Beltane Waning Planting Moon
A sleepy, rainy day. After a very busy Monday, I settled into the Latin and finished off chapter 18 in Wheelock. It took most of the day with a couple of instances (well, maybe more than a couple) of head scratching and paging back and forth to find out what I was not understanding.
Kate and I have settled into our familiar and comfortable routines. She went out today to have her nails done while I labored in the scriptorium.
Tonight is the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association meeting at Borlaug Hall. I feel both mildly competent and wildly confused with both the beekeeping and the Latin. I’ve now overwintered a package of bees, made a divide into parent and child colonies and hived a package of bees by myself. The smoker stays lit for the duration of my work in the bee yard and I have not repeated my various stings event.
Yet. When I pulled the frames from the parent colony and moved one to the package colony and one to the divide, I felt very unsure of what I had done. Still am. I look at the frames and I can tell the pollen filled cells from the honey filled cells. I know what larvae look like and I can identify a drone cell and its unique domed structure. Queen or swarm cells are also apparent to me. Even so, I cannot tell healthy frames from troubled ones.
I get addled about what I’m doing because of the bees buzzing around and forget what I’ve done like I did yesterday with the reverse of the parent colony. I have no clue about what to do with the honey the bees are making, I’m just imagining that I’ll learn about that in time to do it.
In the Latin I miss obvious things and pick up on some obscure ones like word meanings, verb forms and case endings for nouns and adjectives. I have two index cards filled with words, mostly adverbs and conjunctions, that I can’t remember. I puzzle over a translation, no luck, no luck, no luck, then a bright light. Ah ha.
Learning has this daunting vulnerability to it. Without placing yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you’re your doing, you cannot learn. It keeps a guy humble that’s for sure.
