End of the Year, Mite Kill, Buckets of Honey

Today I finished week 2 of Api-Life Var, or Api-Var-Life, or whatever it's called, and the whole back half of my house smells like Thymol, and there are bees everywhere, and my white plastic mite boards are packed with dead ones. So- that's good. It's working. I like it.

And today, just one sting, as i leaned down to see why my gutter was leaking, with 8 billion bees flying about, I pinched one and she drove a pumping stinger into my thumb. That's one of the MOST painful places, though I admit, I haven't tested them all. Or they haven't.  So far, the septum, the little part between your nostrils,  has been the worst, though I don't doubt there are worse even that that. Toes are slso bad. In the short term at least.

The craziness this year, for me, has been having a lot more bees than I am used to, and not quite managing this final process quite right. i keep losing control- I pull supers, miss covering them quick enough, and all of sudden, the whole apiary, which is a tiny roof, is packed with bees searching for a free lunch. Jesus. And they fight each other and are mean and not the happy bees I usually I have, and i think- man, I am a bad beekeeper, I just cause mayhem.

I harvested maybe 50 gallons this year- that's a lot, for me. 11 hives, 9 up on a roof. A great, pretty, warm NW summer. They were a flood in the sky.

And I work- my day job-  next to my bees.  See them all day. As the crow flies, its about 5 feet away, if a crow could fly through a wall. If he went through the window, it'd be 8 feet. I hear their hum and smell the honey all day long. Not that this gives me any insight, except, if they swarm, I get to see it happen and usually get to catch the swarm. And i poke my head out my work window on my bee empire (sure, 11 queens, but who, but ME is the KING??), and say: go forth. Work hard. I'll watch the phones, you go out and deal with spiders and flowers.