Country Mouse Monday: welcome back, girls!!

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, I want to shout it from the rooftops:

It's Spring! It's Spring!  

And to celebrate, we spent a few hours at Rebecca's apiary on Saturday, splitting hives, and bringing some new girls home to our house.

Welcome home, girls!

May you be happy here long time.

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Country Mouse Monday: bees are just yoga, man

This was one of those weekends that was all bees, bees, bees from beginning to end, a blissful playing with and talking about them, first on Saturday at Glide, where I think we taught about 30 interested strangers, to yesterday when my friend Fredo came over for lunch and hive inspection.  Super-duper fun.

Somewhere along the line on Saturday afternoon, standing on the roof at Glide Memorial in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, one of the students, all geared up in her full-body bee suit turned to me and said,

"It really helps if you stay calm, right?"

Yup. Exactly.

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this is your brain on bees

Everything I read this morning seems to overlap the last thing I read, somehow magically picking up a thread that was in the first piece and carrying it through the second, and then from the second into the third.  Like a funny little echo effect, this thematic refrain sets the tone for the day, becomes a lens through which I go looking for the next bit of the pattern to emerge.

First thing I read this morning?  Naturally, a piece about bee brain plasticity, posted to Facebook by the Round Rock Honey Beekeeping Academy, for whom I begin assistant-teaching this weekend (yay!).

Turning Back the Clock on Aging relates new findings that bees who change their social role -- i.e., trade in foraging, an essentially solo late-life activity, for in-hive, more social tasks like caring for young bees, feeding them, cleaning up after them -- reverse the aging of their brains.

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Taking the time it takes

It's Week One, Day Three of my six-week disability leave and I'm standing here at the kitchen counter, eating toast, drinking coffee and thinking and enjoying.  I could sleep all day if I wanted, but instead I'm trying to keep to a schedule, getting up at around 6, later than Joe but while the coffee is still hot.

Standing and typing is a habit I developed when I was too uncomfortable to sit.  The kitchen counter is just the right height, and honestly it offers everything I could ask for.  Enough room for all my tools, not least of which are coffee in my favorite mug, toasted Dave's Killer Bread (also favorite), space for phone, notebook, calculator, books, pencil, etc.  And the light's just right.

I was just reviewing a list I made yesterday, a shopping list for our bees, and realized suddenly how much things have changed.  We started keeping bees in 2009, so now we're starting our fourth season as beekeepers.  It's the fulfillment of a long-time dream and I love it, but that's not to say it's been without challenges.  Or without expense. Or that I almost quit.

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There IS a way...

Lifting a technique from The Bloggess, who naturally didn't invent it but who makes me laugh regularly thanks to the way she re-tells absurd exchanges with her husband Victor like this one on her blog about the allure of dead mice, I would like to take this opportunity to re-tell a conversation last night between me and my Victor -- that is, Joe.  In many ways, Joe functions in my stories (read: my life) the way Victor does in The Bloggess's, except because I'm biased I'm sure Joe is a lot foxier.

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