The bee keeper

I live on a 80 acre farm, mostly woods with around 50 or so blueberry bushes, muscadine vines and various fruit and nut trees so my desire to have bee's fell right in with growing all this fruit. I took a couple of classes, read several books and articles and picked the brains of some local bee keepers. I decided I'd wait abit on becoming a bee keeper, alot of expense envolved and then what bee's to choose? Then one day as I was going out to feed I saw what looked like a living, squirming pizza platter on the ground. I thought it was yellow jackets because we have alot of those around but to be on the safe side I asked a neighbor to take a look. Mr Bruce is a contankerous old butt thats know alot about alot. He came out to take a look and declared the swarm honey bees. I was thrilled,part of my hesitation with getting bees had been solved for me no choices to be made. Now while I was calling around for bee hives Mr Bruce is out there giving my newly found swarm away to a nearby neighbor. When I told him I was keeping the bees his exact words were " Well good God damn" and then he preceded to tell my sister how much I didn't know and call me stupid in the process. I set out to prove him wrong. Kendra and I rushed to a local garden center and bought a hive body and frames. Kendra started assembling the hive inthe truck onthe way home.Now the fun begins, we got the hive body nailed together and set it on the ground and stared at one another. How do you get the bee's inside?
Kendra had heard that laying a sheet of white paper onthe ground in front of the hive and then tapping on the rear wall of the hive would entice the bees inside. Sounded like bull to me but we tried it. So there we both set on either side of the swarm of honey bees, piece of notebook paper on the ground, tapping on the hive body and danmed if those bees didin't start marching into the hive body single file. I couldn't believe it worked, well sort of. There are several thousand bees in a swarm and this was a big swarm, as abig around as a pizza platter and about 3 inches thick. It was gonna take days for them to file in single file, so I got a bright idea to speed them along. I took a spatula the kind you use to flip hamburgers and started scooping the bees into the hive, this freaked Kendra out. She's deathly afraid of being stung but forgot to mention it. So she's tapping on the hive and I'm scooping with my spatula and the kids are filming the crazy ladies playing with bees. It took awhile but we finally got them all in the hive them we stuffed grass cilppings in the opening till they settled down. Neither of us got stung, yea!
The next day my bees were gone they had once again swarmed. They were now about 30 feet up in a tree and the swarm was 3 times the size it had been, guess the scagglers had finally showed up. This time we enlisted Dell's help. First we layed a white sheet on the ground and tried shaking them out,no luck. Next we tried the water hose, wet down their wings and they would drop to the sheet, about a tenth of them dropped. Then Dell decided we had to cut the tree, so he painstakingly saws the tree so that it will gently fall to the ground.He had it going good, the tree slowly decended till the last few feet when it smacked the ground with a thud. The bees went nuts flying every where. Kendra and Dell went nuts too, both scared of being stung. Stupid me held my ground. Eventually the bees settled down in two swarms, one on the ground under the branches and one on the trunk of the tree running parallel 3 feet above me.
More bright ideas, we tried the hose again, this time the bees covered me head to toe. I got stung once under the arm when I accidentally sqooshed a bee and on the thigh, another sqoosh. We decided to back the truck u nder the tree trunk and scrap the bees into the hive, again using the trusty spatula. worked great. Next we did the paper runway and spatula method onthe bees still on the ground. It took a while, couple of hours but we got them all in and they stayed this time. I now have a hive full of little industrious bees and frames full of lucious honey. I've been stung 4 times including the two when we caught the bees, all of them my fault. I keep accidentally squishing them when they crawl on me. I am now officially a bee keeper and expect great things from the experience..... and honey of course.