With winter settling in on northern Minnesota - the wood floors seem to creak more - and, I have switched from doing things to planning things. Planning gardens, planning beehives, looking at seed catalogs, attempting to make soap, and going as far as contacting a realtor or two about empty parcels of land in the area. Trying to keep busy seems to be a bit of a challenge and a case of blues has settled in on me - nothing new, mind you, I have dealt with depression for a long while; it is part of me, so I will make peace with it, settle in, and ride it out.
I decided to give videoing myself while I checked the hives a try. I dug around until I found a video-capable camera. Panasonic DMC-FX07. The video shoot (I think that is what it is called in the biz) went well. The audio is kind of bad and when I stood up completely, my head was cropped out of the shot. In the end, it is roughly ten minutes long; I edited out the part where I got stung on the hand and let loose with a string of expletives.
The weather has been somewhat chilly, and the wind has been up, too. The week started off with a relatively nice, crisp, slightly windy day. Over the weekend, my sister, Meg, a pharmacist in the Chicagoland area, was in Hibbing (our hometown), visiting our parents and grandmother. She was staying through Monday, and decided to pay us a visit. She has been telling her pharmacy technicians about our bees. We needed to check the bees, check their feed pails and clear out any bridge comb that they might have built.
April 10, is quickly approaching. It is the day we head to Stillwater, MN to pick up the bees. Until then, we have been busily preparing things. On Friday, there were two large boxes of stuff sitting on the front porch. It was the unassembled frames, wax-coated foundations, two new bee suits/jackets, a new smoker, and several other miscellaneous things. It looked like we would be assembling frames over the weekend.
Last year, about this time of year, I was busy planting various kinds of hops - in pots - in the kitchen. Mid-spring, I transplanted all of it out into various areas of the garden. The Fuggle, which originally showed signs of being sickly or weak, took off like a rocket. The Chinook was a 1/3 the length of the Fuggle and the Cascade never really made it beyond the four-feet-tall-mark.
We got a jump on the day; a 4:00 AM jump. The hound we are fostering for a rescue, has had back issues (slipped disc). We have been taking him to a chiropractor in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. We missed our appointment yesterday - Melissa, my wife, has been fighting a cold. The good doctor said he could squeeze us in today. There was a caveat to today, however - it had to be either at 7:45 AM or after 4:00 PM in St. Paul. We are in the Duluth, MN area, and St. Paul is roughly 2.1/2 hours south of here. We picked the morning run.
"It tastes strange.", the wife said. I would agree, the fresh loaf of bread, minutes from the oven, had an off taste. It did not rise properly, either. It kept rising, then falling, rising and then falling; not enough gluten, is my guess.
Often, I mull over how I plan to assemble something. When I was building a cherry and walnut desk for my study, I went so far as to design the entire piece of furniture in AutoCAD. I even wrote a Perl script that utilized the golden ratio to optimize the layout of the pieces of the wood that would comprise the top of the desk.
The apiculture world is ripe with puns, and I will admit that I am not immune from putting some really awful ones to use. All throughout the week, I would bring up bees or bee-culture things with co-workers; always throwing in a pun worthy of a resounding "boo!" (not the scary kind of boo, but more of the booing of one off of a stage).
