Anticeptic vs. Clean

This morning I finally got around to cutting some oregano to hang for drying. With the arrow-wood leaves reddening along the fence rows by the old pasture, it's past time to get ready for the cold months ahead, when fresh herbs will be a pleasant memory buried under a foot of snow.

The oregano grows in a small raised herb bed. It all looked very neat and prim a few short weeks ago, but at this point in the summer, the bed's nearly overrun with borage and dill that self-seeded in past years.

The bees don't bother much with the dill blossoms—that's wasp terrain, too light and feathery to for the "heavy-weight" pollinators. But honeybees and bumblebees adore the borage flowers, tumbling by the score into what's now a wild thicket of prickly leaves and blue star-shaped flowers, cheerful as those a child might draw. I grow borage exclusively for the good mood it puts both me and the bees in—and for its long blooming period, which keeps the bees busy even as the last of the goldenrod jumps ship.

Reaching with care into the chaos of dill umbrals, falling stars and intensely buzzing bees, I carefully cut a couple of dozen long springs of oregano to bind with twine and hang in the dry, warm attic until the leaves are dessicated enough to crumble into jars. It's one of the most pleasant late-summer garden tasks I know—the scent of oregano on my paws, the bee-loud soundtrack, and lustful thoughts of the well-spiced tomato sauces to come.

I lay the sprigs on a white tea towel and inspect them closely to get them as clean as possible. Of course, I find a biologically rich world embedded in those leaves and branches—a world of tiny snails and spiders, remnants of cocoon, miniscule black eggs shiny as caviar, leaves that have mysteriously wilted, leaves that have been not-so-mysteriously gnawed upon, and a myriad of other "imperfections" that tell one hell of a tale—the Lively Garden, a Place of Action.

As best I can, I shake off the major league bugs, then gently brush away the minor league critters. Next, I pluck as many of the blackened leaves as my attention span will allow, till mostly clean, green leaves remain. Even so, I'm left with a smattering of unfashionably discolored leaves and a few ethereal vestiges of insect travel and leisure.

In other words, though the drying process will hide some of the oregano's blemishes and the cooking process erase any conceivable risk that might be had in ingesting a trace of vintage spiderweb, my dried oregano won't be purged of the place from whence it came, like the mass-produced "food products" that get power-washed, anti-bioticized, and irradiated into oblivion before being marketed to our tables.

To me, these earthly, flawed sprigs of herbaceous delight are clean in the fullest, most vibrant sense, reflecting the multifaceted meanings you'll find when you look up "clean" in the dictionary—free from violations, spiritually or ceremonially pure, unencumbered, unadulterated.

I'll take all that over anticeptic any day of the week. And so will my bees.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Through the Summer

Four months have passed since my last post on this blog. What happened was I left the city and went upstate to spend some time among the bees and flowers, fully intending to blog about it all. But what I found (or was reminded of) is that being outside trumped sitting in front of my laptop.

And so have flown the days from spring ephemerals to goldenrod, asparagus to apples, tadpole-squirmy vernal pools to goldfinches aligned expectantly on wires. Now the weather shows signs of wearying, and clouds keep me inside more often—as does the desk-y work that pays the bills and makes possible my extended rural incarnations.

Thanks for your patience during my unexplained silence. Here are some photos from the past few weeks, my summertime offline. (Oh, and the honey bees hereabouts are doing fine! We did have a couple of swarms and managed to catch one, so we're now running three healthy and happy top-bar hives.)





More soon!

Bees Magnolia-fied

These not-so-hot snaps of honeybees gathering pollen are from late March, when the magnolias in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens were in their pinup-girl-prime.Not much left of the magnolias now, except for one lovely late-bloomer in a shady portion of the grove...and my appreciative memories. These images offer little more than a sensory impression of a bee-loud moment of pink, branch, and blue in early spring. I hope you enjoy them.

Practical Pollen

Nice bit in the NY Times this week on the clever nature of pollen.

Carpenter Bees 2.0

Catching decent shots of carpenter bees with an iPhone isn't easy, but on this day at the Children's Garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (back in March), the C-bees were abundant and relatively cooperative.

Carpenter Bees Part I

Yesterday was a banner day at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The lilacs were in their prime, working their mind-altering magic on the dazzled crowd of worshipers. Barely noticed on the ground beneath the showy lilac bushes, a thick carpet of deep-purple grape hyacinths played host to a robust constituency of honeybees.

With the honeybees keeping a low profile, the blatant stars of yesterday's pollinator show were the dozens of carpenter bees doing their thing on the glamorous azaleas near the garden's main entrance. I love the vigor and heft of these fuzzy, burly bees, especially in the context of the showy azaleas.The carpenter bees showed a special fondness for the neon-pink azaleas, and virtually no interest in the purple, red, or white ones. There was plenty of C-bee action on the purple wisteria, though, so I'm guessing the non-pink azaleas were not giving nectar yesterday or were simply offering a less delectable flavor profile. It raises interesting questions about what draws a bee to a particular plant at a particular time. The nuances are endless.
Lucky for me, the C-bees were so enraptured with the azaleas that I was able to get close enough with my iPhone to grab a few shots. There's something terribly 1940s about azaleas, don't you think? And (going out on a springy limb here) something so Orson Welles-like about carpenter bees (think driving force, ambition, unapologetic conspicuousness).

Thus it was that, while reveling in all the bee-on-bud action yesterday, my mind unfurled a full-blown mental mash-up involving a Technicolor version of Sunset Boulevard + Busby Berkeley dance moves + Paul Masson wine ad—all populated solely by hearty, gallivanting C-bees. Beware spring's potent cocktail of hot pink flowers, aromatic lilac, and shimmering pollinator charm.

Cranky Thoughts/Earth Day

It's the day before "Earth Day" and bloggers everywhere will be blogging about Earth Day and so I too shall blog (briefly) about Earth Day.

I must confess, given the horrible state of planetary affairs, I'm feeling a bit cranky about Earth Day this year....the logical outcome of one too many articles about imperiled bats, deformed frogs, industrial beekeeping practices, and dead whales with garbage in their bellies—that kind of thing.

Of course, I support the concept of Earth Day, which marks its 40th anniversary this year. I applaud any effect to mobilize awareness of and action on environmental issues. I was seven on the first Earth Day and I remember it as a significant influence when I was a kid; Earth Day is an old, familiar friend.

My crabbiness, I guess, has to do with the name "Earth Day," which implies that the other 364 days aren't quite as urgently "earthy," and perhaps takes us off the hook after we're done attending to that one great (and successful) marketing campaign. (I am not saying that the Earth Day folks are suggesting as much—just noticing the way these word, this year, are resonating for me.)

Earth Day is every day. We live here every day. We sleep here—or lay awake worrying about diseased bats and light pollution—every night.

And we need to be doing a better job, every day and every night, of protecting this earth—her people, her water, her creatures, her land, and her sky (including that beyond our earth's atmosphere, which we have also, incredibly, managed to gum up with our junk).

I know I'm preaching to the converted here, so I'll also confess that perhaps what I am feeling is not really crankiness so much as sorrow. Because it's clear that all we're doing to protect the Earth, collectively and individually, is light years short of enough. As the environmental casualties, horrors, and insults mount, I'm left yearning for a better way to effect the changes we so desperately need.

What—besides blogging, donating to effective environmental organizations, planting bee-friendly gardens, recycling, cooling it on the consumerism, insisting upon serious campaign finance reform, signing online petitions, informing ourselves and sharing what we know with others, and promoting environmental awareness via clever marketing campaigns—should we be doing to turn this sad mess around?

I'd welcome your thoughts.

More Insect Photos

Folks are making some real nice insect pics these days—including the eye-popping colorama snapshots discussed in my previous post.

On the opposite end of the visual spectrum, here are some dreamy black and white insect photos I think you will enjoy. Amble on over to this website and click the "in progress" link at the top of the page to get a look at some sweetly spooky insect-lurkers.

Dew Drop In...

These closeup photos of insects covered in early morning dew have been going around the Interweb for a few weeks now, and for good reason. Looky here.

I love it that the guy who took these is relatively new to photography. He gets up in the middle of the night to hunt for the insects before the dew has dried and they awaken from torpor to resume their active, sun-warmed lives.

Ferreting out the insects is no easy task. Nor is identifying them once they are found and photographed. The photographer, Miroslaw Swietek, says his insect identification books are so dew-soaked as to be pretty useless. In that rich metaphor, one senses the ultimate meaning of life.

Get your fill of Swietek's grand photos here.

Bugging Out on the NYC Subway System

There's a lot of great public art in subway stations throughout NYC thanks to we the taxpayers and the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Arts for Transit program.

En route to the New York Botanical Gardens earlier in the week, I was pleased to find this bee walking the wall at the Bedford Park Blvd. stop on the 4 train.
The bee is a detail from a glass mosaic by Andrea Dezsö titled Community Garden, 2006. As the name suggests, these whimsical, shimmering images evoke the flora and fauna of a garden setting, with plenty of great-looking bugs lurking here and there.

Several of the subway art installations in NYC focus on natural subjects, including kinetic dinosaurs at the stop near the American Museum of Natural History, dramatic undersea creatures at Houston Street, and stately penguins at Fifth and Fifty-Ninth Street (near the Central Park Zoo).

You can take a virtual, station-by-station and line-by-line tour of this art on the MTA website by clicking any of the links above and then navigating (bottom left of the page) to the station or line you'd like to explore.

Thought for the Day

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."—Carl Sagan

Three Bug Blogs I Like A Lot

I respect people who unabashedly put their love(s) out there, so let's start with I Love Insects, an info-rich blog by an entomology student who professes a "perhaps unreasonable appreciation for arthropods." Perhaps, maybe, yeah...But I say, nothing unreasonable about it; bugs are a most worthy obsession!

The Marvelous in Nature covers a lot of ground. Literally. The author, Seabrooke Leckie, is a fabulous writer who really does her homework and in so doing, conveys deep delight in and knowledge of the natural world in ways that are always enriching and enjoyable. Moths are one of her Big Things, but she writes about whatever Mother Nature presents to her, whether it's a spring peeper on her porch, the trout lilies heralding spring, or a cardinal obsessed with the rear-view mirror of her car.

Bug Girl's Blog is also well worth your attention, though the author is on (what we hope will be a temporary) hiatus. There's more than enough here, though, to satisfy your burning desire for eclectic and funky insect-related info for a long time to come.

Soon or soonish, I'll roundup some of my favorite bee and beekeeping blogs. Right now, I'm having too much fun being out and about, syncing my winter-steeped system with the onset of this most glorious spring.

On Golden Pond

Got a little freaked out on Friday afternoon when this sulfurous yellow dust appeared on the surface of our pond. Being perpetually conditioned for bad ecological tidings, my mind immediately went to thoughts of evil pollutants and Hazmat suits.

Happily, after some eco-sleuthing (walkin' & lookin'), I realized that the "deadly fallout" was actually pollen blown by high winds from the locally abundant bog willows (one of the first pollen producers of spring).

Thus was my eco-fretting averted. Bouyant spring mood was restored by the unassuming little willow shrubs/trees that give the bees plenty to work with, pollen-wise, when they need it most. Joy to see the plants abuzz with honeybee industry and the butter-yellow pollen baskets of the workers arriving at their hives.

Dressed to Squill

Pollen counts and allergy-induced sneezing notwithstanding, pollen is a pretty exciting topic if you are a beekeeper or bee-watcher. I've written quite a few pollen-related posts on this blog, with photos of honey bees gathering pollen from jewelweed, crocuses, goldenrod, portulaca, and (as shown below) thistle.This weekend, Wren and I had a great time watching the bees gather buttery yellow willow pollen in the old pastures behind our house. We also saw, for the very first time, a bee packing her pollen baskets with the handsome shimmery blue (!) pollen of Siberian squill, which we'd planted a mass of two years ago with precisely that goal in mind. If you're looking for a great plant to provide early spring forage for your bees + the coolest colored pollen on Earth, look no further than Siberian squill.

This excellent pollen color-chart includes a photo of the blue pollen of which I speak, while providing a guide for those who wish to identify the various pollen types their bees are bringing home to the hive.

I only wish the little bee with the blue pollen hadn't eluded my camera lens. I'll be trying again soon, of that you can be sure.

Feeding Bees With Fondant in the Top Bar Hive

Awhile ago, one of our readers—a top bar hive beekeeper named Gord who keeps bees in Ontario—mentioned that he was seeking out a good method for adding fondant to his top bar hives. Fondant—which is basically a soft, creamy sugar-water mix—is used by some beekeepers to offer their bees a supplementary food source in late winter/early spring or at other times when cold, wet weather or lack of forage places the colony at risk for starvation.

I asked Gord to get back to us when he found a recipe that he thought would work well in the TBH context, and he was kind enough to do so. Behold, his very useful guide on Using Fondant As Hive Insurance. The post appears on Gord's Seldom Fools Apiculture website, which I highly recommend for its good discussions of chemical treatments and other aspects of beekeeping that embodies a respect for bees.