greeting card had two little cartoony bees on the inside, and it said, “I’m so happy to bee with you.” Underneath that, my wife had written, “It looks like you’re going to need a new bee suit.” And underneath that, she had drawn a tiny little bee, about the size of a popcorn kernel. Likely, because I’m a man and was too busy wondering where the gift card was to pay for said bee suit, I overlooked that baby bee and blurted out, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

And my life has never been the same since. Thomas is now two years old, and I’m actually starting to shop for his first beekeeping apparel. Now that he is old enough to run, I figure he’s old enough to run from bees with me. Secretly, I do hope that Thomas will one day enjoy beekeeping. Growing up, my dad always took me fishing and metal detecting, his two favorite hobbies, and some of my best memories are from spending time with him doing those two things. That said, beekeeping is a lot more like work than fishing or metal detecting, so I’m not terribly optimistic. Right now, he does have some semi bee-related interests, namely rolly-pollies and caterpillars. Mostly, though he just like trains, firetrucks, tractors, and monster trucks.

Even if the beekeeping bug doesn’t bite Thomas, a boy has got to develop a good work ethic, and there is no harder work than lugging honey supers around on a hot July day. We will see.

¹In the 1990s, there was a popular band called The Offspring and this thing called Napster where teenagers downloaded music for free to record, a.k.a. to burn, onto CDs. This was more or less illegal, but everybody did it.