December 21 is not the ideal time to discover that I actually only have 5 have Christmas cards in my desk drawer instead of the anticipated full box.  I guess I didn’t buy my normal stash on clearance at the end of last year.  Or maybe I did, and they are in some weird place.    Despite my best intentions, I still have not yet organized my side of the office since we moved the big desk in here.   When was that?   Sometime in the past 6 months, I think…..

Then I received a text message to remind me of a follow up appointment with my doctor.   Has it really been two weeks since I was there?   Is the new blood pressure medicine doing it’s job?  There are more questions than answers in my head right now.

The good news is that yesterday was the last day of school until January 2 and maybe I can find my missing brain cells over the next two weeks.  The weeks since Thanksgiving have been as hectic as any other school year for Hubby and me, but we have been less stressed than in years past.   We’re determined to put a Christmas tree up in our 13 x 13 foot living room this year, and Hubby is on his way to the storage building to see if the one we have will fit.   Not only did we go from 2400 square feet to 740 square feet, we went from 10 feet ceilings to whatever they are in this mobile home.   I know the ceilings aren’t high enough to risk installing a ceiling fan, but how tall is the tree we’ve had for years?

It was warm enough to check hives and add some candy boards last week.  Some of the hives we were concerned about now have enough bees to ease our minds, and adding a little sugar for cold, wet days should help them make it until spring.   We’re not adding a large quantity of sugar this year as we ended up with a wasteful mess last year.  Now that we’re living here full time, it will be easy to add sugar as needed.  We seldom go for more than a couple of weeks without at least one day above 60 degrees here, so we have a huge advantage over beekeepers to the north.   We are also keeping the pollen feeder full of pollen substitute mixed with powered sugar so that the bees have something to find when they insist on foraging.   I went to check the feeder this morning, and bees were already on it despite the 50 degree temperature.

The November swarm we caught is even doing well.  There was only one frame of bees the day after they moved in, but they now have three.  Maybe more bees showed up after that first day, or maybe the queen was determined to bump up her numbers.  It was not a good time of year for them to swarm, but luckily they did so on a day when I was in the bee yard.   There’s so much logging going on around us that we suspect they are wild bees whose home was destroyed.    Maybe they are even renegade bees that swarmed away from us sometime in the past and have now come back to where it’s safer and there’s a buffet set up!   Either way, we’re always glad to add to the genetic mix.

Well, I need to run to the store and buy whatever Christmas cards I can find and then get busy doing what I always intend to complete Thanksgiving weekend!   More about the bee yard later…..