Skep!

For years, I have passed this magical little shop in Manhattan and admired the bee skep and terra cotta pots, the fabulous painted floors, the evocative enamel sink, and the wild, spidery reflections of the candelabrum on the wall after hours.

Looking in the window is like gazing into another time. I have never once seen a human being inside this little store, and sometimes think it really is a portal into another, churning world.

Berry Picking or Sitting at Desk?

Berry Picking or Sitting at Desk?
Berry Picking or Sitting at Desk?
Berry Picking or Sitting at Desk?

'Twas a tough decision; I did what had to be done.


Thanks to the honeybees, wasps, flies, moths and other pollinators who make such delicacies possible.

Spring Wanderings

Spring has definitely arrived in Upstate NY USDA Zone 4. There aren't enough exclamation points in all of human history to adequately punctuate my pleasure with this, my favorite time of year.

This weekend, I saw my first heron of the season, the first pair of goldfinches, and what appears to be a nesting pair of Canada geese down by the pond. The peewees and phoebes have arrived, as have the vireos. To our great joy, a handsome bluebird male appears to have selected one of our many bluebird houses to set up shop. The other 10 or 12 "bluebird houses" we've put up have already been taken up with swallows, who are a delight in their own right.

Over the weekend we saw bumblebees, cabbage white butterflies, and a butterfly we suspect was a comma (yes, there's a butterfly called "comma," along with one called the "question mark").

The honeybees were seen working the willow and gathering pollen from a blue hyacinth. Last fall we planted 100 or so Siberian squill, and they too have bloomed, though I haven't see any honeybee action there as yet. The dandelions have just begun to blossom, and I imagine much of the bees' focus is on that vitally important foraging plant.Speaking of dandelions, Wren and I enjoyed one of our annual spring rituals this weekend—foraging for tender dandelion leaves in the field, which we cooked up with olive oil, anchovy paste, onions, and pine nuts and tossed over pasta. Serious seasonal/local yum!

On my morning walk with the dog yesterday morning, I communed at woodland's edge with the aptly named spring beauties, one of my favorite spring ephemerals.
An additional sign that beekeeping season is officially upon us: I managed to acquire my first sting of '08 on Sunday afternoon while observing Hive Orange from what I thought was an appropriate distance. They weren't having it, though, and clocked me upside my head. It didn't hurt much. Must be the time of year.

Bees in Advertising

Vintage. I grew up singing this jingle.



Also vintage. Completely bonkers. Directed by "Chad." Art Carney listed as narrator. Featuring a very wayward honeybee.

Swarm This! #2

Our new, semi-regular series of intertwingular links of interest—bee-related and otherwise.

Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality

Big Brother's Technical Difficulties

Economic Effects of Not Taking Action on Climate Change

Better to Have Loved and Lost? by Rick Bass

Fork It Over: Ways of Bee-ing

Swarm This!

Introducing Swarm This!, our new, semi-regular series of deeply intertwingular links of interest—bee-related and otherwise.
Give Bees A Chance

The Rules of the Swarm

Mapping the Most Complex Structure in the Universe: Your Brain

What Makes Great Blogwriting?

Utah Scientist: Dust Shortening Winters

Disabled Spy Satellite Threatens Earth

Breaking News: Series of Concentric Circles Emanating from Glowing Red Objects

Political Animals (Yes, Animals)

The Daily Mammal

Sleeping Frog Shocks a Brooklyn Mom

You just never know what you're going to find in a head of organic lettuce—and that's a good thing.

Just fer the hell of it, here are a few other interesting lettuce-pairings:Kitty Lettuce Cup by Stumpytown.

Lettuce Sea Slug by laszlo-photo.

The Rare Right-Angled Lavender Lettuce Bird by mexter.

Call of the Wild, Literally

Looking for a more down-to-earth ringtone? The Center for Biological Diversity offers free downloads of the sweet, somber, melodious and unnerving voices of rare and endangered frogs, toads, birds, and mammals (including sea mammals). It's free! Perhaps they'll add some insect sounds one of these days.

Eye Candy

A lovely animated romp by artist Jeff Scher. What it lacks in bees, it more than makes up for in elephants, flowers, and fun.

Hippo!

A charming hippo named Jessica.

Bats!

No bees today, just bats—and seahorses, and other truly fabulous creatures—from that velvet-minded genius, Jean Painleve.

Wind Power

Give this one a chance...it will all make sense in the end.

glumbert - You Might Have to Watch This Twice

Possible Solutions To The Mess We're In

Should Americans Return To A Simpler, Stone Age Lifestyle?

R.I.P. Alex

Here's something you don't see every day— a New York Times obit for a parrot. A taste:

Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s. When, in 1977, Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans. Most of the research had been done in pigeons, and was not promising.

But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn about 150 words, which he could put into categories, and to recognize small numbers, as well as colors and shapes. “The work revolutionized the way we think of bird brains,” said Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who works with dolphins and elephants. “That used to be a pejorative, but now we look at those brains — at least Alex’s — with some awe.”

And the poignant last bit:

Like parrots can, he also picked up one-liners from hanging around the lab, like “calm down,” and “good morning.” He could express frustration, or apparent boredom, and his cognitive and language skills appeared to be about as competent as those in trained primates. His accomplishments have also inspired further work with African Grey parrots; two others, named Griffin and Arthur, are a part of Dr. Pepperberg’s continuing research program.

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, and was determined to have died late Thursday night.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes eloquently in the NYT on the lessons Alex might teach us. Here's a taste:

"A truly dispassionate observer might argue that most Grey parrots could probably learn what Alex had learned, but only a microscopic minority of humans could have learned what Alex had to teach. Most humans are not truly dispassionate observers. We’re too invested in the idea of our superiority to understand what an inferior quality it really is. I always wonder how the experiments would go if they were reversed — if, instead of us trying to teach Alex how to use the English language, Alex were to try teaching us to understand the world as it appears to parrots."

Autumnal Musings

Autumn has definitely come to Hooterville, complete with an explosion of aster and the first hesitant dropping of maple, birch and chestnut leaves.
It puts one in a reflective state of mind. As pretty as it is this time of year, I'm always sorry to see summer end. Yes, it's 90 degrees today, but it's still autumn! I know it, and the bees surely know it.
They're working hard gathering nectar and pollen off the aster, jewelweed, and goldenrod. These plants are providing the remaining nectar flow of the year—the last flow the bees have available to them before winter restricts them to a long period of waiting in the hive. It's truly a race against time, against the hard frost that will nail the remaining flowers and end the flow entirely, forcing the bees to survive the winter on whatever they have stored up until that point.

This girl's pollen baskets are packed, and she's entering the hive to store what she's collected. Then she'll go right back out again and collect some more.
I did a "hive dive" (inspection) of Rebel Rebel the other day. Things were looking pretty crowded in there and I wanted to see what was up (especially because—did I forget to mention it?—Hive Orange swarmed last weekend, just in time for my mother's visit!). During the visit to the hive, a little honey dripped from my hive tool and these bees were quick to gather it up. I love how pretty they look when they do that! Like girls at a soda fountain in an Archie comic book.

One curious bee decided to check out my record-keeping notebook. There's always so much to see and do in the hive that I have to write everything down right then and there to keep track. The record-keeping helps me follow the many changes that occur in each hive from week to week, as well as my own actions and the results of those. There is so, so much to learn. I hope my brain is big and wrinkled and grey-mattered enough to handle it all.


The notebook comes from a great letterpress printing studio called Foxglove Press.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

This is a bona fide meander; I found this fabulous speech given in the late 1970s by sci fi hero Philip K. Dick and thought it was amazingly prescient and rich.

We've done it again....

Brought to you—or rather, taken from you—by that oxymoron, humankind.

Meanders

Just trust me.

What the Bobwhite Means to You

I'd like to recommend Verlyn Klinkenborg's excellent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about our vanishing wildlife and its implications for us all. Here's a taste:

In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our genes. Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the welfare of other species.

This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self to care.

The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.

We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.