Time to Catch Some Bees!

Time to Catch Some Bees!
Originally uploaded by Beaver w/ a Toothbrush

This weekend we had fun assembling and painting our new bee stuff. The finished product is sitting in a nice shady place waiting for some new residents.

We picked the boxes up on Saturday and started putting them together. Each board was first glued and then held together with a ton of nails. When these are full of honey they may weigh around 30 pounds so I guess that's why they need so many nails. We traced the pieces first so we can make them ourselves in the future.

I noticed that I'm slightly better with a hammer after one beer. Since my hammer skills quickly degraded back to my usual nail bending upon starting the second beer I didn't risk any more.

Painting the boxes was fun because the oops paint ended up being really nice stuff: one-coat coverage, lifetime guarantee, low VOC. If I ever see any more Kilz oops paint I'm going to pick it up for sure (as long as it's not some crazy color). We barely used any of it so it'll be showing up in other projects.

After all the boxes and frames were assembled, Husband dabbed some lemongrass oil around the entrance and interior of the boxes. It's supposed to attract bees like crazy. I hope it will work. I wasn't too excited about bees when I had just read some stuff or heard about them but now that we've built the boxes I can't wait to get some.

Now we're just waiting for the bees to show up. We'll buy some if we don't attract any before too long but there are so many bees around we're hoping we won't have to buy any. =)