Certified Apprentice Beekeeper

Tonight, after five weeks of beekeeping classes that cut into Monday night dinners and TV shows, it came to a grueling finale with the test. Open book, ten questions for each of the ten lessons, totalling one hundred questions. You'd think it would be easy, what with questions like these...

Number 6 answer is wrong.

Well, it ain't that easy sister! Because some of the questions are quite tricky. Even Palomino who has read books about beekeeping, met with beekeepers, and actually has a subscription to American Bee Journal, would agree that some of the questions are more confusing than a simple "True" or "False".

Despite the trickery, John was the third to submit his test in the class. In the meantime, Alfonsina took her test up to one of the professors. Let me tell you something about Alfonsina. For someone who has been pulled over by the Police more times than I can count on two hands (ahem, I'm exaggerating with quantity, wanting my story to sound quite dramatic), she's gotten only one speeding ticket ever! That's because she will approach the ticketing officer with such absolute authority and tell him straight up "No, you cannot give me that ticket!" Perhaps it's her accent, perhaps it's her tenacity, or maybe even her fiery personality that makes the officer put away his pen and rip up the ticket.

After a whispered debate, dramatized by hand gestures and intense facial expressions, the professor said something to make Alfonsina take the eraser of her pencil to the test paper, and re-write an answer. Then she turned in her test.

And there I was, ten minutes later, still struggling to find the answer to questions like True or false: A deep hive body may be used as a super to store surplus honey. Well, a deep hive body (box) is 19 7/8" in length, 16 1/4" wide and 9 5/8" in height; and when loaded with honey at the end of summer can weigh up to sixty pounds! So I instinctively answered False, because heck if I'm going to lift a sixty-pound box from a stack as tall as me.

Another question that stumped me was True or False: You must always feed a swarm. A swarm is when the colony of bees pack up and leave the hive in search for another one. Well, how the heck do you feed a swarm of bees that has taken to the air, or convened on a branch high up in a tree? So of course I answered False.

Then Palomino started heckling me. "Hurry up!" he hissed. "I wanna get atta here already!" Then he elbowed me to look at a message he'd drawn on the cover of his lessons book. That arrow would have pointed to me, and of course the character crying for help would have been yours truly. I could hear Alfonsina chuckling behind him.

In the end, we all passed, the test scores in ascending order, irrespective of finishing order, being 92, 94, 97.


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