You'd think there are some things we'd not need five scientists and several studies for. Apparently, this isn't one of them. Yes, insecticides (especially when applied by the millions of pounds nationally) do indeed harm bees.
But, here's the good news: if we quit using them, things get better.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/nicotine-bees-population-restored-with-neonicotinoids-ban.php
http://www.youris.com/Environment/Bees/Bees_go_mad_and_become_lost_because_of_neonicotinoid_dispersion.kl
How about that?
Monday, March 7, 2011
Hive Building Workday
Despite the dreary weather, bee season is just a flower-hop away and we'll soon be building another batch of hives in preparation for it.
This year we're building both Warre and Kenya-style top-bar hives of Western Red Cedar. Cost of materials for a Kenya-style hives is around $60. The Warre hives run about $75.
If you'd like a hive this year and are willing to lend a hand, please give email me at david.stucky@gmail.com ASAP to get your order in. I'll need to know no later than the end of this week to be able to help.
We'll likely start our building efforts the following Sunday, March 20. Once we finalize the order, I'll send a follow-on email out to nail down the time/date for building.
No particular skills other than enthusiasm are required to help out!
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Pressing Matters
The bees came through this year, surprisingly...even after the coolest and wettest summer I can remember in 20 years. My hives yielded about 70lbs in all...very lovely, light colored honey which is now mostly pressed out and jarred up in my kitchen.
As the first real harvest season for me using top bar hives, extracting the honey proved to be something of an adventure. I made the first run using (of all things) a hand-held potato ricer to press the honey out of the comb. It was a slow, sticky, tiring process, one which prompted me to go in with my neighbors on a nice stainless steel fruit press. That innovation proved vastly more efficient, especially after our technique came into line.
Our process was basically to put all the comb into a five gallon bucket and thoroughly mash it with a very large spoon to make a sort of thick soup of it all. Then we ladled that into the press and slowly applied pressure to sieve the wax from the honey. After pressing out all that we could, I rinsed the still very sweet wax in cold water and used that to make mead (results pending!). Then I washed the wax again to clean it completely and set it aside to be melted down later for candles, salves, etc.
Pulling the honey from the hives this year was a real treat. I was so happy to be able to do so without gearing up....relying instead on tuning into the bees, a little smoke, and just going slowly. Didn't get a single sting across my two boxes or the other three I helped with.
As the first real harvest season for me using top bar hives, extracting the honey proved to be something of an adventure. I made the first run using (of all things) a hand-held potato ricer to press the honey out of the comb. It was a slow, sticky, tiring process, one which prompted me to go in with my neighbors on a nice stainless steel fruit press. That innovation proved vastly more efficient, especially after our technique came into line.
Our process was basically to put all the comb into a five gallon bucket and thoroughly mash it with a very large spoon to make a sort of thick soup of it all. Then we ladled that into the press and slowly applied pressure to sieve the wax from the honey. After pressing out all that we could, I rinsed the still very sweet wax in cold water and used that to make mead (results pending!). Then I washed the wax again to clean it completely and set it aside to be melted down later for candles, salves, etc.
Pulling the honey from the hives this year was a real treat. I was so happy to be able to do so without gearing up....relying instead on tuning into the bees, a little smoke, and just going slowly. Didn't get a single sting across my two boxes or the other three I helped with.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Supers (sort of) and Swarms
This week we had a dollop of drama with one of our first year co-op hives when it decided to swarm.
First year swarms are relatively uncommon, mainly because bees generally have plenty of space and supercedure swarms are rare for new (lively) queens. (Come to think of it, all the queens I've known are lively. Ahhh, but that doesn't belong in this blog.)
As we continue to explore the margins of relevance here, I'll also observe that the hive that swarmed was one that had been very generously fed this spring. Feeding enables more rapid population growth. Because the swarm was clearly a split (many bees remained in the old hive), I'm thinking they just plain ran out of space.
The swarm originally came out about a week ago, prompting the ever intrepid Sherry and Lise to ring me up on my cell phone as I was away for a few days, lollygagging in Portland on tedious business. We (mostly they) managed a remote-control swarm capture and new hive installation. There were ladders, ropes, saws, and exhibits of mad tree climbing involved in making the nab, but in the end the bees had other dreams and promptly left the new box we'd prepared almost as soon as they were dumped in.
If the swarm was indeed a split as I suspect, that means this buzzing ball of bees was chock full of six-legged, airborne randiness: virgin queens, hopeful drones, and all that hot stuff. (Easy there, gentle readers!) Putting this all together, I suppose its no wonder that they opted to stay out on the town a while longer than we had in mind.
So, the bees disappeared for a few days...or so we think. Yesterday a suspiciously similar sized swarm reappeared in a nearby tree whereupon we (the usual suspects, this time not on cell phones) made another nab and successfully planted them in a third hive alongside two existing co-op hive.
Round two decision? The winged throng elected to stay this time around (Sherry swears she caught a glimpse of the queen looking relaxed and having a cigarette...solid evidence in my book of a lucky drone and queen ready to settle down into the mind-numbing routine of laying upwards of 500 eggs a day) and now our co-op has increased by one hive. That may sound like not much, but it represents a 10% boost in our overall hive count...no small matter when you consider that Wall Street on average barely scores half that in a given year.
In spring, bees run out of space sometimes and as we've seen venture out to find better digs. It's mostly a matter of population dynamics. Prompted by this latest adventure, I visited three other hives (one of my own and two others), watched a bit, and then slipped a third super in betwixt the two already on the hive. Hopefully no more swarms this season among our first-year hives.
Some of the signs (other than the blunt signal provided by our swarm!) that made me think another box was due included lots of obviously food-bearing traffic in and out of the hive and, sometimes, in the evening/morning a 'beard' of bees on the front porch. When weather is hot or humid, bees frequently park in alarming numbers on the front of their hives at night as a means of enabling better air circulation inside the hive for honey-drying purposes.
This makes sense if you consider what goes on in a hive over the course of a day. During daytime, a good portion of the bees are out in the field gathering nectar and pollen. Inside the hive there's plenty of room as a result. But bees come back inside at night (presumably to watch TV, just like us!) and that makes for crowded conditions. (Only room for so many sisters on the couch!) On top of that, all of the fresh and very wet nectar brought in during the day needs drying at night. So, space is both at a premium and acutely required in order to allow the miraculous bee breeze HVAC system to do its thing. Hence, some bees adjourn to the porch to make room. Fewer bee bodies in the comb. More bee breeze.
I am reminded here of stories in my own family about my grandfather who as eldest of 19 children growing up hard on a Kansas farm was obliged to sleep out in a corn crib with one his brothers for a couple of winters. I sleep out of doors several months each year here in our mild Oregon climate, but not in winter and this isn't Kansas either.
I meant to say something about the term 'supers' as it applies to our top-bar style of beekeeping here. Strictly speaking, we don't 'super' (expand by adding to the top of our bee stacks) in the way we add to our hives. Conventional (Langstroth) hives add to the top. We insert in the middle or at the bottom of the stack instead.
So, though I think we are super, we do not super.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Bees In Wetsuits
This spring has been more than a little challenging for bees, especially new colonies. Cool wet weather complicates matters greatly for new colonies, primarily because they have no honey stores of their own from the previous season upon which to rely for food when foraging isn't possible. Without stores, bees have to get out and fly in order to eat and rain makes that hard.
Watching my bees this spring, I've learned a thing or two from them about opportunity. Rain chases me indoors and dampens my spirits more than I'd like to admit. When the drops stop falling, I look suspiciously at the sky and have to shake off my own sense of imprisonment before I venture out of doors. Bees, meanwhile, practically leap out of the hive when then get half a chance. They're off (on beelines) seeking whatever goodness they can find in whatever small sliver time has been granted.
Seemingly, staying indoors is no easy solution for me or perhaps for bees either. Cool weather challenges new colonies to heat their hive space sufficiently to raise brood and to make comb. Bees need hive temperatures to stay in the 90's and are able to do so mainly using body friction/kinetic energy. Small colonies have a tough time heating lots of open space. Making comb is difficult in cold weather simply because wax is harder to manipulate.
Fortunately, all of our new co-op colonies seem to be doing very well despite our soggy weather. Some of us have been feeding new colonies with sugar water. Some not. Both fed and not-fed hives seem to be thriving. Most of the colonies have now grown into a second super and may even require a third this year once weather warms and the blackberry flower season fully opens.
The damp weather will decrease honey production this year, making it almost a certainty that our first year hives should be left with all of the honey they produce in order to safeguard the bees survival over the winter.
Swarms also seem to have been somewhat suppressed by the recent weather. Personally, I've only seen two swarms this season, less than I'd expect. We may see a run of late season swarms as weather warms up, but in most years the bulk of the swarms would have occurred already.
Yesterday I took my cues from my colonies, ceding outdoor territory only grudgingly during morning showers and running right back out when they stopped. As I moved gravel and soil and raced to pack a week of chores into a day, I caught glimpses over my shoulder of my bees besting me at every turn. Workers clustered at the hive door seemed impatient with drones hanging about on no particular mission. They pushed their lumbering and indolent brothers aside and bustled past back into the hive, time and again, with huge bags of pollen on their legs, right up until dark.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
I'm Shocked! Shocked to Find That Bees Are Dying!
This week the USDA released the most recent results of this year's bee survey which revealed that 33% of all bee colonies under management perished in 2009. The report sparked a brief flurry of news coverage (you can read some of these in the sidebar at right), but the stories were almost immediately and predictably eclipsed by breaking news regarding flooding in Tennessee, our Drill-Baby-Drill Drama off the Gulf Coast, Heidi Montag's most recent body work, and this morning a feature piece on the fattest cities in America.
I confess that I've never been able to understand why we call 'news' by that name. Most of it is really old, or at least just unsurprising. In Tennessee it rained a lot this spring. The creeks and rivers came up as they have probably thousands of times and washed out whatever was in the way. Off the Louisiana coast we punched a bunch of holes in the earth's crust for the purpose of releasing massive quantities of crude oil. To facilitate this, we put in place a hugely complex (aka fragile), not to mention floating, system of extractive equipment. When the 210,000 gallon per day spill started a couple of weeks ago, it was certainly a bad one, but in the end only one of about 270 which have occurred since offshore drilling began in the late 1960s. As for the shocking revelation that we are fat, it's a virtual certainty that many millions more Americans heard that story on their car radios en route to get fast food than are aware that our sugar consumption has literally gone exponential in the last 20 years, rising from 26 pounds per capita annually to over 135 pounds, up from a modest 5 pounds in the late 19th century.
Viewed in the same way, the bee story is no more news than the rest. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the supposedly mysterious 'malady' behind this large scale die-off is about as real and about as surprising as Ms. Montag's dynamic curvature.
Certainly bees are dying at rates that make all of the world's wars of the last century combined look like polite disagreements over tea. But CCD as a 'syndrome' is much less real than the fact that most beekeeping, like the rest of our industrial agriculture, is fundamentally extractive and destructive of life. In the late 1980s, Wendell Berry noted in one of his essays that the amount of topsoil lost annually due to conventional farming practices far exceeded the amount of food produced in any given year. Interestingly, one of our 'strategies' for accommodating (not countering) this destruction of the land has been to rely increasingly on petroleum to manufacture, transport, and apply artificial fertilizers. Thank goodness we don't need soil to grow food. It comes from supermarkets, silly! Apparently, judging from the fleeting attention CCD coverage usually gets, we've determined that we don't need bees to grow food either.
Claude Rains in Casablanca perfectly expressed our cultural approach to 'news' of this nature when he delivered his famously fake lines, "I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here." (croupier enters stage right and says to Rains, "Your winnings sir.") With agriculture, forestry, energy, medicine, technology--really with virtually everything--we drive like maniacs toward a variety of cliffs and then somewhere about mid-launch into the abyss muster our most genuine affection of dramatic surprise to declare the existence of 'puzzles' and 'mysteries' and 'news' around the fact that we've just driven off the cliff.
As things accelerate alarmingly downwards, scientists are customarily called in to study matters and to suggest prudent courses of remediation.
Be a bee for a moment. For millions of years you've evolved, freely breeding with the usual rapidity of insect populations, to become a creature accustomed to life in a stable, long-term colony probably housed in the protected hollow of a tree, a small cave, etc. Your entire behavioral make-up is geared toward the gathering and storage of honey stocks to help your colony make it through winters, prosper, and even multiply. The interior of your colony is a model of hygiene and order. You've even learned to use naturally antiseptic plant resins as building materials which double as purifiers for your domain. Nutritionally, your chosen food sources are nearly perfect: complex sugar from nectar and pollen which is rich in vitamins B, C, A, D, and E and consists of about 35% protein.
Fast forward to the last fifty years or so. (And, I do mean fast forward. The shift from all of the above to what you're about to read in the new scenario has occurred almost instantaneously in the big scheme of things.) You're still a bee, but your ability to breed freely and to adapt gracefully to environmental challenges has been utterly interrupted. North American bee stocks have been bred down to a virtual genetic pinpoint focused entirely on honey production and docility. Your home is no longer stable or even one that you choose. Rather, you're given a thin-walled wood box, often augmented with artificial materials, paint, etc. This salt box abode is also invaded on a regular basis and, in most commercial beekeeping setups, is actually moved from field to field several times each season, forcing your entire colony to reorient in search of food. (The practice of regularly moving bees for agricultural purposes has been characterized as the single largest forced migration of a living species in history.) What you find when you go out in search of food is mostly one thing (almonds, orange blossoms, clover, etc.) rather than the variety you're accustomed to. Worse, it's heavily tainted with a variety of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides used to support commercial agriculture today. Undeterred, you still muster your numbers and your instincts to store up considerable quantities of honey and pollen to get you through the winter, most of which is stolen from you to be sold. In exchange for this nutritionally complete bounty, you're fed sugar water and occasionally a cocktail of something a biochemist has dreamed up and agribusiness has sold to beekeepers as a 'nutritional supplement'.
That was a long paragraph, one full of the dismal and mind-numbing realities surrounding this little corner of commercial agriculture, aka The Way We Eat. So, let's recap:
I confess that I've never been able to understand why we call 'news' by that name. Most of it is really old, or at least just unsurprising. In Tennessee it rained a lot this spring. The creeks and rivers came up as they have probably thousands of times and washed out whatever was in the way. Off the Louisiana coast we punched a bunch of holes in the earth's crust for the purpose of releasing massive quantities of crude oil. To facilitate this, we put in place a hugely complex (aka fragile), not to mention floating, system of extractive equipment. When the 210,000 gallon per day spill started a couple of weeks ago, it was certainly a bad one, but in the end only one of about 270 which have occurred since offshore drilling began in the late 1960s. As for the shocking revelation that we are fat, it's a virtual certainty that many millions more Americans heard that story on their car radios en route to get fast food than are aware that our sugar consumption has literally gone exponential in the last 20 years, rising from 26 pounds per capita annually to over 135 pounds, up from a modest 5 pounds in the late 19th century.
Viewed in the same way, the bee story is no more news than the rest. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the supposedly mysterious 'malady' behind this large scale die-off is about as real and about as surprising as Ms. Montag's dynamic curvature.
Certainly bees are dying at rates that make all of the world's wars of the last century combined look like polite disagreements over tea. But CCD as a 'syndrome' is much less real than the fact that most beekeeping, like the rest of our industrial agriculture, is fundamentally extractive and destructive of life. In the late 1980s, Wendell Berry noted in one of his essays that the amount of topsoil lost annually due to conventional farming practices far exceeded the amount of food produced in any given year. Interestingly, one of our 'strategies' for accommodating (not countering) this destruction of the land has been to rely increasingly on petroleum to manufacture, transport, and apply artificial fertilizers. Thank goodness we don't need soil to grow food. It comes from supermarkets, silly! Apparently, judging from the fleeting attention CCD coverage usually gets, we've determined that we don't need bees to grow food either.
Claude Rains in Casablanca perfectly expressed our cultural approach to 'news' of this nature when he delivered his famously fake lines, "I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here." (croupier enters stage right and says to Rains, "Your winnings sir.") With agriculture, forestry, energy, medicine, technology--really with virtually everything--we drive like maniacs toward a variety of cliffs and then somewhere about mid-launch into the abyss muster our most genuine affection of dramatic surprise to declare the existence of 'puzzles' and 'mysteries' and 'news' around the fact that we've just driven off the cliff.
As things accelerate alarmingly downwards, scientists are customarily called in to study matters and to suggest prudent courses of remediation.
Be a bee for a moment. For millions of years you've evolved, freely breeding with the usual rapidity of insect populations, to become a creature accustomed to life in a stable, long-term colony probably housed in the protected hollow of a tree, a small cave, etc. Your entire behavioral make-up is geared toward the gathering and storage of honey stocks to help your colony make it through winters, prosper, and even multiply. The interior of your colony is a model of hygiene and order. You've even learned to use naturally antiseptic plant resins as building materials which double as purifiers for your domain. Nutritionally, your chosen food sources are nearly perfect: complex sugar from nectar and pollen which is rich in vitamins B, C, A, D, and E and consists of about 35% protein.
Fast forward to the last fifty years or so. (And, I do mean fast forward. The shift from all of the above to what you're about to read in the new scenario has occurred almost instantaneously in the big scheme of things.) You're still a bee, but your ability to breed freely and to adapt gracefully to environmental challenges has been utterly interrupted. North American bee stocks have been bred down to a virtual genetic pinpoint focused entirely on honey production and docility. Your home is no longer stable or even one that you choose. Rather, you're given a thin-walled wood box, often augmented with artificial materials, paint, etc. This salt box abode is also invaded on a regular basis and, in most commercial beekeeping setups, is actually moved from field to field several times each season, forcing your entire colony to reorient in search of food. (The practice of regularly moving bees for agricultural purposes has been characterized as the single largest forced migration of a living species in history.) What you find when you go out in search of food is mostly one thing (almonds, orange blossoms, clover, etc.) rather than the variety you're accustomed to. Worse, it's heavily tainted with a variety of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides used to support commercial agriculture today. Undeterred, you still muster your numbers and your instincts to store up considerable quantities of honey and pollen to get you through the winter, most of which is stolen from you to be sold. In exchange for this nutritionally complete bounty, you're fed sugar water and occasionally a cocktail of something a biochemist has dreamed up and agribusiness has sold to beekeepers as a 'nutritional supplement'.
That was a long paragraph, one full of the dismal and mind-numbing realities surrounding this little corner of commercial agriculture, aka The Way We Eat. So, let's recap:
- Bees are undergoing a massive die-off.
- In quite literally the past 50 years we've:
- Bred bees down to a very narrow genetic base.
- Largely narrowed their food supply down to a series of mono-crops.
- Adopted a practice of radically and regularly relocating a large percentage of the bee population.
- Replaced clean bee food sources with new ones laced with a wide variety of poisons.
- Convinced ourselves (apparently owing to the success of our self-experimentation on the linkages between sugar consumption and health...see above) that bees don't need real food and can live well instead on mainly sugar water.
- We have discovered a mystery called CCD.
What do you think?
Well, here's what I think: I think that real news might better consist of some serious exploration of how it is that we do utterly reckless things like burn off millions of years of accumulated carbon in less than a century, or intentionally inject massive quantities of toxins into the land and water and air, or wash off a significant portion of our topsoil, or enslave entire species, or utterly deplete global water supplies, or introduce radical genetic interventions in the form of GMO crops, or even radically alter our own diet in the service of convenience...how we do all of these things and still keep a straight face when we call in the scientists to help us explain the wreckage that results.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Fair Winds
Sunday saw me on the wrong end of a shovel again (there is no right end...both ends give plenty of trouble), finishing up two days of digging on a new bean garden. I at least had the sense not to take all that soil turning in one lump and so gave myself more than a few breaks throughout the day.
It was on one of these pauses, though I don't know how, that the idea of a nap occurred to me. The new bed I was digging is conveniently located next to my beehives which sit amongst some tall grass and wildflowers. It's an inviting spot. I stretched out in front of a hive and watched the bees work for a while as I let the early May sun and the sound of their wings drift me off for a few minutes. As the breeze came and went I caught the occasional scent of new honey being put up inside the hive. Though brief, it might have been the best nap I've ever had.
It was back to digging before long. The day cooled off and the bees took their own turn to give it a rest. Soon traffic in and out of the hive all but ceased as the last of the field bees brought in their sweet findings. I finished my work in turn and squatted down to peer into the hive entrance again before I called it a day. There just inside the door fanner bees line the hive entrance, butts pointed out, wings beating to push air out of the hive. My bees are gentle, so I put my hand first and then my face right up within a couple inches of their front door.
I'm sure I went slack-jawed and let out a whooowheee next. These fanner bees and probably thousands like them working in unison in the dark interior of the hive, all aligned heads up and tails down, were driving a steady, warm, sweet breeze out past me into the cool evening air. The smell was irresistible, a mix of beeswax, springtime, and evaporating nectar.
People see the Virgin Mary in pieces of burnt toast. Jesus pops up now and again in drywall stains, Cheetos, and pancakes. Elvis is seen so regularly that someone awakening from a VanWinkle duration nap might be be sincerely doubtful of The King ever passing in the first place.
All of these miracles invariably end up on YouTube set to incredible music. Though it's probably a failure of imagination, I can't really think of how I could have posted my bee breeze on YouTube. It did cross my mind.
YouTube or not, my competitive side tells me that this bee breeze qualifies in every possible way as a miracle of the same rank and order as Elvis at The Mall, Holy Mother Toast, Jesus Mold, or any of the rest.
My evidence is mostly circumstantial, but I'm virtually certain that Elvis, Mary, and Jesus would all enthusiastically endorse the miraculous nature of my bee breeze. Proverbs 6:6, for example, tells us pretty clearly where to look, "Go to the bee, sluggard, and consider her ways and be wise!"
I take this advice personally and am hoping that snoozing in tall grass in front of the hive at least counts for something.
Elvis, before he took his own long nap, the one fueled by years of too much of pretty much everything, gave us his own confession of...well, if not faith, then at least some indication of the powers of the universe that brought him to his knees in his eponymous 1957 hit Too Much which starts out, "Honey, I love you too much..."
If you think these are long shots, I have more evidence in support of Bee Breeze as Miraculous.
As everyone knows, real miracles have to go against the flow in some important way. If every burnt bagel looked like Mary, we wouldn't run to YouTube so often. Defiance of expectations needs to be a part of it. So let's consider Bee Breeze for a moment. Quite a while ago, Bill Nye the Science Guy discovered (on TV) that, normally, warm air rises. Today, thanks to PBS, everyone except Sarah Palin knows this. But, here's the thing: warm bee breeze flows down through the hive out the bottom, against the natural direction of convective circulation. Supernatural air flow at its finest. If this isn't something to blog about, I don't know what is.
(As a point of factoid, bees tend to keep the air in their hives at about 92 degrees as a means of facilitating the raising of young and the production and manipulation of wax. Those are just factoids, however, and not real miracles. It's the hot air going down thing that makes all of this a miracle.)
Finally, I'll put my bee breeze up against the canon of official miracles any day of week simply on account of reliability. The Faithful have been traipsing to Lourdes for centuries now, by all signs mostly in support of the shoe leather industry, but have only 67 recorded official miracles to show for all of those millions of visits.
My hives, by contrast, yield their fair breezes on any night of the week I'm willing kneel down before them to take in the vapors. It's a sure thing.
So, when I do feel like betting, I bet with Walt Whitman when it comes to miracles.
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
It was on one of these pauses, though I don't know how, that the idea of a nap occurred to me. The new bed I was digging is conveniently located next to my beehives which sit amongst some tall grass and wildflowers. It's an inviting spot. I stretched out in front of a hive and watched the bees work for a while as I let the early May sun and the sound of their wings drift me off for a few minutes. As the breeze came and went I caught the occasional scent of new honey being put up inside the hive. Though brief, it might have been the best nap I've ever had.
It was back to digging before long. The day cooled off and the bees took their own turn to give it a rest. Soon traffic in and out of the hive all but ceased as the last of the field bees brought in their sweet findings. I finished my work in turn and squatted down to peer into the hive entrance again before I called it a day. There just inside the door fanner bees line the hive entrance, butts pointed out, wings beating to push air out of the hive. My bees are gentle, so I put my hand first and then my face right up within a couple inches of their front door.
I'm sure I went slack-jawed and let out a whooowheee next. These fanner bees and probably thousands like them working in unison in the dark interior of the hive, all aligned heads up and tails down, were driving a steady, warm, sweet breeze out past me into the cool evening air. The smell was irresistible, a mix of beeswax, springtime, and evaporating nectar.
People see the Virgin Mary in pieces of burnt toast. Jesus pops up now and again in drywall stains, Cheetos, and pancakes. Elvis is seen so regularly that someone awakening from a VanWinkle duration nap might be be sincerely doubtful of The King ever passing in the first place.
All of these miracles invariably end up on YouTube set to incredible music. Though it's probably a failure of imagination, I can't really think of how I could have posted my bee breeze on YouTube. It did cross my mind.
YouTube or not, my competitive side tells me that this bee breeze qualifies in every possible way as a miracle of the same rank and order as Elvis at The Mall, Holy Mother Toast, Jesus Mold, or any of the rest.
My evidence is mostly circumstantial, but I'm virtually certain that Elvis, Mary, and Jesus would all enthusiastically endorse the miraculous nature of my bee breeze. Proverbs 6:6, for example, tells us pretty clearly where to look, "Go to the bee, sluggard, and consider her ways and be wise!"
I take this advice personally and am hoping that snoozing in tall grass in front of the hive at least counts for something.
Elvis, before he took his own long nap, the one fueled by years of too much of pretty much everything, gave us his own confession of...well, if not faith, then at least some indication of the powers of the universe that brought him to his knees in his eponymous 1957 hit Too Much which starts out, "Honey, I love you too much..."
If you think these are long shots, I have more evidence in support of Bee Breeze as Miraculous.
As everyone knows, real miracles have to go against the flow in some important way. If every burnt bagel looked like Mary, we wouldn't run to YouTube so often. Defiance of expectations needs to be a part of it. So let's consider Bee Breeze for a moment. Quite a while ago, Bill Nye the Science Guy discovered (on TV) that, normally, warm air rises. Today, thanks to PBS, everyone except Sarah Palin knows this. But, here's the thing: warm bee breeze flows down through the hive out the bottom, against the natural direction of convective circulation. Supernatural air flow at its finest. If this isn't something to blog about, I don't know what is.
(As a point of factoid, bees tend to keep the air in their hives at about 92 degrees as a means of facilitating the raising of young and the production and manipulation of wax. Those are just factoids, however, and not real miracles. It's the hot air going down thing that makes all of this a miracle.)
Finally, I'll put my bee breeze up against the canon of official miracles any day of week simply on account of reliability. The Faithful have been traipsing to Lourdes for centuries now, by all signs mostly in support of the shoe leather industry, but have only 67 recorded official miracles to show for all of those millions of visits.
My hives, by contrast, yield their fair breezes on any night of the week I'm willing kneel down before them to take in the vapors. It's a sure thing.
So, when I do feel like betting, I bet with Walt Whitman when it comes to miracles.
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
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