A trip up north

Today, I went on a trip to Malaysia to gather some data for our project work.

We met in the morning and got Tasya's parents to drive us up.

We talked.

We slept.

Jessica leaned on me.

I felt like the Titan Atlas from greek mythology, the person who held the sky up, except I was bearing the weight of the world on my shoulders.

We managed to find the place we wanted but to our dismay, all they had were bee specimens and products. We wanted to ask them some questions for our data collection but they weren't the people we were expecting to find. All they did was to promote their bee products.

We found a bee farm not far off and saw a guy behind the counter. The area looked the same but it was alot smaller. We threw some questions at him and he gave us some answers. Though little, we though it was helpful enough. He told us there was more ahead if we followed the dirt road and we did.

We came to this huge plot of land with boxes of bees everywhere and fortunately enough for us, there was an expert in the area. Relieved to find someone we could finally talk to, we started shot our arsenal of questions at him and he gladly responded to each one of them. We also found out that the answers we got from the guy behind the counter from before weren't accurate.

After some talking, he proceeded to show us the bees. He opened up the lid of the boxes and took out a jar with wax inside. It was beautiful. The bees were still inside the jar though they were barely moving. He went on to show us the shelved hives. There were 2 layers. The top one was to collect honey while the lower one was to breed the bees. When he took off the top layer, the buzzing got really loud and he calmed the bees with cigarette smoke. That's right, killing 2 birds with one stone and no bees with smoke, he inhaled and blew the smoke into the hive.

He took out a rack and shook off the bees. He whipped out his pocket knife and cut away some of the wax and passed a small piece to each of us, letting us try the honey. It was marvelous. After placing back the rack, he examined each rack to try to find the queen but to no avail. He brought us to another hive and did the same. He found it in less time than you can say Benjamin is ultimate.

The queen isn't much bigger than the rest. She looked like she was in a condition worse than having SARS, H1N1, ebola and herpes combined, just staying there moving slowly. The person told us that she was old and they're already breeding the new queens. He took up another rack with the larvae and showed us a part protruding from the honeycomb. He told us that the new queen was inside there. He cut it up and inside was a small shrimp like larvae surrounded in royal jelly. He cut it up even more and let us taste the jelly. It had a mild sour taste like plain yogurt. He threw the rest of the jelly along with the larvae into the nearby bushes. We took out more honeycombs and cut up more larvae queens to show us the jelly. We all protested but he still cut them up telling us that he didn't need that many queens or else they would be fighting.

We took some pictures and left the area for lunch after that.

We prepared ourselves for the journey home and talked, slept, woke up, slept and didn't get leaned on again, which was good, until shaz and jess pushed me to the side when the car was turning. pfffft

Enough said.