Category Archives: Bees

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work, Memories, Retirement

Not Stepping In The Same River Twice

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Samhain                                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  You, too, tiny Tim.

Stayed up late last night reading a novel about a Chinese detective in Chinatown, NYC.  Not sure how it happened but China has become my favorite country, much like Germany used to be and Russia before that.  Instead of Buddenbrooks I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, instead of Steppenwolf I read Chinese mysteries.  No more War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, though I could read them again, I choose, as I always have, to plow new ground, read things I have not read before.

I tend not to read things twice, except poetry.  A big part of reading for me is the journey to somewhere new, following a trail with no known ending, a similar joy to the one I find in traveling, especially to countries where the culture disorients me, leaves me little room for my old ways.

New disciplines give me a similar boost:  art history, Latin, writing, vegetable gardening, bee keeping, hydroponics.  I’m sure I miss something in my search for the novel, which may explain why I find living in the same house for 16 years, driving the same car for 16 years, being married to Kate for 20+ years soothing.  As Taoism teaches,  life is a dynamic movement between opposites, the new and the old, the familiar and the strange, the taxing and the comfortable.  The juice flows as the pulls of masculine and feminine, life and death, youth and age keep us fresh, vital.

My buddy Mario uproots himself and moves along the earth’s surface, finding new homes and new encounters.  He changes his work with apparent ease, finding new friends and new experiences as he does.  Brother Jim, Dusty, constantly challenges his present and his past, leaving himself always slightly off balance.  Both of these men take the juice and mold it into art.

There are many ancientrails through this life, including intentional disorientation, familiar surroundings, ambition, compassion, politics, nurturance, keen observation, delight, dance.  The key lies in finding yours and staying with it, getting to know it and to be it.

When you can, you will find every day (well, most days) are Thanksgiving.

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Retirement

Sheepshead

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The card gods were pretty good to me.  I had some good hands, some good luck and a lot of fun tonight at sheepshead.  We had a great evening with a lot of laughter.  It’s nice to be with guys who can see the humor in their own lives.

The wisdom teeth began to throb tonight, a bit surprising after a calm period since the extraction.  I’ve felt fatigued and a bit spacy, but no real pain until today.

I will be happy when Kate’s work is done in early January and she goes on casual time.  Having her here will make our home feel more vital.

Over the weekend I plan to put the bees to rest for the winter and make some more soup with the last of the leeks.  Latin tomorrow.

Bees

Bee Diary: Winter Prep

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Fall                                              Waning Harvest Moon

Up by 10 today.  Still recuperating from the week.  Out to Stillwater to buy moisture boards for the bees and another cardboard sleeve for winter.  I already have two.  The process now is pretty straightforward.  Remove all honey supers.  Done.  Put in the boards that reduce the bottom entrance to below mouse size.  Done.  Take off feeding and treatments.  Will be done this weekend.  Cork up all but the top hole that allows bees access to the hive box from above.  Done, except that I have to drill a hole in one hive box.  Not sure how the bees will tolerate that, but I’ll find out soon enough.

After all this, I wait somewhere into the first couple/three weeks of November.  At that point I put in the moisture board on the top.  This board wicks moisture from the writhing mass of bees as they crawl around each other in a ball that maintains a steady temperature in the colony.  I make sure there is a top entry point cut into the cardboard that conforms to the entrance on the top hive box.  I then put the cover on the top hive box, over the moisture board, but slightly tilted to allow the moisture to escape.  This necessitates a rock or brick to be sure the cover doesn’t blow away.  The card board sleeve fits over the three hive boxes and serves as a wind barrier and provides a small amount of insulation.  The outside of the cardboard has a wax coating to repel water.  After that, walk away.  I’ll check on the colonies in late January, early February.

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories, Travel

Harvest

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Fall                                      New (Harvest) Moon

Second round of apiguard in the parent and the divide.  The top box on the package colony has gotten heavier, but I plan to feed them some more as I will do to the parent once the apiguard comes off in two weeks.  Sometime in early November I’ll get out the cardboard wraps and cover the hives for winter.  That will pretty much finish bee work for the year until late February or early March.  I’ve given away honey and plan to give away more.  Part of the fun.

A quick walk through the vegetable garden shows kale and swiss chard looking good, a few rogue onions that escaped the harvest, plenty of carrots, beets and butternut squash.  The harvest is 2010-10-04_0351not yet over and will go on until the ground threatens to become hard.

While I drove through the countryside on my way back to Lafayette on Monday, I passed field after field of corn and beans, some harvested, some not, about half and half.  Seeing those scenes put me right back at home, especially the corn fields.  Here’s a field near Peru, Indiana with the combine spilling corn into a tractor trailer for transport either to a corn bin, grain dryer or even straight to the grain elevators, all depending on the price and moisture content of the corn.

Indiana is no longer home, Minnesota is, but Indiana has a large section of my heart, the chamber of childhood and early young adulthood, a room full of corn fields, basketball, small towns, a baby sister and brother, county fairs and James Whitcomb Riley poems.  I was glad to be there the last few days and to walk again in the part of my heart filled there so long ago.

We move now toward Samhain, Summer’s End.  Blessed be.

Bees

Bee Diary: September 29, 2010

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Fall                                  waning back to school moon

Marla comes to all the hobby beekeeper meetings.  She also taught the Beginning Beekeeping Course.  She’s bright, quick and has the power to explain things simply.  Good choice, MacArthur.

“Marla Spivak’s work with bees and their keepers has earned her a $500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Spivak is a distinguished professor of apiculture and social insects at the University of Minnesota, but earned her doctorate in 1989 at Kansas University, where she studied under Chip Taylor, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Her work on honeybees’ health has helped protect honeybee populations from disease.

She has focused on genetically influenced behaviors that make entire colonies resistant to disease, and has bred more disease-resistant strains of bees for use throughout the industry.

The genius grants provide money based on creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the future. Other fellows from this year include an indigenous language preservationist, a stone carver and a quantum astrophysicist.

No stipulations are placed on the monetary awards. Fellows are nominated and selected in secret by people whose anonymity is carefully guarded.

Taylor on Tuesday praised Spivak’s work, saying she was unique among scientists in the field. “She works more closely with beekeepers than any of the researchers I’ve ever known,” he said. “She’s been extremely successful in getting them to cooperate.”

As a result, he said, her research more than others’ has had an impact on more people.

“She’s absolutely dedicated to both the science that she’s doing and the industry that she’s working with,” Taylor said.”

Bees

Bee Diary: September 21st, 2010

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Lughnasa                                             Full Back to School Moon

The fumagilin-B in heavy syrup, sugar 2:1 in a gallon water, rests now in the hive box wide feeder with the screen and two plastic reservoirs on each side of the screen.  The bees can come up around the screen and reach the syrup.  It will do two things for this colony, the package colony.  First, it will feed them so they can shore up their stores for the winter months.  Second, it will treat them for nosema, an infection that threatens their survival over the long winter.  Nobody got riled up when I put the feeder on or when I poured the syrup into the troughs.

I also put the shims on the parent and divide to give the bees space where the apiguard goes in the hive.  When I lifted the top hive box off to place the shim underneath it on the divide, I saw that the apiguard had reduced by half at least.  The treatment has gotten to them.  The shims went on, but propolis made getting the hive box squared away on top of the the shim difficult. The propolis allowed the heavy hive box to gain traction on the shim pushing it off center.  Even so, I did, finally, get it on.

When I get back from Indiana, I’ll finish the apiguard treatment, then begin the fumagilin-b for the other two colonies.

Last night I passed out pints of honey to the Woollies.  It tickled me, the satisfaction I got from seeing my friends heft the honey. Scott tasted it.  They will take it home, put it on toast, use it in cereal, whatever they want.  Each time they do, a bit of Artemis Hives transfers itself and its quite literal energy to them.  In that way they become us and we become them.

Bees, Dogs, Woolly Mammoths

Sigh.

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Back to School Moon

Rigel escaped.  Again.  This after I don’t know what iteration of foils and barriers.  The neighbor thinks she scaled the fence.  It’s possible.  I have not electrified that part 05-15-10_bee-diary_0002670because it’s six feet tall.  Maybe I’ll have to do that.  Geez.

Measuring out the fumagilin-b for the nosema treatment. (bees)  Talk about fine measurements.  5 grams to a treatment, roughly one gallon.  5 grams is .176 of an oz.  Not much.  Kate and I got out the parchment paper and played pharmacist, dividing the powder into 5 equal parts.  That’s good enough since the powder comes in quantities of 24 grams per smallest bottle, which is what I have.  This goes into half a gallon of water heated to 120 degrees or so, our water heater puts out water that hot.  8 pounds of sugar gets stirred into to make a super-saturated liquid with a quantity of roughly a gallon.  The liquid goes in the feeder I have that sits over the whole hive box.  I may buy another one.  I like them better than the plastic pails.

Out to Wayzata to the Retreat, the old grounds of the Cenacle, now turned into a treatment center for alcoholism.  Dick Rice, one of my sheepshead buddies, works there.

Tonight each of the Woollies gets a pint of Artemis Honey and Mark Odegard, the label maker, gets a quart.  It feels good to have something to share that comes from our property.

Bees, Commentary on Religion, Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Sport

Grounded

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Lughnasa                               Waxing Back to School Moon

Finished digging the potatoes.  The crop seems smaller than last year’s, but I can’t tell for sure.  Still, we don’t eat potatoes often and we have enough to last us quite awhile.  Kate made an early autumn roast vegetable medley with onions, carrots, leaks, garlic, beets and one potato I pierced with the spading fork.  It was delicious.  So was the raspberry pie–of which we have two.  Our raspberry bushes have been exuberant.  We’ve still got leeks, greens, beets, carrots and squash in the ground.  Some of it will stay in the ground until the frost and freeze gets serious.  I made a mistake last year with the carrots and didn’t get them out before the ground froze.  They became organic matter for the soil.  We also left our entire potato crop out in our garage stair well.  When the temps dropped down, way down, the potatoes froze, then thawed.  Not good for potatoes.  We’re trying to not make those mistakes this year.  We’ll make new ones!

Working with Leslie today reminded me of the punch there is in ministry.  Yes, the institutional confines squeeze life out of faith, but the individuals, the people can put it back.  She asked me an interesting question.  We got to talking about Christianity and she wondered, “Do you miss it?”  I’m not sure anyone has asked just that question of me.  I don’t, not at a faith level.

I miss the thick web of relationships I once had there.  I miss the opportunity to do bible study.  That may sound strange, but higher criticism of the bible is a scholarly affair requiring history, language, knowledge of mythology and tradition, sensitivity to redactors (editors), an awareness of textual differences, as well as a knowledge of the bible as a whole.  I spent a lot of time learning biblical criticism and I enjoyed it.  Not much call for it in UU or humanist circles though.

By the time my nap finished it was too late to put the shims in the hives.  I hope there’s some clear, sunny time tomorrow.  Also need to put the feeder back on the package colony.

The Vikings.  Not sure.  Favre needs some better wide receivers, yes.  The defense played well.  Adrian Peterson did, too.  It felt as if we were outcoached the last two games.  Not sure about that, that’s a murky area to me, but something doesn’t feel quite right.

Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Miracles.

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Back to School Moon

Nap.  Off to Ace Hardware for chemically resistant gloves.  Really.  Why would I use anything that required them?  Normally, I wouldn’t.  But the varroa mites compromise the divide’s ability to survive the winter and the U says to do this until IPM begins to work.  If I didn’t have a strong recommendation to go ahead from people whom I know share my overall perspective on medication, I would just chance it.  Kate made shims for me to put on the hive boxes to give bees enough space to walk around and get in the Apiguard.  She made them in plenty of time.  I forgot to take them out with me.  Sigh.

I have to go out again tomorrow and put them in place.  Didn’t realize I’d forgotten them until I came inside and saw them still there on the dog crate.

The garlic is in the ground.  This is the first year I’m planting only garlic I have grown.  In previous years I’ve always bought a few bulbs of a variety I haven’t tried.  The planting of garlic grown here both naturalizes the plant to our locale and gives me a sense of a circle closed.  Satisfying.

Dug potatoes, too.  One row of three.  Not as productive as last year so far, but not bad.  I planted these at ground level in the oldest of the raised beds, one almost flush with the garden floor.  I will not do that again.  Way too much bending over.  Still, the thrill of digging a potato out of the loose soil constitutes a miracle as far I’m concerned.

The older I get the more I have the opposite problem from the early advocates of higher criticism of the Bible.  They thought miracles were problematic in the biblical narrative and went about finding natural explanations for them or chalking them up to mythologization.  Not me.

Miracles are everywhere in my world.  Those pale yellow roots against the darkness of the soil.  Edible!  Planting garlic in the fall so I can harvest it next June.  Cooperating with insects to produce a sweet, delicious liquid that I can share with friends.  How about that!  Being part of a young woman’s search for her vocational path.  A person mutating from young adult to a professional.  Getting up in the morning with energy and eagerness for the day.  Greetings from Vega and Rigel with tails thumping and bodies quivering.  Knowing that we get our food from the energy of a star 93 million miles away from us.  Having a modest grasp of quantum mechanics.  The absolute, dumbfounding miracle of love between Kate and me, our kids, our grandkids.  Friendships that have endured for years and years.  Life is so full of miracles I have to fight through them to get to breakfast.