Busy bee

Today was so great- it's a day that I will ever forget!
A group of us went to a bee institute about 30 minutes outside of Prague (in a very small town, Dol) to see how bees behave, produce honey, wax, etc. It was really interesting, and I definitely enjoyed the free samples of honey we got :)
We left Prague at about 10am, and rolled through the countryside by train over to Dol- it was a gorgeous train ride along the Vltava River, and I got some pretty good pictures, which you can see on my online photo album!

When we arrived to the institute, we started right off by going up to see the hives. I will admit, I was a little bit nervous because I didn't want to be stung and attacked by thousands of bees (after all, we were about to go approach the homes of almost 1 million bees). But we were reassured by our guide that everything would be okay, as long as we stayed calm and didn't get "aggressive" with the bees. And it actually turned out to be a lot of fun! We were able to see up close how bees produce honey, feed on honey, the eggs they produce in the honeycombs, and even seeing bees "hatching" from the honeycombs. It was amazing! I even got to hold some of the honeycombs, and pet the bees.

Looky looky!

After that, we got to eat lunch, complete with bread and lots of different flavors of honey! There were so many different types: sunflower, lime, buckwheat, honeydew honey, and others that I can't remember. My favorite was the sunflower honey :) We also got a taste of honey wine. Honey wine is VERY strong, as in 18% strong... so we only had very small glasses to try. It was good, but it kind of reminded me of Robitussin cough medicine. Maybe it's an acquired taste. In addition to all these delicious honey treats, we also tried honey chocolate. That was by far my favorite thing I ate today, maybe even on this entire trip. I bought a bar to bring home with me, but I ended up eating it on the train back to Prague- oopsies.
The rest of the weekend, I plan on spending in the studio to get some good work done on my costume. Wish me luck!! I'm going to be very busy trying to get this done within the next week!