There’s nothing like a bee swarm to get the day started. Here in Skejberg, Norway I’m with Hans-Otto at one of his hundreds of honey hives. He was a day late in visiting them and his bees swarmed. Swarming is what happens when the hives get too full of honey and eggs — the queen bee leaves the colony with a large group of worker bees and they start building a new honeycomb on a natural place of their choosing. To solve this problem, we stacked more wooden frames on top of the existing ones (it’s basically like adding another floor to your house) and then lit a smoker. The smoker makes them sleepy and they try to get away from it. In this case we smoked them from the bottom so that they moved upward into the new floor of their house. Voila! To read more about Hans and the 50,000 sisters, pick up a copy of my book “Food Heroes.”
