Monthly Archives: March 2010

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, permaculture, Weather +Climate

Echoes of Narcissus

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Imbolc                                     New Moon (Awakening)

An all day Latin day, this time 3rd conjugation verbs, the notorious bad boys of Latin grammar.  Due to a weak vowel they got jiggered around by spoken Latin until they’ve become most unusual, irregular in some ways.  Got remember the paradigms for present, future and imperfect.  Just gotta remember.  Latin has become easier and harder, reflecting, I suppose, past learning and present state of ignorance.  It is true though that I have begun to be able to read sentences without looking up a single word. That’s pretty exciting.

Ovid here I come.  Of course, that’s Owid to English speaker’s ears.  I have a plan to put my Latin and my affection for Ovid to good use.  When I get closer to its realization, I’ll let you know.

Talked to Mark Nordeen.  He has some pollen patties and has agreed to give me one for the live hive.  I’m gonna see him tomorrow.  Then, in April, I’ll hive the package bees and wait until mid-May to divide the new one, feeding and caring for both of them in the interim.  Kate has volunteered to be assistant apiarist.  Her first job involves whacking together ten hive boxes, eight supers plus frames and foundations.  It will be fun to have help.

All the fruit trees are now visible.  No rabbit or vole damage on any of them.  That’s a relief because I was exasperated at the end of the last growing season–trying to keep Rigel and Vega in the yard, then out of the gardens.  As a result, I didn’t put up the hardware cloth protective barriers around them.

It hit 64 here yesterday and its 56 today.  Geez.  The sun feels good.  When I walked out to pick up the mail today, I felt warmth on my neck.  It surprised me.

General

Erin go bragh!

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Imbolc                           New Moon (Awakening)

N.B.  Kate pointed that this is the anniversary of Caesar’s assassination, not St. Pat’s feast day and she’s right. Except for the Woolly Mammoths who always gather on the third Monday closest to St. Patricks at Frank Broderick’s house for corned beef and cabbage, some good soda bread and a few really bad Irish jokes.

Caesar’s dead, long live Caesar day!  and we can see green in a lot of places the snow in back is gone.  Gone.  64 yesterday.

Today and tomorrow morning will be Latin days because we have to have our chapter done by tomorrow afternoon and instead of Latin I spent my weekend on Apis mellifera.

Brother Mark sends word from Bangkok that there is an invading political protest of 150,000 folks with red flags.  He says they’ve caused many main arteries to be closed.  As he said, over the last several years Thailand has been very rock and roll.

Bees

A Parent Colony, A Divide, And a Package Colony

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Imbolc                             New Moon (Awakening)

Bees.  Bees.  Bees.  Bees.  I’ve had two 8 hour sessions of nothing but bees.  And more stuff about bees.

Today I learned about dividing a colony, a successfully wintered colony, which is our situation here.  As Marla Spivak says, “If you’re not sure, just let the bees do it.”  That conforms to my work late last fall with the bees.  Mark, my bee beepackagementor, had a traumatic autumn and we just didn’t get together quite enough.

Now, though, I understand the next step, which will create a parent colony–the old queen with two hive boxes–and a child colony, which I will treat in the same way I did the current one.  That is, the goal with it will be to get to late fall with three hive boxes with a combination of brood, pollen and honey sufficient to see the child colony through this coming winter.

(2 lb package of bees)

Here’s the difficult part.  The parent colony gets no care after the honey flow stops.  This means that its queen will die of old age and since the colony will then have lost its egg layer, the entire colony will die out over the winter.  There’s nothing cruel about this since it follows the essential biology of bees.  That is, queens live around 2  years and the workers 60 days, so the entire colony would die out under any circumstances without a new queen and even if a new queen were added, the bees that would become the new colony under her reign would be entirely new bees.

There’s a big upside to this for all bees.  We can clean out the old hive bodies and frames, check for disease and virus and if necessary we can burn the old frames and start over.  This means that each bee colony will have a young, prolific queen and each hive will get a complete going over ever other year.  Both of these elements, cleaning and a young, prolific queen increase the colonies capacity to survive and thrive.

The good news is that the parent colony begins making honey the minute the divide is complete.  Honey supers go on the parent colony right away and they start filling up.  A honey super is about half the size of a deep hive box and honey filled frames are their only result.  A queen excluder is put on the parent colony deep hive boxes, so the queen does not crawl up in the honey supers and start laying eggs, therefore only honey ends up in them.

In addition to the divide Mark the bee mentor called and said he had an extra package of bees on the way.  I agreed to buy it because I thought my bees were dead.  Since they’re not, taking on another package of bees means we’ll end up with four hives next spring if everything goes well.  At that point, we should be producing some serious honey, possibly enough to sell at farmer’s markets.

Bees, Great Work, permaculture

The Dead Live

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Imbolc                                  Waning Wild Moon

Big news.  The dead live.  Or, rather, the bee colony I declared dead last fall turns out to be very much alive.  I checked busy-honey-bees_1712this afternoon.  That means the whole bee thing looks more and more rosy here at 7 Oaks.  In the second year we can expect honey.  And a second hive.  Good thing I’m taking this  class.

All about bees.  Nothing about birds.  Marla Spivak is the charismatic professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota who has a lot of knowledge about colony collapse disorder.  She runs this weekend program for beginning beekeepers, a tradition at the University of Minnesota since 1922, as well the Bee Lab and the whole Bee program at the U.

You might not think much more about this, but when you realize that, as I learned today, the Upper Midwest is the primary honey producing area in the United States, flanked by California and Florida, and that there is no bee program in any of our surrounding states, Nebraska is the closest, then you understand the significance of her role and the U’s bee program.

Last year there were 160 people in the beginning bee-keepers class.  This year there were 250 with a waiting list of 150.  Interest in bee-keeping has taken on the characteristic of a small groundswell.  This is great news for bees, not so much for the 250 of us who sat in a theatre today that had little air circulation and 250 human furnaces pumping out BTU’s.  It got hot.

Bees

Bees

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Imbolc                      Waning Wild Moon

Tomorrow and Sunday I study bees.  The U puts on this course for beginning bee keepers each year.  It’s popular, there are 250 signed up.  I need better information because all my bees are dead.  I think.  I suppose I should check one more time just to be sure.

Have to have my Latin done by Tuesday afternoon because the tutor is going up north.  With the next two days devoted to bees, that will make Monday and Tuesday Latin days.

Not much else right now, so, see ya on the backside.

Art and Culture

Tinto

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Imbolc                                 Waning Wild Moon

The first graders, who wanted to see a rock, got to see a lot of rocks.  Chinese jade, Lake Tai rocks, pebbles on the floor of the literati garden.  We also saw Doryphoros (made of rock), the Veiled Lady (rock again).  The kids themselves dropped by the snuff bottles which the teacher wisely referred to as fancy bottles.  At the end, when I asked them what had been their favorite, Riley, a small boy with big glasses, said, “The bottles, because I saw two.”  They were a lot of fun.

The afternoon public tour, a reprise of my Grand Tour idea from last week, had seven folks and they all responded well to the tour idea.  Adults get less excited than first graders, but they all said they had a good time.

Talked for a while with Carolina (Carol-ina), a docent to be, who hails from Bogota.  We talked about tinto and how much better shape Bogota is in now than it was in 1989 when I visited.  Tinto, a thick, concentrated coffee served in Colombia, comes everywhere you visit.  It was fun to find a person with a  personal connection to such an old and interesting culture.  Her husband works for Medtronics.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories

The Colosseum of the Soul

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Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Fake Nostalgia for a Pre-Therapy Age Past

“I can tell you one thing,” he announced, as I recall. “Back in my day, you didn’t have young kids going around talking to shrinks, yakking about their fee-ee-ee-lings, getting all doped up on medications.”

This article in the March 8th NYT made me think, or better, recall.

In early October of 1964 my family was intact:  Mom, Dad, Mary, Mark and me.  We had extended family on both sides that we saw regularly, Mom’s more so because she was Indiana born and Dad’s less so because of his Oklahoma origins.  After my bout with polio when I was a year and a half, our lives had settled into a usual routine of those years, the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Mom stayed home, doing volunteer work for the church and being available to us, the kids.  She did occasional substitute teaching, but it was rare.  Mary and I moved our way through our small town school system where we were known and knew everyone else at least by sight. Mark was still at home.   Summers were long idylls of bike riding, game playing and lazy reading.  Dad worked at the newspaper, coming home with ad layouts from time to time, marking them up with a ruler and a thick pencil.

Of course our lives had the usual family dramas, the deaths of grandparents, an aunt’s long term confinement in a mental health facility, but for the most part things were calm, normal.

In late October of 1964 my 46 year old mother was dead and our lives would never again be normal.  Grief has its own rules, its own storm sewers of emotion and they track in and out, colliding with the needs and fears of others.  Our small family suffered and suffered a lot, both from the grief, the natural grief that follows an untimely death of a parent, Mom, and the sudden compression of the family into a new, undefined life, a life defined by loss and uncertainty.

Life happens as it does and we relate to the changes as best we can.  That was true then, true long ago in the past and will be true in the future.  I have wondered though what our lives, our mutual lives, the lives of the survivors in our family might have been like if we had access to even the most basic of therapeutic assistance.  If we could have, if I could have, for I can’t speak for Mary, Mark and Dad, grieved Mom’s loss and then moved on with my life, rather than heading toward a ten to fifteen year period where emotional ups and downs, too much drinking, too much smoking, too little in the way of sound relationships eventually forced me to do what I was unable to do in those horrible months following her death.

This is not a regret, for it is not what happened, rather it is a what if.  It is a what if informed now by many, many years of therapy, therapy that helped me see myself as I really am, accept myself and my feet of clay, feet not so different from everyone else’s. Analysis, Jungian analysis, that in the end gave me a place to stand that was my own, not a place over against the grief and the abandonment of those years.  Analysis that afforded me a chance to live into my own Self, live my own life and find, now, in my 60’s, a way of life that has a measure of peace and more than a measure of contentment and happiness.

I agree with the author of the article referenced in the beginning.  It was not a better time, those pre-therapy years.

Family, Weather +Climate

Hello Thunder, My Old Friend

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Imbolc                                 Waning Wild Moon

While eating breakfast this morning a loud noise, like a souped up street cleaner, disturbed my cereal.  I asked Kate what it was.  She thought it was a souped up street cleaner, or some other machine outside.  I got up to look.  It was rain.  Pouring rain, buckets, pummeling the roof.  The old snow will take a beating today.

Then, another noise.  Thunder.  An old friend from the warmer seasons.  On your marks, get set, grow.

Kate and I began our 21st year last night at midnight.  Another growing season has begun to push its way toward us, too.  As we celebrate events this year, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, the growing season, each one gets punctuated with, When we (do this next), you’ll be retired.  This is Kate’s last year at Allina, and she will not be sad to let go.  Medicine has changed and not in a good way.

Family, GeekWorld, Health, Humor

Sandwich a Bio-Hazard?

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Imbolc                                        Waning Wild Moon

Those in the health care world, at least the care provider part of it, use medical in a way most of us lay folk don’t.  They ask people they meet, especially spouses like me, if they’re “medical.”  Kate payed me a compliment in this vernacular a few months back by saying, “He probably doesn’t realize how medical you are.”

What does it mean?  In part it means a familiarity with the everyday life of medicine, that is, a life dealing with blood, sputum, questions about constipation or overactive bladders, stitching up wounds or struggling with life or death in a code blue type situation.  I sense, too, that it refers to an acceptance of the brute facts of life.  Illness and trauma happen and they happen to all sorts of people at all sorts of times in their lives.

At some point the news can be bad, “He didn’t make it.” or “You have lung cancer.” kind of bad.  They also know, better than most of us, that death comes in many forms and that it comes to us all.  There is a contradiction here; however, since contemporary medicine sees death as the enemy and procedural medicine as their chief weapons in this apocalyptic struggle.  I use the word apocalyptic here in reference to the universe that dies with each person.

Medical also means going into the refrigerator for something to eat, taking what looks like a sandwich in a ziploc bag and discovering the container says:  Specimen Transport Bag and has the red and black bio-hazard emblem with BIOHAZARD written in bold black letters against the red field.

Being medical does put you in a world different from the day to day, where we consider normality health, enjoy a certain consistency to our routine and find trauma or illness an upsetting deviation.  It’s been a privilege, this past 20 years, to learn about it from the inside.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

The Environment Political

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Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Bounced out of bed this morning at 9:30 am.  Yesterday’s early morning and late night at the capitol had taken its toll.  I’m awake now though.  My Latin for Chapter 7 is done, this is 3rd declension nouns.  I’ve already received one of two books of readings that Greg, our tutor, feels will move us forward faster in regard to translation.

Lobbying in this political environment is tough for the natural environment.  Jobs and deficits rule the world of the legislature; the natural world, or at least the world outside of the built world, intrudes like a beloved relative dropping by for an unexpected visit.

This session we can set the table for issues of future years, defend against certain potential harms and hope to pass some needed but relatively non-controversial legislation like complete streets (involved all potential users of transportation equally, not privileging motorized vehicles), extension of the open-bottle laws to off highway vehicles, promote economic development tools that promote green jobs and encourage retention of the state’s moratorium against building nuclear energy plants.

At some point the winds will become more favorable and we’ll be able to tack instead of run before the wind, as we’re doing now.