I’m here in Michigan, in the United States,
and it’s just the right time of year to enjoy the beautiful fall colors.
Temperatures are around 5°C (41°F) at night and only about 10°C (50°F) during the day.
And yet, the honeybees here are already almost done preparing for winter.
There are hardly any flowers left in bloom.
Around here, it’s not unusual for field mice to move into beehives, looking for a warm place to spend the winter.
Throughout the winter, honeybees don’t hibernate.
They gather around the queen, keeping one another warm.
The honey they’ve stored up until now is their precious food supply for the winter.
They form a cluster, gradually moving upward as they eat their way through the stored honey.
And honey is often said to be good for us humans, too.
It’s good for your health.
It helps you feel calm.
It helps you sleep better.
It gives you energy.
It eases hay fever.
It helps relieve the pain of cuts and scrapes, and even burns.
Some of these claims make you wonder, “Really?”
But you hear them repeated often enough, and they do sound rather convincing.
By the way,
honey eaten right there at the apiary is truly delicious.
It’s a shame that I rarely get the chance to share that experience with all of you.
And there’s something else I’d really like you to discover:
Honey doesn’t just come in two broad seasons, “spring” and “summer.”
Its flavor actually changes in much more subtle ways as the seasons progress.
I wish I could share that with you, too.
That’s another thing I find a little frustrating.
As the seasons move along, the colors of the pollen the bees bring home change, too.
Watching those colors shift, we get a sense of the changing seasons—
our own little calendar, kept by the bees.