A friend of mine is an Amy Helm aficionado. He knows everything about her, travels to see her shows, saw her in Philly, sees her at the Racoon Saloon. He’s a groupie. Once, he hired her to do the entertainment on a tourist train-ride through the Catskills. She can pick him out in a crowd. “Hey Joe!”

So, when Amy was booked at the local City Winery, we all got tickets. I took part of the day off. Not all of it: during the morning, I put wet honey frames back on some of my best hives.

A wet honey frame is one which has just had its honey decapped and spun out. The bees love wet frames because they are covered in a thin film of honey even the high-speed extractor can’t spin off. The bees will eat the traces of honey, or mix it with pollen to feed their babies, or lick the cells of the frame clean and repack the honey in freshly cleaned bomb. Old-timers taught me the trick of under-supering. Under-supering means you take off all the other supers (medium-sized honey boxes use for honey collection, as opposed to the larger deeps which are reserved for brood rearing and winter honey storage for the bees themselves) and put the wet super on the bottom of the stack just above the brood chamber.

I use queen excluders between my brood chamber and supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in the part of the hive I want the honey. Just above the brood chamber and the queen excluder, the newly placed wet super creates a “void” in the hive. The bees hate a void, and they are quick to fill in the frames of the super you just spun the honey out of the day before. I put a little note on the sides of my boxes, like “Wet” or “Comb,” or “Full,” to let me know at glance what is in the stack of boxes.

And that was fun. Then it was time to take a shower.

I don’t get out much. I was on my best behavior. As much as I wanted to try the wine and drink wine in the sun, I’m on antibiotics combating my most recent case of Lyme Disease.

Coming from Woodstock, Amy dressed for the cold. By the fifth song she was sweating and took off her signature denim jacket. She played a few of the great songs from her new album “What the Flood Leaves Behind.” She spoke of her famous father, Levon Helm, and her travels growing up in a culture full of addictions and emotional trespass. Amy’s singing occupies a bluesy-folkish-gospel genre which can allow her to sing some fantastically moving songs of the past. That, and her new release with the single “Breathing” -- many critics calling her best work to date -- made for some true entertainment.

I felt there could have been more people there (probably Amy did too), but the lawn of the winery was nice, the slope of the field exactly right, and the grass is growing in as best it can. The small stage in front of the river was just big enough for her band. I see a much larger edifice is being built behind it and I don’t know if it is for wine or for stage, but it seems to be on the flood plain and I hope it doesn’t wash away.

I couldn’t help but think of our own visionary, Sam Wright, and his dream of building a performance stage along the Wallkill in Walden, below Bradley Field, and what that might have meant for Walden if he had had more support, if dreams had become reality.