The Stool by the Stand

There is no question in this letter, only a report, because you have been asking for a long while now whether you are keeping right, and it is a fair question to turn back on myself for once.

This is the second summer the answer has looked the same from where I stand. The supers come off no lighter than they ever did, a full one weighing exactly what a full one has always weighed, and my back has stopped pretending it can argue with that number. This is not the strain of one difficult week that an easier one undoes by autumn. The knees agree with the back. The mornings start slower than the sun does, and neither has shown any sign of coming back around to where it used to be.

So the yard changed, and I would rather tell you what changed than let you guess at it from a distance. Six hives now instead of eleven, because six is what one back can visit properly without owing a seventh a look it will not get in time. A stool by the stand these days, plain as the smoker, and I sit on it between supers where I once only stood through the whole job. The lifting itself split across two mornings where one used to hold it, the far boxes done a day after the near ones, not because they matter less but because the body doing the lifting only has so much lifting in it before noon.

Here is what deserves saying plainly, since it would be easy to hear the rest of this letter as a small sad accounting, and it is not one. Six hives kept well is not eleven hives kept badly and fondly remembered. It is not a yard waiting to be forgiven for being smaller. Walk the stand with me on any evening and you will find six hives doing exactly what a yard of bees does, tended by exactly the hands that are here to tend them, and none of it is thin for being counted lower than it once was. A meadow does not measure a stand by the stand that stood there the year before. It only asks whether what is here now is being kept.

Watch your own count someday, if the years are kind enough to bring you to it. The stool will be there waiting. It does not mind who sits on it.

— the Beekeeper

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.