Now that the scorching dry dearth-inducing summer in my little corner of Newfoundland with record-breaking high temperatures has come to a close, beekeeping videos might show up on my beekeeping YouTube channel again, but this is the last time I’ll post anything to Mud Songs, the most aptly-named beekeeping blog that ever was. I’ve got other irons in the fire that will likely sneak up and say hello at the mudsongs.org URL in time, and my latest videos will always show up in the following playlist, but maintaining this blog doesn’t cut it for me anymore.

It’s been a good blog, one that began in 2007 or so as a gardening blog to share veggie tales with my family and friends, which then switched to an all-beekeeping blog in 2010, which then became popular enough to garner 5 million views for one of my videos, and then it dropped down to about 200 daily visitors after I had to step away from beekeeping for about a year. I’ve pecked away at it since then whenever I had time to kill at work, and I’ll continue to post pics and video clips on my social media feeds — Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. But things have peacefully run their course here and it seems like it’s time to pull the plug on this old blog, at least in its current form.

This photo shows me tending to my bees in my tiny backyard near downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I first kept bees.

My first couple years of beekeeping in that the small space with only two hives, and then another two the next year, may have been the best years of my beekeeping when I had the most fun, when every little thing was a discovery.

In 2022, I went back down to 4 hives (up to 6 now because, you know, it happens) and I love it. I’m getting more from less. I lost sight of the wisdom of simplicity. So that’s it.

So long and thanks for all the fish.