Sunshine and dirt makes every day better.

Yesterday, I spent a considerable amount of the afternoon hours outside, cleaning out one beehive to make way for new bees. I have a third hive box ready, in case we find a swarm again. I hope for that every spring now, because our most vigorous honeybees who produced the most honey, were a swarm that stopped in my evergreen and we cut the branch and moved them into a hive.

The hive I cleaned out died. From the looks of it, when I did the hive autopsy, the queen may have died. I can’t tell for sure, but there were 3 queen cells. Everything I observed, pointed to a queen-less hive. This is the very hive that I re-queened last June before our trip to France. They were pretty weak before I realized the queen was dead or gone. In hindsight, I should have cut my losses, and let that hive go. It ended up being too late in the season for that small hive to completely rebuild.

I’m a beginner beekeeper. I love it, and I learn something new all the time. I would love to have a beekeeping mentor, but I’m learning everything from books, hand-on practice, online videos and trial and error.

The good news, in my hive autopsy, was that I didn’t see any sign of mites or the wax moths that decimated my weak hive the year before. And, I’m sitting here this morning trying to remember, what I might have done, because I didn’t use any of the chemical mite controls last year. Maybe I should get my beekeeping journal out and actually keep better records.

That’s my stream of consciousness blog writing for today! It’s Thursday, which means I take a complete break from Beachbody coaching. I rarely schedule any calls on a Thursday, unless it’s the only day a team member or client can chat, or if we have a product launch. Then, I schedule my day off, another day. Which I’m going to talk more about in future blog posts, because one thing that leads to burn out for people who work from home, is not setting work hours and thinking if they have a charged phone or computer, they should be on it.

Working from home’s biggest challenge, I think, is boundary setting.

If you want to see what I’m up to today, in my sewing room and then, garden, I’ll be posting pictures in my Instagram story!

Your friend,
Anne Dovel