Daily Archives: September 21, 2010

Bees

Bee Diary: September 21st, 2010

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Lughnasa                                             Full Back to School Moon

The fumagilin-B in heavy syrup, sugar 2:1 in a gallon water, rests now in the hive box wide feeder with the screen and two plastic reservoirs on each side of the screen.  The bees can come up around the screen and reach the syrup.  It will do two things for this colony, the package colony.  First, it will feed them so they can shore up their stores for the winter months.  Second, it will treat them for nosema, an infection that threatens their survival over the long winter.  Nobody got riled up when I put the feeder on or when I poured the syrup into the troughs.

I also put the shims on the parent and divide to give the bees space where the apiguard goes in the hive.  When I lifted the top hive box off to place the shim underneath it on the divide, I saw that the apiguard had reduced by half at least.  The treatment has gotten to them.  The shims went on, but propolis made getting the hive box squared away on top of the the shim difficult. The propolis allowed the heavy hive box to gain traction on the shim pushing it off center.  Even so, I did, finally, get it on.

When I get back from Indiana, I’ll finish the apiguard treatment, then begin the fumagilin-b for the other two colonies.

Last night I passed out pints of honey to the Woollies.  It tickled me, the satisfaction I got from seeing my friends heft the honey. Scott tasted it.  They will take it home, put it on toast, use it in cereal, whatever they want.  Each time they do, a bit of Artemis Hives transfers itself and its quite literal energy to them.  In that way they become us and we become them.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Great Wheel

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Lughnasa                                                       Waxing Back to School Moon

Tomorrow we move into the fall equinox position on our yearly orbit.  In this sense time recurs again and again and again, each spot on the orbit revisited as Earth passes along on its ancientrail.  Of course, the orbit changes slightly each year and the solar system moves further and further away from the center of our galaxy, so in a strict sense the spots are not quite the same, but from a terrestrial perspective over the span of a human life, the differences are not noticeable.  Birthdays point as much to a specific point on Earth’s track around the sun as they do to a “time.”  Our age, which we consider linear, really counts the number of times the Earth has revolved around the sun since our birth, not linear at all, but elliptical.

Tom Crane said last night that he and Roxann climb a hill at the Arboretum and each time they see a tree.  At one point the tree has bare branches, at another leaves, at another flowers and fruit, colors change at yet another point.  It feels linear, but, wait…the colors change, the tree has bare branches, then leaves, then flowers and fruit and again the leaves change color.

As he spoke, I thought of our circle, made sacred now by 20 years of showing up, how our hair has gone gray, our flesh taken on wrinkles and on some of us, a few pounds.  Again, it feels linear, this aging process.  Then, the conversation turned to grandchildren who will crawl, walk on two legs, then three, just as the Sphinx had riddled.  Within our species the childhood, maturity, aging repeats over and over again as the fleshly vessel sloughs off, but its genetic information goes on.