Did you hear the buzz? : Kelly Jo Drey

I believe my endless need to make something is to blame on my Grandma Mary.  She was an excellent woman who always wanted to walk every craft booth at Santa-Cali-Gon.  You could see her taking mental notes of what was up and coming in the craft world so she could take it back home to her little town of Crocker, MO.  On visits all I wanted to do as a child was stare at her tallest armoire of fabric, pick through drawers of felt, and hide behind the "large container of orange juice".  (This orange juice was probably the largest roll of batting you have ever seen, covered in an even larger orange trash bag.)  

While living in Crocker, my grandma had 9 granddaughters, no boys.  (Mikayla, I haven't forgotten about you, you just were not around then).  Every summer all of the girls tried their best to go spend a week or two at grandmas.  We would play dress up in the apartments on their property, follow grandpa into his garden, and occasionally make houses out of grass clippings.  

I now know how much grandma stressed about us all coming to her house.  She would plan group crafts all of us were able to participate in.  We made barbie furniture and clothes out of reused trash she collected over the year.  We would participate in "Christmas in July", where we would all be assigned a cousin to hand make a gift for them before we got to grandma's house.  I don't remember what I made back then, but I know Samantha had cross-stiched a Ziggy character sitting on the word HI for me.  Loved it!

Trying to keep the memory of Grandma alive.   I came up with a challenge for my cousins to be creative and let me post it on my blog.  

First up:  Kelly Jo Drey and her newly installed bee hive - The oldest of us girls, aka the officiant of our mock weddings playing dress up.

The ecologist in me is completely smitten with social insects and has been ever since I took a tropical field biology course in Mexico over ten years ago. Natural selection ensures that all creatures are- -ultimately-- concerned with passing their genes on to their offspring. Having babies. But honeybees exhibit colony-level reproduction. They work as a group, each individual bee a living thing, yet an integral part of a larger organism. The queen bee lays ALL of the eggs. And the worker bees devote their lives to taking care of their sisters-- not their own babies. (That’s right, most of the bees in a colony are female. How cool is that.) This behavior is pretty rare in nature, and utterly fascinating to me.

The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.

~Saint John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople~

I didn’t deliberately set out to become a beekeeper, however. I was required to take an introduction to beekeeping workshop during the sustainable agriculture component of my graduate degree. Members of the local beekeepers’ association taught the course. They encouraged us to sit near our hives and marvel at the zen-like nature of our bees. This made perfect sense to me. A year later, a more intensive course was offered at the local community college, so I signed up. Then Bart gave me a whole bunch of beekeeping equipment as a Christmas gift and that sealed the deal.

The bees were ordered months in advance and the fact that I would need to pick them up (at the beekeeping supply store in North Carolina) on Mother’s Day was non-negotiable. A lot had changed in my life between Christmas and Mother’s Day. I decided the least stressful course of action-- for the bees, anyway-- would be to pick up the “package” on the appointed day, drive them to my (their) new home in West Virginia, assemble the hive, and install them there. Mind you, I was not planning to actually move in to the new place until two weeks later. Thankfully, my good friend (and new neighbor) Savanna agreed to keep an eye on the hive in the meantime. So, I loaded up the backseat of my car with beekeeping equipment, put the bees in the passenger seat next to me, and away we went!

This all happened three weeks ago. I opened up the hive again today to check on their progress and they seem to be doing everything one would expect them to be doing: building comb, storing nectar and pollen, rearing brood. The first round of baby workers should be hatching any day now and the colony will (hopefully) only grow from there.

When Jennifer asked her cousins to write a blog post about something we do that is crafty or creative, she suggested I might feature my beekeeping. Beekeeping is awesome, but it hardly makes me feel “crafty.” I just have a hard time taking all the credit here. It is the bees, after all-- my enchanting, gentle, diligent bees-- that are doing all the work.

The happiness of the bee…is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it.

~Jacques Cousteau~

Thank you Kelly!  I hope this inspires your sisters and mine to be adventurous and try something new!

Jennifer