Stinky feet honey

The hive is all tucked in for the year. We fed them and dosed them for the winter, removed the empty top super that had been there for ventilation, and now all we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best. The fall honey sure does have a more distinctive odor. At first I thought it smelled like dirty feet, but a few days after adding the sugar water feeder the odor mellowed to a lovely butterscotch smell. Now it's just starting to smell like home and I find myself anticipating the smell every day during the commute home. A friend of J's who's also a beekeeper said he thinks the body odor smell is from goldenrod. The first year of beekeeping has been a wonderful experience and has given me countless hours of enjoyment. If I hadn't had the bees to keep me company this spring while I was down with the herniated disc, I would have gone completely cray cray. I'm still learning to accept that beekeeping is not the same as keeping pets, and a lot of other beekeepers consider their  hives strictly as livestock. For  me it's still  difficult to step outside on cold mornings and see dead bees on the entrance board of the hive. In fact I watched one of the bees come out slip into a puddle of water on the entrance board and within a matter of minutes go from a lively normal bee to an upside down dying bee. Later reading confirmed that bees simply can not tolerate a combination of cold temperatures and getting wet. Beekeeping is a strange teetering balance between keeping pets and livestock, but it's now becoming  a necessary part of my life.