| Honeyazza! Greetings and Happy New Year from Jazianzza and Anandamayi! We hope that you had a beautiful holiday season, filled with much joy and sweetness, and are getting off to a good start in this new year. Our book Bee-Coming Strong launched in November. Thank you for all the beautiful support you provided during this exciting time. The book is now available on Amazon as well as Ingram Spark, so you can ask your local bookshop to order it for you if you wish. This will give them some business and also let them know the book exists. |
We deeply appreciate those who have taken the time to leave a review on Amazon and would love for others to join in. It’s a great way for potential readers to know if it’s a book that would be right for them.
So, what the heck do bees do in the wintertime? Do they sit around reading The Daily Bee? Do they binge on Beeflix? Polish their tarsus? (Bees don’t have toes but have little claws at the end of their leg, called “tarsal claws” that help them grip.) Jazi is laughing at me saying, “The answer is none of the above!”
What they do is kind of amazing. They keep their hive at about 95 degrees by using the same muscles that allow them to fly to create heat by purposefully shivering or contracting their muscles. It’s an efficient way to generate heat for their hive. In addition, they cluster tightly together to stay warm, keeping the queen towards the center to ensure she stays warm.
“And,” Jazi is reminding me, “we get to eat honey!” As you may know from reading Bee-Coming Strong, honey is the most bee-licious thing that she can imagine. Also, she wants to shout from the treetops that she is now teaching belly breathing classes, under the close supervision of the wise MamaQueenzieBee. Even her sister Sisizza has started to attend occasionally! What a wonderful development in her little buzzing life.
We’ve done a couple more podcasts. Doing these podcasts has been an amazing experience for me. It has reminded me that there are a lot of good people in the world. The podcast hosts have all been wonderful and kind people who are passionate about expressing good in the world.
One podcast was with Anouk Briere-Godbout. Her podcast, Parenting the Intensity is, in her own words, “a podcast for parents of emotionally intense kids to feel more confident in dealing with your wonderful, but challenging, kids.” I so appreciate her beautiful work in the world. Anouk is full of light, life, and joy.
I hadn’t realized that she was going to record an introduction after we did the podcast, so my introduction and discussion of the book seemed a bit awkward, but oh, well, live and learn! Otherwise, it was wonderful being with this beautiful soul that I now call my friend. If you are interested, you can check out the 23-minute podcast here:
https://podcastaddict.com/
I was also given the marvelous opportunity to be on the Beekeeping Today Podcast with Becky Masterman, a most unusual and gracious young woman. As it says on their website, they “have conversations with beekeepers, researchers, and industry leaders.” I don’t quite know how I snuck into their company, but we had a delightful time together. You will find this 15-minute podcast here, starting about 15 minutes in: https://www.
Wishing you a January filled with many blessings. Thank you again for being a part of our very special hive. Please feel free to share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested. We are hoping for our hive to grow much bigger.
We love the following quote for this month. Apparently NASA has a poster hanging that reads:
Aerodynamically a bee’s body is not made to fly; the good thing is that the bee doesn’t know.
The law of physics says that a bee cannot fly, the aerodynamic principle says that the breadth of its wings is too small to keep its huge body in flight, but a bee doesn’t know, it doesn’t know anything about physics or its logic and flies anyway.
This is what we can all do, fly and prevail in every moment in the face of any difficulty and in any circumstance despite what they say.
Let us be bees, no matter the size of our wings, we take flight and enjoy the pollen of life.