Day 5: And it hasn't even been a week

Began the day with some finishing touches on the sharpening of my cutlass. Once done we drove to the area where we will be creating a new apiary. We were to create a pathway for the car to drive through. Hundreds of branches and trees and shrubs and vines had previously blocked the way, but we took care of them. However a slight injury had to end this journey early.

Once back at the house, we suited off, and were off to the bees. A neighbor came over who had a few hives in this apiary and we went through her hives to make sure each had a queen. We went through five and only 1 was without a queen, so we will have to deal with that another day. One of the other hives appeared as though they were about to swarm. This is when there are too many bees and not enough space in the hive, so thousands of bees fly off together to find a larger location. Because this would be bad for the beekeeper, as he would be losing all of his bees, we preformed a synthetic swarm. We built a larger hive, found the queen in the old one, and moved her over to the new hive. We then took a few of the combs from the old hive, as well as about half of the bees, and added them to the new hive. Soon we will add another queen to the old hive, and with any luck, both hives will be flourishing again, and no bees will be swarming to a new location. We came back for a lunch break, and the father asked if we wanted to go finish off the last 3 hives. I figured I'd stay back and consider it a solid day of going sting free.

It was only about 2:30pm at this point. For lunch we had the national fruit of Jamaica- Ackee. They looked kind of like peaches with large grapes inside, but tasted similar to eggs.

As I thought the day was over I threw on some bug repellant and was ready to relax. But I was mistaken. We took a drive to another apiary that I did not even know existed. We were just going to check on the area, so no suits were needed. Well, apparently bees are attracted to insect repellant, who knew? So as we cruised by we came across a coconut tree with orange coconuts. As I enjoyed my coconut water minding my own business, sting #6 got me in the face. And then they continued attacking so we, or at least I, made a run for it down the overgrown path.

Continuing down this path the father took us to his banana trees that he had planted about a year back, they were soon ready to produce. We continued down the path to a Cocoa tree. The cocoa pods were not as I expected. You can cut them open, suck on the seeds, which have a rather citrusy flavor, and spit them out, or even plant them.

 Our last stop of the day was this gigantic Jack fruit tree. These were like nothing I had seen before and were a great treat to top off another eventful day.