Salon did an excellent job with this article, as they got four different experts with different viewpoints on why the bees are collapsing. You have to get through an ad to get to the article, but I found it worth it.

Gosh. It's been a while since I wrote.

I went to the OUR center garden every morning, planting, weeding, and trying to figure out what people really wanted to do. Finally, by Wednesday, I figured out that we could also go to the Rec. Center, in the afternoon, and it felt great.

It's been 80's out, lately. Just like Colorado, jump right from winter into summer, with just a few days of rain in between. Sigh. I miss the rain. Yeah, I know.

The volunteers have been great. There's a lot of weeding done and beds planted and when things come up it should be easier.

( Read more... )

... but it has.

Thanks to amberley for the reference.

On Saturday I was kind of on edge, as I had no idea what I was supposed to do that afternoon at the National Western Stock Show (okay... why is it National AND Western, or are only folks in the West stock keepers? That seems wrong...). I was signed up from 2-6pm to man the bee booth, but the main coordinator called to say that because of the snow, they hadn't been able to get the live colony out of it's hive, yet. They were going to try at noon (when it would be 24° F instead of 7°F) and they might not get to the show before the end of my shift. He advised that it would probably be slow without the bees.

( Read on about how not-slow it was... )

I'm kind of peering at Etsy and being fascinated. Especially with the stashes of hand spun I have at home, that it would be cool to find a home for. Hm. I have to admit that I spin much faster than I knit, and I have three or four bunches of hand spun laceweight wools from back when it was too hard to buy commercial lace weight yarns. I know that I'm probably never going to get around to knitting them, so why not sell them to someone that would really value them for what they are?

Might well be worthwhile at the prices they're talking about for advertising things.

Thanks palinade for being the pointer to it all. I appreciate that a lot.

The bee class last night was a total and complete coverage of the biology, life cycle, and ecology of honey bees Apis mellifera. It was astonishingly thorough, some of it was stuff that I'd heard about in concept (dancing to communicate where pollen/nectar sources are) but the natural science teacher provided astonishing detail about it (circle dance=close, figure-8=further, speed/number of iterations=distance, angle of the dances=relative angle from the sun with the top of the hive as "at the sun", and, the newest bit, that the frequency of the buzzing while dancing equates to the height from the standard flight pattern from the hive). Sexes, birth, through death for all three social elements, and it was pretty fun. I didn't need to read the book, but it helped to make it easy to follow along with the other details.

I think that what I liked the best were the personal stories. Like the teacher, when she was a girl, accidentally smashed a yellow jacket nest, and had been stung over 100 times that one time. So, when she started beekeeping, she was deathly afraid of getting stung. Then, one day, she'd had a family over to teach them about extraction of honey, and they'd done a few frames, and wanted to go see something else. So the family left after she'd given them directions and things, and she went back to clean up. The extractor had been, accidentally, left open. A bee had found it and brought over 100 of her sisters. But they were getting stuck in the honey when they landed on it to collect it and were, basically drowning in 40 pounds of honey!

She felt really bad about her bees dying through no fault of their own, and so she started rescuing them. She just dug in there and pulled out big handfuls of bees and set them on the ground, where they struggled to find each other and clean each other off. Which she thought was very cool. She realized she'd been so frantic to safe them she hadn't worried about getting stung at all. Then she realized she was getting tickled on her arms, and where she'd dug into the honey, she was covered with her bees, who were just cleaning her off as well. Awwww... :-)

I think it's the personality bits about the domesticated honey bee that amaze me. The biology, what glands do which and how they all work is interesting mechanics for trying to figure out what's happening when there are problems. But... how they interact with people is fascinating to me.

Beekeeping is certainly for geeks. There is a ton of detail and local minutia and specifics that really do affect the outcome.

( Mmmm... details... )

One great good thing that did come out of going to the fair last night was finding out that the local Beekeepers' Association has a weekly, two-hour class from October thru December that covers everything about beekeeping. Ooo... That would be very cool.

Turns out that a neighbor of ours has a bee hive, which is why my garden does so very well so far as pollenation. I should thank them with tomatoes or something. :-)