Summer Waxing Strawberry Moon
Vega took a nap on the couch this afternoon. Not unusual. She likes that spot. When I came upstairs after my workout, she was still on the couch and I went over to pet her, as I sometimes do. In looking at her I noticed that her eye looked strange, swollen. Oh, boy, was it swollen. Her muzzle, too. Vega had become curious about the bee colonies.
Bees know how to deal with curiosity, nip it in the muzzle and the eyes and the mouth.
When I took the bee course, more than one person asked about dogs, concerned that the dogs would attack or knock over the hives. Each time the question was raised, I could see a slight sense of amusement on the bee folks.
“You don’t have to worry about the bees,” they said. But, they might have usefully added, you might need to worry about the dog.
In other bee news I forgot to mention that during hive inspections last week, I saw a new bee work its way out of the hexagonal cell in which it had grown from egg to larvae to pupae to adult bee. She gnawed away the cap, wriggling to get out, but needing to remove almost all of the cell’s beeswax cap before she could get free.
When she emerged, she looked like a puppy, all shiny and eager, untrammeled by the world. Then, she flew off and got to work. That’s the way bees are.
chewer. Even buying the ones rated For Power Chewers she eventually gnaws the damned things apart. But she has such joy with them. Throwing them in the air, carrying them from place to place, sleeping with them.
serious, important matters. Stop your pursuit of a mediocre gift. The tendency to judge our worth by the accumulation of things–a he who dies with the best toys wins mentality–presses us to pursue money or status, power, with all of our gifts. You may be lucky enough, as Kate is, to use your gifts in a pursuit that also makes decent money; on the other hand if your work life and your heart life don’t match up, you risk spending your valuable work time and energy in pursuit of a mediocre gift, hiding the sublime one from view.
