How I Got Stung

When I brought my first batch of honey bees home–the buzzing box headed for my backyard on a warm night in May–I was skeptical that my new hobby made any sense. Would my bees starve? Would they get sick? Would they annoy my neighbors?

Luckily, and by this point, I had been working part time for a bee removal company for a couple months, so I was somewhat seasoned by the job. And upon joining a local beekeepers club, I discovered both bees and urban beekeepers were multiplying in Prescott and the quad-city area. I also learned bees in a small backyard, such as mine, amongst the houses, schools and churches, have just as good a chance as anywhere else to thrive. Neighborhood trees, my giant Pyracantha bush, the neighbor's Russian Sage and any overgrown yards provide enough nectar and pollen–not to just sustain my bees throughout this summer season–but to score me some of their surplus honey!

My closest neighbors hardly noticed how busy the hive situated only 60 feet from their house became, even after I added a honey super (where the bees but the honey as opposed to eggs). In fact, they welcomed my bees when I first told them about it. They were only reminded again of my hive with a gift of bee goodness (honey) I gave them across the fence on Tuesday.

Jumping back to my bee removal job, I get asked a lot: “How did I decide to do this type of work?” Truth be told, there was no “Eureka!” moment, but I believe the Universe must have been dropping seeds here and there, starting with a home exchange I did in Sweden last fall 2014. My friends there were beekeepers, foodies and artists, and owned an art gallery called Honey Gallery in Bromma, Stockholms Lan. The apartment I lived in was next to allotment gardens, which I strolled through most days to appreciate the precious undiscovered glory that is life: birds, bees, moths, butterflies, flowers, apple trees, wild deer and the people that nurtured it.

Another invisible seed was dropped early 2015 while visiting the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension office armed with a couple gardening questions. They gave me a local beekeepers and master gardener's business card and said to call them. So I called Cliff, and he and his wife, Nancy, invited me to their property in Prescott Valley for a show-n-tell. I cannot remember now how the conversation went, but Cliff and I got into bee suits and headed out to the yard where all the hive boxes where buzzing and see how comfortable I was handling frames full of bees, honeycomb and honey. I was comfortable, and so I had to know more...

Things started to really change when I found myself casually interviewing for a job with Cliff's company, Last Shadow Apiary, in his kitchen that I had no plans for. But life as it so happens, has a funny way of sometimes bringing the right path to you even if you are too oblivious to head down it on your own. After apprenticing on four bee removal calls end of February/March, it was in April that I signed a contract with Cliff and started getting calls to remove and relocate bee swarms and hives from water boxes on my own. I travel all around Prescott, and the quad-city area, performing this noble service. I have my own bee suit and all the necessary equipment needed to capture/remove the bees kept in the back of my car. I can feel the spirits of generations of bees emanating a loud buzz as I drive down the road and turn them over to Cliff's. He keeps as many batches of bees as possible and puts them into vertical stacking hive boxes in his bee yard and then re-queens them so they are less aggressive (long story short).

I had never understood just how interesting bees were, but through Cliff's generosity and sharing his life-long knowledge of bees that I learned the ins and outs of keeping a bee hive, honey bee anatomy, procuring a new queen and how to handle her, and the most exciting part to me at this stage: harvesting the honey. What I revel in most now is located under a native Juniper tree in dappled light in my own backyard: the opportunity I have took for myself to have my own hive of honey bees for real! I wanted more than just an occasional purchase of agave nectar I was using for my various baking projects; I deeply desired the real deal with all it's fantastic nutrients from live cultures: the pollen, bee bread, honey in the wax, and the raw honey itself. Luckily, it has all been successful, as I continue to feel at ease working outdoors, being connected to the natural world in this special way and having a real sense of home in Prescott. Bees are such magical creatures that they do so much for us and ask for so little in return.

Looking ahead at 2016, I might expand my home apiary to 2 hives and maybe start to offer hive setup and management for other people too: restaurants, animal sanctuaries, urban farms, ranches and even a bee yard on the Prescott-Yavapai Indian reservation—why not? While putting a “maybe” and an “I might” in front of this last sentence, I find myself evolving as I go along trying to decide what works best in the context of my lifestyle and for the bees. It is also my hope that after you've read this (and maybe other parts of my blog) that you'll grow confident in your own wild and crazy plans like I did! Love, Sharon

How's the ranch life?

This is the question I’ve been getting a lot lately. I’m not totally sure how to answer that question because I haven’t solidly wrapped my head around the fact that I’M WORKING AT A RANCH (and this has been a dream of mine since the urge to be with horses took hold in January). This is mostly my fault because I think my little stressed self had a hard time believing that someone would actually hire me. My life has not been the easiest for a lot of years so I just didn’t spend much time thinking about what life would be like after I started this job, just in case something happened to curtail it.

When I'm in a stall or paddock, I think about how much I’ve fought the waves of change. How I haven’t been as authentic as a could have been, and how I’ve been so timid with expressing who I am. I’m not very proud of this last year of my life, I feel like in many ways I’ve failed. There have been a few bright and shining moments where my head finally surfaced above the clouds and I actually got to SEE what I have and what I’m living, but many, many of them have been marked by fear.

So here’s what I’m learning now: the lesson that I have to learn over and over and over again. Surrender. I will never be able to control every aspect of my life. I may never know what the next six steps are. I may never know what’s next. But I am choosing to believe that whatever’s next, it will be OK. I have 50 years to tell me that whatever comes, I will BE OK. In the next month I will likely be sleeping out in the wildness with a herd of beloved horses or traveling to another country. I don’t know which pasture and if I for sure will be moving the herd, but I’m choosing to believe that whatever it is, that’s the place I'm suppose to be in. I’m choosing to remember that my life has always been orchestrated in ways more beautiful than I could ever have planned myself. I’m choosing to stop fighting the waves.

So anyway, how’s the ranch life? Right now I’m ENVELOPED IN THIS AWESOME ATMOSPHERE. I think it’s good. I keep looking at each horse I feed or water, across the stall, or across the paddock and I feel so incredibly thankful. I get to spend the rest of my life doing something like this. Most horses are incredibly patient with me and I think back to what I wished for, 4 years ago, when I was taking all of those blind steps forward, not knowing where I was going. I think back to those times when the hope of what could be in the future was all that got me through. And I realize that those things I hoped for, those things that I wanted deep in my bones, THOSE are the things I got. It’s like someone knew me and made it all happen. Love, Sharon