• Tag Archives bees wax

  • Bee Diary: July 24, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                 Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Tried out my new Alexander bee veil.  It ties across the thorax with a string and has only covering for face and neck, preventing bees from crawling under the veil and from scrambling for a hit to the face.  Having suffered one of those I’m glad to have my face protected.

    The virtue of the Alexander is that it is much, much cooler than the bee suit, requiring no heavy upper body jacket.  The disadvantage, that I discovered today, is that bees can sneak in under the sweat shirt and sting  your wrist.  Next time I’m going to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt and maybe rubber bands at the wrists.

    Today, like last week, involved checking honey supers.  The package hive has begun to fill up the single honey super I added to it last week, so I added another super to it today and put on the queen excluder, which I forgot last week.  The parent colony has two supers pretty full, perhaps all the way, but the other three supers have little weight.  I don’t candlemoldwhether this is normal or light, though some folks seem to have several honey supers filled on older colonies.  I guess you get what you get.

    The divide, too, has made little headway into the honey supers.  The divide has already filled its top hive box with honey and could be “honey-plugged.”  Maybe I’ll have to reverse the hive boxes.

    Dave convinced me to start gathering bees wax, so I’ve begun scraping it off where it’s in excess, balling it up and bringing it inside.  I forget whether I mentioned getting a candle mold and candle-making accessories, but they came with the Alexander veil.  A late fall project.  I want to make enough candles to burn during the long night of the winter solstice.

    This is a bit easier stretch with the colonies.  It will be followed by a lot of extracting work.


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  • The Odor Of Sanctity

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                    Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Have you ever smelled fresh bees wax?  A smell that takes you right to the essence of the natural world.  It exudes a sense of well-being, freshness, vitality.  I harvested some honey today for the Woolly meal on Monday night.  The honey and the honey comb offer that same sensation; perhaps, as latter day Catholics might have said, it is the odor of sanctity.

    The experience this morning took me back to two other smell, for me equally enmeshed with the natural world as our obvious home.  The first one, of the longest standing for me, I experience in the  produce cooler at Cox’s Supermarket when I worked there as a boy.  This smell combined apple scents, oranges, bananas, lettuce, watermelon, whatever was in season into a perfume that drew me back often.  I would sneak away from stocking shelves or breaking down boxes, push the plunger that opened the door, step inside and be transported to paradise, a place where everything suggested abundance, nourishment and fine flavor.

    Another one of these scents came to me only this year as I harvested parsnips.  Lifting the tapered white parsnip out of the ground, I brought its roots, only just holding the parsnip in its intimate relationship with the soil, to my nose.  Ah.  Again, freshness, vitality, well-being.  It was as if, for a moment, I inhabited the parsnip’s underground world, the place where it truly lived.  There, with the scent, I could trace the connections between the parsnip and its source of nutrients in the soil around it; I could feel the back and forth of vegetable and soil as they interacted in a dance older than the oil beneath the Gulf, older than the iron ore on the range.

    Yes, as I think of it, the odor of sanctity is it, exactly.  The sacred blossoms into molecules that excite this oldest sense, the one that relates us most closely to the rest of our animal brothers and sisters.  The sacred emerges from the sophisticated work of the honey bee turning nectar into honey.  The sacred emerges from the fruits of the earth as they await transport to our tables.  The sacred emerges within the top layers of  soil, that thin web of living things that supports the plants from which we all take our sustenance.  Yes, the sacred emerges in these places, and it sends out an aroma to draw attention to itself.


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