Doesn’t everyone have buckets of honey by their fireplace?
The buckets were filled by the fireplace with care, in hopes that liquid honey would soon be there…
This is what happens when you bring your honey buckets up from the basement to bottle for Christmas gifts … and it’s crystalized solid. We hot water bathed them in the giant whirlpool bathtub one night with moderate success. (Sorry, we forgot to take pictures of that ordeal.) So we brought out the big guns tonight. The Fireplace. It’s amazingly warm there. We’ll let it soak up more heat and bottle tomorrow night – – just in time for Christmas gifts. And the cat is pretty irritated because the buckets are in His Space.
And on the Alarming News Front, we heard about a colony that started out the fall with good honey stores, but a quick check this week indicated that they’ve already burned through the whole winter stockpile. We didn’t get a chance to check Ole, Lena and Lars before the blizzard, and getting a half mile out into the prairie now that we have a foot of snow on the ground is not happening in the near future.
How could this happen? Well, we’ve had a warm autumn. It was fall-like … right up till yesterday. With the warm temperatures, the bees kept flying. The more they fly, the more energy they exert, the more they need to eat.
Pails o’ honey.
Ohhh ladies, I really hope you’re not hungry already.
Idiots Keeping Bees 