Hundreds of dogs and thousands of bees....

Last weekend was full of creatures of all sizes. First of all, Stuart and I went to the SPCA of Wake County dog walk in Moore Square in Raleigh...lots of fun.
We saw the biggest dog ever. See photo:



Lucy was just fine around all the other dogs, although too excited to eat the doggie yogurt that I bought for her!

Then, Saturday afternoon, we checked on Stuart's bees (all 20,000 of them). I was a little nervous and agreed to only watch. First, we had to "smoke" the bees with a few puffs of smoke from the mechanical smoking device. This just makes them sleepy and slower. As I stood there a few feet away from the first hive, we saw a large block of honeycomb just fall from one of the frames and he wanted to pick it up to either take out or put on top of the hive for them to dismantle and use on one of the frames. But the only way to do that was to reach into the hive itself. He had to remove one more frame and was already holding one gently resting on it's edge. He replaced the one he was holding and then pulled out the second frame. He needed me to hold the edges. I was afraid, but slowly stepped up and held the edges. The sound of buzzing surrounded us and I think I stop breathing, in a miconcerted effort to seem relaxed around the bees. They just buzzed away, really ignoring us thankfully. I had to look away for a moment or two to try to _not_ think about the thousands of bees within touching distance. I did at least have the protective head gear with net on and long sleeved and pants on. Once we were done with the first beehive, we had to repeat the whole thing at the second one.

After the whole afternoon full of fun and creatures, I was exhausted and found my way to the hammock for an afternoon siesta!

Although we didn't record our bee outing, Stuart recorded the first weekend with his bees. Check it out: