Today did not go at all as planned. It started off raining, so I pottered around indoors clearing up the kitchen counters which had disappeared under various tools and so forth and moving stuff into permanent homes, doing dishes that emerged from under the tools and that sort of thing. While i was about that I noticed that the apricots I had bought last Friday with a view to jamming over the weekend were getting a little past their best, so decided I really should do something about that - 10 kg of apricots all at once would not be good for the chooks digestion.

Was looking up recipes when the gardening chap called in for his money, which was duly paid. But as it was raining, and he was at leisure, so the speak, he stayed for a chat. For quite some time. In the end I made a cuppa and we sat down and chatted even longer.

Finally shovelled him out the door and decided that, since it was now lunchtime, I might as well pop into Oatlands for some more sugar, onions etc for preserving purposes and got home and got stuck in.

There are still an awful lot of apricots left but so far I have apricot and ginger conserve (labelled), Apricot jam and three bottles of apricots bottled (at least I think they are, I am not sure i cooked them for long enough, so will probably have to use them fairly quickly).



The fancy jars and fancy labels are for the market, the rest are for me. There is a jar of Apricot and Ginger conserve for me as well, but that is already on the shelf, along with the brandied cherries.

The photo also reveals my secret shame - yes, when I talk about mash for dinner, I mean Deb ... shame, shame ...

I discovered that having a fancy jam pan does not stop your apricot jam from catching if you stop stirring it (which I did while making up labels for the conserve) so the contents had to be transferred to a stock pot and a few charred bits picked out before the jam could be finished off. That is why there is none in the fancy jars. From the bits I have licked off spoons and scraped out of pans though, it still tastes fabulous, so I will be kept happy for at least a month with apricot jam of my own.

Was just putting the last lid on the last jar when the bee man came to have a look at the hives and we spent a happy hour or so pulling the hives apart to see what I have.

The weaker hive is, as I suspected, queenless. So we transferred some brood comb into it, and some honey to encourage the bees to make a new queen for themselves. We have also moved it alongside the active hive so that bees get confused and go into either. What we found in there was no brood comb whatsoever, an empty queen cell, lots of frames with drawn wax and a bit of pollen stock, but no honey at all.

The second hive was rather more encouraging. It had lots of honey, and a fair bit of brood comb as well. Some of this has been moved into the other hive, and we added two more boxes to the top of it (taken from the weak hive to give them more of a sense of enclosure and stop them wearing themselves out wandering haplessly around all that space).

So, a bit disappointing, but hopefully all is not lost. And if it is, then I can hope that the active hive swarms somewhere in my yard next spring and I can then transfer the new swarm into the dead hive if it fails to prosper.

It was rather tempting to see if I could take out a few combs of the capped honey, but we decided to leave it, see if the two extra boxes are filled and if so, to take them off for spinning, leaving the rest of the honey to help them over-winter.