In an inspired moment about twelve years ago, I killed off my television. I terminated it with prejudice, which in that time meant giving it to my Ex. I'm pretty sure I didn't intend it as such, but this dubious act of giving surely amounted to a subtle form of sabotage, stealthy aggression along the lines of Trojan Horses or smallpox -ridden blankets offered up in the dead of winter.
Though no TV has as yet regained entry into my household, The Natural Instinct of Humans to Watch Television has nonetheless over the years reasserted itself with inexorable force. This is surely one of the great engines of nature, probably tied to some sequence in our DNA, one lodged in our helix at a point close to those other sequences which leave us Powerless to Resist Shopping, Bound to Drive Automobiles, Unable to Put Down the Doritos, or Prone to Corporate Employment.
Along with Chance Gardner, I like to watch. Happily, I've channeled this instinct into various forms of bestial backyard voyeurism: Bee TV, Chicken TV, etc. I sit, often in the good company of other misfits, and survey the life adventures of my bees, chickens, and whatever other species see fit to present themselves in my backyard. It's no American Idol, thank God, but I pull up a chair or cop a squat on a rock on a regular basis and watch my bees or my chickens do their thing. It's endlessly entertaining and there are no commercials.
I think it was my durable partner in gardening and dear love Kristin who coined the term Chicken TV a number of years ago. We added the bee channel last year. And, inspired by wine and good company the other evening, we opened discussions about a pirate channel for goats.
For my money, Bee TV puts all the rest to shame. HBO, History Channel, Weather Channel, etc....even PBS are but weak alternatives. I tune in sometimes sitting at a distance with a cup of coffee, or sometimes on elbows and knees with my face a few inches from the hive door. Yesterday, I watched a worker bee gobbing propolis into minute cracks on the front of the hive where sugar ants had been entering presumably to rob honey. Today, no ants.
Sometimes it's high drama, soap-opera sexual tension at it's best with shiftless drones and drone larvae being chucked off the front porch of the hive by female worker bees all about business. "We have flowers. Our queen is beautiful and already fertile. What do we need you for?" When new queens hatch some springs, there's rivalry that would make Joan Collins or even Gigi from One Life To Live look like rank amateurs.
More mundanely, on warm days when nectar is flowing, activity goes crazy and the somewhat small entrances to my hives are choked with bees pushing past each other to get in with nectar and out to get more. Their passage is complicated by rows of fanner bees who moon me as I peer into the dark entrance. They beat their wings to circulate moist air down through the hive and out the entrance past their little backsides, all part of the drying effort by which nectar becomes honey.
Saturday was a rock star day for nectar. Bee TV at its best. The frenzy of entrance activity made me curious enough to actually look into the hive Saturday and again Sunday. Sure enough, the bees had added about 5 lbs. of new honey in about 24 hours. Amazing.
The worst habits follow you wherever you go. Bee TV, as it happens, also travels well. This pretty much cinches it as a real instance of the genre: after all, when I travel for work, I see people in airports carrying mobile TV and DVD devices. I too take my habits travelling. Just this Sunday I took my own viewing on the road around the neighborhood. No wires or batteries required. In Whitey's hive, we went nosing around for baby bees and were not disappointed. They were easily spotted curled up in the bottom of their brood cells, no bigger than a grain of rice. His queen is alive and doing her thing. Several bars were also nicely built out with honey, bright, clear, light first year honey that I was sorely tempted to gnosh right there with the sun coming through it for the first time ever. Watching is enough though for this year. With luck, those happy bees will survive and thrive and generate enough of a surplus to afford us a harmless taste.
After Whitey's, a block to the west we also stopped in to check on a neglected hive that swarmed a couple weeks ago. We caught and used it to make a new colony elsewhere. But, checking in I see that the old box, much to my surprise, still has a very vigorous population. The in/out traffic at the entrance is brisk, a sure sign of a healthy colony. Apparently, the hive split instead of just relocating. Judging the by size of the swarm we captured and the buzz remaining in the old hive, it must have been a gigantic bee colony before the swarm. This week we'll put the old hive to right: fix a broken bottom board, check in the boxes, and add a couple of supers. We'll weigh in for a moment, adding a few niceties which, if we're lucky, will in some small way further the humbling, quotidian efforts of tens of thousands of bees over the course of the year and beyond. I know hives in this town, wild ones, that have prospered on their own for decades. We mainly add by not taking away.
Enthusiasm aside, it's a certainty that the Nielsen people do not have us on their radar. All of this undoubtedly falls to the very remotely quirky tails of the viewing preference distribution. Nonetheless I was shocked a few years ago to discover, quite by accident, that we are not entirely alone in our watching habits. At a pub one evening we were almost howling out loud about some scenes we'd viewed earlier in the day on Chicken TV (full disclosure: the scenes in question were decidedly MA on the rating system and involved the often shocking realities of Hot Poultry Love) when our waiter drew up short from across the room, out of earshot (we were gesturing), and came over to ask, "You've got chickens too?"
Now, he's cultured fellow, a talented professional musician who though he tours nationally and even internationally, still pours beer in support of both himself and the better funded segments of our economy. On days when I catch myself zoning out in front of a hive or maybe channel surfing between bees, chickens, and compost pile worms, and I glance down at my ruined Carharts and my dirty nails and momentarily see Urban Yokel, I remember Dan and then Dan on stage somewhere singing to thousands of people and I am reassured
that my wiring is OK after all. Liking bees more than Fox News or Lost does not make me defective and may even be a good thing.
Try it sometime. Turn off your other set. Find a hive. Tune in. See what happens.
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