One hundred and threeeee

A bleaky day.  My friend's son coined this word when he was a little boy and it is perfect.  A rainy, overcast bleuugghy day.  Especially after yesterday, the beauty.  This is the ugly relative of yesterday, the dissatisfied, grumpy one.

BUT!
The bees are here!  Yes, all the bees are installed in their new homes and will hopefully accept their little queens and be vigorous and robust!  It is very hard to keep bees healthy here.  There are so many diseases and parasites.  But they are beautiful, it is such a delight to have their buzzing presence again.  There is an ancient tradition of 'telling the bees" about everything that happens in your family, and I told them immediately about all my children being so far away, and about Jim, my friend's husband, who has recently died, and how sad it had made me.  I also assured them that we had chosen the best place for the Bee yard and that they would be very happy there, and asked them please not to swarm and fly away!

Two packages of bees

The queen - she will be released by her subjects once her pheromones have enchanted them.

Later we had to go back to put in the medicated sugar water, and Tim suddenly decided to shake on to the ground, the ones which were still clustered together in the package box, the few which had not fallen out when he had shaken everyone into the hive body.  Afterwards, I asked him why he had done that, as we were walking away, and he said, "Shame, well they probably thought, 'we've been on this long awful journey, we've been sprayed with sugar water, twice, then shaken about until we thought our pollen baskets would fall off, and then deposited roughly on the ground.  Night is coming on so we better hunker down and try to make it through till morning, and then we'll see where the others went.' And then I came along and shook them out on to the ground and they're all sitting there thinking, 'Oh god,  what now?'"

And so the hives are reborn into new iterations of the Righteous Sisters, and the Loonie Lefties, although they may have been mis-named, as in fact the Loonie Lefties were very docile, while the Righteous Sisters went a little loony.  

Tim and I went to a "Watch" for Jim this afternoon.  I was standing looking at various photographs, of their wedding, of when they fetched their son, of happiness on a fishing boat, and one of my colleagues stood nearby doing the same thing.  She said, "Well, this was a day which we all hoped would never happen, isn't it?"

It is so strange to think that I will never see him again.  He was not a good friend, I didn't know him well as I am a friend of his wife's, but he seemed a very lovely man.

They believe that just after he breathed his last breath on earth, then he breathed his first breath in heaven.  But I don't believe any of that.  I think that he breathed his last breath and that was that.  And then maybe your soul, that little rainbow soul, just wafts out and joins all the other energy on earth, helps trees grow, makes rain over the mountains, falls to earth on an autumn leaf, flies off on a wisp of milkweed seed.