This blog looks bland. Flat. Blah. We need to snazz it up, don’t you think?

But you know, most things look sort of blah in January. The hive boxes out back look downright depressing all dressed in black.

I planted hundreds of daffodils on the bees’ hillside in October and November, and I’m itching to see it burst out in color in a couple of months.

Today, if the sun comes out and hits the hive boxes, I plan to tap on the side of the box containing the weaker colony (if I named each of the colonies, writing about them would be easier). I hope I hear buzzing, but I’m thinking they’re dead. Why? Because there is no activity at their site. The ground outside their hive box is not littered with dead bees that have been removed by the living. Last week I thought the pile of bee corpses outside the swarm-hive colony was a sad sign; now that I’ve learned more, the absence of those corpses at the weaker hive worries me.