"Let the Beauty You Love Be What You Do." - Rumi

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, 

for going out, I found, was really going in.” - ​John Muir

The front yard at sunset a couple nights ago.  Major seeding happening in the greenhouse to the right today.

 “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” -

​ ​

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Today's Infusion:  Hawthorn flower and leaf, Nettles, Hibiscus, Raspberry, Mulberry, and Sarsaparilla.

"​Close some doors. 

Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere." 
- ​Paulo Coelho

Down the road from my house on the way to spend the day at the tattoo shop yesterday:  a gaggle of Vultures.  I did not see anything dead; there were just as many in the trees.  I take it as a sign from a totem of mine.  Their scientific name is apt:    Cathartes aura, meaning 'Golden Purifier."  Their medicine totem is very powerful.  They create life from death. Their riding of the thermals gives vision to the wind.  Graceful creatures, with little fear, doing what needs to be done and sustaining themselves from it - and in so doing supporting health for ALL.  <3

 I saw Grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, “It tastes sweet, doesn’t it?” 

“You have caught me,” Grief answered, “and you’ve ruined my business. 

How can I sell sorrow, when you know its blessings?”
- Rumi

Change.

"Why then have to be human?
Oh, not because happiness exists,
Nor out of curiosity...
But because being here means so much;
Because everything here,
Vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
And strangely keeps calling to us...
To have been
Here once, completely, even if only once,
To have been at one with the earth -
This is beyond undoing."
– Rainer Maria Rilke


~~~

The Solution to Hive Beetles - or, Who's Living in my Hive?

"Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvelous error! –
That I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
And sweet honey
from my past mistakes."
- Antonio Machado

Well, I think I may have found the solution to hive beetles and maybe even wax moth!  Ha!

Did she kill the bee or did she eat one that died naturally from old age or the horribly cold winter we had?  The hive was full of "fresh" dead bees.  I feed them to my songbirds at the feeders when I clean out a dead hive.

Black Widow spiders!  Ha!

I went into winter with 3 hives and one died so I split its contents (honey, pollen, and comb) between the other two to keep until Spring (as they and the freezing temperatures will do a better job of protecting it than any other means I have), but this meant that there was lots of open space in the hives.  Well one of them, Organza, had heavy winter losses and I was concerned she may have died (we had 60mph winds and lows in the single digits this winter), so I went in to inspect Thursday since it was in the 70s and sunny.  I found the hive alive and well (with Queen) though the bee ball was about the size of my fist and loose.  Since temperatures have warmed and the hive has plenty of food, I feel she will do okay.

Anyway, enough background info, get this, I found 7!  seven! Black Widows IN THE HIVE.  I have issues with hive beetles in my hives (no mite issues as many others do) and had seen a couple wax moth larvae at the top when inspecting on a cooler day (but not going further into the hive because it was too cold).  Well, not a single hive beetle in the entire hive!  and no signs of wax moth or their larvae I had seen earlier.

Such Sheer Beauty.

I think the huge population loss was from the weather, but I s'pose the Black Widows may have played a role too?  So maybe not truly an answer, but an interesting consideration nonetheless.  Black Widows are not hunters; they stay put in their webs, so any insect they eat has to basically go to them.  I imagine the bees could learn where they are and stay away (in situations such as this where there is lots of space in the hive).  Seems this type of thing would happen naturally in hives in trees.  Also, I have a feeling the Black Widows were merely being opportunists (food, warmth, protection from the elements) and not ravaging killers.

I took the spiders out gently and put them in the woods to go about their lives elsewhere.  I am just glad I didn't get bit as I know to be careful where I put my hands and bare feet in the yard, but never thought of the danger in my hive.  I don't wear gloves when working the bees and had put my hand right into the area where I spotted the first Black Widow, pictured above.  Ack.  Never considered there being something more dangerous than a bee sting in the hive!

Organza is getting renamed because of this, from now on she will be called 'Friend of the Widow.'  :)

Harvested Propolis for Medicine-making.

I cleaned up the extra supers and got Friend of the Widow down to 3 medium supers, two full of honey and pollen and one just open comb.  Some of this honey will go on my new packages that are coming soon along with the cleaned up open comb supers I took off - no Black Widows!

Heroes - Wendell Berry

I am going to start blogging my heroes:  people who inspire me, people who give me faith in the human race, people who do the right thing no matter, people we should all be acquainted with...

To begin, Wendell Berry, a spectacular man whose words are inimitable, rich and masterful,
yet humble and simple at the same time, words that can be a grace to our days, our life.

Here are some of those wonderful words...and a great interview with Bill Moyers.

'The Peace of Wild Things'

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

If you aren't familiar with Wendell Berry, please become so, and if you already are,
refresh yourself again with the magic touch of his words...

To the Unseeable Animal

My Daughter: "I hope there's an animal
Somewhere that nobody has ever seen.
And I hope nobody ever sees it."

 

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods' shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have waked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

Are you free?

Beast of Beauty

Nature's Abstract

"Why should one reject the perfect in favor of the imperfect?  The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard.  We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite.  Beauty must have room, must be associated with freedom.  Freedom, indeed, is beauty.  The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom."
  - Soetsu Yanagi  The Unknown Craftsman

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." - Sir Francis Bacon

"Beauty is a form of genius - is higher than genius, as it needs no explanation.
It is one of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime,
or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon."

  - Oscar Wilde

Nature's Abstract

"Ask a toad what beauty is.”  - Voltaire

“The divine is not separate from the beast.” - Lenore Kandel

"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion."  - Edgar Allen Poe

 “Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”  - Nadine Gordimer

Nature's Abstract

 “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” - Keats

 “The heart suffers when it cannot see and touch beauty,
but beauty is not shy it is synonymous with existence.” - Hafiz

 “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.“

 - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"There is a beast in man that needs to be exercised, not exorcised."  - Anton LeVey

 "Beauty lifts the soul and the sublime shatters the ego." - J. Campbell

"If women can learn to surrender the seductiveness of youth and to value themselves 

by other than adolescent standards of beauty, they can explore the dignity of elder beauty 

and reclaim the right to age without stigma."  - Z. Schachter-Shalomi 

Beatrice Wood - a hero of mine

 "Beauty will save the world."  - Fyodor Dostoevsky