“The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey … and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”

— Winnie the Pooh in A.A. Milne’s “The House at Pooh Corner” 

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Starting a hive takes several types of boxes and frames.

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The box arrived about two weeks before Christmas, and was so big it sat on the front porch until my husband got my niece to help him wrap it on Christmas Eve.

I didn’t let on, but I knew what was in it, or it least I hoped I knew: hive boxes for bees.

Last summer, I got it in my head that I wanted to raise bees. It started as a desire to have my very own honey, but became a secret longing for something outside myself — something I could work with my hands and, like Pooh, claim for my own.

On Christmas Day my hopes came to fruition. My box held brood chambers, and super boxes that house the frames that hold the hives, plus a hive tool, a smoker and a suit complete with one of those Dr. Doolittle-type nets to wear over the face.

By January my birthday came, bringing with it another special gift. My parents paid for a one-day class given by the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers’ Association. I attended “An Introduction to Honey Bees and Beekeeping,” which promised to teach “basic facts about honey bees, plant pollination and the fundamentals of beekeeping,” at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

After a day of meeting with expert entomologists and folks from around the metro area who raise bees, I’m stung, so to speak. I cannot think of a creature on the planet more special than the honey bee.

I learned the terminology for raising bees, from the bee’s anatomy to the boxes and tools used to raise them. The brood (larva and pupa) of the hive are raised in what’s called a brood chamber (old timers call these “deeps,” because they are, well, deep boxes). Super boxes are placed on top of these, with movable frames, for the bees to store surplus honey — the honey that the beekeeper harvests.

Metal containers called smokers are used to pump smoke into the colony, disorienting our fuzzy friends and subsequently disarming them, allowing the beekeeper to work without getting stung (at least not too many times).

I learned the seasons of bees. Early spring is the busiest time, called build up; by midsummer, if the colony has been healthy, the honey harvest comes. Dearth brings a falling off of activity in autumn, and the bees rest in winter, taking care only to feed themselves.

Queens are the center of success for a colony because they lay all the eggs, but it’s the female worker bees that make all the decisions and do all the work. Male drones, except for mating, are completely expendable. The system has been in place since the dawn of time, and honey is one of the oldest harvested substances known to man — it’s estimated that we’ve been doing it for more than 10,000 years.

And of course, there are so many other byproducts of bees than just honey: super-rich, supernutritious royal jelly (fed to the queen by the worker bees) is prized as a diet aid and emollient for looking younger; beeswax, of course; bee pollen. Without the pollination provided by honey bees, one-third of the globe’s vegetation would vanish.

I spent a few moments walking around the gardens after the class was over. It had been a miserably cold morning, but now the sun was out and it was warm, like spring. I had a met a lot of really nice people — there is a kind patience innate in beekeepers. I had learned a lot.

But it was the thought of a bunch of boxes, painted white and stacked outside my dad’s old barn, that I kept going back to. And the bees (which will arrive in a “nucleus box” by mid-April). Busy bees. They ask for nothing, and give us so much. Including peace of mind.