Monthly Archives: April 2011

Bees, Garden

The Early Growing Season

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Spring ( it even looks like spring today!)                             Waning Bee Hiving Moon

This morning or early this afternoon I pull the grass out of the entrance reducers and the bees will be free to navigate from their new home.  Tomorrow I’ll check on the hive to see if the bees have remained focused in the middle of the hive box.  Otherwise the newbees have the run of the grounds and the air around here.  From now through fall we’ll be engaged in a delicate dance, first to prevent swarming, then to encourage adequate honey supplies for winter, then, if possible, production of surplus honey for sale.

One colony will receive the traditional treatment with three hive boxes, reversed and prepared for winter.   The other two get another hive box and after that, supers.  I’m trying to gauge how much sense it makes to struggle with overwintering since the odds seem stacked against it.

Veggies go in the ground, today, too, seeds and a few transplants–leeks, in particular.  Yesterday I moved the tomato seedlings to larger pots.  The seed potatoes are in a kitchen window, eyes beginning to bulge.  On Tuesday or Wednesday, I’ll cut the potatoes into chunks, each with an eye, then wait a day or two for a callous to form.  After that, in they go.

At that point the bees will be in their first week, all the vegetables with the exception of the post-frost plantings will be in the ground and the garden will have assumed its early growing season form.  At some point, too, I have to get out and work in the flower beds, the gardening that used to occupy all my efforts.  Now the perennial beds are established and I understand the patterns and problems they have.  Flowers are not as labor intensive as vegetables.

Aging

Life

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Spring                                                     Waning Bee Hiving Moon

I have a much more plastic week ahead, one with more time here at home, space to plant vegetables, care for the newly hived bees.   Weeks with a lot of activity like last week wear me out, I begin to feel frazzled, as much from too much people exposure as physical weariness.  Without weeks like that, though, I feel disconnected from day to day life, so I need them, but it’s nice to have a more leisurely pace the next week.

Translating Ovid gets left behind in those weeks since it requires a block of time for concentrated effort.  The same thing is true with Missing.  I have allowed my life, again, to become ragged in its rhythms, often a sign of vitality in my docent, Sierra Club, Woolly world, but a sure barrier to the creative work of writing and the detailed focused work of translation.

Mark and I were coming back from getting the bees and he asked me if I had any regrets.  Up until a couple/three years ago I would have said, “Yes, I didn’t get a Ph.D.”  Now though I have let that go, a part of my past, not regretted, not celebrated.  Just a part of my past.

What good are regrets?  They chain you now to things you didn’t do or wish you had done differently in the past.  There’s no going back there to change them, no way to erase or re-do.  Instead, I have the life I have, one I’ve chosen, sometimes with sound, well thought out choices, sometimes with impulsive, creative choices and sometimes with stupid, petty choices.  It is though, my life, and it is the synergy among all those choices that makes me who I am.  So, no, since I do not regret who I am, I cannot regret.

Have I lived a perfect life?  Far from it.  Two divorces, a struggle with alcoholism, estranged from my father, not the hallmarks of a perfect life by any means, yet at this point it’s the life I have, complete with mistakes, bloopers and bone-headed errors.   Gotta say I’m fine with it.  A life I’m proud of at this point and that I hope to extend as long as the flesh is willing.

Bees

Bee Diary: April 23rd, 2011 Hiving

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Spring                                                 Waning Bee Hiving Moon

The bees are in the house.  Mark and I drove out to Nature’s Nectar near Stillwater and picked up three three pound packages of Minnesota Hygienic bees.  On the way back the beespackagebees hummed in the back, a pleasant noise.

Tom and Roxann came up to watch the hiving, as did Pam from across the street.  It has a certain ritual feel, a rite of spring.

The wooden packages with wire sides have a feeder can of syrup suspended from the top, along with a queen cage and newly mated queen.  After setting up the hive boxes with 9 or ten frames each, the hiving process moves stepwise through spraying the bees with sugar water to make them less able to fly, then pulling the syrup can out, followed by the queen cage which goes in your pocket to keep her warm.  Four frames come out of the hive box, in the center, and the bee package rapped sharply against the remaining frames to jar the bees loose.  Once they have fallen, a buzzing moving mass to the bottom, the beekeeper spreads them out along the bottom and releases the queen.

I chose the indirect method of queen release this year, putting a small marshmallow in the end of the queen cage so the queen and the workers can chew their way through it in 3 or 4 hours.  The cage gets wedged between two frames, the hive cover and the telescoping cover go back on and the bee year has begun.

Family, Humanities

If You Can, Speak

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Spring                                    Waning Bee Hiving Moon

More fun with poor Actaeon.   I translated this short speech of Diana’s and it really gets to the point of what Ovid had in mind.

Diana has just sprinkled Actaeon with avenging water and his transfer to a stag is complete, though he doesn’t know it quite yet.  She says to him:

“Now let me show you the garment you saw set down,

If you can tell about it, you may.”

When he tries, all that comes out are a groan and tears, “only his pristine mind remained.”  Ouch.  You want to stay on the good side of any goddess in your vicinity.

We’ve decided to change my tutoring sessions to a reading course format.  I will prepare several verses, translate them, but on the day of our session, I will read the Latin out loud, then translate as much as possible from sight.  This should speed up my learning.

On Friday’s Kate goes to the bank to get our weekly cash, goes to the pharmacy which is close by (our credit union is at Mercy Hospital and the pharmacy in the medical office building across the street) and often comes home with lunch.  When she gets home, she says,  “I’ve got money, drugs and food.”  Those little domestic rituals.

Bees, Family, Garden, Great Work, Humanities

Daffodils Are Up. The Bees Are Coming. Growing Season Is Underway.

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Spring                                              Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Tomorrow afternoon is the day the bee’s come to their new home.  They will have traveled by truck from Chico, California, spent a night at Jim’s Nature’s Nectar and will leave Stillwater for Andover around 2:00 pm.  Back home here at Artemis Honey they will go into their colonies, one per package, a tuft of grass tucked in the entrance reducer for the first 12 hours to keep everybody home the first night.  Sounds like 3 folks will come for the festivities.

Today is the first Latin day in three weeks.  I’ve had an unusually full period that eliminated the full day slots I like to use for translating Ovid. I find I have to get into a flow with it which takes some time.

In addition to bee hiving I have vegetables to plant this week, too.  Succession planting plus new veggies, cool weather veggies like peas and carrots.  My potatoes came two days ago.  They’re on a cookie pan while the eyes grow a bit more before I cut them up and plant them, probably late next week.

Mark will have been here two weeks tomorrow.  He takes long walks here in Andover, goes into the city with me when I won’t be long and takes walks in the city.  Still calming down after a tough period.

On to Diana and Actaeon.  I’m getting there with this story.  When I finish my first pass on the translation, mostly literal (which is not easy for me), then I’ll take on the next, equally difficult challenge, putting my translation into idiomatic English.  Prose, most likely.  Translating it as poetry feels like a different, more complex process, one I’m not ready to take on right now.

Also, Grandson Gabe’s 3rd birthday.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Touring

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Spring                                      Waning Bee Hiving Moon

A Titian tour this morning with students from Harding High School in East St. Paul.  My group was largely Asian, Hmong for the most part.  They were attentive and responsive.  At the end Peng and Veng, two boys who had shown a lot of interest, reached out and shook my hand.  An adult gesture.  Surprised me.  Made me feel surprisingly good, too.

Second tour, also from Harding, had kids in a drawing class focused on a project to produce symbolic portraits of themselves.  An interesting tour to design, to think through.  Not sure how this group, also all Asian though with some Chinese students, too, reacted.  They were more closed off, but remained engaged through eye contact.

After that, over to the Sierra Club to return the material from yesterday’s event at North Hennepin Community College.  Spent a half-hour talking to Margaret about mining, volunteers, fund-raising, then drove home in the heart of rush hour.  Bushed.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities, Politics, World History

Freedom

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Spring                                                Full Bee Hiving Moon

It is never safe to speak and act for freedom in an unfree place.  How many have learned that lesson?  American revolutionaries.  French.  East Indian. American Indian.  The South African blacks.  The list could go on and on.  Spartacus.  Socrates.  Even Jesus.  It is never safe to be unfree.  That’s the paradox, the motivator.

And freedom will have its way.  History, though I know the arguments against this position, is on the side of freedom.  It is an ache in the human heart that never goes away until satisfied. Ask the African-Americans or undocumented folks in the USA today.  Ask the Muslims in France or the Turks in Germany, the Romany especially in the Slavic countries.  Ask the Jews of the diaspora anywhere.

To stand on the side of freedom is to stand with the future and against the past.  Each of us takes a position every day, with every purchase we make, every political decision we try or fail to try to influence, every value we pass on through our behaviors and our teaching.  To live is to choose.  Always.

I spoke with a man today about the political environment for working against climate change, for healthy and sustainable forests, agriculture, cities.  The political winds today blow against us.  Is that a reason to sit down and wait them out?  No.  It is a time to stand up, to find the actions we can take that will move us toward a more just and verdant world

One of those actions, always, is to work on the side of freedom.  Ai Weiwei and others held in China today need and deserve our help.  Not as an action against China, but as one for it.  For a world where political speech and action has a place of honor, not a jail cell.

Art and Culture, Asia, Politics

Dissent Magazine on Ai Weiwei

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Spring                                                Full Bee Hiving Moon

from the friendly folks at Dissent magazine: (please note:  in deference to recent activity about copyright, I’m going to only post excerpts and links of magazine and newspaper articles.

The Purge of Ai Weiwei

Colin Jones – April 13, 2011

WHY WAS Ai Weiwei allowed to say the things he did? Any journalist who interviewed him in the last several years would eventually ask him the question, and it was incredible how Ai could reformulate the same answer again and again. Here he is on CNN in 2009: “On the one hand, the prime minister would memorize my father’s poetry in front of the great public, but on the other hand, the police were, you know, following me. So it’s hard to say.” In other words, Ai did not know why, but he suggested that whether he was going to get away with it or not remained to be seen.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Getting Technical

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Spring                                                         Full Bee Hiving Moon

Over to Hennepin Technical this morning for earth day.  I’m responsible for a Sierra Club table there during a three hour long green event.  Not sure what this will be like, but it sounds like an interesting day.  I’ve already worn myself out this week and I have two tours tomorrow, plus Latin on Friday.  Worked yesterday on my art student tour for portraiture, then went into St. Paul for a meeting with non-traditional allies for the Sierra Club.

Snow.  Snow.  Go Away.  Come back around All Saint’s Day.  I love winter, but I’m ready for spring.

Gotta go.  On the flipside.

Bees

Bee Diary: Keep On Keepin’ On

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Spring                                                           Full Bee Hiving Moon

The die is cast again for this season.  Three packages, three three pound packages with around 8,000 bees each will arrive on Saturday.  I’m glad Kate convinced me to buy the larger package since the shipments experienced a two-week delay due to bad weather in California.  Gotta dig out the syrup spray bottle.  Started defrosting the pollen patties left over from last year.  Once done a couple of times hiving bees is not a formidable process, but it does require execution of several steps.

I did learn why my divide failed.  When I requeened it in late summer after inadvertently killing the queen while checking for mites, I did what I thought was a slow release, but it turned to be a fast one.  I stuck a marshmallow in the end of the queen cage so that she and the workers could eat their way through it and come together in happiness and fertility for all.  In fact what I needed to do was put a piece of hard candy in the same place, something that takes four days for the workers and the queen to eat.  Over that length of time they become familiar with each other, old buddies, willing to cohabit without any smothering going on.

As you know, royalty is not beheaded or shot, unless you’re uncivilized like the 17th century English, but instead have the garrote. The same thing is true for bees.  To kill a queen the workers form a ball around her, known as balling (a different use of this term was popular during my college days), and plug up the holes through she which she breathes.  Not a violent, but a certain, death.

The queen is dead, long live the queen.  Yes, colonies will requeen themselves given time, but heading into the gales of November there is no time.  So the divide died an early death.

The parent colony, I think, died from American Foul Brood.  At any rate I burned the hive boxes, frames and foundations.  Scorched earth against this plague.

That leaves my strong package colony.  It looked good headed into winter.  Plenty of bees, what I thought was adequate honey supply and a fertile, young queen.  I’m not sure what happened here.  It could have been mites.  It could have been an inadequate honey supply.  It could have been its fate, woven elsewhere by Artemis and her court of virgin nymphs.  At this point I can only proceed with a completely new bee population and hope that last winter was an anomaly since it was from a weather perspective.

Anyhow perseverance is the route to wisdom in beekeeping as in so many of life’s endeavors.  So, in the immortal words of Robert Crumb, we’ll just keep on truckin’.