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What happens today?  It is a mystery, to me.  Seriously!  136 episodes, we record every two weeks, and suddenly I no show?

Here’s the scoop!  I have 2 beehives in my backyard, that my brother and I try to keep alive and maybe get some honey out of.  It’s been going pretty poorly because we’re terrible at this, and bees are strangely like cows or sheep or babies in that if left alone they’re more or less surely going to die.  Bees are pretty tricky because in the process of dying they will send tens of thousands of bees out to find a new home (this is called swaming and is the natural reporducive path of the bee).  But if the bees are flying off to found a new hive they steal half your honey (and half your bees) and this is especially bad in the middle of a big city because who the hell wants 20k bees to show up unannounced.  Anyway, we had 2 swarms (maybe more) earlier in the year and we really don’t want to piss our neighbors off anymore, so we have a bee guru who showed up to help us out.  And get paid.

Anyway, bee guru is doing his thing and my brother is like “oh snap, I gotta get to this thing” and so I hop in the suit and spend 3 hours rearranging the bees’ homes.  It’s pretty interesting.  The comb is used for several purposes.  Storing honey you’re familiar with.  They also make cells to incubate larva into drones, into workers, and into queens.  The comb looks different depending on what’s going inside, so you can sort of tell what your queen is “thinking”.  Also, if she’s laying too much or too little of one type of cell you can tell if she’s crazy or unhappy or whatever.  Our comb was a total mess, and you can reorganize the combs to make sure the queen is on the right track.

Took us hours, and the whole time my phone is in the house while I’m outside.  What happens when you’re away from your podcast alarms?  Derp.

The bed music during our advertising is an old loop by Dan of Steel!

The bed music while we explain what the episode is about is Son of a Bit “Chased by a Running Chupacabra” used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Finally, the song we use in the intro is “Shiny Spaceship” by the 8-bit Ninjas.  Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License