Friends, what is the one tool that makes building a million hive boxes and 8 million frames so much easier? This puppy. Which I bought on sale at Home Depot (once again, my good friend Patty Grady pulled through with good pricing and priceless customer service) and with which I am spending endless hours building and building and building in my basement.
You’ll need a Patty Grady, too.
Patty is one of Deb’s high-school friends, and she now works at the Home Depot on Highland Avenue. Sometimes those huge stores can sap the strength and energy from you because they’re so overwhelmingly big. Finding a little nut or bolt or screw in a big place like that can send me into a tailspin, but Patty pulls me right out of it.
Whenever I enter my Home Depot, I go straight to the Pro Desk and find Patty, who leaves her station to walk me all over the store and collect whatever I need. She steers me from bad decisions. She figures solutions. She’s saved me bundles in time and money, and I love following her up and down the aisles because she’s fun. And friendly. She knows everyone in that place. And if she doesn’t, then she’s sure got us all fooled.
Everyone needs a Patty. Especially if you build top-bar hives and restore metal lawn chairs.
I rode that scooter of mine all the way out to the Creation Museum and then completely forgot to take a single picture of Doug or of his bees there or of anything at the museum. What on earth is wrong with me? You know, I’m just not a big picture taker, and I completely forget to do it. I get caught up in stuff.
I caught the tail end of Doug’s lecture about bees. I’d say there were 30 people there, which surprised me. What surprised me even more was the number of people at the Creation Museum. It was flat-out packed. I thought that maybe my presence there would set off an alarm of some kind, but not one of the thousands of people there seemed to notice me.
We visited the 6 hives Doug keeps behind the gardens at the museum, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t see anything I hadn’t already seen. We opened only a couple of hives and pulled only a couple of frames from each, but I didn’t get to watch Doug make any decisions. And I guess that’s what I need…to watch experienced beekeepers make decisions based on what they see in the hive.
Doug’s a very very nice guy, and I want to shadow him as he works his hives and makes splits, but there just wasn’t much for him to do on this visit. One of Doug’s four sons, Elijah, was there, too…he’s about 7 years old…and, wow, is he comfortable with the bees. Amazing, isn’t it, how you can sort of see a kid’s future in how they do what they do at 7?
After I got home, Suzanne came to visit and we ran out to Home Depot for a hell of a lot of nails (because a lot of new 8-frame, medium-depth supers and all their frames arrived this week, and I get to hammer them all together), and then we grabbed an ice-cream cone at Hold the Nuts; then we came back to visit the bees…who, as you can see from these beards, are hot, too.
