The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Well, this has been a weekend full of just about everything. To make a long story short....

I got a lot of good stuff accomplished. I made two nice batches of cold processed soap - an Orange Cranberry Holiday soap and a Honey Oatmeal soap. Both turned out really nice and full of moisturizing oils. I also made lip balm and filled over 100 tubes. And I started a batch of prison wine.

The bad and the ugly stuff all happened today. We went down to winterize our bee hives and found that two of them had died within the past month. When I say "died", I mean deader than a door nail. We were so shocked and disappointed. There were fine last month when we robbed honey and fine two months ago when the Dept. of Ag. guy came out to inspect them. I wrote all about it on The Bee Buzz if you are interested in reading about it. We are now down to three hives - half of what we started with this year. I could just cry.

So, in a nutshell, that was our weekend. I suppose we always have to take the good with the bad. Being out here on our homestead makes even the worse day a little more tolerable. We have so much to be thankful for that it's really hard to throw a pity party when little things go wrong.

On the upside, while we were working in the apiary we had a couple neighbor ladies from down the road stop by. They were both very friendly and we stood and talked to them quite a while. They told us of a man down the road that also raises bees, and they're going to hook us up with him. One of them owns the chicken farm across the street with her husband and she said they'll certainly work out something with us so we can get chicken poop for fertilizer! The other one said her husband rides a motorcycle and they'd love to ride with us sometime.

There's always a silver lining - even when you have to peel back a few layers to find it!

Bee Free,
Penny