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?

The beauty of making things

A lot of people have asked me how they can get a trolley like mine to play with. And I usually say, "Why don't you just make one?

Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood

A child finds joy making things.
An adult finds release buying them instead.

One of the pleasures of compulsively tossing out words has been hearing from others.

Quilbilly is a science teacher who, not unexpectedly, likes to figure out how things work. I like to brew beer and fix typewriters, he likes to, well, smelt iron.

He wrote a lovely post describing his students' reactions to his hobby.
He makes it sound so simple:

"You really need just four things:

 iron ore (the right kind of dirt), charcoal, a furnace, and a source of air."

He's right, of course, but it's the process that makes it joyful.

"And there is nothing more profoundly simple than staring into the depths of the coals and thinking about nothing and thinking about everything." Quilbilly

Mr. Rogers loved children for who they are, for who we are, for what we are. He showed children "how people make things," taking the magic woo woo out of technology and putting it back into people's hands. Things like sneakers, crayons, and fortune cookies. Harmonicas and pretzels, zippers and fortune cookies. Jeans. Kazoos. Dolls. Flashlights. Erasers. Tortilla chips. Towels. Plates. Trumpets. And money.

Mr. Rogers fostered interest in our world, and his passion to make the world accessible to children created far more scientists than our current efforts to standardize education ever will. Quilbill's handful of iron gleaned from dirt reconnects children to the earth and stardust that make us possible.

Thanks to my sis-in-law Jan for the heads-up of the first video, which can be found on pictures for sad children.