Falling in love with Richard Taylor

[tillie]

I am off today and am reading The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor.  I can't put it down.  He describes exactly how I feel standing on my deck between my hives:

"One of the joys of a woodlot yard is to look skyward in the spring, through a break in the foliage, to see the thousands of bees cascading in like a waterfall and rising in equal numbers to scatter over the countryside for miles around. How they do this without constant collision I cannot imagine. They stream upward and downward without any interference whatever, threading their individual irregular paths with such speed that it would be difficult to follow them if there were not such numbers. They are oblivious to me, even though I may be standing directly beneath the break in the foliage that is their entrance to the yard. They swoop past me on every side, then each to its own hive, which is indelibly fixed in its memory from among the twenty or more hives that are there.

The spectacle is greatest in spring, when each bee seems to feel that the destiny of the race depends upon its wings. I may stand directly in front of a hive, into which the bees were pouring a moment ago until I obstructed the approach, but they do not dream of attacking. They are driven by the need to forage, gather and bring home. But when I step aside, restoring the familiar sight of the hive, they descend upon it in a cloud. They display every color of the rainbow, for they are carrying large and colorful pellets of pollen on their hind legs, gathered from dandelions, willows, rockets and other spring flowers. This pollen is the "bee bread," as beekeepers call it, intended not for themselves, but for their rapidly developing larval brood. It is an inspiring spectacle."...The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor, pg. 31

Oh, my,

Linda T in Atlanta

[doak]

I forget which one of his 2 books I have read, but that was several years before I got started.
I read it several times before and then after I started.
doak

[Moonshae]

He must have more dexterous bees then I do. I stand at the entrance to my 10 × 10 "beeyard", which is at the rear of my two hives, and the bees occasionally crash right into me. They also manage to land strangely and flip themselves onto their backs on top of the hives, although they quickly right themselves and fly away after that.

[Michael Bush]

I do like Taylor.  I have "The How-To-Do-It Book of Beekeeping", "The Comb Honey Book and "The Joys of Beekeeping".

[MarkR]

Joys of Beekeeping is the book that first got me interested.  It's still on my bedside table.

Mark