Please welcome a chapter-mate, awesome woman and fantastic author–Winnie Griggs!Hello everyone.  I’m so pleased that Keri invited me to stop in for a visit  today.My new release, The Proper Wife, was a really fun story to write.  The heroine, Sadie Lassiter is the younger sister of Ry Lassiter, the hero in my book The Christmas Journey.  As soon as she appeared on the page of that book, I knew she had to have a story of her own.  And what an intriguing heroine she turned out to be – spirited, intelligent, both confident and unsure at the same time, and, unfortunately, something of a klutz.  In other words, not at all the staid, prim and proper miss that Eli Reynolds, our hero THINKS he’s looking for in a wife.  Here is the back cover blurb to give you a little taste of what the book is about: Sensible, settled, steady… and not Sadie Lassiter.Eli Reynolds knows what he wants in a wife, and the flighty Texas girl couldn’t be further from the mark.  Eli has his nine-year-old sister’s welfare to consider – Penny deserves a mother who will give her proper care.  But when bad weather strands Eli and Sadie together, he sees a new side to her character.  She’s rash – but also resourceful.  Instead of discipline, she has diligent faith.  Her housekeeping skills are lacking, but she’s filled with humor and sweetness.  She may not be a “proper” wife, but to save her reputation – and to take a chance on happiness he’d never expected to find – Eli will take her as his bride.One of the small but pivotal scenes in the book has my heroine deciding to harvest some honey from a hive whose location is a well guarded secret.  I did quite a bit of research on beehives and honey gathering and during that time stumbled on quite a few irrelevant but fun facts relating to honey and honey bees.  I thought it would be fun to share some of them with you.  And, for no other reason than the fact that I was born on a Friday the 13^th, I’ve decided to list 13 of them. 

1. The word honey comes from the Hebrew and means enchant.
2. A single honey bee will visit 50-100 flowers on a single trip out of the hive.   Even so,  in her entire lifetime, a honeybee will produce only about one twelfth of  a  teaspoon of honey. 
3. Bees must fly approximately 55,000 miles and gather nectar from approximately 2 million flowers in order to make one pound of honey.  This is the lifetime work of nearly 300 bees.
4. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
5. There are 20,000 species of bees, but only 4 make honey.
6. Honey, when stored in an airtight container, never spoils. It can be stored unopened, indefinitely, at room temperature. In fact, sealed honey vats found in King Tut’s tomb, still contained edible honey, despite over 2,000 years beneath the sands.
7. No two honeys are exactly alike in flavor, color, and nutritional content.   This is because the types of flowers on which the honeybees feed and climatic conditions of the area greatly influence the honey itself.
8. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
9. Honey bees are not native to the Americas – they were brought here by the early colonists in the seventeenth century.
10. Due to the high level of fructose found in honey, it is 25% sweeter than table sugar.
11. Worker honey bees are all females. Males do not know how to even feed themselves and their only reason for being in the hive is for reproducing with the queen. The males do not have a stinger and they are kicked out of the hive in the fall, because there are no uses for them.
12. Honey bees never sleep!
13. The lifespan of a worker bee is about 4 weeks during spring and summer; in winter, the lifespan is closer to 6 weeks. On the other hand, a queen bee can live up to 2 years.

And there you have it.  How many of these were a surprise to you?  And do you have any personal experience with bee hives?~~~~~~ Excerpt for The Proper WifeBorn and raised in the bayou country of southeast Louisiana, Winnie moved to the opposite corner of the state when she married her college sweetheart over 25 years ago. She and her husband, along with their four teenage children, reside in Plain Dealing, a small community nestled in the piney hill country of northwest Louisiana….