Daily Archives: June 24, 2009

Great Work, Politics

Accepting a New Position

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Summer                      Waxing Summer Moon

The escape artists of our local pen had to remain outside when I drove into the Sierra Club meeting.  They did not break out again.  In this case they need an incentive to escape.  That usually consists of a human in a place not immediately accessible to them.  I was gone; Kate was gone; ergo, no incentive.

This was the baton passing moment for the legislative committee.  Josh introduced me as the person taking over from Dan Endreson, who had filled the job for the last four years.  I enjoy politics, enjoy talking politics and enjoy the strategy and execution.  This position will be a lot of work, but a type of work that energizes me.

The heat which sat on us for a couple of days has modulated a bit downwards and the night is pleasant.

The waxing summer moon is the slimmest of slivers, a nursery rhyme moon in need of a cow.

Our Land and Home

Houdini Inhabits a Canine

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Summer                 Waxing Summer Moon

Each penitentiary or prison warden fears the convict who can identify a weakness in the multiple barriers to escape.  So do dog owners.   Our puppy Rigel wiggled under the gate leading down to our perennial garden, an impressive feat considering the narrowness of the opening and the size of her body.  When I blocked this one, she wriggled through a slat in the gate as far her rear hips which just would not fit.  I had to pry the gate apart to free her.  I nailed another slat diagonally across the gate and she quit trying.

Now, however, we have a dog of a similar color, Vega, but different strategy.  A good strategy.  Good for Vega, that is, but bad for us.  I went outside this afternoon to work in the perennial garden in back, overlooked by the deck where our dogs spend much of their time when relaxing.  I looked up there.  All five dogs up there.  Rigel did not try the gate.  Ah.

Oh. I turned, walked around the side of the house and suddenly, standing beside me, Hello!  Hello! I’m here!  Look at me! was Vega.  At first I thought she might have vaulted the gate.  I had put a concrete block down and inadvertently left the solid side up.  I had to know how she did it.

After 13 dogs I have some window into the canine mind.  After finally coaxing Vega  back onto the deck inside the fenced in part of our yard, I left her out there, let the rest of the dogs out and returned to the perennial beds.  Sure enough, only 3 minutes passed and I caught sight of Vega, not on the concrete block, which I had guessed, but near the fence that borders the perennial garden about 100 feet or so from the deck.

The fence is chain link and has contained all of our dogs except for the occasional whippet who follows out some animal that dug to get in the yard.  I have a regular routine of walking the fenceline, checking for breaches and filling them with old tree trunks, fence rails I no longer use, rocks.

Back to Vega and the fence.  She looked at me, looked down at the area where the fence met the ground, crouched with her doggy butt up in the air, tail wagging and dug.  At first I thought it was just a feint, that she had really jumped as I imagined.  Nope.  She got up, then crouched down again, put her nose under the fence, then squeezed her 70 pound puppy (a really big puppy) body under the fence and Hello!

Sigh.  Now I’m going to have to harden all the fence line that borders the perennial garden against these escape attempts.  Instead of the bird man of Alcatraz we have the man dog of Andover.

Bees

Late June Hive Inspection

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Summer                        Waxing Summer Moon

Mark and Elise came over today.  We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.  They licked and pressed and jumped.  New people!  New people!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!  New people!  Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.  Baby head!  Baby head!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!

Mark and I went out to the hive and popped the lid after suiting up.  The smoker worked better today, but I’ve still not got it down.  There are a lot of bees.  I thought so, but Mark confirmed it.  There are lots of brood, plenty of honey and a few uninhabited queen cells.  We scraped and checked each of the 20 frames, leaving two frames out to insert into the new box we put on top.  The hive is now three boxes high, its maximum.

Next week or so, the honey supers go on the third box.  About half the size of a hive box the supers fill up with honey.  They are the work product that goes into the centrifuge for extraction.  A typical super has about 30 pounds of honey.  Seems like a lot to me.

Mark finds the bees fascinating per se, the honey a bonus that sometimes pays for the bees and the equipment in a given year.  I agree.  The hive construction project alone interests me.  The six sided cells, the propolis, drone, worker and queen cells, the making of honey and its storage reveal a life way and a life form unlike any we contact in the usual day to day.  There is more, too: the queen and her squadron of drones, hopeful suitors, all but one of whom will live and die unfulfilled, the solitary life of the queen, moving from cell to cell squeezing out egg after fertilized egg, the workers who build the cells and scout out food, coming back to communicate in a well known  complicated dance.

Many bee keepers work without suits and gloves.  Honey bees that survive our winters have a docile temperament and are not as defensive as the ordinary person would imagine, though Mark says they get more protective in the fall when the beekeeper begins to take the honey.   This might seem a bit cruel, but in fact the bulk of the honey, say 80-90 pounds, remains in the hive boxes and has enough nourishment for the hives to over winter.