I never missed a class. No matter what the weather conditions or how appalled I was to drive. I lapped up information like a puppy drinking from a puddle. I ignored the fact that I appeared to be the only student in attendance that was “top-bar driven” and focused on the honey bees. I learned about the incredibly short life cycle of drone and worker bees. Drones are the male freeloaders. Their sole purpose is to cruise for chicks, (mate with a virgin queen) and then sponge off the female worker bees who produce wax, build combs, tend to the nursery and forage for food to feed the entire colony. Both drones and workers mature in days and die within weeks. The Queen however is special. Once she emerges, she takes two or three mating flights with those lazy hound dogs that are just hanging out, and when successful, has the ability to lay a million eggs. If hive conditions are right and her attendants vigilant, Her Majesty can live for several years. That is of course, unless a greedy beekeeper decides she needs to die and be replaced by a more prolific layer, thus increasing the probability of a larger honey harvest. I dismissed this barbaric notion immediately. Rosie would always be my queen. For you see, in my minds eye, she already had a name. And even though my friend thought this name totally plebeian, I disagreed. Rosie would be a working queen, not a monarchial figurehead.

Through the following weeks, my education continued. I learned about biology, broods, dearths, diseases, mites, moths and seasonal blossoms that affected pollen and nectar gathering. I learned about supplemental feeding, swarming and robbing. And as we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of Italian honey bees over Russians or Carniolans, I learned that beekeepers are an extremely pontifical group with very distinct  opinions and are not one bit shy about sharing them.

My class notes were becoming a novella when the subject turned to bee acquisition: “Nucs” versus “Packages.” A nuc is a miniature colony consisting of four or five frames with existing comb, brood and a laying queen. A package on the other hand is basically a box-o-bees. As “newbees” with no experience, we were encouraged to order nucs for our virgin hives because they were already established and would take an immediate foothold. Packages were discouraged because they are simply 3 lbs. of bees that have been syphoned into a small wooden crate and shipped north from a southern state. A queen bee is included in the box, but isolated in her own encasement, with no guarantee that she will lay. Of course, there were pros and cons to both. A nuc brought forth an immediate mini hive, but also might transport disease, laying dormant in the frames. A package on the other hand was just a bunch of orphans that had barely been introduced to one another, with an unfamiliar queen dangling in her jail cell.

I pondered the situation: My new hive was empty. It held no frames with foundation, no combs filled with brood, honey or pollen and no queen already accepted by her peers.  Everything pointed to the wisdom of  a nuc. So…. I ordered a package. The immigrants and I would become proficient and grow together.  We would all be starting from scratch, stumbling along trying to figure things out, but the honeybees were products of nature and  would come (I felt confident) equipped with internal knowhow and flawless survival instincts.

It was now end of March, classes were finished and the only thing left to do was wait. I second guessed myself several times during this waiting period and had anyone informed me that the success rate for a new package was only 20%, I’m sure that I would have made a different choice. But I didn’t know this at the time. In March, I only knew that I had a box-o-bees being delivered from the warm state of Georgia to the chilly state of Virginia in late April. And as a new mother awaits the birth of her child, I began anxiously marking the days off the calendar.