I have a new set of little red suitcases. They are very cute. They are not terribly functional. But, boy are they cute! I got them because I thought it’d be fun to have something to carry around my honey collection. See, I have a growing collection of honey. I am doing an increasing number of events about honey: teaching, speaking, and offering tastes. I needed something to gather my jars bottles and paraphernalia. And there, right in front of me one day, I saw the little red suitcases.
The unfortunate part about these little red suitcases is that they are just not very sturdy, alas. I have taken them to a few events now and I think they are going to have to be relegated to my desk, because they are already showing signs of age – at one month. Also I now have more honey than I can even carry.
Not that that’s a bad thing!
I recently put my bees to bed for the winter. This involves waiting for a warm day, opening up the hives, checking to make sure they have enough honey to last until spring, and doing what I can to winterize them. This summer, when it got hot, I switched the inner covers from solid covers to screened ones. The inner cover is the piece that fits under the “roof” that you can see when you see beehives out in a field. I also removed the “queen excluder,” the grate that keeps the queen in the brood chambers, the lower boxes, and out of the stored honey in the upper boxes, the supers. Queen excluders are metal and when it gets cold the workers could get chilled when they climb up to get honey stored in the supers.
This is a tenuous time for me when it comes to my bees. I can’t do a whole lot for them right now because they are, of course, in charge of what goes on inside the hives. If there was a lot of nectar and pollen available this summer, they will have been able to store up a lot of honey which will get through the dark days of winter. If not, they won’t. I’m trying very hard to care for the bees without adding sugar or artificial foods to their hives, but if they don’t have enough food, well, that’ll be a big decision for me. Fortunately right now they are in pretty good shape. So far.
Spring is really the trickiest time, truth be told. The bees, activated by warm weather, shake off the winter, fly out on cleansing flights, and search for food. If the weather is really warm in January, say, the bees fly around and really don’t have anything to eat, since nothing is yet in bloom. The activity makes them hungry, which is a problem if there is no stored honey in their hives. It’ll be important then for me to keep watch.
It was easier when I had my bee hives way up in the back of my house. But actually that was a horrible place to put them, since “out of sight, out of mind” was the way it went. The bees, unobserved, died. I am trying very hard to make it different this year.
My bees are now right in front of my house. I see the hives every morning and every night. Which means that I think about them all the time. Every day. Every night.
I know it’s a bit early to think about this, but pretty soon the days, after getting shorter and shorter, will get longer and longer and then I’ll get to see how the bees did this winter. For now I can only hope that my ministrations were enough.
In the meantime, Happy Holidays to you and yours. In this time of darkness and light, may your days be filled with the wonder of it all. Mine certainly are. Thanks to the bees.
