Michelle Styles:

Yesterday for the first time since 2008, we actually harvested our own honey.

Frames of honey, honey extractor all ready

In 2009, we had an attack of mice which destroyed the hives. (Mouseguards not on.) We acquired another hive BUT the cold winter was no good for them. Then 2011 had a cold Spring and 2012 was another cold Spring. I had nearly given up when we decided one last time in 2014 and got some bees. We didn't take off any honey.
BUT this year, we have honey! Hooray. About 40 lbs worth.
I put the Porter bee escapes on on Friday to clear the supers where the honey is stored. Then early, early on Saturday morning before the bees were up, I  went out and retrieved the supers.
One or two bees remained in the supers and were easily brushed off.
At that time in the morning, the bees are not flying. This makes it so much easier and likelihood of getting stung is much decreased.
Then I set up the honey extractor -- which is hand cranked. The wax cappings are taken off to reveal the honey and the frame is put in the extractor. Then the frames are spun round and round. Centrifugal force gets the honey out.

Honey from the extractor pours into the filter

It works well except if there is a high proportion of heather honey. Heather honey is like jelly and very hard to extract. The best way I have found is to crush the frames and melt them -- releasing the honey. The honey melts at a lower temp than the wax. Thankfully though my youngest son has strong arms and the honey was all spun out.
This year's honey is relatively pale. Heather honey also tends to be more amber/caramel in colour. I suspect there is fuchsia. I know there is thistle in there. It tastes absolutely wonderful.
After being extracted, the honey gets filtered to get rid of the wax/dead bees etc. I also put the cappings in and allow them to drain.
Once filtered the honey is bottled.

Heathcliff inspects the jars of honey

Other than bottling  a couple of bottles for my youngest son to take back to uni with him, I am just waiting for the honey to drip through.
The spun supers are put back on the hives so that the bees can clean them out. The bees hate wasting any honey. They will clean everything. It is sort of amazing.
The bees still have time to forage and rebuild their stores. I will give them some Apiguard as a tonic/guard against varroa. And then they will be shut up for the winter.
In Feb time they will be fed on fondant and the cycle will be gin again.

The big news is that a nucleus of bees arrived yesterday. Long time readers of this blog will remember when beekeeping came easy. Then there was the attack of the mice in 2009 and starvation and frozen bees at the beginning of 2010.  A fellow beekeeper knew he normally gets swarms and offered to capture one for us, if we'd supply the hive. A few weeks ago, he captured the swarm and put it into the hive we provided. He then allowed them to expand. Yesterday, he stuffed cotton wool/sheep fleece in the entrance and drove the hive over here. A very brave man is Mr L.
 The bees have a feeder full of 50/50 water and sugar. My only fear is that the wonderful Mr L doesn't live far enough away and the worker bees will fly back to his hive, leaving the nurse bees and larvae behind. This happened when we first got bees. Starvation is never pretty and I learnt my lesson -- always feed for the first few weeks.
The recent cold weather is not doing the bees any good. Mr L was going back to feed his own bees as they had eaten up their stores because of the cold weather. When it rains, bees don't fly.Plus there is often a drought of good nectar plants in June.
My youngest is now in charge of the bees. He says that I am not to do anything because of my lymphoedemia and the potential for getting stung. There is a suspicion that a bee sting or three might have contributed to the problem initially. I will be good.
In my efforts to reshape my bottom, I have started doing the 10 minute solution Perfect Pilates. I did 5 days of their total body blast off which was excellent and had never attempted Pilates before. The fact that Pippa Middleton did pilates gave me the push. Pilates is not easy but it is less intense..in some ways. It takes loads of concentration because it is all about form. As the days went by and I began to understand more what I was supposed to do, and therefore I could work harder. I did like the fact that there was no jumping. And the back of my legs were sore so I was definitely using differnet muscles. Tomorrow means the start of the 10 min belly fat blast off dvd for 5 days. This was the first 10 min solution dvd I tried and focuses heavily on the core. I enjoyed it the first time I went through it. 50 minutes of intense abs work.
The key with this is persistence and working out every single day.
Special mention should be made of my bee suit. the last time I had it on, it was snug about the beam as it were. This time, it looked like I had borrowed a suit that was three sizes too big and I was completely swamped! My son says that as I shall not be wearing the suit that often, this is not a problem.

We will be getting more bees. My husband and youngest want to. They have promised to do everything. It is all fine as long as I do not get stung. I did have a long talk with the physio about it.

I went to the Hexham Beekeepers meeting yesterday where the guest speaker was Northern England's chief bee inspector. It was a thoroughly interesting evening. Last year's colony was too small, and got too cold. Also the entrance way got blocked with dead bees and they could not get out. His message was -- if you think is amiss, check. You can clear varroa floors etc in the dead of winter with you put on Oxalic acid. But basically if your colony is less that 8 frames and it is a hard winter, they are going to have a hard time surviving. Spring management is all about winter preparation.

1. Complete Colony Collaspe seems to have been caused by Deformed Wing Virus. It is a virus that comes after severe varroa mite infestation. Basically the products beekeepers (namely Apistan) have been are not working and other things need to be used. Foremost is Apiguard or thymol. There is a new product called Api-lite-var which if used properly also works. But must not be placed over the brood as it kills. It goes in the corner of the hive. But it is temperature dependant.

2. Scotland which does not have regular inspectors is in the grip of Europeon Foulbrood. It has worrying implications for Northern England beekeepers and bees. The English inspectorate is training. There is also a worrying increase in nosema.

3. American Foulbrood and other diseases can be caused by people feeding honey to bees. For example put honey purchased in a supermarket out in a wasp trap. Or leaving a jar out. Some farmers feed out of date honey to livestock. It can carry spores.

4. I also learnt how to tell if a colony is about to swarm -- an egg in a Queen cup along with an increase in drone brood. Without drones, the colony will not swarm as they cannot count on drones from other colonies. Because cutting out drone brood is a remedy for varroa, there is a question if too much has been cut... Anyway all remedies start with first catch your Queen. Finding the Queen can be a problem as I well know!

5. Hygiene, hygiene, hygiene. Have a bucket with washing soda and water for washing tools. Fumigate unused brood boxes etc with acetic acid. Do the checks for varroa.

So eventually bees will be in the garden again. But I reccomend people becoming involved with their local beekeeping association.

After reading all the literature on lymphoedema, the beekeeping is going. I can not take the risk.
Sigh. Neither is there an option of having my youngest take over as I'd get roped into doing something and there are bee lines to think about...
It is quite possible that the bee stings contributed to the overloading of my system in the first place.
When God closes a door, he opens a window, but it can be hell in the hallways of life.

Yesterday, a neighbour phoned, concerned that he had not seen any honey bees in his garden. I had to explain about my earlier bee murdering disaster and my hopes of getting a new colony. Somehow I don't think he was mollified. Apparently he is worried about his damson crop...

So what can people do to help the honey bee? The British Bee Keeping Association has a list of 10 things the general public can do.

1. Write to your MP or MEP to lobby for more funds for bee research. We really do not understand enough about bees and what makes them ill.

2. Plant bee friendly plants. This is important. Grass and evergreens are not bee friendly. Certain repeat flowering plants are not bee friendly. The BBKA does have a list on its website but flowers like foxgloves, herbs including mint and thyme, fuchsia, asters, sunflowers, daisies, hollyhocks and delphiniums are all loved by bees. In many ways with the problems of agricultural pesticides, gardens area haven for bees.

3. Join your local beekeeping association. They do run courses for beginners. They are friendly and welcome new people.

4. Find space for beehives. Even if you do not want to look after bees yourself, you might be able to have space for a hive. Some beekeepers need sites. The benefit for you is well pollinated crops and perhaps several jars of honey. Sited right, a beehive does not bother its neighbours. Contact your local beekeeping association.

5. Buy local honey. Local honey has lots of good properties including not being ultra heat treated so it is helpful for colds and allergies. If you are not sure where you can buy local honey, contact your local beekeeping association. Local honey tastes far richer than the mass produced stuff you buy at the supermarket.

6. Do not keep unwashed honey jars outside the backdoor. First of all it attracts wasps but more importantly, foreign honey can contain bacteria and spores that may be harmful to your local bees. The bees as well as the wasps will try to eat the remaining honey.

7. When encountering bees, be bee friendly. Do not flap your hands or run. Stay calm. Walk slowly away and go into the shade of a tree or shed. They sting because they are frightened for the hive.

8. Protect swarms. Call your local council to get the number of someone to deal with them. swarms are important. Generally they are not aggressive as they have fed on lots of honey. But if you disturb -- say spray them with water they get irritated. So leave them alone and call an expert.

9. Encourage your local authority to plant bee friendly plants. Parks, verges and other public areas can be a real haven for bees. Wildflowers such as rosebay willowherb can provide lots of honey. Evergreen plants and grass can't.

10. Learn more about bees. Contact your local beekeeping association. There are beekeepers ready and willing to talk to all ages and manner of groups. Generally they have an observation hive for schoolchildren.

The loss of bees is a very real problem but little things can help to make a difference.

Both of my beehives are gone. Mice got in and ate the honey. The bees starved. It is all my fault.
There are reasons why you leave on mouseguards...
I think I can get a new colony in a few weeks, but doubt that I will be harvesting honey this year.

Yesterday, my husband deemed the time was right to change the floors in the beehives. Because we use varroa floors (basically wire mesh) to help control the varroa mite, they do have to be cleaned as the bees can not do it.
Normally I try to get my husband to do the job... Grumpy bees and all that. However, I also wanted to discover about the possibility of mice. Far better for me to do it as it would have been my fault....

The bees were sluggish until I moved the hive and then they began to get active. Why, oh why when you are just about to do something difficult does the smoker go out? With the weather starting to cloud over and become cold, there was no hope of abandoning and waiting for the smoker to start. I just had to keep going on with the operation. Success was measured in two clean hive floors, no mice and most importantly no stings... Of course, the smoker started belching out smoke and the sun beat down, the instant I got back to the garden room.

My husband decided to make the bat box more secure and so we had a bat flying about the garden in bright sunlight. It swooped low over the garden for awhile and then we think went back to the box. My husband and youngest son both commented that they did not think there was a bat in the bat box and it could have been just the first flight of Spring. I begged to differ.

The whole question of whether or not the bees have made it through the winter is currently vexing me. My husband even casually mentioned that perhaps I should consider reading the latest missive from British Beekeepers Association about what to do in the early spring. He suggested going to look at the hives. I looked. However, there is snow on the ground. Unlike moles, when the weather is cold, bees clump together and hibernate.
But I do worry. Part of this worry is because I did not put mouse guards on before I left for Sorrento in the autumn and by the time I had returned, the weather had gone cold and the mice would be hibernating. I did not dare check to see as the weather was too cold...and so on. Mice like to eat honey and hives make perfect hibernating places. This is the first time that I have not put mouse guards on. SIGH.
The winter aconite is in flower as is the hazel tree. There should be plenty of pollen and such like for them. The one good thing about the garden is that we do have year round flowers.
My husband said that he saw the starling looking interested in the hole in the wall where it had chicks last year. Spring will be here before I know it, and I will have my answer about the bees.

One of the things I have been doing over the holidays is to make beeswax candles. I had not used up the beeswax from this year's harvest, and we were getting low on candles. There is a certain amount of satisfaction in making candles. Melting beeswax releases a wonderful perfumed scent and its fun to pour the wax into the mould and then the heart stopping moment when you know the candle is set but perhaps not quite ready to come out but you are going to try any way. Soft warm wax is very tactile.
I only managed to ruin one candle this year, and the wax was easily remelted.
It is a timeless process. Beeswax has been used since time immemorial, just as honey has. Cave pictures have included honey/beeswax hunting representations. However, it was not until the mid 19th century that modern beekeeping was born.
Until the invention of whale oil and then paraffin, beeswax was the clearest light. It does not smoke like tallow. Its light though is yellower than the white-blue of paraffin. And when it burns, beeswax releases the most wonderful scent.
I tend to make taper candles as they fit into the candle holders.
Beeswax is also used in a number of products from cosmetics to furniture polish. The cleanest wax from commercial beekeepers tends to cosmetics and the worst for furniture polish.
Because the bee uses the very efficient hexagonal shape, it does not produce much wax and pound for pound, beeswax is more expensive than honey.
Anyway, when I look at my candles and my store of honey, I am very pleased to keep bees. It is a worthwhile hobby and hopefully one which will grow in popularity. However, despite bees being one of the most studied creatures through history, we actually do not know that much about them and the dangers the modern world/chemicals/practices present.

Next Friday -- 10 October, I will be going up to Berwick upon Tweed to give a two hour workshop on writing romance as part of the National Year of Reading. Apparently the ticket sales are going well. So I guess it won't be just the librarian, my daughter and I...
Anyway, I am looking forward to it, but also feel a bit like I have just emerged blinking into the sun after doing my revisions (or more accurately rewrite)
I have also started revising/editing my Governess one. I am going to try to be methodical about this one. I am tempted to get a Story Board and a stack of index cards. Is this a procrastination technique or merely a reaction to not having seen a huge hole before I submitted the Viking?
Or will I get the cards, decide that it is too much like hard work and go back to the method that works for me? Because my books tend to be about 15/16 chapters long, it should in theory be easy to divide the board up my way.
Several of the big flaws with the Viking -- were the hero/heroine leads, and the laying of way too much pipe. In other words I over complicated the back story and made the main characters react to events rather than cause them. Characters in a book make their lives happen. Would I have realised this with index cards?
I know that such measure are not good when I am writing the first draft. There is really very little that can come between a writer and the blank page. Writers eventually have to write. But after that, lots of things can be done. I figure that I might as well give it a go. I know several writers who swear by such measures.
In other news:
The honey has been harvested -- 22 pounds. It was a poor year. The beehives now have to be made ready for winter -- with mouse guards and the annual treatment for varrora.
The pumpkins are about ready to be harvested as are the tomatillos. Tomatillos are green tomato like fruit that are used in making green chile sauce. They are very sharp in flavour and very easy to grow. The chile crop is decent this year but again because of the lack of light, the plants did not fruit as well.
And I have started to have fires in my new fireplace. Instead of having blue hands as I type, the fire now crackles merrily. Of this could lead to procrastination -- stirring the coals, putting more fuel on, burning index cards etc etc.

The Observer Magazine ran an article on the crisis in beekeeping yesterday. Suffice it to say, I know most of the arguments and I know that the research desperately needs to be done. There are still no answers to the Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD, although the being stolen by aliens theory has been heavily discounted. CCD has resulted in huge losses for American agriculture as flowering plants depend on the bees to pollinate. Not enough is known about bee disease and the international transfer of bees. For example, Greek queens being sent through the post. Are these bees more or less susceptible to bee disease? Equally, has the big business of moving hives about the country caused part of the problem? If large beekeepers move their hives and feed the bees on corn syrup, are they asking for problems? How much can the bees take? Whatever is happening, it seems like the bees are stating loud and clear that something is drastically wrong. And cutting the funding to reearch is not the answer.
Do I believe the dire predictions about no bees within a decade? I do not even want to think about it, because without bees, human beings have huge food production problems. I just wish the government and their senior civil servants would start taking the concerns seriously.
On a happier note with beekeeping, my two hives seem to be increasing nicely. I suspect there will be a lot of oil seed rape and so I will have to spin the supers earlier than I would normally. Oil seed rape produces lots of honey but it crystallises rapidly. Once it crystallises, the bees have difficulty using it. It is also almost impossible to get out of the comb. Last year, I ended up having to cut the combs and then gently heat to get the honey flowing. Fingers crossed that this year, I do things at an earlier stage.
It would also be great if this summer was normal. With a cold spring, the bees have been building slowly and I worry about having another rainy summer where the bees can not fly for days on end.
And a small plea -- if you have not tried your LOCAL honey -- do. Locally produced honey tastes far different from the honey found in the supermarket. England produces about 10% of the honey it consumes. And yes, I do know that the Third World honey does help to stimulate development, but I still think local honey is something special.

Yesterday, I basically took the day off. I also did the bees as I am attempting to remove a brood box and the boxes desperately needed to be reversed for this to happen.
A small point -- bees get v tetchy before a thunderstorm. Cue -- multiple bee stings.
Beekeeping where you take the sting with the sweet.
Anyway, the first stage of the process is done and I have put ointment on the stings. My pride is also slightly hurt. And I should have listened to my gut instinct rather than my dh's blandishment of oh look how still and warm it has become...
After being stung, I did sit down and watch What Women Want -- it is very amusing , but it is all about the Mel Gibson's character's growth arc, rather than the growth arc of his romantic interest.
Today is a day for doing little jobs and not letting the day get away from me. I should clean. I am making bread. And will probably do a batch of peanut butter cookies for when the children come home as we now do have enough sugar in the house. Making bread can be very therapeutic and the price of bread has gone up far more than the price of flour and yeast. It makes sense once again to bake. I tend to make much less exotic bread than my dh. He likes doing the chile cheese breads, and breads that seem to take ages and then go with savoury meals only. I prefer the sort of every day bread that can be used for a number of different things.
He learnt to bake bread when I refused to make chile cheese bread. He is now convinced that he makes better bread... I say it all depends on what you are using it for...
In one sense, I have finished the wip but in another I am in a holding pattern. It can't be submitted until I know about the revisions of the last one. My editor has promised the revisions by the end of the week....
The thing to do is to start the longer more complex historical that I have been threatening to write. I have done my research which helps.
But I keep thinking that awful question --WHY. Why is is it important for my hero to be behaving the way he is. Why is it important for my heroine and why is she over him at the start and why will she fall in love with the person that he is now? It is always all about the people they are now, not hte people they were back when they first knew each other. Although they may carry the guilt, hurt and anger forward. People can not change the past. They can only go forward.

It is warm in Northumberland. Too warm. The Oriental poppies are blooming. Normally these bloom in June to coincide with ducklings. (Somehow we lost a duckling this morning and so are now down to 8. I still can't bring myself to put them in a pie!) The gaudy pink summer flowers are now contrasting with the crisp colours of Liquid Amber birch and the beech. And there is a colour clash..
Maybe the flowers etc know some thing I don't. Maybe all the rain we had earlier this summer felt like a winter. I don't know. All I know is my plants are acting strange. And I am still in t shirts in the house. Normally I take Eileen Ramsay's advice and wear two sweaters at this time of the year as I do not like having the central heating on. Not this year.
I want my November to be cold and frosty. Maybe even snowy. 11 years when we moved to our house, snow lay on the ground for weeks. The movers could not get the tea chests to me until a few days before we moved. Somehow, I can't see this happening here this winter.
BUT all the signs are that someone is going to have a hard winter. Geese and siskins arrived early. The holly bushes are full of gleaming red berries. There has been a bumper crop of apples and pears.
The bees are still flying and I need to take out the varroa strips and make the final preparations for winter -- namely putting the mouse guards on. Mice will try to hibernate in beehives and can thoroughly disrupt a colony. I do not worry about extra feeding as we have plenty of ivy and late autumn flowers, plus a number of winter flowers including winter aconites, snowdrops and hazel. The bees as a general rule of thumb have enough to see them through. If they feel a bit light in February time. I will give them a sort of Royal icing type feed -- apifondant.

My revisions are coming on. The basic problem with this book is that I did not make one key conflict personal and so it ended up being far more external than internal. at my wonderful editors' suggestion, I am internalising it. It is working far better. My editors are there to make the hard suggestions and to tell me to take a second look at those areas that are not working. fingers crossed that it is going to work this time. Already I can tell it is getting better.

Now that the honey has been all gathered, and the apistan strips to protect against varroa mites are in the hives, my attention turns to the wax. I already rendered down the cappings wax a few weeks ago, but now I need to take all the broken comb and the bracing comb of the various frames and melt that down.
Beeswax pound for pound is more expensive than honey and is an important by product of keeping bees.

There are different grades of wax -- the lighter, the more prized. Capping wax because it tends to be nearly white is the sort that is used in cosmetics. The wax that comes from the old brood combs is probably only good for polish -- although I have been known to make it into candles but they don't burn as well I don't think.

Anyway, I now have candles to make -- generally the tapers as they are the most useful. This can be quite fun, but it is also time consuming. Disheartening when the mould topples over and the wax spills out. But fantastic when the new candle emerges. And I did not really get any candles made last year. My dh is now making noises about having very few candles left...

I use a variety of moulds. Thornes which is the biggest British beekeeping supplies store also has a sideline in candle making equipment. They are always very helpful. And their products are top quality. But be warned -- they have a wide variety and there is a lot that goes into candlemaking.

As an aside, the coal industry in the Northeast used tons of candles in the Regency period and several fortunes were made supplying the tallow candles. Until I really started looking into the Northeast during this period, I did not realise how diverse the industry was and how many different things were needed to support the coal mines. Interestingly, the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire owed a lot to the tax on seacoal. The Northeast was the primary supplier of coal to London. I am currently reading Peter Ackeroyd's new book -- Thames and it is full of interesting facts about trade, docks and the general importance of the river. Thames may be a prehistory word.

Yesterday, the front garden again filled with bees. This time instead of flying low and being easy to catch, the bees opted to swarm high into the lime tree. It was a cast -- a smaller swarm with a virgin queen at its head. Casts are usually difficult to catch.
My only hope now is that the beehive remains with a large enough colony. I doubt we willl get any more honey off that hive this summer. The annoying part is that the rosebay willow herb is just coming into flower and it is generally a time of intense honey production.
A learned beekeeper told me that no two summers were the same. I can identify with that.
I also feel writing books that no two manuscripts are the same.Each takes on its own characteristics and quirks.Sometimes the beginnings fly along. SOmetimes the endings. Soem want to be typed on the computer and some want to be written long hand. Sometimes, the characters remain shadowy for the longest periods. And other times, they emerge full blown. The only constant is the difference.
This wip is being frustrating. I keep changing my mind. BUt I know once I get my editors' thoughts back on the last one, my own thoughts on this one will crystalise...and then I will be able to write. Until then, it is slight exploration.

Julie Bunello has posted a lovely review on cataromance for . My favourite bit was Michelle Styles is one of the most exciting and original voices in historical romance and her latest novel, The Roman’s Virgin Mistress, is a superbly crafted tale which will hold her readers in thrall! It is wonderful to think that someone feels I have an exciting and original voice.
I also liked: Laced with plenty of passion, adventure and intrigue, The Roman’s Virgin Mistress is an engrossing historical romance written by a novelist who seamlessly interweaves historical detail with high drama, intense emotion and sizzling sensuality.
Julie, of course is a highly expereinced reviewer and takes her reviewing very seriously. If you have not seen the new look cataromance, be sure and do so. It is wonderful.
I was also pleased to read on Roxanne St Clair's RWA blog that It's true, it's true: the historical romance novel is alive and selling! In the words of a buyer from one of the major chains, historicals are "trending up" for the first time in a while. This is especially true of the bestselling authors of historical romance, and booksellers are closely watching the numbers of new and midlist authors in this sub genre, because increased sales from those authors is the sign that the trend is real and lasting. Terrific news for the hundreds of writers and millions of readers of the beloved historical.

Let us hope the trend is long and lasting. And readers continue to enjoy my books. The only thing I can do is to make my books as enjoyable as possible.

Yesterday was a day of frustration. We had a bee swarm. In mid July! Arrogantly I had considered we were beyond such things. Most of the swarms happen in late May/early June. By mid'July there is no real chance of getting honey off a swarm. The annoying part is that honey production also stops on the hive they swarmed from.
This time, the swarm which was about the size of a basketball -- so a proper swarm with the old queen rather than a cast -- landed in the Monterey cypress. I had no wish to lop bits of the tree off, so I attempted to use smoke and a skep. They appered to go into the skep, BUT when I checked later in the midst of a rainstorm, the bees had vanished. So did they give up and go back to to their hive? Or take off for somewhere more suitible? I don't know. All I know was that I had to lug the spare brood box back into the house. As I did not know which hive the bees had come from, I could not simply dump them back in. My thought was to put them in their own hive and then reunited with whichever colony seemed weakest AFTER I had taken the honey off.
Once the rain stops, I will have to check the honey situation and try to determine which hive is making a new queen.
SIGH.

Yesterday's Telegraph had a very tiny article, so small I nearly missed it. Complete Colony Collapse has hit Europe. Spain, Poland, Greece and Croatia have been hit. This syndrome/disease has already wiped out 50% of bee colonies in the US. It has the potential to cause an enormous impact and only rates half an inch.
Right now, there is nothing I can do. My colonies appear to be healthy and I shall be giving them a Spring tonic when the weather next turns warm. But as far as I know -- no one knows what is causing this disease or how to prevent it. Or indeed what the long term consequences of it will be. The wild bee colonies have already suffered because of the varroa mite. Much of agriculture depends on bees as the chief pollinating insect. If this population suddenly decreases by 50% or more, what does that mean for the food supply?
It is not good. And perhaps I should be pleased there are not the panicked articles such as one might find for avian flu, but it is another worry. I don't want anything to happen to my colonies and I really don't want to think about the long term consequences. Hopefully they will figure out what to do BEFORE this syndrome reaches Northumberland.

Another worry is : are the ducks going to have ducklings this year? I don't want any more ducklings. They are cute but a pain. And ducklings grow into ducks. We already have more duck eggs than I know what to do with. Duck eggs are great for cooking btw. I am just hoping that we discover all nests and the ducks don't decide to build their nests in the neighbour's garden...

My wip is coming on. This is my favourite phase of novel writing.It is taking and shaping. It is in the shading that you can really start to do something. I am a great believer in bad pages can be fixed easier than blank ones. You have clay to work with. You start seeing connections.

I have discovered another how to promote your book blog -- Pump Up Your Online Book Promotion. It is worthy of looking at and does give some pointers about Technorati. However, the best reason I know to use Technorati was Isabel Swift's post from about a year ago. If you have not read the Long Tail article -- it is worth reading. I am well aware there is more I could do with my blog and that I basically use it to write whatever I am thinking about. Hence it tends to jump around -- possibly not ideal for promoting my books, but it makes more interesting for me! SO I am afraid you will have to suffer through it.

Sold and Seduced will be on sale in the UK in April. The cover is yummy, and well, I like the story.

It is a lovely sunny day and there was a frost this morning. Firends of mine in Minnesota have emailed to say that thiswinter has been the coldest since 1979 and they were expecting more snow.
In other words, a direct contrast to the UK's weather...

My dh showed me a somewhat frightening article from The Independent --Honey ,Who Shrunk the Bee Population. It is all about how in North America, bee colonies are suddenly suffering from colony collapse disorder. Over the space of a few days, bees are abandoning hives and going away to die. The remaining bees are found to be riddle with all sorts of diseases. And no one knows why. Thus far, it has been mainly limited to the mobile apiaries. These are colonies that are hauled around the US to do the necessary pollination of crops. Because the US has been flooded with cheap honey imports in recent years, pollination has become the biggest money earner for many large beekeeping concerns. First to Florida for the citrus crop, then up to Pennsylvania for the apples and on to Maine for the blueberries. Some speculate that it is the stress of travel combined with the high protein and syrup supplements and differing pesticides that is making the colonies toxic. BUT they just don't know. It has the potential to severely impact the bee industry in the US, and with it agriculture over all. The true extent will not be known for at least a month because winter hibernation is not at an end. All I know is that I hope they find the cause and cure soon, and that it does not spread across the Atlantic.

One more worry but at least I know my colonies have not collapsed this year. Knock on wood.

And I need to get back to my wip as I can see the deadline looming, but also light at the end of the tunnel...