Fall New (Harvest) Moon
Second round of apiguard in the parent and the divide. The top box on the package colony has gotten heavier, but I plan to feed them some more as I will do to the parent once the apiguard comes off in two weeks. Sometime in early November I’ll get out the cardboard wraps and cover the hives for winter. That will pretty much finish bee work for the year until late February or early March. I’ve given away honey and plan to give away more. Part of the fun.
A quick walk through the vegetable garden shows kale and swiss chard looking good, a few rogue onions that escaped the harvest, plenty of carrots, beets and butternut squash. The harvest is 
not yet over and will go on until the ground threatens to become hard.
While I drove through the countryside on my way back to Lafayette on Monday, I passed field after field of corn and beans, some harvested, some not, about half and half. Seeing those scenes put me right back at home, especially the corn fields. Here’s a field near Peru, Indiana with the combine spilling corn into a tractor trailer for transport either to a corn bin, grain dryer or even straight to the grain elevators, all depending on the price and moisture content of the corn.
Indiana is no longer home, Minnesota is, but Indiana has a large section of my heart, the chamber of childhood and early young adulthood, a room full of corn fields, basketball, small towns, a baby sister and brother, county fairs and James Whitcomb Riley poems. I was glad to be there the last few days and to walk again in the part of my heart filled there so long ago.
We move now toward Samhain, Summer’s End. Blessed be.
