Bees

Bee Diary: May 24, 2010

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Beltane                                          Waxing Planting Moon

Discovered an important aspect of bee-keeping this morning.  When the temperature is 87 and the dew point is above 70, it gets really, really hot in the bee suit.  Hot 05-24-10_bee-diary_6701enough that by the time I finished I had begun to get dizzy, sweat literally dripped off my forehead and face.  I couldn’t get the bee-suit off fast enough.  Came inside, sat down and drank a couple of glasses of water, didn’t move.  Better now, but whoa.

(a frame of honey from colony #1)

Colony 1 has begun to produce honey!  The top honey super has several frames full.  The second, bottom super is not as full.  I’m not sure whether I should put on another honey super or two.  Need to poke around in the bee literature.  Colony 2 has filled up the hive box divided from the parent colony (#1) and has begun to build comb in the new hive box.

While inspecting this colony, I transferred all the new frames and foundations to a new hive box.  When I put the current one on, I didn’t notice I had failed to drill an entrance hole in it.  I took one out with a hole and switched the frames into it, then closed up colony 2.  Its primary job is to fill two hive boxes and make honey for overwintering.  Beyond that it may make some honey late in the summer, but maybe not.  Either way is good.

The package colony, #3, has drawn out a good bit of comb and has made progress with larvae, honey and pollen, but is not yet ready for the second hive box.  That goes on when 80% or so of the frames have drawn out comb filled with those three.

Two stings today, both happened when lifting frames.  I inadvertently placed my index finger on two different bees.  It is not a big deal at all now, a nuisance.

The smoker stays lit for the whole operation, too.  That’s a big and important advance for me.  My movements have slowed down and my inner world has a much calmer 05-24-10_bee-diary_6702aspect to it.

(colony #2 with its hat at rakish angle)

Family, Travel

Expatriate Kin

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Beltane                                       Waxing Planet Moon

Expatriates.  Both my brother (see below) and my sister live the expat life in Southeast Asia, Mary in Singapore and Mark in Bangkok.  I’ve only been over there once, in 2004, for one month, they have both been there over 20 years.  That’s a long time to live in another culture, to live politically disenfranchised from the community in which you work and have your home, to live in a place where the familiar cues of home are either non-existent, weakened or have a different meanings, to live far from the places where you grew up and the people you knew then, including family.

On the other hand it gives you an opportunity without parallel to become a global citizen, to take in the lifeways of persons whose basic assumptions about life are different than your own.  It gives you a chance, if you take it, to get to know yourself much better, for the you that you are stands out in bold relief in places radically different from your own.

It exposes you to the kind of danger Mark experienced over the last few weeks when his host country, a place he lives in because he loves it there, turns feral.  Not only that, the wild citizens set up the zoo right outside his soi.  Scary.

The expat life interests me, but I view it from a distance.  The closest I come to it is the life of a Hoosier in the Gopher State.  Sometimes it can come pretty close to that expat feeling, except I felt like an expat in Indiana, never in Minnesota.  Except when they crank up the music for hockey or start hauling those ice-fishing houses out.  Then, I feel a bit lost.

Family, Politics

Bangkok Dangerous

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Beltane                                                    Waxing Planting Moon

From my brother, Mark Ellis.

He was there:

Dear Charlie, I mailed you a letter today from my neighborhood post office. That sounds very banal. However, it represents the end of the long siege of Bangkok. The Post Office, although it was only about 200 yards from my soi, was in the Red Zone. It was shut for a long time. It was open today, for the first time in a while. It felt very good to go there and mail a letter. I know it sounds simple, but the positive feeling was profound. I walked around to see all the destruction yesterday. Charlie, it was very senseless. These Reds burned a TV station on Rama 4. They burned and attacked the ground floor of the Thai Stock Exchange on Soi Asoke. They destroyed the Metropolitan Electrical Office on Rama 4,in Klong Toey. They destroyed several Bangkok Bank branches on Rama 4. They destroyed a Tesco-Lotus shop. They destroyed and looted a 7-11. They hit another bank on Rama 4. I went to Silom, which looked okay. I went back up Rajadamrai. Apparently, bombs were found near Rajadamri Station, the morning I walked by it. I took a left, past the destroyed Zen Department store. It looked like a bomb had gone off there. I walked up Rama 1. Siam Square’s shops were burned down. I walked up to Victory Monument. Center One, a shopping center and Watson’s was totally destroyed. I walked up to Din Daeng intersection. The Police box was burned down. Backhoes were burned. Electrical junction boxes were destroyed.  A bank had been set afire on Ratchaparop Road. There were burn marks in the road where tires had been burnt. I walked up Ratchaparop. I took a left at Makkasan and walked home. Charlie, it was totally senseless violence. I am afraid that CNN and BBC ‘s coverage was not balanced. The Red shirts flipped out. They are a leaderless mob. Further, provinical halls were burned down in: Ubon Ratachatani, Mukdahan, and Khon Kaen, all in Isan. Some trucks were burned in Chaing Mai. It was totally unreal. I feel sorry for the poor peasants who died supporting Thaksin. The Isan people are really nice. Some of them have been terribly mislead. They do not represent all the peole of Isan or Chaing Mai. I hope this violence stops. Regards,Mark

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Humanities, US History

Baby boomers, angels or devils?

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Beltane                                           Waxing Planting Moon

Baby boomers, angels or devils?  As part of the bleeding edge of the boomer generation, born in 1947, and step-parent to a Gen-Xer who often articulated his frustration with us all, I have had the full boomer experience plus listened to and read many critiques:  self-involved, cowards, greedy, idealistic (in a pejorative sense), hypocritical.  You might summarize it by this phrase:  Not the Greatest Generation.

Were there the yuppies who only provided the then current manifestation of suburban oxford cloth striving?  Of course.  Were their Vietnam War era protesters who were cowards?  Sure.  Did many who critiqued Emerson’s notion of the establishment end up part of it and indistinguishable from those there before them? Had to be.  I’m sure if we did a generational breakdown of the folks involved in the latest banking scandals we would find many boomers among them.  Greedy?  Hell, yeah. Clinton and Bush were our Boomer presidents.  Uh oh.  Did many boomers have dreams of a back to the land paradise that devolved into something much less?  Oh, yes.  I had the Peaceable Kingdom, for example.

All these critiques are valid.  And they would be valid for any generation.  They only express the ongoing critique of American culture as materialist.  It is a critique based in fact.

History will be kinder to the Baby Boomers than the keyhole history used to validate sweeping criticisms.  Why?  Because as a generation we sacrificed ourselves and our lives over and over again.  We provided allies to and were a direct part of the Civil Rights struggle.  When our country interfered in a millennia old civil war in Southeast Asia, using as a rationale a bankrupt understanding of communism, we stood against it.  When women began to push back against the leftists of the day and the whole patriarchal culture, we again provided allies and were a direct part of the struggle.  While many of us blended back into the cultural establishment we had critiqued, which is no surprise, many of us stayed out.  We joined the Peace Corps.  We worked in community organizing, community based economic development, community health clinics.  We stood in solidarity with working people and were working people.  We supported the poor and were poor.

We put our own beliefs and our own received values again and again into the alembic of radical critique.  We changed our hearts, transvaluated our values and moved on to the next struggle.  Yes, we were then and are now guilty of idealism, of believing we need a more just, verdant and peaceful world, as the NPR sponsor says.  Our lives have not been easy, they have often been painful estranged lives, wandering from one inner journey to another, searching always searching, traveling this ancientrail, then another.  This is the stuff of epochal change, of shifting the zeitgeist.

Has that change always gone in the direction we intended or hoped?  Never does.  Has much of the change we sought produced the conservation reaction we saw in Reagan, the Moral Majority, the Christian Right?  Yes, but always remember Alinsky, the action is in the reaction.  The view of history is long.  Once the reactions have settled down, as they may be beginning to now, it will become more obvious that baby boomers paid with the coin of their own lives to gain both victories and defeats.

We rode and shaped a shift from a manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy, from a white majoritarian male world to a world with an appreciation for difference, a world in which women have surged ahead, a world in which war no longer stands for glory and is questioned at every turn,  a world in which the world matters.  These are not bad things.  They are good things.  Very good things.

Were we responsible for them?  No.  Did we act as the agents of the change? Yes, we did.  We shaped and were shaped by the chaotic, violent, bigoted world into which we were born.  When the last boomer is dead, our legacy will be a different set of problems from the ones we inherited.  That’s the way culture and history works.

Weather +Climate

Hot and Humid

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Beltane                                         Waxing Planting Moon

Savannah has moved into the twin cities.  The jet stream has a ridge bulging into southern Canada and right over our northern border.  That sucks the hot, sticky Gulf air right up the mid-section of the country and plops it on us.  Some weather service sites have us exceeding the all time high of 87 tomorrow, perhaps 88 or even 90.

While those of you in the humid tropics, say Singapore or Bangkok, or even Georgia, may laugh at such a high, temps above 75 are serious business here in the northern heartland.  We don’t mind a few each year, just to remember; but when they come early and stay late like a guest overstaying their welcome, well, sir, we’d prefer they just kick back on down to the Big Easy.  We don’t need their kind in our state, not for long.

No bee work today.  Rainy and overcast in the am while too windy this afternoon.  I’ll head out tomorrow or Monday if we get half an hour of calmer weather.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Politics, US History, Writing

Staying Within My Skill Set

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May 22, 2010              Beltane                    Waxing Planting Moon

While reading an article about Trevor-Rope, a British historian,  I learned that Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall in an attempt to answer the problem raised by the Enlightenment’s idea of progress.  This triggered, for some reason, an echo of the talk by Siah Armajani at the MIA a couple of weeks ago.  A successful artist and philosophically inclined Iranian, he said, “I don’t know how to make legs. [this in response to a question wondering why there were no legs on the figure he said represented himself in an installation currently on display at the MIA in the Until Now exhibition.]  I try to stay within my skill set.”

I’ve not tried to stay within my skill set in that I’ve lived what I call a valedictory life, one typified by reaching to another skill, like say, beekeeping or vegetable gardening or becoming a docent, rather than following the trail laid down by my more obvious gifts:  scholar, poet, writer, political activist, monk [that is, a person oriented toward the inner world].  That’s not to say I’ve abandoned them, I haven’t; but I keep myself off balance by continually being on what I love, a steep learning curve.

This lead me to wonder just what my skill set is and what I would be doing if I chose to remain within it.  A notion came to me, though it’s not the first notion along these lines that I’ve had, but I thought some about what it would mean to stick with it, see it through to the end.

My study contains stacks and shelves of books arranged because they speak to a general interest I have:  the Enlightenment and modernism, the Renaissance, Carl Jung, American philosophy, matters Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian and Indian, Poetry.  You get the idea.

Ian Boswell, a recent Mac grad, and pianist for Groveland UU, said he loved my presentations because they presented a “clear stream of ideas.”  I said, “The history of ideas.”

There is a core skill set:  I have a decent grasp of the history of certain big ideas in Western thought and a much less comprehensive, but still extant, notion of the history of certain ideas in the East as well.  I can communicate about these ideas in a manner accessible to most.

So.  Put that together  with new definitions/understandings of the sacred, the reenchantment of the world, an earth/cosmos oriented approach to the inner life, an historical and ecology examination of Lake Superior, Thomas Berry’s Great Work, a long immersion in the Christian and liberal faith traditions, a now substantial learning in art history, an awareness of and some skill in the political process and work on translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis, an idea begins to present itself.

A series of essays, monographs loosely tied together through a historical, ecological and political look at Lake Superior might use the Lake as a particular example.  It could be the thread that held together thoughts on emergence as a redefinition of the sacred, a symbol reenchanted in another {this is where the work on Ovid could play a role.], a place where the Great Work can focus in another [this is where the political would be important], a look at the history of ideas related to lakes and nations, placing Lake Superior in an art  historical context by examining photographs, drawings, paintings, poetry and literature related to it.

It’s a thought, anyhow.

Garden, GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

Fly Dragon Fly

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Beltane                                    Waxing Planting Moon

Under the cover of a cloudy sky and a gentle rain I planted tomatoes, peppers and alyssum, spread moss as a mulch and cut the scapes off the garlic.  It’s hard to believe but the garlic will be ready to harvest the middle to late part of next month.

I always turn my computers off during a thunderstorm.  Better safe than sorry.  When I came down at 2:30 to crank them up again after the loud thunder bangers we had crashing through around noon, the clouds had dissipated.  I looked up and saw a fleet of winged insects flying to and fro, everywhere, just outside the windows to my east and to my south.  I went out to see what they were.  Dragonflies.  They flew in various directions, scouring, I imagine, for recently hatched mosquitoes.

The dragon fly has a warm spot in my heart not only because they eat mosquitoes, though that’s enough, but their bi-wing construction and hovering flight also appeal to me.  They have just a tinge of magic and the exotic.

As I planted the tomato and pepper transplants in the suntrap, I happened on a small dark toad.  He had been happily ensconced under the bale of sphagnum moss that I moved when I begin to spread it.  He looked around, hopped a bit and stopped.  I told him I didn’t mean to uncover his hiding place and that I was happy he had chosen our garden in which to live.  He acted like he didn’t hear me.

Bees, Garden

The Weekend Ahead

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Beltane                                   Waxing Planting Moon

Today will see planting under the planting moon:  tomatoes and peppers, alyssum and butternut squash.  Unless it’s too breezy and/or stays rainy this will also be a bee day, too.  I have to continue reversing Colony 1’s hive boxes until July, check the feeder pail in the package colony and replace the new hive box I put on Colony 2.  Part of my deal with the woodenware assembler (Kate) is that I put foundations in the frames and drill my own one inch hole in the hive boxes.  Oops.  Put a hive box on without a hole.  Shouldn’t be a problem to swap it out with a new on in which I have cut a hole.

Gotta head over to Northern Tool right now and pick up the wagon that we’ll use the garden tractor will pull.  We have a young man, Ray, earning money for college.  Which turns out to mean, I think I wrote earlier, trade school.  He mows the lawn so we can change up the lawn tractor and let it become a donkey.  Back in the day I moved garden material myself with a wheelbarrow or we had sons here to do it, but now we’re going to use mechanical help.

Art and Culture, Poetry, Writing

A Study in Shadows

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Beltane                                   Waxing Planting Moon

My poem The World Still Smells of Lilacs will be printed in the upcoming Muse, the newsletter for MIA docents.  They (Bill and Grace) wanted an image to go with it, but one from the MIA collection.  It took a while to find one that worked well with it, at least for me.  This Study in Shadows is the one I chose.

I”m honored they asked me.  Grace wanted to know how many poems I’ve written, “Oh, I don’t know.  Hundreds, I imagine.”  I’ve written poetry since high school, but lost all of my work through my senior year of college when my 1950 Chevy panel truck got stolen.  My poetry became an unwilling hostage, unceremoniously dumped I suppose.

Since then, I’ve written poetry off and on, in this journal or that and I’ve never bothered to collect them.  I have one small booklet I printed on the computer as a holiday gift several years ago, but that’s it.  Pretty uneven work I’d say.  A few good ones here and there, a lot of therapeutic pieces, some just plain rambling.

Another bee and garden weekend, plus chapter 16 of Wheelock, then, later on in the week, another 5 or so verses of Ovid.

Aging, Art and Culture, Weather +Climate

All Miked Up

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Beltane                                 Waxing Planting Moon

I completed my last tours for three weeks this afternoon.  This was an Elderhostel group, now called Exploritas for some reason.  They fitted me up with a microphone and transmitter; I tuned to channel E and began the tours.  As a hearing impaired person, I know how valuable these things can be, especially if there is any echo or other transient noise.

The Asia tours went well with lots of questions, interest and stickiness in that some folks kept with me to one more set of objects after the tour had already gone over 20 minutes.  The second, a treasures of European art, felt less vibrant, but it was at 1:00 pm, after lunch and 3 hours into the groups stay at the museum.  I know I collapsed when I got home, tired from all the time on my feet.  My suspicion is that they were also tired.

Kate takes off on Tuesday for San Francisco, so I’ve planned a couple of weeks close to home.

Looks we may get some free irrigation, cloud style, not piped.  I’m in favor.

I’m awake now, my nap was deep.  Onto the treadmill.