Subject: I wonder - Shall I Keep Bees This Spring?

From: [email-masked] (Peter Amschel)
Date: 7 Dec 1996 02:40:34 GMT

It is almost the winter solstice and then soon it will be bee season again. 
Will I keep a colony this year? Those hive bodies are all needing cleaning. 
The frames will be even a bigger progect. I will have to get one of those 
sharp tools to dig the old wax and propolis out of the grooves in the frames. 
Maybe I could use some other tool to dig out those grooves. I have wire and a 
stack of foundation. Maybe I will just clean the frames and put a narrow 
strip of foundation at the top of the frame and not bother with the wire. I 
wonder where I should order my package bees? Maybe the guy who sold me the 
royal jelly is where I should order the package. That was nice of him to sell 
me a small amount on credit. Should I try to raise a queen or two again this 
year? It was fun to drop the little larvae onto the pool of royal jelly that 
time. What if the bees go hogwild like they did in my first year and make so 
much honey that I can hardly keep up with them with my little plastic 
two-frame spinner? My kitchen is not the best place to extract, but it was 
adequate before. Will I be up to this task? It would be better not to start a 
colony than to end up not perfoming my duty to keep the hive as best I can. 
That was awesome, the way the bees hovered and flew almost everywhere in the 
clearing I had cut in my bamboo grove. And that wonderful smell from inside 
the hive! And the sound! C'est magnifique! I wonder what is my deadline date 
to decide - no, if I do it I should start soon and do a little work regularly 
on the frames and hive boxes, a little at a time on a regular basis like the 
bees do. We can learn a lot from bees. Hmmmmmmm. Well, I will think more 
about this later as there is still plenty of time to decide.