The Bee Man Cameth

 

Yes he did. He came yesterday. And as it turns out this was quite an auspicious day for him to come.

 

In the morning I had received an email notification of the Convivio Book of Days blog post for August 24th, St. Bartholomew's Day. It is quite an entertaining post for us book artists and bee hosts. In case you aren't going to follow that link, I'll sum up the important points. 

1. St. Bart is the patron saint of tanners and butchers. Why? 'cause he was flayed alive. 

2. Therefore, he is also the patron saint of book binders, paper makers and printers (because of the leather and vellum and stuff - which book binders and printers use).

3. There is a lovely prediction: 

            If Bartlemy’s Day be fair and clear,
            hope for a prosperous autumn this year.

And it was a beautiful day yesterday.   

3. Also, St. Bart happens to be the patron saint of Bee Keepers. The logic there fails me here a little. 

But never the less!... Matt happened to come on the appropriate day as August 24th is the traditional day in England to harvest the honey. And harvest he did. 

He took two of the "supers." He thought they had about 40lbs. of honey each. They were so full the bees hand built combs in between the two and when he pulled them apart they were just dripping honey.  

 He very kindly scraped the combs, honey, bees and all into plates for me. Finally it got to be too much and I had to get bigger bowls.  The result was three jars of combs and honey (two for him - one for Miss Mary), and then some left over for me.  

And it is delicious! Fresh honey! I don't think there is anything better. It is so sweet and delicious. 

Matt also scraped off some of the propolis for me. This is an extremely sticky, resinous stuff the bees use for all kinds of stuff. You'll have to follow the link to wikipedia because otherwise I'd just be plagiarizing. It sounds like very interesting stuff, definitely worth spending more time researching. 

  

Any by the way - it smells heavenly! A power punch of that smell from bees wax. If you could get high from it - we'd all be in big trouble.

And then I also figured that if the saying were true: 

  If Bartlemy’s Day be fair and clear,
            hope for a prosperous autumn this year.

Then I would be needing a new purse, or as they say in Philadelphia a new pocketbook. It was such a beautiful day after two days of rainy gloom and I just want to be prepared for all this prosperity.   

I had already been planning something along these lines for various reasons. Pedro bought me the most wonderful pocketbook in the winter. But as the summer came on it turns out the pleather is sticky. Not very comfortable. So I've been wanting to recreate the same bag in cloth. And even though I really like the bag the way it is, as I was fiddling with this new one, I thought it could use some improvements. Like, more pockets.

 I am rather pleased with it. There is a long pocket on the right for umbrella, coffee cup, fan, or whatever. And on the left side is a pocket for keys and a pocket for cellphone. All the important stuff on the outside.
On the inside we have - ha! even more pockets! Trust me. No bag can have enough pockets.

My only complaint about the design is the gaping key-pocket. I need to address this somehow, either with a snap or something to keep the keys anchored to the bag. It would be inefficient to lose one's keys.