Day #28 Grannie's Bee Lessons

My grandkids came to visit Friday night while their mother was at an awards dinner for The Hope Clinic in Lawrenceville. We had great fun. We ate stove toast (I don't have a toaster, so I toast bread by buttering the slices and frying them in a saute pan until they're golden brown - the kids think it's goumet fare). They drew monster pictures and fancy designs. We heated up some soup and ate it. They told jokes. We made butter from some extra creamy goat's milk, and ate it on crackers. We baked Grannie's special Molasses Chewy Cookies, and then we ate some of them. Let me know if you want the recipe. I'm going to try to make it with my homegrown honey next year.

For somebody who's never liked to cook, I sure do a lot of it around my grandkids.

Anyway after the cookies, they asked me about the yellow four-tiered hive I have sitting in my dining room. So I took it apart and explained all the pieces. Then the questions came about how the bees operate, how they find the flowers to pollinate, why there's only one queen per hive, why to use a queen excluder (one of the parts of the hive), and how bees find their way home if they fly five miles away from the hive.

We talked about bees for about two hours. For a fifth-grader and a second-grader, that's a long attention span. Then it was time for them to leave. I sent them home with some cookies in a bag.