Bees, Friends, Health, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Spring                                                  Waxing Flower Moon

The Woollies met last night at Stratford Wood where Bill and Regina live.  The topic of the evening was friendship, requiring time one said, trust another, play yet another.  We evoked our history as a group of men who have given each other time, trust and vulnerability.  We talked about the vessel, the container we have created, a place of safety and love.  We wondered about men and the trajectory of men’s lives that leads away from the easy friendships of youth and into the barren land of male competition and ambition.

One of us spoke of his wonderful physical.  His doctor commended him on lowering his blood pressure through diet alone.  All looked well.  Until the phone call.  Which said his hemoglobin numbers were well below normal.  Since then he’s been endoscoped, colonoscoped and even put on film by a small bowel camera.  No joy.  No explanation.  Only shortness of breath going upstairs and fatigue.  He sees a hematologist this week.  Kate thinks the hematologist will probably take a bone marrow biopsy.

My swollen hand and bruised middle finger got some attention.  We discussed, again, the bees.  Charlie said I should get an epi pin right away.  Kate, who sees a lot of bee stings in urgent care, has a more moderate evaluation.  A localized reaction to multiple stings.  I think she’s right.

Cybermage Bill Schmidt’s brother in Iowa still lives, though in hospice care.  Another brother, Bob, had a near deal with sepsis.  Life is fragile and wonderful, treat with gladness.

Bees, Cooking

Avoiding the Swarm

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Spring                                   Waxing Flower Moon

A bruising middle finger, swollen passes the inflammation onto the top of the hand.  It itches.  This aspect of bee-keeping has its annoying moments.  Like using same finger to hit the i with regularity, or the comma both assigned to this one on the right hand.  This will, however, pass.  Kate says it is possible to develop an allergy of significance, I hope I don’t.

This time of year in bee-keeping the primary task is to keep the colony from swarming.    My hive had burr comb when I opened it, comb on top of the top frames;  it also had swarm cells, that is, cells in which the larvae have been fed royal jelly to produce a queen.  Both of these are symptoms of a colony ready to swarm.  Swarming is natural, the way feral bees keep their population at optimum size and spread their kind.  It robs a beekeeper of the honey flow, however, because it is the over-wintered colony that produces the maximum amount of honey, so beekeepers want to keep their bees happy.

One way to do this is to do a partial reverse, which I did Saturday.  Since a colony tends to move up during the winter, this puts the largely vacated middle box on top, thus creating more room for the hive.  A hive with room and food is less likely to swarm.  Another critical point comes in ten more days, when I then do the complete reverse.  About 10 days after that, I’ll split the colony in two.  That means I’ll have two colonies, plus the new one I’m starting this weekend while Kate’s away in Colorado.

I’ll have three colonies through the fall, while the parent colony (if it doesn’t swarm.) will naturally die out.  If things have gone well, I’ll have two parent colonies next spring which I’ll split in May, thus giving me four colonies, two producing a lot of honey–the parents–and two perhaps producing some, but their primary task lies in producing a strong parent colony for the next spring.  Then, I’ll have two colonies which I’ll split and so on.

Spread composted manure and hummus on the bed I plan to use as part of our kitchen garden after shopping at the Anoka co-op.   Not such a great experience at the co-op.  It was an old style co-op with few price labels, indifferent and largely volunteer staff, crowded aisles and only a modest selection of food.  Think I’ll stick with the Wedge.

Cinema and Television, Great Wheel, Humanities, Literature, World History

Cry the Beloved Country

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Spring                                                      Waxing Flower Moon

The crescent flower moon slung itself just beneath the tree to the west, over Round Lake.  A thin cloud passed across it, perhaps a cloud like the one Muhammad rode through on his way to Jerusalem and the Holy Mount.  These crescent moons have South Carolina and the Arab world in their wake, calling to mind on the one hand a new meaning to hiking the Appalachian trail and on the other lakes and rivers of sand, desert nights with stars so numerous no Caliph could count them all and tents raised near a palm filled caravan serai.

Kate and I watched Cry, the Beloved Country, only about 15 years after it made it to the screen.  I’ve never read this book though it’s one I’ve had on my list a long time.   Richard Harris and James Earl Jones are titans as far as I’m concerned, able to bring gravitas, authenticity and depth to movies in which they appear.  In one of the more memorable scenes in the movies, James Earl Jones and Richard Harris, the father of a murderer and the father of the victim, unknown to each other, yet coming from home ground close to each other, speak about the murder.  If you can watch this scene unmoved, you’ve lost touch with something important.  Four stars.

On a less elevated note I’ve begun watching Spartacus:  Blood and Sand.  It’s on the instant play feature Netflix has available through the wii.  It’s compelling tv, not as good as Cry, the Beloved Country but as a sand and sandal adventure yarn, it’s pretty damn good.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

A Year of Consolidation

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Spring                                         Waxing Flower Moon

Hmmm.   Wax.  Bees wax, or, propolis as it is properly called.  I just did a mid-April reversal of the top two hive boxes per the Minnesota bee-keeping method for a cold climate.  This involved taking out each frame, examining it–even though I’m still a bit uncertain about what I’m seeing–putting it back after scraping any queen cells, a few, then switching the top hive box with the middle one.  This does something good, though right now I can’t recall what.

A nimble joint future awaits me since I got stung four times today.  Each time a little less reaction.  The first sting came from a bee that crawled up my pants leg.  Another came as I removed a frame.  The third and fourth as I took off my bee suit only to discover that on its back were a lot of bees.  The bee suit still lies on the floor of the honey house.  A lot to learn.  These hive boxes, which have lots of larvae, pollen and honey are heavy.  Another reminder of why hitting the weights is a good idea.

Next week the Minnesota Hygienic bees come in their little wooden package.  They will go into the new hive boxes that Kate has assembled and coated with polyurethane.  She’s also assembling honey supers and coating bottom boards, tops and other miscellaneous woodware.

This is a year of consolidation on the gardens and bee front.  We’ll make sure we can make good use of all the vegetable beds and companion planting ideas.  We’ll shore up our preservation and storage options.  I’ll learn about the honey extracting and bottling process as well as colony division and hiving my own package of bees.  We have fruits and berries, even a few nuts to learn how to care for, all of which fit in well with the Brenda Langston inspired version of healthy eating.

Inside though there’s still the Latin.  No consolidation there yet.  It’s an upward curve so far.

I have been wondering recently about my work at the MIA.  This is my 9th year as guide and docent.  The art world as a whole continues to fascinate me and the research challenges it presents are gifts to my life, not burdens.  Touring has become easier and more enjoyable this year.  Not sure why.  Just has.   Should I continue on a sort of emphasis on Asian art, especially China and Japan, or should I really lock myself down into those two and really learn them?  Should I perhaps shift my learning focus to prints and drawings, an area not many docents cover and in which the bulk of the museum’s collection of object lies?  I think what I’m saying is I want more depth in the experience.  I’ve gained breadth and I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity.  How to make the experience richer and deeper?  That’s the journey now.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Doing Stuff

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Spring                                                      Flowering Moon

The netaphim ruined last year by dogs Rigel and Vega has repairs.  The repairs sit safely inside fences that Rigel has shown either no interest or no capability to penetrate.  They should last.

The bees will wait until a less breezy tomorrow.  Wind blows the smoke around and I have to perform a reversal, hive check and clean off the bottom board.  The reversal of the top 2 hive boxes encourages the queen to move into the top box and lay eggs there to create an ovoid shape of larva outside of which the nursery bees will complete a ring of pollen and a ring of honey.  This makes the planned colony split on May 15th assured of one hive box full of larva, hopefully the top one with new larvae and therefore newly born nursery bees.  Nursery bees take more kindly to moving around than the older worker bees.

Irrigation folks have scheduled Tuesday to come out and turn on the irrigation system.  A good thing.  They usually wait until the second week of May since our average last frost date is around May 15th.  I imagine that’s moved up closer to the first week of May on average, but a frost outside the average is still a frost so most planning still accommodates the old date.

Tomorrow the bees and soil amending, that is, putting in composted manure and humus on the raised beds and adding some sphagnum moss (some more) to the blueberry beds.  The outdoor season with sun.  The great wheel turns.  Again.

Aging

Home Is Where The Boxes Are

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Spring                                          Waxing Flower Moon

At the recycling place I pushed in flattened box after flattened box, a layered batch of cardboard going back to late November, another step in the home as retailer, receiving goods directly from middle-folk like Levenger, Amazon and Williams-Sonoma.  Another instance of disintermediation these flattened boxes could serve as both metaphor and symbol of an age shifting old patterns of store fronts and even big box stores to the home, ironically moving back to the days of the Sears Catalog and Montgomery Wards catalog stores.

In many ways the home is now the hub that a business district used to be.  We pick up our mail and some of us our newspapers and magazines off a computer screen.  We watch movies mailed to us by Netflix or streamed directly into our TV’s by wireless routers.  We shop on the internet and have things delivered to our home instead of driving to a store, picking them out and doing self-delivery.  An increasing percentage of us now move from bed to office without the interference of a commute.  In some instances, like vegetable and flower growing, another percentage of the population has started growing their own.  Others keep bees, raise chickens, some have goats.

The times have changed and they have changed in dramatic ways, but like the fabled frog in the pot of boiling water, the changes have proceeded at such a deliberate pace that we scarcely notice all of them.

The cell phone, too, has replaced the landline at home, the old familiar location centered phone call having gone the way of crank phones.

Those of us who are aging will benefit a great deal from most if not all of these changes.  We can look forward, I think, to certain tele-conferenced medical services, perhaps rugs that know when we fall.

Home has become more like a subsistence farm without the subsistence level life style.  Again, at least for some.

Garden

A Sliver

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Spring                                  Waxing Flower Moon

It was out there tonight, the flower moon, a small crescent hiding behind the trees in the west, a promise, a sliver of promise, looking much like the cantaloupe I cut up this afternoon.

Plucked out old daylily stalks, cut down liguria and bug bane stems from last fall, stripped away dead fern fronds from the rocks and threw that ugly, didn’t work very well cucumber screen over the fence into the back.  It gets moved tomorrow.

Tomorrow is an outside day.  Bees, some weeding, some soil amending.  I decided to follow a companion planting notion I found, but it requires a bit more thought before I put many seeds in the ground.

Finished Chapter 12 in Wheelock and headed into Chapter 13, but before I get there, I’m diving into Ovid again.  The fun part.

Aging, Art and Culture, Cooking, Friends

S.A.D.S.

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Spring                                        Waxing Flower Moon

Shopped at the Wedge.  Boy, have co-ops changed.  They’re no longer like buying screws and nuts at a hardware store where you have to know the price and quantity.  Barcodes, scanners, conveyor belts.  The selection includes meats and many items found in other grocery stores as well as drop-dead gorgeous produce, a large line of tofu and tempeh, shelf fulls of various rice products like mochi, sea weed and other sea plants in many different forms.  Impressive.   I picked up tempeh, mochi, sweet rice wine, nori, coconut oil and sunflower oil among other things.

Made me feel like an aging hippy.  I realized there were a lot of folks in there who spent the sixties just like I did, smoking dope and fightin’ the man.

Tour this morning had great kids and a game teacher.  We wandered around, stymied now and then by sudden art disappearance syndrome, SADS.  SADS happens when curators and registrars start getting creative with the collection.  In theory we walk our routes before the tours but I’ve become lax on that score and may have to start again, especially if SADS continues to interfere with my tours.

Saw Wendy this morning, too.  I gave her hug and told her she looked great. And she did.  It was good to see her.  Breast cancer is scary.