Global Swarming Honeybees: The Queen of Serious Moonlight (& Other Delights)

5.27.2008

The Queen of Serious Moonlight (& Other Delights)

We had a fun, sunny, and productive holiday weekend—nice change after a week of cold and rain.

Got a quick peek into the two new hives, Moss Garden and Serious Moonlight. Both hives are building comb nicely. Here you see the bees getting started on building comb on a new top bar.
During our "hive dives," we got a glimpse of the queen of Serious Moonlight. She's the big bee marked with the blue dot at center, left. (Click the photo below to enlarge it so you can see her.)
Found this beautiful striped spider on top of one of the hives.
Had to evict a wasp who was beginning to build a nest underneath the hive lid. Beehives seem to attract quite a little ecosystem; it's always interesting to see what turns up on and around the hives.

We had our first official guest of the season this weekend (Swarmcatcher Karen) and she, Wren, and I disbursed some free wildflower seeds kindly provided by Haagen Dazs as part of its Help the Honeybee campaign. More on that adventure—including (possibly) a little movie—soon.

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Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die