For the love of bees!

I have a love/hate relationship with bees. I like how they look in my quilts, so that definitely makes them useful. I like how they have this whole pollinating thing going on that is useful to all of us and I like honey, in fact I love honey. So I think that is where the love thing comes in. Now comes the hate thing. A few years back I came downstairs one morning, made coffee as is my usually routine and when I went to set it down on the dining room table I seen there was a sticky substance. With further examination I found that this sticky substance not only was on the table but also on the floor, coming down the wall and going across the top of the ceiling. We had this whole Amityville thing going on. My initial reaction was to run out the door screaming, call in the media and make some instant cash off of our house of horrors. But common sense and past experiences told me this was just another round of bad luck with our old house. Husband comes home, sticks his finger in it and then licks it, “ummmm honey”. Okay so now we know we don’t have some kind of poltergeist taking over, but we definitely have a bee problem. It seems the bees had moved into the floor of our bedroom. How this happened I don’t know. It was decided that we would have the bees smoked out and then we would do the clean-up. This consisted of pulling our floor boards up and removing a whole bunch of honey combs, honey, etc. from inside the floor/ceiling. What a job, we removed buckets full. We then laid floor dry to seep up more honey and then removed it. After the job was done we re-laid our floor and went back to our less then normal life. How did these bees move in? They obviously worked very hard at what they were doing, how did I not hear them? Since this experience bees have shown up quite often in my work. They always look kind of cute, something I now know is not true. But I now have a connection to these bees. A connection to this circle of life that is happening around us (sometimes closer then we think) even when we are not thinking about it (or possibly when we are sleeping above it)!
M’s Easter baskets usually have a theme. One year it was bees! Flower seeds to plant,
a book on bees, a little dress with bees on it and a little wool purse with bees!