Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

Thursday night Kate and I watched Conflict Tiger, a movie by Sasha Snow that followed the same story retold in the book, Tiger.  It’s a powerful, gritty movie about the reality of life in the taiga.  The characters in the movie, especially Yuri Trush and Ivan Dunkai, have a powerful presence, Trush as the hard-bitten but compassionate eco-policeman and Dunkai as a shamanic character with intuitive grasp of the tiger and taiga learned practical wisdom.

(Ivan Dunkai, Sasha Snow)

Today I did bee business.  Moved six honey supers, put two on the south colony and took the remaining four into the third garage bay.  The trailer on our lawn tractor is a handy piece of equipment.

Two colonies:  the south, filled with bees, boiling up out of it like angry vengeance, not wanting a stranger pawing around in their home; the other, docile and less populated.  When the south colony residents went into their angry buzz and started slamming against the veil and gathering on my right glove, my body zoomed back to last fall when I made a mistake.  You may recall that I decided to replace a honey super on a hive without veiling up?  OMG.  WTF.  OUCH.  My heart rate went up today.

Since I use nine frames in ten frame hive boxes, the bees often construct comb in the empty spaces and they had done this in the south colony.  Since I had to reverse the hive boxes on that colony today–this forces the bees to fill up both hive boxes with brood which makes for a better crew to harvest and make honey–one of the chunks of non-frame comb fell off.  It had honey it.

It’s now on the kitchen table.  Fresh honey in the comb.  Worth that bit of pit-a-pat.

Bee keeping is a collegial activity.  I keep the frames clean and coming while the colony builds up, adding sugar syrup if necessary.  Once the honey flow starts, if the colonies are strong enough, I put on honey supers and harvest the honey they make that is in excess of what they need to survive over the winter.

In other words I provide a home and its maintenance, they pay the rent with honey.  It is nothing less than a partnership with both parties putting in their own labor and each party getting benefit.

It is, in that way, a very tangible micro-instance of the relationship we have with our mother, the earth.  In that macro relationship we are the dependent party, yet we have work we put into the relationship, too.  It can be constructive work or destructive work, we choose, but the feedback systems in play make destructive work dangerous, too often causing mother to remind us of our place in the order of things, the great chain of being.

In fact the great chain of being does not run from earth to heaven, rather it runs around the skin of the earth, more like a great mesh.