respectably looney

Ryan agreed that he might be fair game for a blog post.


I can hear what my sisters are thinking all the way from here, but it's his first time, so I feel I should be gentle.
I'll start out with the beehive. Way back last summer he was wistfully bemoaning the fact that I wouldn't consent to a beehive in my backyard (and by that I mean an actual beehive in my actual backyard, no euphemisms). In one of those moments of marital clarity, I shot back that when he quit smoking he could have his damn beehive, and sure enough, January 24 was the quit date and he never looked back. Actually he smoked a cigarette about a month ago, after which I explained to him using very small words what I would do to him and which parts of his anatomy would be involved should that happen again because I am not raising my beautiful children to be smokers so help me, but that is neither here nor there, unless it happens again and the bees have to find a new home. I don't think it will. He loves these bees.
The beehive arrived by mail about a month before the bees, which was fortunate, as it took Ryan about a month to decide where to place the beehive, construct a platform at the proper height, use his smartphone's GPS to make sure the beehive entrance was facing Southeast, and get out the old-fashioned green-bubble level to make sure it was flat (what the hell, Ryan's smart device? You can surf the web but you can't level a beehive? I guess there are limits to what Droid does, after all), and then change his mind about the location and go through the whole procedure in a different spot (atop the chicken coop! On the roof! Three inches to the left of the first location!). This is also how he rearranges furniture, but that is a whole 'nother blog post.
So at last the bees arrived, which was an unbelievable production (I found out later from my sister the bee expert that most people who have bees mail-order them from a bee factory, but ours are wild-caught, organic, free-range mountain bees, snatched out of their pristine home by some lady in Boulder and put in a cardboard box, then passed on to another lady who happened to be driving our way that night, and left on our porch at about midnight, since she passed through later than she planned) and our up-the-street beekeeping neighbors came over first thing in the morning to assist (Inga) and/or videotape and laugh from a safe distance (Nathan). I was in charge of herding the boys out of harm's way (five boys five-and-under including theirs - I don't see anything that could possibly go wrong there)
So Ryan and Inga suited up in bee armor and prepared to transfer the swarm from the box to the hive. The bees were all sort of bunched up on a couple of wooden rails, which should have lifted out of the box and into the hive before the bees even knew anything had changed, but of course the rails were too wide to fit into our hive. Some swearing ensued, the kids and I moved back about ten yards, then the intrepid Inga proceeded to whack the bunched-up bees off of the rail in the general direction of the open hive. Suddenly there were about three thousand disturbed bees humming around in a disturbed-bee-cloud by our back door. The kids and I moved back about half a block. I missed most of what happened next, but there were only a handful of stings and it only took the bees about six hours to find their way into the hive, where they are busily building combs and pollinating local flowering shrubbery (saving the world, really) as we speak.