Wha?

From an article in today's Washington Post:

"Hundreds of engineers are working to bring the [Fukushima] nuclear plant under control.... Potential solutions for containing the hazardous materials include...dropping a cloth over the reactors."

Really?

No, no, no. Not small hive beetle, not the Queen laying eggs in the wrong place. My girls are just eager to build comb.

That's what this is. Burr comb. I've had it before and it's a beautiful sight even though the poor bees have toiled to build it and now I just have to remove it. But I'll make a candle out of it, so their work won't be wasted.

I want to understand this bumper sticker.

So I read this. Now ask me if I understand it. Ha!

I also want to understand quantum mechanics because someone in my yoga class told me that my pessimism about the planet (hell in a handbasket, etc) could be eliminated if I just read and understood the writings of Amit Goswami. We'll see. I'll read one of his books.

What's this?

I was digging in my garden the other day, planting peas and potatoes, and came across this hard piece of something about 6 inches under the ground. At first I thought it was a rock, but it can be cut with a knife, as shown here, and it produces a powdery white substance when you break it down. My guess? An old fungus.

To cleanse the palate after those icky bee posts. Pictures from Stephanie's trip to The Netherlands and Belgium.

Thanks for sharing the pictures Steph!

The Daughter will be traveling to The Netherlands in May. She'll visit 5 cities in 10 days: Paris, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. Her school gives its students a travel grant to be used during the summer between the two semesters. Let me translate. The people paying the tuition (that would be The Parents) are basically paying for the trip. All part of the tuition. Sort of like having them add 3K to the tuition and then saying "good news, new student! We'll give you 3K for travel!" I'm OK with that. Travel = education.

Oh no. It just occurred to me that today's beehive discovery may be small hive beetle.

Could those be small hive beetle larvae in my hive and not, as I thought, honeybee larvae? I can't do anything tonight at 11 PM, but tomorrow I'll be out there checking those larvae, no matter what the weather.

Small hive beetles! I should have thought of that. I even saw three of them a week ago.

I thought I had found all the "ing"s of beekeeping last year. But since then I've learned of other "ings"

checker-boarding -- a method of moving new frames [4/4/11 update: not "new frames" but "drawn frames" -- there's a difference and I just figured it out] and frames full of bees/brood/honey around to create a better environment for the colony
piping -- the sound made by scout bees when they are leading a swarm to its next location or when they are alerting the swarm to the new location, or both (I think)
sliming -- the fouling of a hive by small hive beetles. It's an unpleasant saga and involves the odor of rotting oranges. I admit to smelling something "off" today and 10 days ago when I cleaned out the bottom board of the hive. I've been trying to deny the smell but now I can't, and shouldn't.

Parental warning on language, but maybe it's worth it for the educational value.

Another blogger found this. It takes my mind off my big bee brohaha.

Oh, and it's not for the squeamish either. A lot of blood and teeth and death.

OMG. OMG. OMG!

(I hate to start a sentence with the word "so" but I just have to do it here.)

So I'm puttering around the yard, not rushing around, filling up the bees' watering places since so many of them are out on this 50-degree sunny day. I decide to peek under the top of my hive to see what's up, if anything. Well, a lot is up, including the Queen, who is obviously in the top of the 4-box-high hive laying eggs on the underside of the inner screen cover. This might not mean a lot to anyone but a beekeeper but it's NOT what you want to see. The Queen is obviously healthy, and is being fed well and (most important I guess) she's being kept alive. But I DON'T want her laying eggs on the screened cover! And right now I have a vague idea of what needs to be done, but only a vague idea of the best approach.

About a week to 10 days ago, I was musing about adding another new box with frames to the top, because the hive seemed so strong and surprisingly full of honey given the time of year. I asked my beekeeping listserv group if anyone agreed with my idea of adding a box. I got a few answers, all of them helpful but none of them being this answer: yes, add a box NOW. So I didn't add the box. I was waiting for a warmer day to do a hive inspection that would give me more information about the state of the bees.

Now I must go do some reading, and thinking, and probably emailing, to get ideas for how I can add a box without killing the Queen. I'd like to do it now, but it's 4:30 in the afternoon and the temperature is dropping and the day is getting short and the bees will be coming home and oh my poor dear Queen out there laying eggs at the f'ing top of the hive.

OMG.

[PS: The larvae are in the middle of the picture. The white stuff on the right is fondant, a solid sugar candy that I fed them 2 weeks ago and they probably didn't need but they almost finished. A self-respecting beekeeper will look at that and say "why didn't you remove it? or why didn't you this? or why did you that? or what were you thinking??"

Beekeeping: not for the faint of heart.]

Graphic novels. That's what they're called in publishing and library lingo, but they're still just comic books to me.

One of the benefits of volunteering at my local library is coming across things I wasn't looking for. Like this little documentary about bees, and this so-called novel about bees. I'm a graphic novel snob -- don't like them. Or the idea of them. But reading anything is better than reading nothing so... The system for shelving graphic novels, at least at my library, is really, really stupid. Well, not stupid, but odd. I guess the way I would describe it is that they are organized by series, which translates (in my brain) to organizing them by size.

I think the bees are the heroes in this "novel" but I'm not sure. Will report back later.

Am I getting too old to understand these things?!?

I'm seriously asking for an explanation for this and any other New Yorker cartoon I post with the label "New Yorker cartoons I don't get." I will not be offended if someone decides to explain these things to me. I mean really...what is this all about. Jars of jam?

Could this be garlic? (3/26/11: Taste test confirms that it is!)

In the fall of 2009 in this very spot I planted garlic bulbs, and in the spring of 2010 I harvested a small crop of garlic. I didn't plant garlic again last fall. So what's this? Maybe it's garlic from the original planting and it just wasn't ready to emerge until now? Or maybe when I dug up the garlic last spring I left behind some bulblets, which are now emerging? [Chives, upper left, are looking good!]

My vegetable garden deer fence is more or less re-installed but I have to make some more adjustments to keep the beasts from sticking their noses under the fencing and forcing their way in. And the fencing has to be groundhog-proof too, since a family lives in the woods across the street. And there are a few bunnies here too, although ever since the foxes became more apparent I've seen fewer and fewer bunnies.

3/26/11: Rhetorical questions. Why do people have to keep reminding me to smell and/or taste leaves? Am I incapable of remembering to do that? dummy.

How can you not love these pictures?

They were probably talking about where to have lunch.
(For those too young to know, these are pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.)

Latkes. As good as they look. No, better.

Thanks to Anne for the inspiration and directions.

A Friend brings food, and more.

It was such a treat to meet and greet and spend a while yesterday with my friend A. of The Complaint Department. A. visited my home, met my kitties, toured my small gardens, saw my beehive, and generally relaxed, drank coffee, and schmoozed with Doug and me for a nice long while. So for the first time, I've met, in the flesh, someone I've known only through blogging -- I highly recommend it to others!

A. brought the delights you see before you. Apple/walnut (?) bread -- she will speak up I hope to confirm or correct my memory and tastebuds -- and Blondies, those most decadent and wondrous bars of everything tasty.

It was a wonderful visit! And she didn't complain once. Not once.

(Please note the Black Midnight Cake on her very interesting and well-written blog. So far, I've managed to avoid making this cake but I'll eventually lose the battle with my brain and bake one. And for meat-eaters out there, you really should try her Rouladen. It's a very easy recipe and oh-so-yummy.)

From somewhere out there in the Big WWW. Sweet! Brave! Probably rescued by the human behind the camera.

This is such a great book.

An excerpt, lifted from NPR. Sarah is describing a conversation about the play Assassins, which she saw in the Berkshires. My favorite part is when she gets into Maureen Stapleton.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes. There they were — John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz — in tune and in the flesh. The men who murdered Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were elbow to elbow with Lee Harvey Oswald and the klutzy girls who botched their hits on klutzy Gerald Ford, harmonizing on a toe-tapper called "Everybody's Got the Right to Be Happy," a song I cheerfully hummed walking back to the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying.

Not that I came all the way from New York City just to enjoy a chorus line of presidential assassins. Mostly, I came to the Berkshires because of the man who brought one of those presidents back to life. I was there to visit Chesterwood, the house and studio once belonging to Daniel Chester French, the artist responsible for the Abraham Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial. A nauseating four-hour bus ride from the Port Authority terminal just to see the room where some patriotic chiseler came up with a marble statue? For some reason, none of my friends wanted to come with.

Because I had to stay overnight and this being New England, the only place to stay was a bed-and-breakfast. It was a lovely old country mansion operated by amiable people. That said, I am not a bed-and-breakfast person.

I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're "quaint," a polite way of saying "no TV." They are "romantic," i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're "cozy," meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.

The real reason bed-and-breakfasts make me nervous is breakfast. As if it's not queasy enough to stay in a stranger's home and sleep in a bed bedecked with nineteen pillows.

In the morning, the usually cornflake-consuming, wheat-intolerant guest is served floury baked goods on plates so fancy any normal person would keep them locked in the china cabinet even if Queen Victoria herself rose from the dead and showed up for tea. The guest, normally a silent morning reader of newspapers, is expected to chat with the other strangers staying in the strangers' home.

At my Berkshires bed-and-breakfast, I am seated at a table with one middle-aged Englishman and an elderly couple from Greenwich, Connecticut. The three of them make small talk about golf, the weather, and the room's chandeliers, one of which, apparently, is Venetian. I cannot think of a thing to say to these people. Seated at the head of the table, I am the black hole of breakfast, a silent void of gloom sucking the sunshine out of their neighborly New England day. But that is not the kind of girl my mother raised me to be. I consider asking the Connecticut couple if they had ever run into Jack Paar, who I heard had retired near where they live, but I look like I was born after Paar quit hosting The Tonight Show (because I was) and so I'd have to explain how much I like watching tapes of old programs at the Museum of Television and Radio and I don't want to get too personal.

It seems that all three of them attended a Boston Pops concert at Tanglewood the previous evening, and they chat about the conductor. This, I think, is my in. I, too, enjoy being entertained.

Relieved to have something, anything, to say, I pipe up, "I went to the Berkshire Theatre Festival last night."

"Oh, did you see Peter Pan?" the woman asks.

"No," I say."Assassins!"

"What's that?" wonders the Englishman.

To make up for the fact that I've been clammed up and moping I speak too fast, merrily chirping, "It's the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president."

"Oh," remarks Mr. Connecticut. "How was it?"

"Oh my god," I gush. "Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush." Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is "too personal," but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

Now, a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast's teapot collection, they probably didn't want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I'm around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

I continue. "But the main thing that surprised me was how romantic Assassins was."

"Romantic?" sneers a skeptic.

"Totally," I rebut. "There's a very tender love scene between Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz."

Blank stares.

"You know. He was the anarchist who killed McKinley. Buffalo? 1901? Anyway, the authorities initially suspected Goldman had helped him, but all it was was that he had heard her speak a couple of times about sticking it to The Man. He'd met her, but she wasn't his co-conspirator. Anyway, the play dramatizes the moment they meet. He stops her on the street to tell her that he loves her. The guy who played Czolgosz was wonderful. He had this smoldering Eastern European accent. Actually, he sounded a lot like Dracula — but in a good way, if you know what I mean." (They don't.)

"He told her, 'Miss Goldman, I am in love with you.' She answered that she didn't have time to be in love with him. Which was cute. But, this was my one misgiving about the performance, I thought that the woman playing Goldman was too ladylike, too much of a wallflower. Wasn't Emma Goldman loud and brash and all gung ho? Here was a woman whose words inspired a guy to kill a president. And come to think of it, one of her old boyfriends shot the industrialist Henry Frick. Maybe I'm too swayed by the way Maureen Stapleton played Goldman in the film Reds. She was so bossy! And remember Stapleton in that Woody Allen movie, Interiors? Geraldine Page is all beige this and bland that so her husband divorces her and hooks up with noisy, klutzy Maureen Stapleton, who laughs too loud and smashes pottery and wears a blood-red dress to symbolize that she is Alive, capital A. Wait. I lost my train of thought. Where was I?"

Englishman: "I believe Dracula was in love with Maureen Stapleton."

"Oh, right. I haven't even mentioned the most touching part. Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley sing this duet, a love song to Charles Manson and Jodie Foster. Hinckley and Squeaky sang that they would do anything for Charlie Manson and Jodie Foster. And I really believed them! Squeaky's like, 'I would crawl belly-deep through hell,' and Hinckley's all, 'Baby, I'd die for you.' It was adorable."

Mr. Connecticut looks at his watch and I simultaneously realize that I've said way too much and that saying way too much means I might miss my bus back home. And I really want to go home. I yell, "Nice meeting you!" and nearly knock down the teapot collection in my rush to get away from them.

Clutter as you enter my house: three scarves (Resolution No. 8), a stack of miscellaneous books, and a bowl from the Southwest, pre-1920.

The bowl is OK there. But the scarves and the stack of books should go some place else.

Resolution No. 8: Try to finish most of the 20+ scarfs I've started.

Spotted at the local Amish market.

I've read that cooked cow's head is a traditional Mexican breakfast dish. For a particularly disgusting view, go here. Or not. I recommend not.

Lucy and boyfriend.

The outside kitty sometimes comes to visit late at night. I don't know that he's a he, but I'm pretending he is. Lucy is always the interested party. She's got a crush on him....

[With Stephen Colbert in the background.]

Some hope for the so-called health care system?

I'm generally a pretty pessimistic person. Or maybe I'm just a realist. For example, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about climate change, and I have reached absolutely no conclusions about anything. I feel like no one can have an informed opinion on the subject because there are just too many variables and unknowns.

I feel sort of the same way about health care in this country. As a ER doctor friend said to me recently "there is no system" in the health care system.

But Atul Gawande, a physician who writes for the New Yorker, has the power to make me less pessimistic. He did it last summer when he wrote about end of life choices. He did it 2 years ago when he contrasted health care in a smallish place in Texas with care given in Rochester, MN.

Now he's done it again by writing about medical hot spots: specific places and specific types of people who account for huge gobs of health care $$. And how some very smart people are using common sense and grass roots techniques to keep those specific people healthier. If you're interested in this kind of (wonky?) thing, you gotta read it; I can't summarize it.

Photograph by Phillip Toledano.

More bees.

This illustration is from an 11th century Arabic medical book. I think it's so beautiful.

From Wikipedia:
The Tacuinum (sometimes Taccuinum) Sanitatis is a medieval handbook on wellness, based on the Taqwim al‑sihha تقويم الصحة ("Maintenance of Health"), an eleventh-century Arab medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad. Aimed at a cultured lay audience, the text exists in several variant Latin versions, the manuscripts of which are characteristically so profusely illustrated that one student called the Taccuinum "a trecento picture book," only "nominally a medical text". Though describing in detail the beneficial and harmful properties of foods and plants, it is far more than a herbal: listing its contents organically rather than alphabetically, it sets forth the six essential elements for well-being:

* sufficient food and drink in moderation,
* fresh air,
* alternations of activity and rest,
* alternations of sleep and wakefulness,
* secretions and excretions of humours, and finally
* the effects of states of mind.

Illnesses result from imbalance of these elements, therefore a healthy life is lived in harmony.

Boy could I use a manicure. Not very likely.

This possibly elderly worker landed on the ground in front of the hive with a pretty heavy load of pollen. I put her on top of the hive hoping she could get home from there. When she showed no signs of moving, I helped her get back to the front door. Just one lady of a certain age helping another.

Pollen gathering.

(a) The crocuses are blooming.
(b) Bees are landing on the crocuses and wrapping their bodies around the stamens.
(c) Bees are bringing bag-loads of something yellowish back to the hive.
Can I conclude that the bees are bringing crocus pollen back to the hive? Not sure. Beekeepers say that skunk cabbage (AKA false hellebore) is also blooming now and bees love it. There may be skunk cabbage in the park next door but I've never seen it -- never really looked for it. Maybe I will soon. My yard has real hellebores, and they are beginning to poke up and out.

I'm really glad I put up that mouse guard, and the girls had no trouble at all navigating over it.