Bees are the New Black

          We visited my parents last week, because my dad decided he wanted to keep bees. K, who used to keep bees, said he'd act in a consulting capacity, which I imagined, in my innocence, to be telephone and email answers to Dad's questions. Next thing I knew, we had driven across Kansas,  zeroed in on a beekeeping supply store in Denver, and were purchasing a hive and all the gear, to go along with Dad's hive. Bees will be coming in May. I suspect commuter beekeeping will follow, even though 600 miles is a long way to drive to tend bees.

          I understand from my current-events reading that backyard beekeeping is now the latest thing, ever so much hipper and trendier than backyard chicken-keeping. It is to laugh that something which requires you to dress up like this:

is currently considered the sine qua non of hipsterosity. I didn't think hipsters had much tolerance for clothing that makes you look like a slightly more ridiculous version of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. And frankly, beekeeping has more an air of the elderly eccentric* than of the chic coffeehouse denizen.

          Physical labor is involved as well, which seems antithetical to hipsterism.

          But there you go. Bees. They're hip.

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*And I do feel that my dad fits more firmly into this category—especially the "eccentric" part—than into the "chic coffeehouse denizen" category. He doesn't even like coffee.