A Boy and the Beekeeping Bug

By: Stephen Bishop

Men, if your wife is trying to tell you she’s pregnant, whatever you do, don’t turn to her and say, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

Not that I had three children already, I had three bee jackets. The fact is I didn’t have any children—my wife and I had been trying for years. Once you’ve been married for eight years, you start to resign yourself to the possibility that the only offspring you’ll hear in your house will be when you rediscover your long-lost burnt CD collection in a storage box1 (sorry, if you didn’t get that joke, it was really very clever—you just weren’t a teenager in the 1990s. Please refer to footnote #1 for historical joke context).

So I certainly wasn’t expecting to be greeted with life changing news when I walked through the door one Friday after a long day’s work. But on the kitchen counter was an envelope, my name written on it in my wife’s handwriting. That was unusual; normally, if my wife wanted to communicate with me, all she has to do was tell me the same thing at least two or three times—no writing was usually necessary. A card should have been a red flag because it wasn’t my birthday and, after a quick mental panic, I realized it wasn’t our anniversary either. But I didn’t have time to process the other alternatives because my wife then handed me the envelope and told me to open it.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“Just open it, and you’ll see,” she said.

Well, I didn’t see. The greeting card had two little cartoony bees on the inside, and it said, “I’m so happy to bee with you.” Underneath that, my wife had written, “It looks like you’re going to need a new bee suit.” And underneath that, she had drawn a tiny little bee, about the size of a popcorn kernel. Likely, because I’m a man and was too busy wondering where the gift card was to pay for said bee suit, I overlooked that baby bee and blurted out, “But I don’t need one, I’ve already got three.”

And my life has never been the same since. Thomas, my little baby bee, is now two years old, and I’m actually starting to shop for his first beekeeping apparel. He got his first sting a few weeks ago, on the ear lobe, and understandably he is now a little standoffish toward Apis mellifera. I hoping that having his very own toddler beekeeping suit will empower his interest in bees again. At the very least, I can put him in the suit and take him to the farmers’ market to help with marketing—who could resist buying honey from an adorable toddler in a beekeeping suit?

Secretly, I do hope that Thomas will one day enjoy beekeeping. Growing up, my dad always took me fishing and metal detecting, his two favorite hobbies, and some of my best memories are from spending time with him doing those two things. That said, beekeeping is a lot more like work than fishing or metal detecting, so I’m not terribly optimistic. Right now, Thomas mostly just like trains, firetrucks and tractors.

Even if the beekeeping bug doesn’t eventually bite Thomas, as his parent, I’ve still got a contingency plan—namely a teenager has got to develop a good work ethic, and there is no harder work than lugging honey supers around on a hot July day with your dad.

1In the 1990s, there was a popular band called The Offspring and this thing called Napster where teenagers downloaded music for free to record, a.k.a. to burn, onto CDs. This was more or less illegal, but everybody did it.