Minding my daughter's beeswax

The comb

 It starts with curiosity, with love, with whatever this thing is that compels us to sit outside and just look, just sniff, just listen. If you watch honeybees long enough (and you can never truly watch bees long enough), you begin to get just how crazy crazy this living thing is, and maybe a little humbled, too.

Humans are not the be all and end all after all.

The melting comb

Bees screw up, too, it turns out, and the bees who made this comb didn't study the bee hive long enough to see that the frames were not in place. (I have no idea what I am talking about, my daughter and her beau are the apiarists, not me.)

The summer heat melted the combs enough for them to collapse in a heap on the bottom of the hive.

Beeswax melts around 145-150 F, but takes longer to melt in a double boiler than you might expect.







And what do Kerry and Eric end up with?

Beeswax, of course, made by bees--and if Wikipedia is right, then a pound of the stuff represents about 150,000 miles of flight, or well over halfway to the moon.

The spoon used to stir the beeswax

I keep a hunk of ambergris in my home, because I like it, and that's reason enough. I have no idea what will become of the beeswax, but for me, knowing it exists is reason enough for joy.

Great job, Eric!

Ain't life grand?

A story about basil

Last August, various bees sniffed among our basil flowers, seeking nectar.

Pollen grains stuck to their fuzzy bodies, which they carried to nearby plants and half the chromosomes of one plant joined with those of another. Not sure if the bees or the basil felt anything special, but these acts of communion give me joy.

The fertilized flowers dropped their show-offy petals, their opulence no longer needed once the union was complete, and the flowers got down to the business of making seeds.

Come fall, after the first hard frost, I stripped the dried flowers from their stalks.

In idle moments, I'd unwrap the seeds from the dried flowers, tiny hard black secrets holding next spring's promise.

I gently blow the chaff away from the seeds, and put them away in a small brown bag, tucked in the pantry, hundreds of living organisms, dormant, waiting for the sunlight.

Back in March, when the sun was just starting to win its battle with the dark, I sprinkled a few seeds on a tray of peat moss. Tiny green leaves erupted.

A week or so ago, we put our seedling in the ground, and they've been busy using the sun's energy to grab carbon dioxide from the air, to make more leaves.

Last night we ate the first of this year's batch, as we will, grace willing, until the next hard frost come November.

I am getting older, as we all are, but not the basil, living a lifetime between frosts.

And if there's a point to the story, to our story, we can find it in the basil.

We just have to look.

No point trying to grasp the intricacies of photosynthesis if you cannot see the flowers.

I like bees

Nectar's tough to find in November, but the bees are still at it.
We're still at it, too, whatever this "at it" thing is.

I'll get back to Arne, and teaching science, and all that other nonsense when the bees decide to give it a rest for the winter. I'll get back to the important stuff.

Buzz, buzz, buzz--they won't sting me unless I do something stupid, like step on one.

Picking basil seeds in October

Spent a good chunk of the afternoon collecting basil seeds. Spring is less than 5 months away.

My basil never dies. I eat the leaves, true, but not so many that they do not flower. Bees steal a little nectar, dragging basil sperm around with them, pollinating flower after flower after flower.

And now I take each dried flower, tiny as they are, and strip out a few seeds from each, black dots not much larger than the period at the end of this sentence.

And each one of them is alive.

Late February, when the darkness has reduced me to a nervous psoriatic shell, I will plant them. I will not remember the sweet smell of basil as I picked at the dried fruit today. I do not have that kind of imagination. But I will smile anyway. I do have that kind of hope.

You can, of course, buy seeds, and avoid the "tedium" of manual labor. I love Pinetree Seed Company.

I sat on our back stoop, bent over my bag of dried flowers, stripping seed after seed, and my hands were happy.

My hands go back millions of years, my fingers a few hundred thousand. Fingers were meant for picking. I pick my guitar, I get music. I pick basil pods, I get seeds. I do both under the open sky, and both give me joy.



Time dissolved as the sun slowly crept across the sky--my hands picked and picked as my grandmother's had, as my great great grandfather's had, as some hirsute hominid did on a continent an ocean away did a hundred thousand years ago.

A honey bee harassed me for a few minutes, obviously drawn by the wafting basil oils. I explained to her that she was wasting her time, but she kept buzzing around my hands anyway. A cozy of cosmos waved just ten feet away, but she wanted to get inside the bag of dried flowers.

She has been evolving her sense of smell as long as I have been evolving fingers that need to pick. I'm sure our ancestors met before as I am sure our descendants will meet again.

Neither of us did much to help raise the GNP today, though I bet she did more than I did. All economies ultimately rise or fall on how much biomass we can raise from the ground.

On a very local level, the honeybee and I share a gift. We both hum from energy emanating from the sun captured by the basil.

And on a beautiful October afternoon, with sharp shadows reminding both the bee and me that the darkness is coming, we both felt joy.

The pictures are all from today. What a spectacularly gorgeous day here at the shore.
In Heaven as it is on Earth. We are truly of the land, nefesh, and all that. Just ask the bee.

On experts, two

I got stung by a honeybee yesterday. I like to walk barefoot, and our backyard is covered in clover.
Aside from the few moments of ouch, I don't react much. It's cool finding the stinger sac still attached, pumping away more venom, if you're in a detached mood. I scraped off the stinger, let the pain wash over my foot for a few minutes, and that was the end of it.

End of the bee, too, alas.

***

If you are ever attacked by a swarm of bees, the USDA recommends that you run as fast as you can without flailing your arms while simultaneous pulling your shirt up around your face.

1. RUN away quickly....
2. As you are running, pull your shirt up over your head to protect your face....
3. Continue to RUN.

At least until you find shelter. Don't pull a Yogi Bear, though--if you jump underwater, they'll be waiting for you when you surface to breathe.

This would be a fun scenario to practice in class--break down the directions, try to implement them, and discuss the results. I like it so much I may try step 2 on my own today.

It's June--my words wither under the joyful June light.
Yogi gleaned from Clipart for Free.

Berries

She wrote, simply, "hi mike."

I assumed I was the Michael she meant, but it does not matter, berries are for all of us, so I am using the photo. The hand belongs to Jessica Pierce, the berries to whichever mouth gets them first.

***

Along my walk to school are several cherry trees--the cherries are ripe now. I get to school with a tongue stained purple.

I found two blueberry bushes three blocks away yesterday. The mulberry trees are about to give up ripe fruit in the next week or two. It's a great time to be a mammal (or a bird).

The cherries are small and dark, full of bitter tannins countering their ridiculous cherriness.

When I eat a cherry, I believe in God. Not the wordy omega John God--I keep Him in my pocket in late autumn. I mean the atavistic, prehistoric sun god, the Ra, the one who sets off week-long dancing and unpardonable ecstasy. The mysterious one. The unknowable one. The one found in a June-warmed cherry.

Most of the year, I can talk myself into anything. In June, I simply cannot talk. No need. Life is bursting around us.

***

When I was still young, I feared dying in spring or summer, feared missing what was to come, dying in the midst of plenty.

Now I fear dying in winter. I do not wish to die, few of us do, but when I do, I want to be surrounded by possibility, by sunlight, by berries.

I want to be the bee found nestled in the flower at dusk, her last day spent exhausted and resting on clover petal, a life well spent. I do not want to die in the hive. Even a 5 star accredited hive full of well-intentioned bees trained to transition me to the next life.

I am not transitioning anywhere. In June I am here, and no other "here's" exist. In June William Blake makes sense. W.B. Yeats makes sense. Even death makes sense.

***

The school year is winding down. And what have we learned?

I live in a good town. I teach in the same town. I am paid through taxes given up by my neighbors. I work hard, and so do they.

The least I can do is teach their children the ecstasy of June berries, pursuing the happiness of sweet stained lips instead of the demands of a petulant man-child dictating education policy several hundred miles away.

The least I can do is show them our local lichen and hawks and bees, instead of just words in books written by strangers who know nothing about the pair of mallard ducks who slumber on the Bloomfield Green.

The least I can do is show children why I still get excited when the sun rises over our town, our gardens, our homes, and why so many of us choose to stay here. The sun worth knowing is not the one in the textbooks, the one of fusion and distance and solar storms.

The sun worth knowing is the one that keeps us alive, the one that we can feel on our faces, the one that pulls the bay over my clams, the one that blesses the cherries with sugar.

If you want to teach science, start with joy. If you cannot tie joy to wild berries, go play on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Real education starts on Bloomfield Avenue.

Let it bee....

If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, by us.

We cannot know what bees know, but we close our minds, our universe, when we presume mechanistic explanations for all animals not human. If I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I'm throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.

***

After giving myself to the first tree, I imagined blending honey and cherries and yeast to make this year's melomel. I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2--she was carrying her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. I suspect she saw me doing the same a moment earlier.

The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: "There may be bees in those flowers--get away!"

She slinked away, now fearful of bees, and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose--a child in love with flowers and bugs does not work well in cubicles.

Not all things are possible, but these things are:

You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.

You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.

You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.

You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.

You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.

You can bury your face in early April cherry blossoms.

You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.

What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?

Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?

Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?

***

My Dad is dead. He loved bees.
My Mom is dead. She loved bees.
My sister is dead. She loved bees.
I will someday be dead. I love bees.

Maybe it's the bees that are killing us. Maybe it's not. But if it is, I'd still love the bees.

Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.

The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter--she died two days later, while I held her hand.
The last few hours of my Dad's life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.
I did not hold my sister's hand--she was killed by an errant missionary--but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always. Like a bee humming she sang, sang, sang.

***

It's spring.

The flowers are back. The bees are back. The mystery, too, is back.

We can spend our Januaries pondering the mystery of life, the misery of death, while our brethren sleep through the dark days.

But now it's spring--humans with their electric lights and propane heaters no longer dictate the terms.

Get outside. Breathe. Live.