I used my silly forty days remark too soon. We are supposed to get at least four more days of rain this week. Jim and I decided it was better to get the bees in during a drizzle late yesterday afternoon than have them sit in the boxes they arrived in for four more days.

After many years with the bees down on their own, in one corner of our property, we moved the bee hives next to the office last year. We thought they might like this warm sheltered spot close to the vibration of the Flower Essences. The shipping and invoicing building is right to Jim’s left in this photo. The passageway to the bottling room is right behind him. Behind the lilac on the right is one of the windows in the bottling area. Last summer the bees seemed to love this warm southwest corner. We loved watching all their activity from our desks.

The queen bee goes into the first hive. All the other bees that arrived with her will follow her into the hive. First, Jim takes off the lid of the hive and removes one frame from inside the hive. The queen arrives separated from her hive in a little box. Jim knocks the plug that holds the queen in her little box out of the hole and places this box down between the frames. Her bees will come and get her out of the box and settled her into her new home.

Sometimes with a restless queen, people leave the plug in and let the queen’s bees eat a hole in the sugar plug to get her out. With the rain, it seemed unlikely that the queen would want to go anywhere but into the relatively dry hive. At Jim’s feet are the bees that will then join the queen in her new hive.

Here Jim is pouring the bees into the hive. With the rain they were cooperative about going right into the hive. Usually there is an enormous swirling cloud of bees at this point but the rain kept them mellow. After our concerned debate all weekend, transferring the bees in the rain actually turned out to be easier and less dramatic than usual.

Here Jim shows the box holding the second queen for the second hive. Jim wears this jumpsuit because he has had some run ins with the bees during which he got stung many times. Theoretically, everything on the suit zips together so that the bees cannot sting Jim, but at one point when the netting over his helmet folded in against his face, Jim got stung twice. I was not wearing a suit while taking these pictures and when I went to brush the bees off Jim and his suit at the end of the job, one bee stung me on my palm.

An ecuadorian shaman told me that bees never sting accidently and that the placement of the stings is always to facilitate a healing for the person or to release pent up emotions. As a consequence, I try to stay very calm and cheerful when I am near the bees. This is easier than it sounds because I love honeybees and they make me very happy. When I get stung, I think of it as serving me and necessary for some reason. I know being relaxed about bee stings is not the way everyone can be about bee stings. I am grateful I can welcome the occasional sting without concern.

Sometimes Jim has to really bang on the box to get the bees to leave their temporary box home. The bees are almost like a liquid unit of moving oneness as they move from box to hive. Here you can also see that some of them did take flight and then found temporary shelter in the folds of Jim’s bee suit.

With the transfer complete, we went inside to watch it rain some more, hoping that the bees would make do with the sugar water we left them. When the rain stops, there will be so many Flowers for them. All the apple trees are coming into blossom and there are so many other Flowering trees right now. We are looking forward to sunshine and visiting the apple trees almost as much as the bees!

It’s been a little bit wet here. All my plans to be outside in the garden these last three days came to naught as it has poured almost continuously. I went out long enough to see that the weeds are doing well.

Our new bees arrived but can’t go into their hive until it stops raining. When they go in their new hive, the top of the hive has to come off for a couple of hours while they buzz around, getting settled in. Bees hate rain so we are hoping to wait until it stops before moving them. So far, no break in the precipitation to finesse this transfer.

Here is a new Flower Essence made on a trip to Bennington, Vermont where Lizzy goes to school. Does it surprise you that the Flower is called Dutchman’s Breeches? I will sit down with the Flower soon to ask for data but in the meantime, this new Flower Essence has been the butt of some jokes, pun intended.

I went down to Bennington to see Lizzy dance last weekend and then I was there again this weekend to help with a sprained ankle. During a dance improve class on Friday, Lizzy and another dancer had a run in with Lizzy’s ankle.

This weekend we watched it rain, plied Lizzy with Flower Essences, and suggested she stop trying to dance for just a few moments ( it’s amazing how much moving around one determine dancer can do while keeping her leg elevated on a pillow). There also has also been MUCH debate about ankle problems and whether it is fair to say that the family’s ankle problems come from Jim’s family of origin, not mine.
Jim has sprained his tiny, delicate ankles 7 zillion times. Ben comes in a close second with 6 zillion sprains including an especially dramatic sprain last year in Prague that left his entire foot black and blue for weeks. I have sprained my robust and sturdy ankles but once when I was twelve and barreling down a mountain with no skiing skills to speak of.

Jim claims these facts offer no proof of anything. Gardening, he points out, is not like pick up basketball. Jim comments that had I continued on with my budding ski career then we would have a chance at valid statistical analysis. Point taken, but I still think that while the children got their athletic talents from Jim’s side of the family, they also got their weak ankles from him too. Basically, my gene pool was worn out before we started having children. All of them looked like Jim clones from birth. As one gentleman in the village put it, “You can tell the Sheehans are a poor family, they could only afford one face.”

Back to Lizzy, here she is just a few moments ago on her way back to Bennington with several bottles of Essences and some crutches that she is really looking forward to dancing with.

It’s Thursday so Sophie Cardew, Deb’s daughter, is here. Her day at Green Hope farm is one of three jobs she has. One job is at Simon Pearce pottery doing glazing and trimming. One job is at the Cornish, New Hampshire General Store doing pretty much everything. We grimace at her descriptions of cleaning the store’s deli slicer! And we get Sophie on Thursdays.

All day long Sophie cheerfully bounces back and forth from the barn, carrying in loads of everything necessary to restock our shipping stations. Sometimes there is time at the end of the day for her to get out in the gardens. A couple of weeks ago she spent the afternoon transplanting seedlings with me. But usually she spends the whole day getting us ready for next week’s orders.

One recent Thursday, Sophie and I decided we needed to reorganize where all this stuff was coming from. We tackled the barn itself. The barn is always in a state of flux with inventories running low and new and usually different stuff arriving to fill the space. Things get disorganized out there.

After our morning in the barn, we were so proud of how tidy we got the place. There was even some room for Ben’s pottery wheel for a few days. Before our work, it had been squeezed in between cartons of colored Flower Essence boxes. Ben could wedge himself down among the boxes, but could hardly lift his elbows to center the clay. We got things so organized that there were a few golden hours during which sunlight poured in upon Ben in a spacious room as he threw earthenware pots for the garden.

This zen like moment was short lived.

At the end of last week, Jim picked up 20,000 copies of a revised edition of the Animal Wellness brochure from the printer and unloaded them into the barn. Just a few short days before, a palette of 30,000 1/2 ounce cobalt blue bottles had arrived. Murphy’s Law requires that all tractor trailers arrive at the farm when no one but me and maybe one other fortunate soul is here. This time Patricia was the lucky one who got to heave all the boxes of bottles from the trailer truck into the barn with me. As always, we were proud of ourselves, but glad to see the tractor trailer truck pull away from the farm.

But the point of this blog is to tell you about the new Animal Wellness brochure! It is so much better than the last edition. I have updated the ingredient list for each of the twenty two remedies and also clarified the descriptions of several of the remedies. More importantly, I have rewritten the brief introductory explanation of Flower Essences in a much more grounded way, using my new favorite analogy for Flower Essences as electrical road maps AND at the end of the brochure I give very specific possible ways to use the remedies and explain why all these methods will work equally well.

I am just so glad to have this to share. I really believe someone could get the gist of Flower Essences from this small brochure and have many of their questions answered. (Well everyone has to believe in something!)

Once again, we have printed a copy with ordering information and one without ordering information for those of you who want people to order directly from you. Once again, these brochures are free on request. I have been so excited to see them flying out the door this week. It’s great to send Sophie out to the barn for another box of them. Isn’t it Soph?

Visualize photo of smiling Sophie here. Jim took the digital camera on a trip with his sixth grade class or I am sure Sophie would be happy to pose as she sprints into the office with another load in her arms!

The comments on the blog “From Entitlement to Gratitude” were plentiful. Most thoughts and questions were about the shift in the Elementals interactions with us.

Here is one e-mail from a Green Hope friend named Kavita. Both her question and the Elementals’ answer as received by Kavita are so very beautiful and clarifying:

Kavita writes, “I was puzzled by one aspect of the elemental’s choice to shift their relationship with humankind in certain instances.

I interpreted what I read to mean that the elementals were now choosing to withhold love / no longer willing to extend love to humans in certain circumstances. This seemed dissonant with my gut sense of elemental energy – which feels only loving, to me. I thought I would ask them directly about this.

I wandered out to the woods on this land where we live, land which is currently in resurrection mode thanks to recent renewed loving contact with all beings inhabiting this land and lots of lovely flower essences.

I told the elementals I was glad to have a clearer sense of them, and that I am much gladdened to join with them more consciously now.

They informed me that ‘Belief is not necessary. A willingness to join and a cooperative spirit is all that matters.’

I told the elementals of the quandary I described above.

They told me, ‘Withholding support is not the same as withholding love (to which a sort of addendum was offered: ‘Withholding love is not possible – only through a veil of fear can this even be perceived as possible.). Withholding support is sometimes appropriate at this time. Doing so with loving intention causes no harm, even if in your perception harm is being done. If the idea of ‘dead matter’ disturbs you, you are placing too much emphasis on the perception of material reality. Nothing dies, in love’s realm – This is the only reality. We encourage you not to concern yourself with the circumstances in which we may choose to withhold energy, support, what have you. Tend to your own garden of loving intention and action. Molly wished to light a fire of loving awareness, to which you responded. Honor Us and All with your love in spirit and action. This is all we ask. We are with you in love – even those who do not know it, even if we believe they should, Love Prevails.’

Thank you Kavita for your willingness to share this exchange with all of us! Love, Molly

I work in the gardens of Fridays. First thing I do in the morning is walk through all the gardens seeing what needs to be done. Then I ask my Elemental and Angelic partners what the priorities should be.

Right now the Arbor Garden remains chock a block full of blossoming Daffodils. This week will probably be the swan song for a lot of them. With this photo I thank them for having made the last few weeks in the gardens so delightful.

One thing I was concerned about this morning was Plum blossom pollination. We lost our two hives of bees late last winter to varoa mites and the replacement bees have not yet arrived from Georgia. I went down to our Plum trees, ready to try some hand pollination if necessary. Happily there were many other pollinators in the Plum blossoms and even some honeybees.

These could be from a group of honeybees that swarmed on us last summer. This swarm took off to the west in an enormous flying icicle of bees before we could get them in a new hive here at the farm. It is wonderful to imagine a nearby hive surviving on its own. Honeybees have suffered from many difficulties in North America in the last decade or two. But that’s another blog. For today, I am just so joyful that somewhere a colony of bees has survived all the difficulties a modern honeybee faces.

May May inspects the Red Currant bushes. We can happily report that these too were full of different pollinators! Now I am off to the asparagus bed to weed. That was the Elementals’ top job for me this morning after I posted these photos! Have a wonderful weekend!