Dateline: South of France...

April 5, 2009

Despite the predicted probability of rain the sun shone amidst clear skies this morning, that azure blue that is so characteristic of the south of France. It has a depth to it that makes you feel that no matter what might happen it could hold back the blackness of space beyond. When it is with you it seems that all is possible, when it is not, well just say that that might not be a propitious day for adventure.

Today I had set a couple of tasks for myself and also was invited to help Christian and Corinne do some work on the hives. They were going to kill one of the Queen’s that was hurt and replace her with a Royal cell from another hive, a cell that would hatch in about a week into a new Queen. One of the hives with perhaps 60,000 bees had produced several of these Royal cells clearly intending to produce a new queen. Normally this queen would either replace the older queen or would take some portion of the hive and migrate to a new home.

You can’t control bees really, you can only set up conditions that are favourable to them. But if they want to leave they’ll leave and all of your investment in time and money for the hive will be lost. In the beekeeping world this happens fairly frequently. But they will only leave following a new queen so making sure that the queen is happy, with no challengers, is critical.

My tasks for the day were to finish cutting the grass and cleaning up the courtyard and to organize my tools for the work I was to undertake in the next couple of weeks. This was actually more work than you might imagine and I spent the better part of the day taking care of this (taking out a couple of hours to help Christian and Corinne with the bees).

By evening I had everything done and lit the first fire in the fireplace for the year. It was a good fire and burned well into the night while I cooked up some stir fry and made a stew for eating over the next couple of days…days predicted to be colder and with more rain. I wanted to be ready for them!

After toasting my Dad with a rye and ginger (or two), I went to bed to Travel further with Charlie. Steinbeck was still in his wondrous mood, marveling at the vitality of the Midwest, the can-do spirit and youthful vigorousness of it. I could only wonder at the incongruity with our times and the eminent demise of Detroit as well as the economic malaise gripping the land and indeed the world. What would be his sage observation today? Would he marvel at the breadth of back necessary to carry this load? Or would he advise all of the Midwest to get into their mobile homes and make for greener pastures. We’ll never know.