Guest Blog from abigailmm – Twenty thousand head of very small livestock – part one
I have been interested in the idea of keeping bees for a while. Fifteen years ago I took a course, but for several reasons didn’t get bees. I had another chance this spring, and this time I was really ready to take them on.
The class was taught by two professional beekeepers. John was a beekeeping hobbyist before he retired from his engineering job, and since then he has increased his operation until he has several hundred colonies and a pretty full-time job again. His partner Blake was one of the local beekeeping club’s youth scholarship students as a thirteen-year-old. He took to the bees so successfully that now he owns about three hundred colonies, and is president this year of the club. He’s nineteen!
Their main beeyards are many miles south, where there is a better honeyflow.* Their honey house**, site of the class, is about 60 miles from me, at John’s home. In general, they don’t keep bees there at their home site, because it would be a serious nuisance when they were processing honey to have thousands of local bees battering at the door of the honey house to get the sticky sweet as they were bottling it. But they have a sideline of supplying a couple hundred new “nucs,” or nucleus hives, each spring to hobbyists in the Collin County area.
So in the early spring they accept hive boxes, put three or four frames of bees and brood from their strongest hives into each one, plus a new queen***, set them out behind the honey house, and feed them for six weeks to get them to start building up their numbers. Then the students, beginners, and other customers come back on the designated evenings and get their new hives.
Here is John’s driveway (John is on the right) with all the hives he is going to fill with bees. One of my frames had a tiny bit of extra protein, in addition to the glue and the nails, from an incautious hammer blow on the side of my finger. But the red spot doesn’t show in this photo. The red arrow points to MY hive.
I brought home my bees about 10pm on April 29. They look very small in my backyard (and as I look back at this picture, it’s so green! The yard is all dry and crunchy and straw-colored now). At this time there were probably around eight thousand bees in the hive. My first hive inspection is on Youtube.
Although John showed me my queen when I got the hive, I could never spot her myself. A couple of weeks later, I was upset to see queen cells built on the surface of the comb. These are extensions put over normal cells when the workers realize, by the diminished pheromones, that their queen is ailing or missing. If they have worker larvae less than three days old, they can enlarge their cells and keep feeding them royal jelly and thereby produce new queens, a process called supersedure.
This is a fairly normal occurrence, but beekeepers don’t like to see it, because there is a three-week gap in the hive’s springtime growth, while the new queen grows up, gets mated, and starts to lay eggs. But anyway, my bees managed it, and on June 17th I saw the queen, and lots of sealed cells of pupating young bees.
I’ll talk about some divergent philosophies of beekeeping, describe an inspection, and also let you know how much harvest I was able to get in this first year, in a couple of subsequent posts. Meanwhile, my cousin Kieren Ladner visited a few weeks ago. He is a professional photographer, and kindly agreed to document a hive inspection, so I have a supply of nice detailed photos of the bees in the hive, as of June 17. He took the three above.
I spend a lot of time sitting out in front of the hive with binoculars, watching the coming and going, and wishing I had x-ray vision. Also I WISH I had Elizabeth Moon’s (emoontx’s) camera, AND her skill at photographing bugs.
* Honeyflow is beekeeper jargon for the annual period(s) when a great many flowers are blooming and offering nectar, and bees can rapidly build up lots of surplus honey.
** The Honey House is the beekeeper’s production facility for extracting and bottling honey. State regulations cover such requirements as stainless steel fixtures and washable walls and floor. You can NOT use your kitchen and legally sell your honey.
*** The queen is the only fully-developed fertile female in the hive. She lays up to 1000 eggs per day in the spring when the colony is building up its strength for the honeyflow. The workers hatch from fertilized eggs, but their diet causes them to develop wax glands and mandibular glands (for making food for baby bees) but not functional ovaries. Their ovipositor becomes modified to the stinger.°
° And yes, I have been stung. Three times so far, and all of them avoidable if I had been paying attention to the bees’ behavior, and had not been stubborn. Two were relatively benign, the third must have had much more venom in her, cause it HURT and kept hurting for a couple of days. So now I pay more attention, and I try not to be stubborn. If they look or sound cranky, be flexible in your plans. GO AWAY.
Happy 26th and tra la la
I know what the calendar says, but officially it’s the 26th. I tweeted about this earlier: we celebrate two anniversaries, our wedding anniversary the third of January*, and the 26th of July, which is the day, now nineteen years ago, that I drove to the Bangor, Maine airport to pick up this skinny, nervy, twitchy**, odd *** English writer wallah whom I knew very slightly, for a harmless tourist weekend and . . . unscheduled things happened. Peter asked me last week if I’d like to go out to dinner for the 26th, which is what we usually do, and I said oh yes, please, definitely.
Then I noticed that the 26th fell on a Monday this year. Wait, no! Not Monday! Now that Wednesday Ditherington practise is no more, Monday is semi-sacred second weekly tower practise! † Peter had already made the booking. I was as humble as possible when I asked if we could change it to Tuesday.††
And it is now rather late at night (as it so often is, about 300 words into tonight’s blog entry) and I am, in truth, a trifle the worse for wear.††† Although a certain amount of this is the calculated fiendishness of restaurants: they ply you with booze, because that’s where the easy mark-ups are, and half a glass of champagne on an empty stomach and I can’t find the floor with both hands. Sigh. You’d think I’d learn to say ‘not till the first course, please’, wouldn’t you? But you scamper into the restaurant—or you do if you don’t go to restaurants much, and we don’t—in a festive mood, so when they come round waving the wine list and lo!, there is champagne by the glass‡, I lose all self-control ‡‡. . . .
Would that‡‡‡ I could lose a little more self control in another direction. I’ve just been having a tweet exchange with EMoon on the subject of practising our singing at home: neither of us does it well or easily, because we’re too self-conscious. Arrrgh. Relax, open the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and let rip: Um. No. Tweet is sadly not a bad description of the kind of noises I make: a sort of muffled eeeping noise. Siiiiiiiigh.
And thus I tell you about today’s voice lesson with mixed emotions. In the first place I can’t stand it that he’s frelling leaving.§ And soon—the end of August and he’s away for a fortnight between now and then. In the second place . . . I’d about decided that Dido’s lament was a bridge too far. Purcell is, in my admittedly limited experience, always harder than he looks—all those lovely long legato lines are full of beartraps and tigerpits of tune and timing—and I’d just about struggled through the early bits of poor Dido’s final moments AND THEN THERE’S THAT FRELLING HIGH G, and . . . nope. No way. I must have been mad to think I could do it—blurt it out there all stark and exposed like that. I’ve been known to hit a G when I’m doing exercises, but then you’re just creeping up the scale while thinking hard about something else.§§ I know the G is there, but . . . it doesn’t come when it’s called.
So I went in today thinking that I’d rather go on with Finzi’s Fear No More, which is what we worked on last week, and I’ve got just about enough voice a year after we started to begin making some attempts at interpretation, cough cough cough cough.§§§ And Blondel sat down at the piano and masterfully opened Dido and Aeneas and started playing. What’s an elderly hag to do? Chiefly what she does in these circumstances is botch things up in a truly amazing manner.# But Blondel, after a year’s practise, pulls my strings pretty well, and just over the course of the hour Dido began to emerge from the banshees and the scalded cats and . . . I actually hit that damned G. I was so astonished that I instantly reverted to scalded cats, but the point is . . . it’s there. It is there, and not only when I’m creeping up on it while thinking of something else.## Okay, this is a good thing, but . . .
And furthermore, because I have no sense, I’m having another voice lesson on Thursday###, to spin out the misery a little more, and get me really cranked for our LAST lesson after he gets back from holiday. It’s going to be a very. . . er . . . a lamentably musical week. I also still have a little dog to finish. The little dog is going rather nicely, I think, thank you. But Peter is playing bridge tomorrow night, and I’m going to stay down at the mews and crouch over the piano and work on a little dog . . . and sing. I am.
* * *
* JRR Tolkien’s birthday. Yes. And your point is?
** Have I told you about him giving the beginning of his Library of Congress speech with his chin on the table because he was pulling up his socks?
*** Also tactless, but that’s another story. Remind me to tell you about lunch.
† Very slightly in my defense, Colin only holds practise if he knows in advance he has enough people, and I’d already said I’d come. On Fridays at New Arcadia^ we just turn up and hope for the best.
^ Peter would know better than to suggest we go out to dinner on a Friday.
†† Clearly it serves me right to have rung like a blind water buffalo last night.^
^ Blind can be done, although not by me. But that lack of opposable thumbs is a ratbag.
††† I might be emphasizing this a little more except it was only a few weeks ago that Alicia and I were forced to drink an entire bottle of champagne almost by ourselves, and I don’t want any of you getting the wrong idea. I am a sober old frump, I’m afraid, and . . . believe it or not, I do feel a strange responsibility to model Sober Old Frumpness as a positive lifestyle choice. I want to work tomorrow, whatever tomorrow we’re talking about, Tuesday, Friday or Zingwath^, and July or November or March, which means either dreadful abstemiousness or an awful lot of water before bed. And the problem with an awful lot of water right before bed. . . .
^ This is a Gflytch day. They have eight or nine in a week, which isn’t a week either, but it depends on the planet. They get around, the Gflytch.
‡ Peter and I had a simultaneous mutual FAIL moment in the taxi^ on the way over when we realised we both forgot the champagne stopper. I’d even got the sucker out. It was lying on my bed next to my keys. I picked the keys up, and . . .
^ So I can get lit, right?
‡‡ Besides, I had something to celebrate. Never mind anniversaries, the hellhounds ate their dinner, despite the fact that it was earlier than usual and there was clearly something else going on.^
^ No, no! No dog noses on this skirt!
‡‡‡ She says cagily, wrenching tonight’s topic progression so violently aside that it screams like a hellhound whose tail has just been stepped on.^
^ This actually depends on the hellhound. Darkness shrieks. Chaos prostrates himself because clearly he was an Evil Dog and left his tail in the wrong place.
§ Not to mention that several of my nearest and dearest—including Peter, Merrilee and Hannah—have made gentle, indirect, non-hellgoddess-rousing noises about how perhaps, since I’ve had what was supposed to be my year to find out what singing feels like as research for writing songs^, maybe I would take Blondel’s departure as a sign and STOP voice lessons. ARE YOU CRAZY? I’M JUST STARTING TO GET INTERESTED.^^
^ Do your homework. Just as I was saying the other night in Ask Robin.
^^ No! No! Not interested! Interest is deadly! Interest takes more time!
§§ Keeping your sinuses open, say. And your tongue forward. And your support supportive. Your body never feels as squashy, eely and lumpy as when you’re trying to organise it for singing.
§§§ And this is really INTERESTING!!!
# Have I told you that Blondel’s replacement at the cathedral is asking if Blondel has any students to pass on to him? And that he’s even younger than Blondel? Can I bear to take voice lessons from a cherub? Can a cherub bear to give voice lessons to an elderly, self-conscious hag with a little skinny voice and a G that does not come when called? What if the cherub is not unflappable? What if he is mean? What if he makes me burst into tears? What if I make him burst into tears?
## Interest is a terrible, scary, despotic thing.
### Right before handbells. Gah.
SUNSHINE contest reminder
AND DON’T FORGET TO GET YOUR FANTABULOUS BAKING DECLARATIONS IN FOR THE DRAWING FOR A GLITTERY AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF THE NEW EDITION OF SUNSHINE. See Saturday’s blog post for details, if you missed it.
But this one is only running till the end of the week, so don’t hang about.
Deadness and weather
I’m a beyond-dead knackered person. A beyond knackered dead person? Whatever. The weather is not conducive to coherent thought, or even retention of much vocabulary: it’s that kind of swampy fug that makes you feel like one of those several-thousand-year-old bodies buried in a peat bog. You may be well preserved for your age but . . . Could I convince you that my birth language is Gveltch*, and I tend to revert when I’m really tired? Gehgrug. Ardangle brak. Slomag. Dah. Fribkizam daldol rakpek, flob in jestru, dangwhammy. I’ve just told you that anyone who rings bells in this weather deserves to be winkledubbed by the gazortfuls till bragolindon. So there. Colin’s crew meets on Mondays, and they have a second tower to keep rung, like we at New Arcadia are responsible for Old Eden, ** so we were ringing at Little Warbling tonight. Little Warbling is known to be the coldest, dankest, clammiest tower in three counties—and the bells are furthermore rather lightweight, so ringing them doesn’t even warm you up much. Except tonight. By the time we’d rung them up, ready to do something with, I was already glad I’d forgotten to change out of my shorts into jeans. There was no air in that air in that bell tower tonight, and I rang like it.*** I had some company being witless and collision-prone, but the end result was nonetheless not inspiriting. Sigh.
I have a better reason for an absence of brain tonight than merely the weather however. I have, I think, referred to the fact that several crucial planets are apparently laying down the aetherial inter-spheroidal version of rubber in retrograde lately, and I have a whole slew of friends having a variety of really bad times. As most of you will know, there isn’t usually a lot you can do in these situations, except pester them with emails/phone calls and, if you’re close enough, cups of tea†.
One of my musical friends has a much-beloved little dog—who died last week. It’s not that she wasn’t due to go some time soon; she was. She’s been elderly for several years and stopped Going Everywhere with Him about a year ago. But? So? Who is ever expecting it when it happens? And who, having given his heart to a dog to tear††, is frelling ready for the final good-bye? †††
So I was possessed by the insane notion of writing a lament for a little dog. I’m not at all sure this was one of my better ideas, but it’s too late now.‡ I can always lose my nerve and retitle it Hellgoddess Railing at the Universe: why don’t our standard companion critters last longer, for pity’s sake? Unless you have a parrot or a boa constrictor you can figure on their checking out every decade and a half or so‡‡, destroying you utterly, and putting you through deciding whether to do it again or not.‡‡‡ So PEG II had a holiday today§ because after a few days of dorking around looking nervously at the ragged beginnings of my mournful little lament and failing to commit, I really wanted to get on with it, one way or another§§. I’d like to put it through his door§§§ by the end of the week.# Gulp.
* * *
* As spoken by the Gflytch. Long time blog readers may remember the Gflytch. They used to appear, scary and scowling, in the shadows of lj.
** And are occasionally dragged into service at Madhatterington on the grounds that it’s the same benefice or some such.^ I haven’t had an update on Madhatterington in a while, and I’m afraid to ask, because anyone who knows the answer is too likely to reply, Oh, that reminds me, what are you doing Sunday afternoon . . . ?
^ The Church of England hierarchy is seriously beyond me. But I like our priest. He wears that t-shirt that I spent years trying to think of someone to give one to: Jesus Loves You. But I’m His Favourite. –I haven’t quite had the face to ask our priest who gave it to him.
*** I am trying to remind myself that a year ago getting through Cambridge at all would have been a miracle beyond my grasp, never mind without being shouted at. One of the frustrating things about being a Not Very Good Ringer is the way everything makes a difference. If you can ring Cambridge, you can ring Cambridge (or Grandsire, or Stedman, or anything else), right? Wrong. Because each bell perforce must start at a different point of the pattern (like a kind of relay race), you will start learning a new method by ringing it always on the same bell, most often the two. That’s the same number bell, the second bell in the row/circle of six. Except that when you’re learning, you want literally the same bell. The exact same bell. The number two bell is a whole different experience at Little Warbling than it is at New Arcadia or South Desuetude. I have been hacking at Cambridge long enough now that I have rung it at Little Warbling before . . . but, as I now recall, the last time I tried was kind of a disaster. Maybe this is reassuring. I’m improving. Siiiiiiiiigh. I just want to be disgustingly brilliant, you know? Why can’t I be disgustingly brilliant? I must not have filled the form out right. I’m sure I ticked the ‘disgustingly brilliant’ box.
† With or without chocolate bickies. I realise this comes as a shock, but not everybody turns to chocolate in times of stress.
†† There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Rudyard Kipling gets it right (again). Don’t let the sentimental twaddle that has grown up around this poem fool you: he’s not in a good mood^.
http://homepage.mac.com/rmansfield/thislamp/files/72e33ce48fa33d32d561c2c2018483e7-165.html
^ And no, you’re right, it’s not Shakespeare. Be grateful.
††† Note that any reference to the rainbow bridge will be deleted. Does. Not. Work. For. Me.
‡ Most of my stuff sounds pretty lugubrious anyway, or at least weird. I wouldn’t tackle an epithalamium.
‡‡ You may get twice that out of a horse, of course, but that may almost be worse, because it’s still only about one-third of what you’re hoping for yourself.
‡‡‡ Probably. Critter people are like that. Which means that one of the saddest, most demoralising curses of our modern era is the no-pets-allowed at old people’s homes.
§ Yes, I know, horrors etc, I am an irresponsible cow, etc etc. Bite me.
§§ I have bottomless, ardent sympathy for people who find words intimidating when I’m trying to write music. Sticking notes together is so . . . is so . . . is . . . uh. . . .
§§§ No, he doesn’t read the blog.
# If Finale hasn’t driven me to running mad with an axe before then.
Chocolate and reality
EMoon wrote to the forum in response to my ‘how do you write good fight scenes’ the other night in Stoked:
YES. And YES again. Coming from the gut and the connection to reality. YES. Doing stuff in real life, other than sitting alone with typewriter/computer*. Imagination works best on plain food like blisters and bumps and scrapes and (though drama becomes increasingly undesired, if ever it was) enough human drama to know what it feels like to be yelled at, insulted, ridiculed, and to have done some of those bad things yourself. (Writers, however, work best on excellent food, including chocolate and beverage of choice.**)
Riding horses, yes. (A woman once wrote wanting me to tell her what it felt like to ride a gallop, because she–who didn’t ride and thought horses smelled bad–was going to write a book about a girl who tamed a wild horse because. Headdesk.***) Outdoor stuff: hiking, camping, scrambling on rocks, walking on different surfaces (loose sand, damp sand, mud, rock, turf, etc.), being up at dawn sometimes (sorry to those who hate dawn, but it has its characteristic smells and colors)† and midnight and all other times of day and all weathers.
Skills your characters have–try them, do them badly, but do them. Even one crookedly-knit scarf with uneven stitches will give you the body-feel of the hands moving in that rhythm. Even one batch of bread that doesn’t actually rise, or is wet in the middle when you thought it was done gives the full sensory experience of handling the materials, kneading, smelling it at different stages, etc. Even if you never hit a target, shooting a longbow, crossbow, or other projectile weapon will give you that necessary sensory memory.
[Note for those of you whose computer screens are showing aberrant colouration: THIS is where EMoon's comment stops and I start.]
Yes. It’s pretty simple really: get a life. Peter used to say that the best training for writing fiction was to go out into the real world and get a proper job, which is pretty much the same thing: don’t live exclusively in your head, even if you have a very good head, stocked with the finest, most complete information on everything.†† Get out and do stuff. It doesn’t have to be a life like a banker or a lawyer or your parents ††† would applaud. But it needs to have more than Twitter, Facebook, and a blog in it. ‡
Although this then brings us to write what you know. Which is also good advice . . . sort of. This is obviously a particularly aggrieved question for those of us who write fantasy and/or science fiction: I’ve done my homework on vampires, dragons and pegasi, sure, but not out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.‡‡ I talk about this in the FAQ somewhere: one of the best things about writing fantasy is that you get to make up your own rules. One of the worst things about writing fantasy is that you have to make up your own rules, and you have to make sure they all hang together, and then you have to follow them.
But to invent a good world with all kinds of stuff and critters and rules that this one doesn’t have, you need to have an instinctive, physical understanding of what a world needs, as well as a good imagination. And the more real-world stuff you’ve done, the better your extrapolation is going to be to your own unreal world. My discovery of homeopathy bears more than a passing resemblance to Mirasol trying to get her head around being Chalice. I’ve done enough camping to conjure Greentree. There are a lot of critters in my books because critters are important to me‡‡‡—and the one book that doesn’t have any important critters§ in it has baking instead.
And after last night I thought we should probably have a recipe.
Three-Chocolate Truffle Brownies
These are based on Chocolate Truffle Triangles from Big Soft Chewy Cookies by Jill Van Cleave, but I found a few of her instructions peculiar, I’m a lazy cow and I hate leftover egg whites, and besides, I wanted more chocolate in mine.
2 sticks/1 c slightly salted butter, soft room temperature
½ c granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 ¼ c all purpose flour
6T unsweetened cocoa powder
10 oz semisweet/dark cooking chocolate: this is one of those things that varies a lot brand to brand and country to country. I now prefer so-called British dark cooking chocolate to the American semisweet stuff I used to import, which seems to me too sweet for some purposes. Whatever you use, break it up in pieces
¼ c espresso or strong coffee or very strong hot chocolate
8 ounces white chocolate, broken up
1/3 c whipping cream
Oven at 350°F
Cream 10 T butter with the sugar until smooth. Add egg and vanilla, then flour and cocoa. Mix till dough forms. Press evenly into an ungreased 8 inch square pan. Bake till edges just begin to pull in, about 15 minutes. Let cool.
Melt dark chocolate and ¼ c butter together. Stir till blended and set aside.
If you’re using coffee or espresso you need 2 T more sugar: dissolve in your chosen liquid when it’s hot. If you’re using hot chocolate, make it VERY STRONG and not too sweet. Cool to warm and stir into melted chocolate. Cool just till it gets claggy, then spread over the baked crust. Chill in refrigerator until set, 2-3 hours.
Heat cream till just not-quite-boiling. Take it off the heat and start dropping broken-up bits of white chocolate in while whisking like mad—white chocolate isn’t chocolate, and has a malign chemistry all of its own. Also whisk in remaining 2 T butter, which will stabilise it if it shows signs of misbehaving. Let cool till spreadable and then lather it over the dark chocolate in the pan. Another 2-3 hours in the refrigerator till it sets thoroughly.
Cut in teeny-tiny squares and brace yourself, or possibly your pancreas.
Dairy-free notes: I can’t help you with the butter, because I do use butter. But you can make hot chocolate successfully with soy milk which works fine here (in Playing with Your Food there is a recipe for using coconut milk, which I’ve never tried in the truffle brownies, but seems to me it ought to work). And I’ve had two successes using soy milk with the frelling white chocolate at the end and one disaster. I like white chocolate, but it has its little ways. My best suggestion there is the whisking like mad part.
POSTSCRIPT, THE NEXT DAY: it belatedly occurs to me that some white chocolate has milk solids in it, so anyone super-sensitive needs to read the label. I can get away with it here, but I don’t eat it often either. And there will be milk-free white chocolate at your local health food shop, or there should be.
* * *
* Or even occasionally piece of paper and white-knuckled grasp of writing implement. I noticed with interest that Melissa Marr—who isn’t even forty yet—tweeted recently that when she’s away from her desk she usually writes in a notebook. Golly. I’m a little-knapsack-laptop addict, but I still write longhand in bed (and sometimes on the sofa), and, while this is kind of a special case, when I take homeopathic cases I do that longhand too, although I may mug it up on the computer later. Not unlike getting that first scratchy longhand story draft on the computer . . . or that first even scratchier sketch of a piece of music onto frelling Finale. Whatever works, which is the gist of all of this. Whatever. Works.
** Absotively.
*** Geezum frell with knobs on. The ones that haunt me are the teenage girls who want to teach their horses to go without bridles, just like Harry and Aerin. GAAAAAAH.
† I’m very fond of dawn, approached from behind. It’s afternoons I could do without.
†† And people run when they see you coming, because you’re probably going to try to offload some of it on them.
††† And I am not talking only to kids and teens here. There are lots of people who’ve never shaken their parents’ expectations, and may go to their graves in a placatory posture, even when the old trout(s) died decades ago. This is sad. Don’t do it. If you were unlucky in the parent department, remember it’s your life.
‡ She says, looking nervously over her shoulder. Hellhounds instantly raise their heads, perpetually ready to be interested in something. Oh, right. Hellhounds. I’m safe.
‡‡ I did my research on bees too, and threw almost all of it all out again. But then I knew what I was throwing out. This is another important skill: laying down the right kind of soil for something else to grow in. Or like Harry and Aerin’s horses going without bridles: this is perfectly possible, but it’s in the highest degree unlikely that you’re going to have an entire regiment of bridle-free cavalry. You might as well have dragons and be done with it.
‡‡‡ And my dressage training was crucial for the bridle-free cavalry.
§ Well, no, I wouldn’t really call vampires and weres critters.