Category Archives: Bees

Aging, Bees, Family, Politics

Cyber Demons At Play

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Spring                                         Waxing Flower Moon

Parts of my website have disappeared over the last couple of weeks or so.  All of the liberal faith parent page got eaten by cyber demons, some I may have called myself.  The handy moon widget I had right next to the latest blog entry also went missing.  I have been unable to restore either one though I have not made a concerted effort.

Sunny but cool today.  Closer to normal.  Tomorrow is Gabe’s second birthday and Grandma flies out on Friday to celebrate.  Grandma levitates literally and figuratively when she has a chance to see the grandkids.

She had a hip injection yesterday and though the full benefit of it has not yet appeared, she got enough relief to convince her and the doctor who manages her pain that a hip procedure would help a lot.  That’s good news.  She’s also exploring a more rare procedure in which the bursa over her left hip would be removed.  No consensus on that one yet.

I’m about to leave for the city to have a meeting with Margaret Levin and Justin Fay, evaluating this year’s legislative work and getting ready for next year.  Gotta pick up my sunglasses at the UofM (I left’em at Brenda’s class last Tuesday.), buy some mochi for the grandkids and pick up some leeks.  Legcom call tonight.  Busy beaver for a few days here.

My hand has deflated and has returned mostly to normal.  Not quite, but almost.  That’s good because I get a package of bees this Saturday and I may have to start this whole process over again.

Bees, Friends, Health, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Spring                                                  Waxing Flower Moon

The Woollies met last night at Stratford Wood where Bill and Regina live.  The topic of the evening was friendship, requiring time one said, trust another, play yet another.  We evoked our history as a group of men who have given each other time, trust and vulnerability.  We talked about the vessel, the container we have created, a place of safety and love.  We wondered about men and the trajectory of men’s lives that leads away from the easy friendships of youth and into the barren land of male competition and ambition.

One of us spoke of his wonderful physical.  His doctor commended him on lowering his blood pressure through diet alone.  All looked well.  Until the phone call.  Which said his hemoglobin numbers were well below normal.  Since then he’s been endoscoped, colonoscoped and even put on film by a small bowel camera.  No joy.  No explanation.  Only shortness of breath going upstairs and fatigue.  He sees a hematologist this week.  Kate thinks the hematologist will probably take a bone marrow biopsy.

My swollen hand and bruised middle finger got some attention.  We discussed, again, the bees.  Charlie said I should get an epi pin right away.  Kate, who sees a lot of bee stings in urgent care, has a more moderate evaluation.  A localized reaction to multiple stings.  I think she’s right.

Cybermage Bill Schmidt’s brother in Iowa still lives, though in hospice care.  Another brother, Bob, had a near deal with sepsis.  Life is fragile and wonderful, treat with gladness.

Bees, Cooking

Avoiding the Swarm

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Spring                                   Waxing Flower Moon

A bruising middle finger, swollen passes the inflammation onto the top of the hand.  It itches.  This aspect of bee-keeping has its annoying moments.  Like using same finger to hit the i with regularity, or the comma both assigned to this one on the right hand.  This will, however, pass.  Kate says it is possible to develop an allergy of significance, I hope I don’t.

This time of year in bee-keeping the primary task is to keep the colony from swarming.    My hive had burr comb when I opened it, comb on top of the top frames;  it also had swarm cells, that is, cells in which the larvae have been fed royal jelly to produce a queen.  Both of these are symptoms of a colony ready to swarm.  Swarming is natural, the way feral bees keep their population at optimum size and spread their kind.  It robs a beekeeper of the honey flow, however, because it is the over-wintered colony that produces the maximum amount of honey, so beekeepers want to keep their bees happy.

One way to do this is to do a partial reverse, which I did Saturday.  Since a colony tends to move up during the winter, this puts the largely vacated middle box on top, thus creating more room for the hive.  A hive with room and food is less likely to swarm.  Another critical point comes in ten more days, when I then do the complete reverse.  About 10 days after that, I’ll split the colony in two.  That means I’ll have two colonies, plus the new one I’m starting this weekend while Kate’s away in Colorado.

I’ll have three colonies through the fall, while the parent colony (if it doesn’t swarm.) will naturally die out.  If things have gone well, I’ll have two parent colonies next spring which I’ll split in May, thus giving me four colonies, two producing a lot of honey–the parents–and two perhaps producing some, but their primary task lies in producing a strong parent colony for the next spring.  Then, I’ll have two colonies which I’ll split and so on.

Spread composted manure and hummus on the bed I plan to use as part of our kitchen garden after shopping at the Anoka co-op.   Not such a great experience at the co-op.  It was an old style co-op with few price labels, indifferent and largely volunteer staff, crowded aisles and only a modest selection of food.  Think I’ll stick with the Wedge.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

A Year of Consolidation

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Spring                                         Waxing Flower Moon

Hmmm.   Wax.  Bees wax, or, propolis as it is properly called.  I just did a mid-April reversal of the top two hive boxes per the Minnesota bee-keeping method for a cold climate.  This involved taking out each frame, examining it–even though I’m still a bit uncertain about what I’m seeing–putting it back after scraping any queen cells, a few, then switching the top hive box with the middle one.  This does something good, though right now I can’t recall what.

A nimble joint future awaits me since I got stung four times today.  Each time a little less reaction.  The first sting came from a bee that crawled up my pants leg.  Another came as I removed a frame.  The third and fourth as I took off my bee suit only to discover that on its back were a lot of bees.  The bee suit still lies on the floor of the honey house.  A lot to learn.  These hive boxes, which have lots of larvae, pollen and honey are heavy.  Another reminder of why hitting the weights is a good idea.

Next week the Minnesota Hygienic bees come in their little wooden package.  They will go into the new hive boxes that Kate has assembled and coated with polyurethane.  She’s also assembling honey supers and coating bottom boards, tops and other miscellaneous woodware.

This is a year of consolidation on the gardens and bee front.  We’ll make sure we can make good use of all the vegetable beds and companion planting ideas.  We’ll shore up our preservation and storage options.  I’ll learn about the honey extracting and bottling process as well as colony division and hiving my own package of bees.  We have fruits and berries, even a few nuts to learn how to care for, all of which fit in well with the Brenda Langston inspired version of healthy eating.

Inside though there’s still the Latin.  No consolidation there yet.  It’s an upward curve so far.

I have been wondering recently about my work at the MIA.  This is my 9th year as guide and docent.  The art world as a whole continues to fascinate me and the research challenges it presents are gifts to my life, not burdens.  Touring has become easier and more enjoyable this year.  Not sure why.  Just has.   Should I continue on a sort of emphasis on Asian art, especially China and Japan, or should I really lock myself down into those two and really learn them?  Should I perhaps shift my learning focus to prints and drawings, an area not many docents cover and in which the bulk of the museum’s collection of object lies?  I think what I’m saying is I want more depth in the experience.  I’ve gained breadth and I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity.  How to make the experience richer and deeper?  That’s the journey now.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Doing Stuff

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Spring                                                      Flowering Moon

The netaphim ruined last year by dogs Rigel and Vega has repairs.  The repairs sit safely inside fences that Rigel has shown either no interest or no capability to penetrate.  They should last.

The bees will wait until a less breezy tomorrow.  Wind blows the smoke around and I have to perform a reversal, hive check and clean off the bottom board.  The reversal of the top 2 hive boxes encourages the queen to move into the top box and lay eggs there to create an ovoid shape of larva outside of which the nursery bees will complete a ring of pollen and a ring of honey.  This makes the planned colony split on May 15th assured of one hive box full of larva, hopefully the top one with new larvae and therefore newly born nursery bees.  Nursery bees take more kindly to moving around than the older worker bees.

Irrigation folks have scheduled Tuesday to come out and turn on the irrigation system.  A good thing.  They usually wait until the second week of May since our average last frost date is around May 15th.  I imagine that’s moved up closer to the first week of May on average, but a frost outside the average is still a frost so most planning still accommodates the old date.

Tomorrow the bees and soil amending, that is, putting in composted manure and humus on the raised beds and adding some sphagnum moss (some more) to the blueberry beds.  The outdoor season with sun.  The great wheel turns.  Again.

Bees, Garden, permaculture

Beesy Morning

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Spring                                         Awakening Moon

Checked on the bees today.  They needed syrup so I put in two pitchers full.  They also needed another pollen patty. The colony looks healthy.  Lots of bees hard at work.  No stings.  I have a few things to check on in terms of what I need to do now.

Got all the mechanical detritus out of the soon to be honey house.  Next is a good sweeping and a washing, then organizing a table and the rest of the equipment.

(honey bee head under an electron microscope)

General clean up.  Getting ready for spring, which has sprung on us with some surprise.  Bought the seeds for early stuff and I’ll plant the onions tomorrow morning after I plan the rest of the vegetable garden.

We need rain.  If it fits in your faith tradition, please do a rain dance for us up here in Andover.

Bees, Letters, Minnesota

Trivia (thanks, Tom)

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Spring                            Awakening Moon

“Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth.” – (?)Mark Twain

I like this quote, I even love this quote, but Mark Twain?  Doesn’t sound like Twain to me.  Sounds more like an existentialist thinking in Country Western.  A little bit country, a little bit Camus.

HONEYBEE FACTS:

The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is -40 or 110 degrees.

The St. Lawrence Seaway
opened in 1959
allowing oceangoing ships to
reach Duluth, now an
international port. Duluth,
Minnesota and Superior,
Wisconsin are ranked the 3rd and 4th largest ports in the world. If
counted together they would be the worlds largest port.

The
Minneapolis
Sculpture
Garden is the
largest urban
sculpture
garden in the
country.

The Guthrie Theater is the largest regional playhouse in the
country.

Minnesota has
90,000 miles of
shoreline, which is more
than California, Florida
and Hawaii combined!

In 1956,
Southdale, in the
Minneapolis suburb
of Edina, was the first
enclosed climatecontrolled
shopping
mall.

The Hormel Company of Austin, MN marketed the first
canned ham in 1926 and introduced spam in 1937.

Introduced in 1963, the Control Data 6600, designed by
Control Data Corporation, was the first “super” computer. It was
used by the military to simulate nuclear explosions and break
Soviet codes as well as to model complex phenomena such as
hurricanes and galaxies.

There are 201 named
Mud Lakes, 154 named
Long Lake, and 123
named Rice Lake in
Minnesota.
The Hull‐Rust mine in
Hibbing is the largest
open‐pit mine in the
world.

Bees, Dogs, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Caution: Dangerous Rodent Ahead

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Spring                                      Awakening Moon

We have an injured dog.  Hilo, our smallest whippet, and a friend for many years, got in a scrap with an animal, a squirrel or a rabbit, and got a nasty wound below her right lip and another, larger one underneath her jaw.  She didn’t come for quite a while yesterday, we thought she had escaped, but she finally came in the house.  It was only this morning that I noticed a swollenness to her jaw, a sack that looked like a double, maybe a triple chin.  Infected.

Kate took her to the vet where they drained the infection, debrided the wounds and sent her home with antibiotics.  She looks better now and was happy to go in her crate for the night.  A safe, familiar place.

Dogs have their good days and their bad days.  I think yesterday was a bad day for Hilo.

Yesterday afternoon, when I went out to finish the boarding up of the chain link fence, Rigel sat out near the back Norway pine, a small floppy ear and a front foot stuck out of her mouth as she made crunching noises chewing on what could only have been some small animal’s skull, most likely a rabbit, perhaps the one that wounded Hilo.  The reality of the natural order goes on every day on this property, dogs and small prey animals, bees protecting their hive, gophers digging through the lawn, hawks diving and killing small animals, humans eating pork and beef and god knows what else.

Our world has two lives, the one of artifice in which we humans take a shot at controlling the weather, food supply and safe drinking water while just outside the carapace of our homes, any home, anywhere, the world of violent struggle, a world without artifice, goes on about its traditional routines.

Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Light Week Ahead

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Spring                                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

Out the door to the grocery store.  It must be Saturday.  Finished revising the presentation for tomorrow morning and I’ll post it later today.

Kate’s off at work, a now unusual Saturday for her.  She’s begun experiencing the old aches and pains, the ones from before the surgery that were brought on by too much physical effort over too long a time.  The good news is that when she slows down the aches and pains do, too.

I have a quiet week coming up. No legcom meeting since the Legislature is in recess and no tours on Friday.  I do have a night meeting on Monday with the Sierra Club, something called strategic communications, whatever that is.  I’ll find out.  The night after that I start a three evening course on healthy eating taught by Brenda Langston, former owner of Cafe Brenda.  This is yet another stab at the great goal of eating only as many calories as I need.  I’m looking forward to it.

The lighter week means I’ll have time to get in some work outside like cleaning up the yard outside the orchard and the vegetable garden.  It has a plethora of sticks, plastic objects, wire, fence posts that have been moved around over the course of the late fall, winter and early spring by Rigel and Vega.  They remain eager and energetic, digging deep holes here and there, running, jumping, barking, having a good doggie time.  But what a mess!

I also have to get some work done on the beehive, not a big deal but I need to check it and feed them.  Note to self:  use smoke and wear bee suit.  I also need to get the old machine shed completely out and prepped for its conversion to a honey house.  All that can happen while we wait for planting season to begin.

Bees, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths

Vanitas

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

A Woolly brother goes in for knee surgery on Monday.  He’s a bright guy who will select a surgeon with care.  He’s also good at taking care of himself so I’m sure the surgery and the recovery will go well.

These are the years when retirement income and the upcoming procedure can fill a lot of conversation.  The body degenerates, the centre does not hold, things fall apart.  The way of it, this human, animal, mammal, finite life.

I had planned to check on my bees tomorrow, see if they pollen patty needed replacing and put on a syrup feeder, but the weather guy says cloudy, cool and wet.  Not a good bee day.  Like many of us, bees stay home when the weathers inclement and they don’t like uninvited guests.  Really don’t like them.  Sunday or Monday look better.  I’ll wait.

Kate and I are through Chapter 9 in Wheelock, closing in this week on Chapter 10.  We also got a book of readings and now do sight reading in each session in addition to the readings in the book.  This last reading was from Seneca about slaves and masters.  It’s moving.  The issues of slaves and slavery is old, very old and the issues of freedom and the injustice of slavery is also old, very old.

The more we work with the Latin the more I become committed to classical scholarship and the doors it opens into human thought, human thought not in dialogue with Christianity, but with the world of Athens.  This is a world both intimately connected to us, yet very foreign, too.  It is pagan, though that’s an anachronism, since before Christian dogma, there were other religions, not paganism.

I’m still pumped about the health care reform even if it fell short of single-payer.  That’s for later.  Right now, let’s party.