Weekend End

Around 8pm, I whine about being so tired, and not knowing why, and N. says, “Because you’ve been zipping around like a hummingbird on meth for days.”

There may be something to that, if I think of it. If I stop measuring by how much I didn’t get done this weekend and look instead at what I did do. [Here, gentle reader, you may skip to the next paragraph to avoid the dull list meant primarily as a reference for my future self when she thinks her life was empty or she lazy.] Dinner out (nice, but not demanding), repacked and hauled boxes of books and Christmas things up into the attic, vacuumed, did laundry (a daily task anyway) dismantled and scorched the empty bee hive boxes (a light touch with the hand torch to kill pathogens), weeded, went to a 2 hour beekeeper meeting, drove 20 miles to sit for an hour in the dentist’s chair to fix a little gap where food was getting stuck, walked the old college haunts, walked around the water with D., wrote, crushed and extracted some frames of honey, cleaned the chicken coop, drove S. to meet a friend for coffee, went back and forth to the house twice to assist with the extraction of a huge swarm, drove S. to rehearsal another 15 miles away…Okay. So maybe my sleepiness is a little justified.

Here are some pictures of the swarm I helped hive. It was in a bottlebrush tree in a mobile home park. My mentor (queen beekeeper extraordinaire, keeper of great beekeeping knowledge) did 98% of the work. I just watched and feathered excess bees and learned.

This is the swarm, large and heavy, in a bottlebrush bush.

My mentor taped 2 mediums together to make a deep for the new beekeepers who will receive this swarm. I ran home to get the hive bottom from my supplies.

Here are the bees on the top of the box, once we'd given the branch a few shakes to drop them down. We scooped the overflowing bees up to the top of the box using the short side of a primary turkey feather - one of a beekeeper's most helpful tools.