In the past three weeks that we were south we made up for any time up here spent being a little less productive. The first week found us starting work at 6:00 in the morning unloading tractor trailers of bees coming back from California, spreading them out, and not finishing until 7:00 or later in the evening. After the bees were happily back in their southern homes, our days started a little later, around 9:00, but involved a lot of manual labor from making nucs, lasting until 7, 8, or even 9 at night, since Adam has been doing all the grafting for the queens we've needed for nucs. In the past three weeks alone, while working with our friends Gary and Terry Ford, we've made 700 nucs between their bees and ours. And the nuc orders are still coming in daily! This winter has been extremely hard on overwintered bees up north, so a lot of people are opening up their hives to find out that their beloved bees died of either cold, starvation or both. Its a good feeling to be in the business that we're in, because the world needs bees! With their amazing ability to pollinate the various flowers and trees we enjoy and consume food from, the world would not be the same.
We were also happy to come home for a short while to be able to visit with out beloved dog Winston. I never wrote anything on Facebook or on a previous blog, but just a few days after arriving in SC at the beginning of March, we made an emergency trip home to bring Winston to the vet. Shortly after arriving down there, Winston had an intense seizure. It terrified us. He had never had seizures before, and since he truly is our first child and beloved companion, we wanted to do everything in our power to make him happy and healthy. After visiting the vet and spending a lot of time thinking about it, we realized that Winston is simply not a traveling dog. He is happiest when he is free at home to curl up by the fire, hunt his typical rabbit grounds around the yard, and play with his best buddy Chester. It was a hard decision to make, but one we didn't regret, to leave him with Adam's parents while we returned to bee work in South Carolina. We worried about him a lot less as we knew he was in a loving, familiar home, with all of his favorite things: family, brother, freedom to run, and a warm wood stove to curl up next to. ;) He sure was happy to see us when we got home though! He couldn't stop smiling at us for several minutes!
Brotherly love
Stud
Being home has given me some time to catch up on all the paperwork, mail, and bills I couldn't get to down there. Unfortunately the service where we are is sketchy, so it makes doing internet work challenging. So I probably won't be able to update this again until we get home. We're heading back down at the end of this week and will be down South until the first week in May or so when we bring the bees back home. We'll be very busy making up the rest of nucs during that time, but we'll be balancing it out with some fun trips, like seeing my cousins in Chattanooga on the way down for Easter weekend, and then spending time with family in Florida at the end of April. I'm excited about those little things we get to do because of where our work takes us.
I'll try to update our However Wild Honey page on Facebook over the next couple weeks to show everyone what we're up to with making nucs. Keep up with what we're up to on Facebook, as its a lot easier to post pictures and short status updates that type long blog posts from my phone! Stay warm everyone and I'll pray the warm weather heads north soon!
