Lichen soup and blood sausage

I admit that there is not an immediate connection between the photo and the title, but let me explain how my mind wandered!
While enjoying the sight of busy bees collecting nectar and pollen I started thinking about how they were preparing for winter. How they would be staying in clusters in the hive to keep warm, fluttering the wings and shivering and exchanging places from the inside of the cluster to the outside, and how they would need a lot of honey to have the energy to keep warm. Then I thought of how we live a life of plenty in warm houses with central heating, warm clothes and shoes that don't get soggy and with supermarkets that offer you out of season greeneries throughout the year. Certainly very different from the bee's struggle to overwinter. That is when my mind wandered further back, to my ancestors that had to struggle like the bees to overwinter. In the autumn they would slaughter the lambs coming back from the summer grazing, salting some, smoking some and conserving the rest in whey. Autumn would also be the time of plentyfull eating of interiours (heart, kidney, liver), making of blood and liversausages conservation of that little vegetable that the climate allowed to grow, the harvesting and storeing of big sacks of potatoes making jams from rhubarb and wild berries. That is how they prepared for the long and dark wintermonths. They would also exchange meat or fish in the village for some flour and sugar from which they would prepare occasional treats. The families and workers would all live in one big room where the fire was kept, they would share beds, stay close and tell stories into the evening while knitting or sewing clothes, shoes and other necessities, hoping that the spring would be mild and that their resources would last until more could be gathered. It was a question of life and death, not so far from that of the bees in the hive. I did not live these times, but they are close enough for me to have experienced their remains, like preparing and eating the blood sausages and collecting lichen to make a milky soup. I doubt that I would I be able to overwinter like my ancestors?