Monthly Archives: May 2010

Bees

Bee Diary: May 15, 2010

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Beltane                                        Waxing Planting Moon

Colony 1, the parent colony, got a reversal of the two hive boxes today.  I checked the honey supers and they have some honey, a very modest amount, but they still have a lot of comb to draw out, so the honey will come when that work finishes.  This colony has bees all over the place and they were ornery today, buzzing, circling, hitting the screen of my veil but not stinging.  They flew up in concentric tornadic columns from the hive entrance, making the noise that sends wise predators running.

Ah, well.  The beekeeper goes where wiser beings fear to tread.   With smoke, slow movements and a work plan I’ve not the found the bees difficult, but that one day where I 05-15-10_bee-diary_0002670defied common sense and peeked in without the bee suit or smoke, I did.  The multiple stings I took color my movements and my tolerance of the task at hand, making me want to move quicker, get done a bit sooner that good beekeeping suggests.  My hope is that repeated visits to the hives combined with good management practices will slowly drain that anxiety.

Colony 2, the child colony, has the old hive box from the parent and a new, young marked queen.  I didn’t see her today, but I did see larvae, so she’s there and at work.  After I checked for swarm cells, I closed colony 2 back up.  Finally, colony 3, the package colony hived about 3 weeks ago had worked through their initial bucket of syrup, so I had to come inside and make a new one for them.  The pollen patty was good.  Again, there were larvae and the comb looks fresh and beautiful.  I closed them up and declared this week’s bee duties discharged.

I’m sending the picture here into the UofM to ask about the pancake shaped additional comb the bees have built.  I’m also going to ask about black streaked comb.  I couldn’t find the frame, I think it’s in the parent colony, but I saw it when I made the divide.

Bees, Weather +Climate

Bee Plan for the Weekend

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Beltane                                     New Moon (Planting)

The sun.  The sun.  We’ve been doing a great imitation of Seattle for the past week, cool and rainy.  Today and tomorrow we’ll have plenty of sun.  I’m glad because I have to check on my division (#2), see how their doing; check on my package colony (#3), see if they’re drawing out comb, the queen’s laying brood; and, finally, I have to check the two honey supers on the parent colony (#1) and see if I have to add supers, as well as doing a reverse on the two hive boxes.  The reverse follows, roughly, the amount of time it takes a queen to migrate into the next hive box.  This way, she lays eggs in the bottom hive box, then moves up into the top one, lessening the chance that the colony will feel crowded and want to swarm.

Tomorrow, too, I’m going to take my new digital camera and shoot pictures of the pancake comb I’m seeing, as well as the dark, splotchy comb.  I’ll send the pictures to Gary Reuters at the UofM to get his take on them.

The sun after a long stretch of Aunt Roberta dull, gray days makes me feel great.  Work to be done and time to do it.

Kate continues to look forward to her hip surgery as the pain in her right hip has become excruciating.  I’ll be glad for her when its better.

Bees, Great Work

Bee Diary: May 13, 2010

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Beltane                                  New Moon

On Tuesday night I attended my first meeting of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association.  Down a muddy road near the practice field for women’s soccer at the corner of Larpenteur and Cleveland in St. Paul, part of the St. Paul campus of the U. of M., lie a small, old complex of buildings that house the bee research facilities for the UofM.  They’re not much to look at.  The bee yard has knock down chain link fence around its blue, gray and tan hive boxes.  A building that would fit well on a run down farmstead in northern Minnesota seems to house bee equipment and a more modern, but well used building with a truck dock and sliding door completes the place.

It would be a mistake to take this as a reflection of the quality of the work done by Marla Spivak, her bee wrangler Gary and a small flock of grad students.  Some of the finest bee research on colony collapse disorder has been done here as well as the development of a strain, the Minnesota Hygienic, specifically bred to combat it.

When I arrived, the loading dock area had a crowd of maybe 50 people, most, like me, under dressed for the 43 degree rainy weather.  A smattering had bee suits.  We had been asked to bring them since there would be a live demonstration of dividing a hive.  I brought mine and put it on, not to protect me from the bees but from the chill in the evening air.

Two young female grad students got out the smoker, cracked the hive boxes and went through the various moves necessary to complete the division of an over-wintered colony into a parent and a child colony.  I did this a couple of weeks ago, so it was review, but helpful anyhow.  I had not, for example, tilted the queen cage up so the syrup would not drown her in case it entered her cage.  I had also forgotten to remove a frame way earlier, though I did do that on the day I divided the colony.

This was very informal with frames passed around so folks could see larvae, identify drone cells, that sort of thing.  There were a lot of absolute newbees there.  I felt I had a bit of experience on them, but not much.

After that we retired to Hodson Hall on the campus about a quarter of a mile from the bee yard.  There we sat in tiered seats, an entomology class room, evident by the row of glass cases outside containing japanese beetles, cotton moths and water borne larvae.  This was informal, too, consisting of a few presentations.

One guy had a method apparently used in Canada to increase the field force available to one set of honey supers.  This involves two hive boxes set side by side with a queen excluder over half of each.  A board covers the exposed part of each hive box.  This allows two queens to lay eggs, increase the number of worker bees.  The honey supers get filled up quicker and with better drawn comb for comb honey.

Another guy brought a beautiful top-bar frame in with a free formed comb.   Then we had pizza, mingled a bit, heard another presenter, and left.  This will be a useful group as time wears on.

General

Paddling

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Beltane                                 New Moon

Boy, I’m just keeping my head above water right now.  Finished my Latin this morning and managed only two verses of Ovid before my tutoring session.  This afternoon I have to get ready for a tour tomorrow morning.  Over the weekend there is more bee work to do and more garden work to do, too.

I also need to find enough time to finish chapter 15 in Wheelock, a few more verses in Ovid and  plan the final meeting of the Sierra Club’s executive committee.  I’m not complaining, this pace keeps me alive, moving forward, just observing that this period has had a confluence of activity.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Self

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Beltane                                   New Moon

In theology and philosophy an anthropology reveals how the system views the human.  The Cartesian split between body and mind is an anthropology as is Freud’s id-ego-superego.  A familiar medieval anthropology is the body-mind-soul, a tripartite division.  From just these three examples you can see that anthropologies often get layered one upon the other rather than displacing each other.  We assume the Cartesian anthropology when we cannot imagine mind moving or directly affecting anything in the material world, but we might also believe in the medieval body-mind-soul division when it comes to the afterlife.  We may also, in our daily lives, use Freud’s work to analyze our own motivations and dilemmas.

One of the valuable lessons seminary taught me was that we each have our own theology, our own psychology, our own metaphysic, our own philosophy, our own anthropology.  That is, we all have conclusions, though they may be unformed and unsystematic, about the nature of the sacred, the operations of the human mind, the way the universe is really put together, our own views on beauty, truth and justice.  We each, too, have our own anthropology, gleaned from our years of experience as an example of the kind as well as our years of observation of others of our kind.

Here’s my anthropology in summary.  We are unique, solitary and complete within ourselves, yet each of us yearns for the other, some contact, some intimacy that suggests our unique and solitary nature does not condemn us to life alone.  This tension between our isolated existence and our yearning for connection is unresolvable, creating a great deal of suffering, though also creating the purest joy most of us ever know.

We live our lives, when we live them most richly and well, with what I call the Self constantly with us.  The Self is not a perfect you, nor a successful you, rather the Self is the you that can contribute your individual gift(s) to others.  This means that the authentic life, the life lived toward the fullest expression of the Self, is, ironically, the one lived most fully for the other.

Stripping away cultural roles, parental expectations, linguistic and moral customs, seeking the you that calls you forward into richness and toward harmony with the whole of creation is our only real task in this life.  It is not easy, in fact it is hard, and prone to manipulation and deception both from within and without.

If you can, however, pare away the not-you, get down to the core, the place where the seeds of your true Self are, you can nurture those seeds until they grow strong, bloom, bear fruit.  It will be a rare fruit, a strange fruit, a fruit with a flavor and a vitality only you can bring to it.  This journey, the ancient trail inscribed over the temple to Apollo at Delphi, Know Thyself, is the only path that leads to solid ground.  Until you come to know  yourself, you stand on sand that can shift under you.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Health

Death Came Calling

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Beltane                                     Waning Flower Moon

Yesterday death came to call.  Dizziness and nausea took over my body while my mind raced back to October, 1964, trying to inhabit, again, the mind of my mother as the stroke hit her, trying to imagine the transition from vitality to powerlessness, wondering what thoughts came to her as she fell to the floor in the basement of the United Methodist Church.  Pushing this thought back, far from me, get thee behind me death, I wondered if she had done the same, imagined that this was like all the other times, a bit more severe than most perhaps, but surely something that would lift.  It didn’t.  She died a week later.

Death had come to call on me as a reminder of the future in the guise of a dark moment of the past.  All that work on Latin, I thought.  Then, just as quickly, would you have done something else?  No.  The answer is no.  At that moment a peace settled over me, if this was my time, so be it.  It’s just fine.  If not, I’ll get downstairs and study my i-stem nouns and ablatives.

Then, today, in a lecture, Nietzsche posed a hypothetical:  What if a demon came to you and said, “You will live and relive your life.  All of it.  The pains and the sorrows, the joys and accomplishments, all of it, even this visit from me.  And you will relive it not only once, but over and over.”  What is your response?  If you can say, Thank you, oh divine one, then you have lived an authentic life and have come to rest with who you are.  Nietzsche called this the myth of eternal recurrence.

I find I’m on the Thank you side of the demon question.  Yes, I’d like another helping please.

Much of my attitude toward life seems to have its roots in Nietzschean thought.  Strange that I’m just now discovering this.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Friends, Great Work, Health, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

When Do Many Avocations Become a Vocation?

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

Beekeeping, it seems to me, must always fall under the avocational** rather than hobby* definition, because it engages one’s time in a manner similar to an occupation, only perhaps not in as time intensive a way.  Under the latter definition I have an avocational interest in gardening, writing, art, religion, politics and now Latin.
Add them all together, as I do in my life, and the result is a vocation composed of many parts integrated through my particular participation in them.

I like the idea of a hobby as an Old World falcon, that is, engaging the world with grace and speed, stooping now and then to pluck a prize from the earth below then returning to some nest high and remote to enjoy it.

Whoa.  Worked out last night at the new, amped up level, after advice given to me by an exercise physiologist.  My polar tech watch which monitors my heart rate began to fade so I didn’t have a reliable way of checking my heart rate.   Guess I overworked myself because when I finished dizziness hit me and nausea soon followed.  Kate was home last night so she took care of me, eventually giving me a tab of my anti-nausea med.  That calmed things down, but didn’t put me right.  So I went to bed early.  Even this morning my stomach was sore, like someone had removed it and wrung it out like a dish rag.  Kate says I may have too little fluid during the day yesterday combined with salty foods.  Combined with the more vigorous workout it upset my body’s homeostasis.  It put me temporarily in the same place as the benign positional vertigo.  No fun.  No fun at all.

Lunch today with Paul Strickland.  He still doesn’t know for sure why his hemoglobin levels dropped so far.  He had a five-hour iron infusion last week and his color is better as are other symptoms.  We talked about his and Sarah’s place in Maine which has the possibility of a large LNG port being created nearby.  This is Eastport, Maine, roughly, and borders Canada, so the Canadian government has a voice as well as environmental groups.  Sounds horrific, an example of big corporate power taking on a relatively weak local government.  Bastards.

More sleep after.  I have returned to near normal but I’m going to skip the workout tonight just to be sure.

I have never sought nor do I plan to seek retirement though most folks would call me retired and I so call myself at times in order to give folks a handle easily understood.

At 6:00 pm I’m going to my first meeting of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper’s Association. It raises an interesting question for me about the difference between a hobby and an avocation.

The first two definitions here are of the word hobby:

*1. Etymology: Middle English hoby, from Anglo-French hobel, hobé
Date: 15th century

: a small Old World falcon (Falco subbuteo) that is dark blue above and white below with dark streaking on the breast

2. Etymology: short for hobbyhorse
Date: 1816
This one comes from an entry on avocation:

: a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation

** Etymology: Latin avocation-, avocatio, from avocare to call away, from ab- + vocare to call, from voc-, vox voice — more at voice
Date: circa 1617   : a subordinate occupation pursued in addition to one’s vocation especially for enjoyment
Art and Culture, Family, Great Work, Politics

A Gray Monday

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Beltane                                Waning Flower Moon

Business meeting.  Over to a flooring store to schedule the replacement of carpet in the small bedroom that will become Kate’s long-arm quilting room.  Lunch at Chili’s where the music was so loud I could barely hear myself think, literally.  When my one ear gets crammed full of noise, I find processing  thought difficult. Would be a good hell for me.  Lots of interesting conversation happening next to a loud waterfall.

Grocery store, too.  I’ve done regular, that is weekly, grocery shopping since seminary days when I used to cook for the whole floor of students.  Most of the time I’ve enjoyed it, something about being able to make choices and the diversity of a supermarket.  These days though I’ve begun to find it a nuisance, a repetitive task with little to commend it.  Maybe that will change, or perhaps I’ll be able to reframe it.

How bout that world out there, eh?  Oil pumping into the Gulf where it has begun to tar birds, clog up the wetlands and ruin shrimping and oyster farming.  Volcanoes in Iceland wrecking havoc with airplanes.  Snow in Minnesota in May.  A frost, too.  Gov. Pawlenty’s cruel cuts in the state’s budget overturned by our Supreme Court–with two weeks left in the legislative session.  Big fun at the capitol.  Enough snow on the East Coast over the last winter to confuse the debate in the Senate over a climate bill.   Not to mention the usual run of human misery and suffering.

I’m impressed right now with a political approach that takes into account particulars, that is individual suffering, the Gulf shrimp, the passengers and airlines troubled by the Icelandic ash plumes while acknowledging the need for universal abstractions like equality, justice, human rights.  I’m impressed with this approach because it doesn’t exist.   More on this at another point.

Art and Culture, Family, Health, Humanities, Letters

Transformations

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

A calmer day today.  After the bee work I planted bok choy and monkshood, finished raking the potato patch level, dead-headed tulips and daffodils.  A productive day.  The stuff I protected last night survived the frost well, though some of the coleus got nipped a bit the night before and I forgot three coleus plants in the park.  They don’t look great, but I think they’ll survive.

I said the other chapter 14 in Wheelock was half way through the book.  Not quite.  Chapter 20 is halfway.  It’s still a steep learning curve and that’s what I like.  Even the 9 verses of the Metamorphoses I’ve translated have already given me a deeper appreciation for the whole project Ovid set himself.  He correlates the painful and often vindictive transformations he records in the book with the kind of transformations the Gods have made to the whole of creation.  A dark thesis.

Kate’s hip is giving her fits.  I’m really glad she has the surgery scheduled for June 30th.  Won’t come too soon.

Bees

Bee Diary: May 9, 2010

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Beltane                                        Waning Flower Moon

A new feature on ancientrails, the ancient trail of bee-keeping.  This diary will serve as my record of work with my colonies and a way to review the year’s learnings and prepare for next year.

colony2colony1

From left to right is colony 1, the parent colony of bees started with a package a year ago.  The parent colony has two honey supers on it now, the gray boxes, and a queen excluder which you can see as an unpainted strip of wood between the honey supers and the top hive box. The bottom hive box sits on a bottom board which rests on a leveled foundation, in this case bricks.  Colony 2, with the silvery metal cover, is the hive box, painted gray, and an empty honey super covering a plastic pail of 1 to 1 sugar syrup.  The green board underneath is the bottom board and the foundation in this and the next instance are a heavy plastic decking plank cut into small pieces.  Colony 2 was the third hive box on the parent which I divided a week ago and to which I introduced a new Minnesota Hygienic Queen on Monday.  The third box, with the copper top, which all the colonies will have eventually, is the colony started a two weeks ago from a 2 pound package of Minnesota Hygienics.   In the final frame I’m smoking the top hive box of the parent colony preparatory to an inspection of the frames.  Kate took this picture last Monday and the other pictures were taken on May 1.

Today I started by preparing the smoker, the metal object you can see in the picture with me.  This has taken a long time for me to learn and I finally have found a way to colony3keep it working for the 30-45 minutes I need to do my inspections and whatever work I need to do.  I now use hamstermebee670050210 bedding to start the fire, throw in some compressed wood pellets, pumping the bellows to create a flame and embers.  Then I put in smoker fuel, a cotton product that I assume is leftover material from spinning cotton into thread.  Once this has established itself I put on the suit, zip up the headpiece, cinch up the sleeves and put my pants into my socks.  I learned this last one the hard way when that bee crawled up my pant leg and stung me on the butt.

Each time you start work on a colony you smoke the entrance, which is to the back in the colony 1 photo and to the right side in 2 & 3.  Then, each you time you lift something, like the top or a hive box you put smoke under the object you’re lifting before you take it completely off.  The smoke calms the bees and, it just occurred to me, the beekeeper.  Often when you crack a hive box you have to use a hive tool to break the propolis the bees use to seal up their hive.  It’s a sticky, brownish substance that sets to a somewhat pliable but sturdy joiner.

Each time you check the hives you look for several different things:  swarm cells, which are really new queen cells indicating that a swarm is imminent, larvae which mean the current queen is at work and present–this is a situation bee-keepers call being queen right, disease, this one is tough for me since I’m not sure what I’m looking for and pest invasions like mice or ants. In addition to this general inspection there are also specific tasks related to each inspection since the goal is to disturb the hive as little as necessary while maintaining a good weather eye.

Today

Colony 1 (the parent colony with a year old queen):  I checked the honey supers to see if they were full.  They weren’t.  Had they been I would have added two more.  I also removed the queen excluder and checked a couple of frames in the top hive box and underneath it for swarm cells.  After setting the top box on the ground, I did a similar inspection of the bottom hive box, then reversed the two by putting the top box on the bottom board and the bottom box on top of it.  Queen excluder.  Honey supers.  Top board.  Hive box cover.  Done.

I noticed pancake shaped cells constructed on top of the cells on the frame foundation.  I have no idea what this means.  I saw a few swarm cells and what looked like a large number of drones, fat bodied male bees.  I also found larvae which meant colony 1 is still queen right.  You can kill the queen during an inspection.  That’s a buzz kill.  Ha.  If a colony is not queen right, it will not produce worker bees or honey.  This is one of the reasons you stay out of the hives as much as possible.  In addition, the bees know much more about being bees than you do.  Let them handle it.

Colony 2 (child of the parent with a few weeks old queen):  There was pancake shaped cell structures in this colony, too.  Again?  I did see larvae here and an empty queen cage, so colony 2 is queen right.  It looked to me like a lot of these guys were drones, too, but what do I know at this point?  There were a lot of bees and they did look and sound crowded–a lot of buzzing–so I added a hive box with ten frames and foundations, left the original hive body on the bottom board and put the empty on top.  Then I closed colony 2.

Colony 3 (package with few weeks old queen):  I lifted the copper hive cover, found the syrup pail still had plenty of syrup, smoked the hive box and lifted out a few frames.  There are larvae and the  beginning of the ovoid structure of brood, then pollen, then honey.  The pollen patty has had little activity, but I left it in just in case they need it.  After hiving a package, the population of the colony declines for the first 21 days as the queen lays and workers go out seeking pollen, many of whom will die.  After the brood begins to hatch and the nectar flow begins in earnest, the population will ramp up.  When 80% of the frames have brood, I’ll add another hive box on this colony.  Both colony 2 and colony 3 have the same task this year, build a strong parent colony, three hive boxes, that will over winter and divide next May.

Colony 1, if all things go well, should produce honey this year.  Next year and from then on, again assuming things go well, we’ll always have two parent colonies producing honey and two child colonies in the process of becoming parents.

Under any circumstances I go the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper Association meeting on Tuesday, May 11th, and found what those pancake things are.  Until the next entry in the bee diary.