Starting the Journey

Oh what a wonderful thing to be
A healthy, happy, busy, buzzy bee
What a wonderful way to while the hours
Supping up the nectar on the open flowers

I decided to create this blogg to share my experiences on my journey into working with bees - to share my learning, mistakes, insights, frustrations, joy, anguish, insights, thoughts and inspirations.  I say working with bees rather than beekeeping, because I believe that bees are wild and wonderful spiritual creatures, messengers of the gods, from whom we can learn a lot if we just but listen rather than seeking to control for our own ends.  The blogg will also therefore contain details of meditations and rituals, as well as a log of my attempts to establish a colony of bees in my garden.
My fascination with bees began when I was a small child, when I used to watch them in the garden of my parents house, and sometimes catch them in my hands and talk to them, on some occasions putting single bees that I had caught in my bare hands into jam jars temporarily in the hope that they would give me some honey - I didn't really understand how the bee/honey thing worked back then; how much work goes into producing honey, how nectar has to be gathered, transformed in the bees honey stomach, and condensed down in the hive through fanning and evaporation.  I just knew that bees gave us honey, and therefore they were my friends.   I would let them go after a short while, and they would buzz off on their way.  I never got stung.
As an adult I have been stung twice by bees, on both occasions I had accidentally either trodden on a bee with bare feet, or having felt a tickle on my foot, rubbed my foot with the other foot, squashing a bee.  I can't really blame them for stinging under such circumstances, and although it hurt, I felt more upset that I had killed the bee.  But even in stinging me, the bee gave me a gift.  Bee venom is therapeutic for a number of conditions, such as arthritis, rheumatism, tendonitis, and the sting in my left foot greatly alleviated the tendonitis I had been suffering with in my left ankle.  Bee venom therapy is an interesting subject, but it is a shame that the bee generally has to die when it stings.  However, something I learned on a Natural Beekeeping course I attended recently, is that if you can manage to stay very calm when a bee stings you, and resist the urge to brush it away, but stay still, the bee can sometimes manage to pull its sting out of your flesh and remain intact and so survive.  Sometimes, giving it a very gentle nudge can help it pull its sting out.  I hope that the next time I am stung I can see it as a gift, a blessing of the Goddess and manage to do that!
Blessed Bee