I have a guest post on Aardvarchaeology. It’s about bees! Go read it, the rest of this post will make more sense then.

Above, one of “my” bees can be seen diligently working on what I think is a Centaurea phrygia. The picture was taken sometime mid-summer, after the rapeseed bloom and before the heather. The Centaureas seemed to be popular with the bees, as were white clover (Trifolium repens) and the entirety of the rose garden. As a beekeeper you learn to pay attention to where the bees are going, and eventually you learn why they go where they go - roses don’t yield much nectar, but they are excellent pollen sources. And since we built the rose garden, we have definitely seen an increase in stored pollen in our hives, which should mean they winter better as they can start a new brood season earlier in the spring.

In reference to my post on Aardvarchaeology, we did end up getting heather honey after all. About 15 kiloes of it remained firmly stuck to honeycombs after extraction, and many combs broke from the pressure of the honey that wouldn’t unstick (honey is extracted from combs by putting them in a kind of centrifuge).

But it’s not all bad: Heather has a special taste that many people seem to favour. This means our autumn batch tastes subtly different from the honey extracted earlier this summer, which makes it more interesting to sell. It’s my experience that people are more keen on buying something if there are two versions and they like one better than the other. Not that I’m in this for profit, of course …

Now the beekeeping season is pretty much over, as far as this part of Sweden is concerned. What remains is removing the yearly treatment of varroa, and then the hives are closed for the winter. Sometime early in the spring, we take a quick peek inside to see that the colonies aren’t starving, but beyond that, no real beekeeping is done until, say, May.

Thankfully, talking about bees is an activity that can go on all year round!

bees, apis mellifera, honey, pollen, beekeeping, heather

In the future, instead of having to go through the hassle of telling you, dear reader, if a link is in Swedish or English, I shall adopt a brilliant colour-coding scheme instead.

From now on (and retroactively if I’m really bored some night), links to Swedish-language sites will look like this, whereas English links look like this. (Swedish sidebar links are marked with an (S).)

I really hope I have no colour-blind readers.

I participate in my first carnival, join Planet Atheism and make Pharyngula’s mile-long blogroll (look for me among the “People of Reason”), and what happens? I get sick and don’t post anything at all for a week.

I’ve had plenty of ideas and inspiration and would like to imagine that I’m now about to go off in a frenzy of blogging about all sorts of erudite topics. Problem is I seem to have had most of my ideas while in a fever, and now I can’t remember them.

While I gather my thoughts, those of you who read Swedish should hop on over to Nordic Dervish and read his posts on the seminar about freedom of speech with Lars Vilks that happened last week. I had planned on going, but it didn’t seem like a good idea seeing as I was having trouble staying upright at the time. Apparently, some muslims turned up to tell the people present that “we love the prophet more than our parents, we love the prophet more than our wives, we love the prophet more than our children and what would you say if I called you a dog?” Given how unlikely Swedes are to suffer from religion-induced cynophobia, I doubt the response from the audience was particularly understanding of their point. The muslims proceeded to vaguely threaten the artist in arabic. If you don’t understand Swedish you can still see some pictures from the seminar here.

ETA: Apparently FOX reported from the seminar. I’m doubtful that everything in the report is true, but I guess it’s accurate enough.

Also, check out Bob - he’s not as scary as the mohawk will have you think. He’s been writing some good stuff about alternative sexualities clashing with churches recently. I have this devious plan that perhaps more traffic will make him blog more often.

In other news, I just discovered that Panda’s Thumb has a hot new layout (which for all I know may be a few weeks old, as I can’t remember when I last visited them) with a bee in it! This makes me happy.

lars vilks, freedom of speech, illness