Standing at the Trailhead of Winter

I woke up at the usual time this morning, 5:30ish, and though I didn't have to get up, I couldn't go back to sleep. The bees had arrived, and I had to go get them and bring them home to their new hive. Excitement along with trepidation propelled me out of bed to get ready for the trip. While I went through the basic beekeeping course and have been reading beekeeping books since then, I still wondered if I could actually take a cage that seemed to contain upwards of a thousand bees and transfer them to the hive. I wondered if I could get the queen safely nestled between two of the frames where the bees could then eat through the sticky plug and allow her to enter into their new home. Hubby teases me about my not-so-successful attempts to have goldfish, saying he hopes the bees last a bit longer, and this makes me wonder if I will end up, sadly, killing an entire hive of bees. I certainly hope I don't. (Hmmmmmm. I have no idea what happened here, but I had a paragraph abo...

Today I cashed in my Christmas present from Hubby and spent nearly eight hours learning about bees. I am now of the opinion that bees are the coolest insect ever. From their five eyes to their pollen basket, they are honey-making machines and hive engineers. The bee truly is an amazing creature. Come May, I will have my first hive in place, my first colony hopefully settling in and building their combs. I set off early, right at daylight, because of the unexpected snowfall yesterday that left nearly 4 inches of mess. I wanted to be sure to give myself enough time just in case the roads were still iffy. The highway had some icy spots starting off, but the farther I got away from home, the more the roads improved, so I finally relaxed, turned on the radio, and made my way towards Long Lane Honey Bee Farms just outside of Fairmount. The only rough spot I encountered was the road Google Maps told me to take just outside Oakwood. This road hadn't been plowed. This road called for 4-wh...