Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Back in June we were just getting started with an entirely new and exciting learning curve with the beehive. This is a sequel to that post.

We’ve had a lot of frustrating things go on this summer, and we have entered a zone of discomfort. This is a sort of grey zone where you are unsure about the path forward. You have many questions but no satisfying answers, and you need more data to do better assessments. In Stoicism there is the idea that “the obstacle is the way.” The thing that is blocking you is actually the thing you need to confront and address. And this requires us to try new things, venture into the unknown, and find out what more we can learn.

We have issues with thistles, compaction, transplanting disappointments and poor crops or poor yields. While you can’t expect a perfect season, we know there is a lot of work to do in the research, experimental and trials. Attempting new things is the only way out. For a long time we just kind of thought, meh, things will figure themselves out. But after some repeated poor results I find myself getting tired of not moving forward, not seeing the results I want to see and now I really want to go fully ahead and tackle these issues head on.

A mindset shift is the difference between staying stagnant and boldly moving forward even if it is into the unknown. And I think I may have arrived at this point this year.

You can only absorb the information you can absorb at the time you are prepared to absorb it.

At this point I’m left with some highly specific questions to find answers to. If there’s something I was good at in university, it was finding information. So I’m looking forward to this task.

These sorts of things are only solveable if you learn by doing. Nobody can tell you the answer. The answers are germane only to us and our journey. With a little persistence and observation, maybe we can pass on what we’ve learned. I’m sure I will be writing about these things over the winter and into next season.

Before I end this post I will pass on a story about the bees that happened just today. The bees have given me an amazing summer of “learn by doing” and also a healthy dose of “nature will always brutally remind you to stay humble and that you don’t know anything.”

I had to split the hive in July to avoid a swarm that I wasn’t prepared for. I took the capped queen cells and four frames of brood to another field and set up a box for them there. I continued checking for a few weeks to see what they were up to, excited to see if I had successfully split the colony and raised a new queen. But I never found her, the eggs became bees and all I could see was bees packing honey into the combs. In the back of my mind I knew it was possible that she had not mated yet, or that I had simply not seen her, but the absence of new eggs had me suspecting that the queens had not made it and that this was simply a queen-less colony living out their days. As such I decided to walk away from the colony until it was the end of honey season.

Well…now it is time to prep the bees for winter and there’s a new learn-by-doing-curve. The honey flow is over and the bees are hungry. I prepped my hive as best as I understand to, and I went back to the “abandoned” split hive to check what was going on.

I expected to find a few straggling bees. But what did I see? Frames full of capped brood of course! Several frames full, in fact. This colony definitely had a queen and wow was she laying perfectly full frames of eggs. The frames of capped brood mean they were layed about 2.5 weeks ago…meaning the queen would have started laying shortly after I decided to walk away.

Today, I finally found her. My first new queen! (there she is, right in the middle)

I had to try something new because my hand was forced: split the hive. I had to walk away because I wasn’t getting any new information. Nature sorted itself out, and now I have a small but going-strong colony to see if I can’t build up for the next two months going into winter.

The obstacle is the way.

Learn by doing.

Stay curious.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice