Song of the Sea to the Shore
by Robert Fanning, published in Aug 2002 issue of Poetry
Unraveling velvet, wave after wave, driven
by wind, unwinding by storm, by gravity thrown -
however, heaving to reach you, to find you, I’ve striven
undulant, erosive, blown -
or lying flat as glass for your falling clear
down: I can’t swallow you. So why
have I felt I’ve reached you – as two reflected stars,
surfaced, lie near – as if the sky’s
close element is one in me, where starfish
cleave to stones – if you’re so far?
I’ve touched you, I know, but my rush
subsides; our meetings only leave desire’s
fleeting trace. Every place I touch you
changes shape. Shore, lie down -
undo. I’ll fill your thirsty bones with blue.
I’ll flood your every cave and we’ll be one.
Beekeeping Begins
The bees are living in my garden now.
Getting the bees
I left home at 7:30 am on Thursday, racing across Orcas Island so I could catch the early Anacortes ferry and then racing down highway 20 so I could catch the earlyish Port Townsend ferry. The connections all worked, and I was able to spent Thursday afternoon with the warm-hearted family who run Tarboo Valley Bees in Quilcene. They taught me how to hive packages of bees, and we worked together with the docile bees until it got dark. We didn’t even need gloves.
beehives at Tarboo Valley bees
Getting ready for customers to pick up bees
Next morning, I left Quilcene early, and arrived home barely before nightfall, after travelling all day with my bees. The poor things had already been in their packages since last Monday, driven from California to Washington in the back of a truck with about 350 other packages. Adding my additional 12 hours of travel, including two ferries, two trucks, and a small boat, may have just about done in any good will the bees might have still had At any rate, when I hived them the next day (yesterday) my nice docile bees had turned into the Bees from Hell.
Regardless of how much sugar water I sprayed them with, they let me know in no uncertain terms that they were Not Pleased with anything that was happening. It took a few minutes, and a few standoffs, before I got serious about suiting up and covered every square millimeter of exposed flesh from head to toe. After that, the hiving went reasonably successfully, with a couple small hitches due to my rank inexperience.
My basic Bee Facts:
I purchased two four-lb packages of New World Carniolans from Tarboo Valley Bees in Quilcene WA. The folks at Tarboo Valley Bees had driven the bees up from a huge bee breeder, Olivarez Apiaries in Chico, CA. It turns out that the bees in the packages at the time I received them were actually Italian, but the mated Carniolan queen is what allows the apiary to call the package “Carniolan”. Since individual bees live only 6 weeks, my hives will truly be only Carniolan in a couple of months, because the queen bee will be laying only eggs of her own type.
I’m using all Medium (Western) hive boxes, all 8-frame.
I’m not using any foundation. My frames are all from Kelleys, specially made for foundationless hives with a wedge on the top bar pointing downward.
I replaced the cork in the queen cage with a marshmallow at the time of installing the package.
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Things I wish I’d done differently, so far:
I wish I had installed the queen cage in the lower Medium box, instead of the upper one. (I’m using two Medium 8-frame boxes to start off each hive.) The bees tend to gather in a big clump around the queen, and it seems like it would have been better for that clump to be in the middle rather than right at the top.
I wish I had not even attempted Ziploc baggie feeders. Why does anyone think that’s a good idea? The books and the forums all mention it as an option, and the low-tech quality of it appealed to me until I tried it. Then, after sugar-waterfalls and various collapses I vowed never to go that route again. It’s cumbersome, messy, and unsettles the bees because of having to be put right on top of the frames.
I wish I had called up some of the woodenware suppliers ahead of time and asked if they could make me some 8-frame ware. Western Bee Supplies in Montana has good products at good prices, but did not mention on their website at the time that they’re also open to producing 8-frame ware on request. We ended up cutting new dovetails on regular 10-frame size boxes, and making the boxes smaller ourselves. And we had to put homemade tops and bottoms on, because the custom tops and bottoms take so much longer.
Things I’ve done so far which seem good:
I made hive-top feeders out of quart mason jars, put down into holes in my temporary lids. This works well. I don’t have a hive box surrounding the jar, but it’s clean and tight so there isn’t really any sugar water leaking out to draw robbers.
I give them water out of an old chick waterer with stones in the trough.
We painted the hives with shellac, a natural product, to protect them from the weather. I like this better than paint.
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Questions I’m waiting to learn the answers to:
Will the bees build all kinds of crazy comb structures in the foundationless hive?
Will the bees accept the queen, and not kill her when she leaves the queen cage?
In one of my hives, I see a few small splotches on the outside, on the wood. Do I have a Nosema problem already?
One hive is taking more syrup than the other, and the activity around it seems more orderly. Does that suggest that that hive is in better shape?
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random bee thoughts:
The extent to which a hive is a single organism fascinates me. With two hives, I feel that I’ve gotten two animals, kind of. Formidably complex, with elaborate developmental stages and communication methods. Keeping bees seems to be more about subtle perceptions and careful research then it is about the basic physical labor of upkeep. Livestock for the intellectual?