At The Speed Of Snail

Sometimes progress is painfully slow but eventually we do get where we are going. I finally decided on a quilting design for the string quilt. The red blocks have free motion round spirals and the blue blocks will have square spirals. (Technically, I am not sure there is such a thing as a "square spiral" but I know what I mean, and I expect you do too.)
Polly watches to make sure I am stitching things correctly. She's a stickler for detail.
The big job of the weekend was getting the hives all moved back to their winter home. Moving bees at any time of the season is tricky but at this stage, with the heavy honey boxes, it is a stress. We feel great relief when it's over. There are 23 hives in all (one is hiding behind another in this picture, in case you are counting.)
Already we have started taking the honey supers off. With our wet summer, the bees have struggled to put away much honey. Despite having about double the number of hives we normally do, honey production will not match last summer's. They still have a few weeks to work so we are hoping for sunshine into the fall.