Buzzzzzz

     Besides chickens, my father kept honey bees.  Beekeeping is known as apiculture.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beekeeping  The place where hives are kept is called an apiary.  In my father's case, the apiary was at the far back of our lot.  There were two gray boxes that sat up off the ground.  Bees flew in and out all day long.
     I was afraid of bees and hated having to pass the hives.  "Leave them alone and they will leave you alone," was what I heard every time I whined about the bees being along the path to my swing set.  This off the cuff advice was not exactly true.  Though I looked straight ahead and walked calmly past the bees, I still managed to get stung more times than I can count.  Once a bee got tangled up in my hair.   My mother had to examine my scalp to find the stinger.  I twisted and carried on while she had me head in a headlock.  Honey bees deposit a stinger when they bite.  The stinger has to be removed quickly to reduce the amount of venom delivered to the victim.  Scraping with a fingernail is the most handy way to remove a stinger.  Tweezers can also be used.   Another time a bee flew into my open mouth.  I spit it out and took off running for the house.  The bee didn't sting me.  It felt fuzzy on my tongue, though.  On the occasions that I was stung, I would hear, "Well, the bee will die now.  You have your revenge."  Honey bees sting as a last resort when they feel very threatened because losing the stinger basically disembowels them.  Small comfort when you are seven years old and your scalp is throbbing.

Bee hives

 
     The bees did provide a learning experience that, I'm betting, none of the other kids in school had.  I learned about the composition of bee society - workers, drones, and the queen.  The workers were all female (sound familiar?).  They come from fertilized eggs laid by the queen.  Males or drones came from unfertilized eggs.  There is one queen per hive, and she is the only bee capable of reproducing.  Worker bees, who feed all the bee larvae, feed large amounts of a substance called royal jelly to that special little larva that becomes the queen.  The queen flies high into the air, mates during this one time flight with several males (who drop dead afterwards), and returns to the hive for a lifetime of egg laying.  She can live 3-5 years and is replaced when she dies or fails to be productive.  Worker bees live only six weeks during the summer, but can live 4-9 months through the winter.  Drones are on stand-by for mating during the summer, but get pushed out of the hive in the fall.  Why feed a useless male all winter when you can make a new one in the spring?  http://www.backyardbeekeepers.com/facts.html

The smallest bee on the left is a worker.  The middle bee is a drone.  The largest bee on the right is a queen.

     Whenever my father worked with the bees, he wore his bee suit.  It was a khaki jumpsuit with a hat and veil.  Some beekeepers wear gloves, but my father usually used his bare hands.  The main thing to do was to keep bees off one's face since the face tends to swell when stung.  Beekeepers also use a device called a smoker when working in the hive.  The smoke, produced by various types of smoldering material, calms the bees.  Once a hive was turned over by some mischievous neighborhood kids.  My father set the box back in place.  He found the bees in a huge, swarming mass in a nearby tree.  He grabbed the queen and placed her inside the hive.  All the bees followed her back home.  Problem solved. Beekeepers sometimes move hives.  Let's say you want apple blossom honey.  The thing to do is to move the hives to an apple orchard when the trees are in flower.  The guy who owns the apple orchard gets his trees pollinated, and the guy who owns the bees gets honey from a particular source.  If you saw the Peter Fonda Movie called "Ulee's Gold" you learned about tupelo honey, a highly prized honey from the tupelo tree.  http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-tupelo-honey.htm 
I remember that my father moved some hives once.  The transfer was done at night, when the bees were asleep.

Bee Smoker

        

Bee Suit

     Dad just liked having bees.  I only remember one time that he took honey from the hives.  The process involved removing waxy, wooden frames from the hives and spinning them to extract the honey.  http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/2008/05/extracting-your-honey.html  Our honey was very dark, not the pale golden stuff that comes from the supermarket.  My mother explained that the bees made our honey from many different flowers, and that produced dark honey.  I can't vouch for this since she was the one who said bees will ignore you if you ignore them!
     Another thing that my mother told me was that beekeepers didn't get cancer.  Her information came from the Anton Cancer Research Center in Germany.  In 1952, they published a report saying that there were no people with the occupation of beekeeping among the people with cancer that they studied.  The assumption was that bee stings stimulated the immune system and warded off cancer.  These days people are swearing by bee sting therapy for all sorts of ailments from arthritis, to Herpes Zoster, to Multiple Sclerosis.  The research, however, doesn't back up the benefits of being stung.
     There are a lot of people traveling around with epinephrine pens ready to inject themselves should they be stung by a bee.  Just how  common is a full blown case of bee sting anaphylactic shock?  Ten to fifteen percent of us will experience large areas of swelling that can last for up to a week after a bee sting.  Only .5% of children and 3% of adults experience full blown anaphylaxis after a sting.  I once met a family who had incurred a $3,000 emergency room bill when they took their child in for a bee sting.  After waiting 3 hours, they were told they had no reason to be there and sent home.  The lesson to be learned is that if you are not gasping for breath 20 minutes after a bee sting, you'll be fine.
     You won't find many back yard bee hives these days, but you might find them on top of city hall in some big metropolis.  City beekeeping is the latest trend.  With less green space, there are less pesticides used in cities.  This is a healthier environment for bees.  http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-livestock/bee-keeping/unexpected-beehives.aspx
     So bees are a good thing,  bee stings might be a good thing, and honey is delicious.