Saturday, March 30, 2013

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.

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