Country Mouse Monday: the hive & the present (+ give-away!)

Opening a bee hive is like opening a present.

You know some things in advance, just from the shape of the package. Plus, this ain't your first rodeo -- or birthday or Christmas -- so you have some sense of what might be inside the box.

But until you take off the cover and start to unwrap that colony, you don't really know anything.

Opening a bee hive is like opening the present.

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more goodies from the hive: lip balm

Probably the Grape Nuts commercial from my youth has affected me more deeply than I'd like to admit ("Many parts are edible").  And stories about native peoples and farmers and pioneers who wasted not any part of an animal they'd killed, using every bit for some purpose.  So when I fell on this recipe for lip balm that uses beeswax and honey -- two items we have in abundance around these parts -- this County Mouse had to have a go.

Giving credit where credit is due, recipe is courtesy of www.honey.com -- Honey-Kissed Lip Balm. 

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