It’s been almost four months since our last blog post. As I write this journal entry, I am sitting beside a beautiful lake at the campus of the American University of Iraq - Baghdad, where I have been working for the past year. Between my work in Iraq and the restrictions imposed on everyone around the world by COVID-19, I was not able to visit Irish Acres Apiary for a full year - twelve full months without a single hive inspection, without opening the hives, without any treatments or feeding, nothing. For one full year, our colonies of bees were on their own, left to their devices, without any “beekeeping” help from humans. How did they do? Well, as it turns out, they did pretty well! When I left Kentucky for Iraq in early October, 2019, I left behind eight hives, a number that was down from the previous year as I had been in Iraqi Kurdistan for the previous year and was unable to visit the apiary regularly, catch swarms, split hives, and do all the work t