Summer Waxing Grandchildren Moon
Ah. Today I discovered a way to harvest/extract honey. It’s called the cut comb method and the particular information that was most helpful came from Linda’s Bees. If the general notion of bee-keeping interests you, there is this local website, Nature’s Nectary, that focuses on northern beekeeping.
The comb honey process made it easy to create small aluminum foil gift packages of honey from Artemis Hives. Fun to have a homemade treat to give away to friends. Homemade in the parent colony, that is. I just collected it, cut it and packaged it. Damned retailers get all the profit, the producers get stiffed every time.
In a shopworn phrase this lifted my bee-keeping to a new level. The usual bee work, building woodenware (Kate), installing foundations (me) and doing the hive inspections (me) plus hiving packages and doing the divides and reverses (me) has an intrinsic fascination. This superorganism performs its work in an astonishingly graceful way, choreographed by millions of years of evolution and attended to by me, but only in the most superficial way. I don’t fly out to the flowers, lay the eggs, take care of the nursery, remove dead bees, store pollen and honey or flap wings to cool the hive.
A magic exists in the natural world that requires no mystics, no spell books or grimoires.