Getting Started in Beekeeping
A friend asked, in a recent comment, for some tips on getting started.
The first thing to do is find out about local beekeepers. In the case of my friend in Savannah, the Coastal Empire Beekeepers Association looks like a good bet. I didn’t see a web site for them but there is a public email address listed at UGA
Many associations offer ‘bee school’. This is what we did through the Seacoast Beekeepers Association in New Hampshire. These programs can be excellent because they reflect local realities, season specific tips, and often provide a well structured approach for introducing the novitiate to the art and craft of beekeeping.
Beekeeping is not a cheap hobby but it need not be horribly expensive either. In general a beginner needs a good understanding of the vernacular that describes equipment, methods, and the bees themselves. Books abound and are helpful but may not be sufficient. Web sites are helpful too but, as one commentator said, getting advice from the internet is like asking a stranger to guard your wallet (or your purse).
This shot if from April when we started our colonies.
In our case we purchased supers, frames, wax foundation, a smoker, a bee hat, and feeders. Our plan was (and is) to start with two colonies placed in two hives. (See there, I am passing on some jargon already. A hive usually refers to the habitation while a colony refers to the organic ‘collective’ consisting of a queen, a gazillion workers, and a small number of drones.) To get things going we purchased two packages. (Jargon alert!) A package consists of a queen and a nice cantaloupe sized ball of workers shipped in a box that looks a LOT like my Dad’s old cricket cage.
From that point we followed the process suggested by our mentors at bee school and, with a lot of luck, our colonies should be ready to survive their first winter. Yep, that’s a fact. It takes all of their best effort to ensure that there is (1) enough comb (2) enough brood -future bees (3) enough food to make it from late October to late March. For my friend in Savannah this is not nearly as much of an issue but I am sure he will discover that even the lush gardens of his home and the traditionally mild winters are the bright side and some other threat looms periously over the future of his colonies if he decides to take up this practice.
One final (for now) note. Beekeeping has changed in HUGE ways in the few years since I first considered getting into it. Twenty years ago, a box and some frames would have been sufficient. Not anymore. If you decide to keep bees, do it right. There’s a lot you can do wrong and it won’t just harm your bees, it may well do harm to many others as well.
Omaha
Don’t have much to say. Spent the day in Des Moines and drove west just so I can fly east tomorrow.
Wet Water
None who know me will be surprised when I admit I have done many foolish things. Once I rode a bicycle across a high exposed ridge in driving rain, deafened by thunder and hounded by lightening with a lust for more than bare rock and scattered trees.
The occasion for today’s commentary was my advice to a bride not to be nervous. Perhaps not the most foolish thing I have done but certainly one of the least effective. On that occasion, during the course of some correspondence, the bride observed that she simply could not stop being nervous even though I had suggested she do so. I might as well have attempted to command the tide stop, the moon rise, or my wife to do my bidding; each are utterly impossible.
In retrospect I realize how silly it is to tell anyone who is nervous not to be. It is, I think, like telling water not to be wet. This is especially true for people caught up in major life events like weddings, funerals, and high school reunions.
The Divine Recluse
“They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.”
– Emily Dickinson
A philosophy of religion professor I greatly admired said to me that “God is either in everything, or in nothing.” I have often thought of this and think I will never let go, entirely, of the sense that this question is very close to the center of our existential dilemma. The declarative testimony of some preachers often clashes with our own, and often profound, sense that God is a very long way off. Perhaps this is most true of ‘high mileage’ ministers; Ministers who say, week after week, that “God is near” or “God will provide”, or “God is love” while at the same time living lives of personal spiritual desolation.
Saint John of the Cross, a Carmelite monk and famous Spanish mystic of the 16th century, spoke of “The Dark Night of the Soul”. Though I can lay no claim to mysticism due to my own proclivity for skepticism and rational thought I do not believe that the spiritual desolation that many know today can be equated with his experience of exquisite sorrow. For one thing his travail was a stage in a life long journey toward greater awareness of the nearness of God. Ours, by contrast, is a contemporary and increasingly empty wasteland. A wasteland that is the consequence of longing or lust for something other than God.
When I retired from public ministry almost fifteen years ago I was met by objections from colleagues and friends. One, I remember in particular, said, “Don’t do this, you will lose your faith.” Really? I suppose the epicenter of this concern depends on what is meant by faith. What often passes for faith is not faith but enthusiasm for it. That is, what many consider ‘faith’ is an emotional rush associated with tantalizing hope for ________ (fill in the blank with health, wealth, power, the winning lottery numbers). Longing, not faith, is the hallmark emotion of our age. We are obsessed with this sense of longing and the market is eager to exploit the demand. Consider our entertainment, the means by which we create and then fill idle hours. Today the ‘leading brands’ are fueled by longing. American Idol, Next Super Model, The Bachelor/Bachelorette are testimonies to our ambition for something more. In contemporary religion we are all too often exhorted to believe so that we too can have __________ (you may borrow from the previously completed blank).
Week after week the disenfranchised, the wealthy, the overwhelmed, and the overlord exhort their personal deities to grant a boon. And, to assure success, they (we) cry all the louder, “Hear Us!” The regular worship of many takes on the trappings of a pep rally and we, the worshippers, are the fans. Fans of Faith.
It is this kind of “faith” that can be easily lost. And when it is lost the heart of our hearts is a desolate, without relief from the scorching winds of self reproach, doubt, and despair. This is no “Dark Night of the Soul” it is a living hell.
When I first began to compose this piece the juxtaposition of statements by poet, professor and parishioner occupied my mind. In 1993 my wife, deeply loved by me and all her family, died. In the seven years prior to her death we struggled, together. For my own part, I was not so troubled by some sense that God was absent. Instead I was haunted by an inexplicable sense of pervasive good. I began to realize more fully that we live in an ugly world where cancer is part of nature. I saw the compelling evidence that pestilence is an unrelenting condition of life. Likewise, poverty is the norm for most people in this world and yet… in the midst of such a world I held in my heart something mysteriously beautiful. In the fifteen years since then I continue to question many things but what I question most is how could we all seem to miss the outrageous eruption of good in a world so utterly hostile to it.
Far more than the presence or absence of God I am amazed that any of us ever has a sense of God’s presence. We, in spite of ourselves and our distance from conventional means by which we articulate faith continue to be amazed by God. I suppose this is the real meaning of “amazing” in grace.
A Right to Left World
I wonder how it came to be that right to left was the way to read… for some but not all of ‘us’? In a left to right world how do the ‘right to left’ live? Are there closet right readers (those who read wrong)? In a world where calamity is the expectation and on a slow news night the increased humidity of a mild summer night is presented by the ‘chief meterologist’ with a view toward the apocalypse it seems likely that the end is where we find our meaning.
My beloved is a cheater reader. She doesn’t exactly read right to left but she sneaks a peak at the last chapter to decide whether she will stick with the writer to the end. Is the end, she asks, worth the effort? In a right to left world do we already know where we are bound but wonder from whence we came?
Several Sundays ago our minister wrestled with Paul, or at least Paul’s interpreters. “All things work for good.” Unlike those ‘things’ that work for food or a good salary, I suppose. No, what our minister protested was the tempation to abandon accountability for Andersonvile, Auswitz, Somalia with a blithe “all things work for good.”
When my late wife was diagnosed with her, eventually deadly, cancer two polar opposites set to work explaining our dilmena. It was all good, somehow. Or, it was all bad and we deserved it. To say I loathed the latter and the one(s) who declared it would be self evident to any who know me but to say that I equally loathed the former might come as a surprise. After all they might say, “You are a minister, of course you believe all things work for good.”
Not so fast. I find it far easier to accomodate the reality of disease, decay, and death than to explain birth, vitality, and hope. How can anyone emerge from the torture chamber and have hope or from the oncologist where ‘the facts have been explained’ and belive that there is joy afoot? I can’t speak as an authority of every instance of suffering and the discovery of goodness but I can say that I have no answer but this: goodness is conceived even in the deepest trouble.
On a whim... 