Daily Archives: April 4, 2014

General

A Year Without Bees

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Spring                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

This will be the first year in the last 5 or 6 without bees.  Just weren’t gonna work this year.  A case of bad timing.  I remember last year when I got the package, the colony that outperformed every other colony I’ve had three times over.

Kate was in Denver celebrating the grandkid’s birthdays.  I had thrown my back out moving a heavy hive box, Kona’s cancerous tumor had gotten infected and she was near death, plus the new bees arrived.  It was a cold, wet spring, just like this one and I drove out to Stillwater, picked up the bees, then stopped by John Desteian’s, my long time analyst.

The combination of back pain, Kona’s trip to the emergency vet (always very expensive), having to hive the new package in dismal weather and Kate far away had sent me into a tailspin.  I needed help and John is my backstop.

And I got it from him.  He turned me toward the numinous and Heidegger.  That got me away from my funk and I got up the next morning, hived the new package and got Kona over to her regular vet for a follow-up visit.

It was not a great time period.  Now I’m retreating from bee-keeping this year, so I can visit Gabe at his birthday party.  It’s also a good year for a rest, a halt.  We have a lot of honey, well over 70 pounds. We’ll focus our outdoor energy on the flowers, the vegetables and the orchard.

General
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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

The way it goes here.  Record snowfall yesterday, spring next week.  It does look like the Mother Earth_r1weather map has decided to relent, give us some good news about the coming growing season.  I want to get in the garden before we leave for Gabe’s birthday the last week of April, plant those cool season crops.  Won’t happen unless the snow melts first.

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

The Sound of Silence

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Spring                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

An unusual time with my Latin tutor, Greg, this morning.  I started translating, that is, I read the Latin which I had annotated, pronouncing the Latin words in the order in which I would translate them, then gave my translation into English.  Nothing.  I went a little further, still nothing.  The silence unnerved me.  “Greg,” I said, “Are you there?”  Oh, yes. Just listening.  Usually, Greg would say something like, well, let’s look at this, what about here?  That would signal, in his gentle way, that I had gone astray somewhere.

Today I read through over ten verses in a row, translating as I went and he said nothing. When we were finished, after he had explained the one place I faltered, a tricky part of Latin grammar and only at the very end, he said, “The best yet.  You’ve really got it.”

His silence meant assent.  I was doing fine and just needed to keep going.

Wow.  That felt good.

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

The Dance of The Seasons

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Spring                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Coon Rapids has 9.0 inches and Ramsey has 8.0.  We’re between them so our snowfall must be somewhere in that range.  Minnesota’s weather always surprises.  I know many people live in areas where the weather changes only from dry to wet, never from hot to cold, but I find that sort of climate just as difficult to imagine as I figure they do ours.

It’s not like I haven’t experienced the sub-tropical, tropical climates.  I have.  What I can’t imagine is a whole year where the temperature doesn’t change and where one season is dry and the other wet.  Living in it, I mean.  From my vantage point it appears boring, but I know people adapt to it.  Brother Mark and sister Mary both live in climates very different from ours here in Minnesota:  Arabia and Singapore respectively.

I don’t know how much of the world’s food production occurs in the temperate latitudes…stopped to look it up.  “Most food is produced in the temperate Northern hemisphere, with the US by far the largest total and surplus food producer.”  IPCC, 2007 So, while we humans are by body a tropical to sub-tropical species, we are now fed by those regions that have a fallow season as well as a growing season.

This is the world I know best, being a midwesterner by birth and continued residence, changing location only slightly (by global standards) from the lower to the upper midwest. This agricultural area-the heartland of U.S. as well as world food production-is my home.  It is no surprise then that the Great Wheel has come into prominence in my way of viewing the world.  It is a temperate latitude agriculturally focused calendar, one that weaves together the rhythm of spring emergence, summer growth, fall harvests and the winter’s cold, growthless time into a whole.  With the Great Wheel we understand the necessary interlocking components of seasonal change for food production and more, how those components also serve as metaphor for our own lives.

The best thing about the Great Wheel is its insistence on the whole, celebrating the distinct seasonal changes as elements in a cycle, all required.  We cannot become summer people, or winter people because we know the summer as the hot, growth enhancing aspect of vegetative growth, not just the time of swimming suits and summer vacation.  I suppose this underlies my inability to imagine those other climates.  One season, extended, made permanent, upsets the dance.  At least from the perspective of those between 30 degrees and 50 degrees north latitude.