Melania Trump unveils a White House replica beehive buzzing with new colonies on the South Lawn

First lady Melania Trump on Friday announced a sweet new addition to the South Lawn, expanding the White House honey program with a newly installed and fully functioning beehive modeled after the executive mansion.

The queen-worthy new hive, hand-crafted by a local Virginia artisan in the image of the White House, will add two new bee colonies to the property’s existing two.

That seems like a good idea, but it’s not going to stay pretty.  Everything about bees is sticky.  Melania can probably call Goddard Space Flight Center and get a new mini White House printed up.  NASA has large volume 3-D printers, and they are only 6 miles away.

I just made that up, but it probably is 3-D printed.  The roof of the portico is the only tricky part, and that could be printed separately and glued on.   The inside is empty to receive frames, so the walls could be pretty thin.

Melania should release the 3-D printer file so beekeepers could fabricate their own White Houses.

The article says a local artisan built that, but I doubt it.  3-D printing is the way to go.

The queen-worthy new hive, hand-crafted by a local Virginia artisan in the image of the White House, will add two new bee colonies to the property’s existing two.

It isn’t very practical.  That is the brood box, where the queen lays eggs and raises bee babies.  When the bees are making honey, like now and in the fall, boxes are added for honey production.  There is a thin panel, called a queen excluder, that can be added to keep the queen in the brood box and away from the honeycombs on top.

Bee hives were kept on the grounds when White House carpenter, Charlie Brandt, started keeping bees around 2007.  That was just about the time that people started talking worker bees dying off from Colony Collapse Disorder.  The White House beehives became official in 2009.

A couple of years after that, I started keeping bees.  They were really good for pollinating my fruit trees.  My favorite part about keeping bees, was being the “bee guy” at school.

Bees were a hot topic, and they remain endlessly fascinating.  My go-to bee fact was that a male bee, a drone, has a grandfather, but not a father.  A drone comes from an unfertilized egg.  Fertilized eggs produce workers and queens, both female bees.

The wondrous properties of raw, local honey was also a popular topic.  I doubt most of it, but taking a spoonful of honey each day seems like it could help with hay fever and seasonal allergies.  Local honey would include local pollen, so a person’s immune system could gradually adapt.  

I sold my honey at school, and occasionally gave it away when I screwed something up.  I was really bad at taking attendance.  That’s important, but with my students, was rarely a problem.  When the attendance clerk, Cheryl, called me with a specific attendance issue, I would give her a jar of honey and apologize. 

One year, I neglected to attend my pre-observation meeting with an assistant principal.  That’s certainly unprofessional, and might be disrespectful.  I apologized and offered her a jar of honey.  She declined the offer, but I was prepared for that.

“In my culture, it’s customary to offer a jar of honey as an act of contrition.  It is considered a grave insult to refuse a gift of honey.  Very bad juju.”

Yeah, it’s stupid, but she accepted the honey.  It’s difficult to be mad at a fella after that.

I wasn’t in the bee business to turn a profit, but to add to my mystique.  The presentation needed to show that I was committed to the project.

I didn’t get a color printer to make the labels, but I did order oval stickers and the nice, food-safe, jars.  At my scale, that is about a dollar for packaging.

Melania Trump is a fancy, sophisticated lady, so her honey presentation reflects that.

A wooden lid and glass jar, she’s probably in for two bucks just for packaging.  The Department of Agriculture requires the net weight in ounces and grams, along with name and address.  Maybe that’s on the back, but since her husband appointed Brooke Rollins to be the Secretary of Agriculture, it’s probably fine.

Not like anyone who is given one of these jars would ever use the honey.

It’s a nice photo.  One bee, probably phony, resting on the center jar.  A blooming houseplant that is superfluous to honey production, adding some color and a wicker basket background to match the hue of the honey.

The expansion is expected to boost annual honey production by an estimated 30 pounds, allowing for even greater use in preparing White House culinary dishes, serving as official gifts from the president and the first lady and supporting charitable donations of healthy foods to local food kitchens, according to the Office of the First Lady.

They are going to pull a couple of hundred pounds of honey. That seems like a lot when it’s in four 5 gallon pickle buckets, but that won’t go far at the White House.   I’m sure some of it gets used in White House culinary dishes.  People love shit like that.  A jar of White House honey is a great gift for the staff that keeps the house and grounds, but there may be hundreds of people at that level.