As you know, this blog is about bees: Teaching, learning, doing, reading, and thinking bees. I told you once before that I started this to tell what I do with my bees. At this point I must say, “Do as I say and not as I do!”.

There are various reasons that I have not seen my bees for almost 6 weeks. This is the time that I need to be attentive to their winter feed stores. I really do not know if I still have any bees left in my hives. The last time I was in the bee yards was to check the new queens. All 12 colonies and 7 splits were doing very well. I left them for for a week and went to Orlando, FL for a week to my youngest son’s pinning for completing his RN school. When we came home, my wife went to the emergency room with excruciating pain and ended up in the hospital for 23 days with Pancreatitus. Now I cannot leave her by herself for too long at a time as she is still very weak and I have to give her 4-6 small meals a day, also there are followup Drs.’ appointments that have to be done in the next two weeks.

Most of the beekeepers that I could have asked to check them works a job and works with their bees on the weekend. The others are in my category and are not physically able to take on another group of bees. So I just have to trust that I will have bees when I can break loose to go to the apiaries.

Needless to say that I have to have faith and hope for the best. Beekeeping is not an exact science, but there are some things that needs to be done in a timely manner. You will have times that nothing seems to go right and no matter what you do, you cannot change it. That is when you just have to suck it up and do what you can when you can. I know that the bees have been around for a long time and they didn’t need my help then,  so maybe they don’t need me now.

But not all is lost. I have been reading and studying and making plans for the time that I will be able to go to the field. If you are going to use screen bottom boards, have you got them ready? If you know that you need to change brood boxes, have you got the right number and are they ready? Is your honey supers clean and do you have foundation in all your frames ? Have you marked your boxes yet? Do you have enough supers to put an extra one on each hive? If not–when are you going to get it done? Oh! and by the way, do you have enough 5 gal buckets to put your honey in once you start extracting? These are questions you and I should be asking ourselves. Only you can answer that. I am not ready in any of these areas. I have been busy trying to get out of doing these things. Now I wish I had someone to tell me to get busy. It is hard to work for myself. If I was paying me, I would have fired me before now. Good help is hard to find.

Get ready— because the Spring honey flow is commencing!