One, just one, of the thousands of proverbs, axioms, and sayings my father lived by was “Good things come in small packages.” He was a “proverbial man” in temperament and action, and he liked this saying, in part, because the woman he married was under five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds wet. So, she was a small package, and he would add, diamonds come in a velvet box smaller than a packet of washers.

I don’t know how I got to this opening paragraph, as this particular column is about flowers and bees, but there it is, and the simple connection is: beauty, wealth, usefulness, purposefulness as a function of natural law, have no direct correlation to size. Now let’s not go crazy.

Simply saying, right now, at the very end of the growing season, what my honeybees are feasting on, the asters, come in small packages. These tiny flowers are as rewarding to the bees as huge eight-foot sunflowers, long ago matured and gone to seed and now being raided by woodpeckers and finches. There is not much more out there for bees and pollinators to forage. A few sprigs of golden rod are still blooming, but most of the prominent fall nectar producers are beyond peak and drying in the cool winds of late September. Purple loose-strife is in the same condition. But the wild asters are thriving.

There are so many different types of asters, I don’t know them except to call them by their colors -- purple asters, white asters, yellow. Of the white asters, there are many. One of the benefits of being so far behind in weeding the garden is that the weeds actually mature into the plants they are, and you would be surprised what happens in a hippie garden where Mother Nature is irrepressibly out of control, or in control, as your perspective may be, and the weeds turn into flowers and in this hippie garden into wild white asters by the bushels and bushels.

You can’t even walk through the place, and it seems just weeks ago it was looking great, and the leaf-mulch was around the onions and the tomatoes (mostly) staked and then maybe it was all waiting for that first rain because a jungle appeared overnight and I sent away to Johnny’s Select Seeds for a new machete. Can’t come soon enough.

But what such dereliction does produce is a remarkable stand of these weed/flowers and man do the honeybees love them. These tiny blossoms are producing both nectar and pollen for the workers, and any hour the air warms over 45 F a patch of these white flowers might have half a dozen bees going flower to flower searching almost in desperation for the last harvest – the nectar for honey and the carbohydrates, and the pollen for the protein. Young bees are fed a mixture of these two building blocks – honey and pollen – chomped by the nurse bees, then regurgitated as bee bread.

The egg laying of the queens has slowed way down by now, and in another month they will stop altogether and into winter mode the cluster swings until she beings laying the spring eggs in February.

I have a ton of honey still in the field. Reports from local beekeepers is that the harvest is light this year, but from what I have taken, it is about normal, and the flavor such that I am in possession of an above average vintage. I noticed a few weeks’ dearth during the drought, but my bees were bringing in stuff from somewhere and they had a few strong fields of goldenrod here during the fall. Now the asters are quite thick in my neck of the woods, and my harvest will continue as soon as I put a cap on this literary (I have learned to be generous to myself) diversion.

I was able to get enough honey bottled to set up my tent at Walden’s Harvest Day and it was fun to see all the Waldenites and to bring my product into the village. I was proud to say to my prospective customers, “This is real ‘Walden honey!’ I have hives on three sides of the village. You can’t get more local than this,” while offering them a free sample. The people responded. Thanks.