Lughnasa Waxing Back to School Moon
Kate has had a nasty cold since Monday and I can feel it trying to claw its way up my esophagus, making my throat scratchy. My hope is that the recent two time bout I had with some bug in July, then August has revved up my immune system. With rest I can pound this sucker down before it takes hold.
Starting back on Latin today. I took part of July, all of August and the last couple of weeks off with the bees and the vegetables and the orchard. Thought I’d get work done on Ovid, review, but in fact I got very little done. An old student habit of mine, if it’s not pressing, it’s not getting done. I’m looking forward to the weekly sessions, building toward enough confidence to tackle Ovid and others on my own. It’s a project, like the bees, that keeps the gears turning, not giving them a chance to rest. Best that way.
A few years back it was the MIA docent training. Then the move into permaculture and vegetables and fruit. That one’s still underway as I learn the complicated dance of seasons, cultivars, pests, harvest and storage. The MIA training, for that matter, only gives you enough legs to get into the books and files yourself, training you to look and think about art, but each tour demands specific self-education on the objects and the purpose of that tour.
(Minoan Gold Bee pendant from Crete, circa 2000 BC)
Part of my impatience with the seminary experience is that I’ve moved so deeply into more concrete endeavors. Art has the object as an anchor, then its history and context. Latin has words, grammar and literature as well as Roman history. Vegetables and fruit have real plants, particular plants with needs and products. The bees have the bees themselves, the colonies, woodenware, hive management, pest control, honey extraction. This is, probably, the world I was meant to inhabit, but philosophy and the church lead onto another ancientrail, that of the abstract and faraway rather than the particular and the near. It’s not that I don’t have an affection, even a passion for the theoretical, I do, but I find my life more calm, less stressful when I work with art, with potatoes and garlic, with conjugations and declensions.
I now have almost three decades of life devoted to the theoretical, the abstract and the political so I bring those skills and that learning to my present engagement with the mundane, but I no longer want to live in those worlds. They are gardens others can tend better than I can.
milestone birthday. Happy Birthday, Jean-Marie matchbooks, the whole Jax touch. I met Jean-Marie’s daughters and spent a good bit of time chatting with her oldest who until recently was a graduate student under Marla Spivak, the bee goddess of the UofM. She and Jim of Nature’s Nectar, whom I saw later, convinced me to try and keep my old parent colony.
house where I pushed in the cork at the end of her wooden home, inserted a marshmallow (tiny) into it firmly, then opened the divide, took off the honey filled top hive box and inserted the queen in the middle of the second box. This is called a slow release. The queen and her workers eat away the marshmallow from one side, workers in the hive from the other. Over the time this process takes, so the theory goes, the new queen becomes less threatening to the workers, who then allow her to come out and become their new monarch. If it doesn’t work, they kill her. I won’t check for another week.
Doing the extraction. The frames with honey go in the extractor, lid up. Then they whir around and centrifugal empties them of their honey while leaving the honey comb intact. That means next year’s bees won’t have to waste energy building comb. They can go straight to honey production.
capping, there is an additional step, uncapping. Kate did this chore with the electric uncapping knife. We had at least one extractor run with 80% or more capped. This honey was darker. We can bottle it right out of the extractor after filtering.