I am the Audience

Bees out of the box

May 7, 2013

a day in this life

I’m a little surprised. When I tried peeking in to the hive yesterday, bees were sitting on the box and I didn’t see a lot of movement toward the front of the hive. It appears that they got moving when I finally calmed down and left them alone. This morning when I went out to remove the box, they were ALL clustered up at the front and about a quarter of the quart of sugar syrup was gone.

It’s difficult to take a picture through the plexiglass, but you can kind of tell.

It looks like about 20 didn’t make it and considering how they are put in the box, that’s pretty impressive.

Actual package creation starts at 3 minutes.
All is Vanitas

May 7, 2013

art

The North Carolina Museum of Art had a Still Life exhibition last winter and I learned a new word. It is vanitas. Vanitas “allude to the transience of life.” They, frequently, have fruit (sometimes beginning to spoil), flowers (sometimes beginning to lose petals), butterflies, musical allusions, bones, time pieces. Some were lavish bouquets of flowers that would never have stayed fresh long enough to be painted, or simply didn’t bloom in the same season.

One piece I found to be particularly clever had fruit and flowers that would never be present together. They are seasonally incompatible. (You have to know some about what produces when for that one to make sense. It would have worked better for people who grew their own food than the denizens of supermarkets. I’m not sure my son knows that grapes and tulips don’t go together.)

I like the more subtle vanitas, the ones you have to be paying attention to recognize.
More bees

May 6, 2013

a day in this life

Monica and Todd of The Carolina Bee Company drove for nearly 24 hours yesterday to bring packaged of bees from Georgia to North Carolina. One of those boxes was for me.

AND it’s raining today, which isn’t prime bee-handling weather. But, you have to do what you can when you can.

So, I used Monica’s no-shake package installation method, waited for a break in the action and went for it. The queen’s carriage is dangling between 2 bars that are simply pinching the little strap in place and the box is in the back where bars 11-23 will go when I take it out tomorrow. The quart sized sugar syrup bottle is between the box and the queen. The queen is between the bottle and the entrance.

They are so busy that I can’t put the flap down to take a picture, but I think they like it here.
Weed killer

April 24, 2013

note to self

Mix 1 gallon of vinegar with 1 cup of epsom salt and a tablespoon of liquid soap. The soap helps it cling to the leaves.

It works better on broad leaf plants but doesn’t affect some grasses if you use table salt.. Epsom salt kills grass, too. ‘Though more slowly.
Grief

April 22, 2013

dancing in the field of dreams, poetry and songs

Say not in grief that she is no more
but say in thankfulness that she was
A death is not the extinguishing of a light,
but the putting out of the lamp
because the dawn has come.

– Rabindranath Tagore

it is perfect.