Hydrangea Sex

 

 The bee hive is taller than it used to be....a couple new levels on it since the nectar flow really kicked in hard. Now its almost over and all that's really left is the hot and heavy going on in our tree hydrangeas. Last year I talked here about how incredibly stunning these big, fluffy glamor queens are this time of year.

 

I noticed that the flowers faded faster this year and that our bigger, healthier hive was very busy swarming in and out and jetting to the fluffy blossom masses. Turns out there's a connection. The flowers fade and "turn" once they've been all pollinated. Its very possible that with our more mature population this summer the bees polished off the nectar flow and pollen distribution faster than last year.

 Kind of fun to think about our little hive making a noticeable difference in the local pollination.

I also noticed this year for the first time the anatomy of the hydrangeas. The "blooms" we notice and ply with ph to alter and sell at a fortune to fill out bridal bouquets everywhere aren't blooms at all. They're just bracts...fakey flowers with no real sexy flower body parts. They're all for show...just billboards to attract the insects. You have to look deeper to see the real goods beyond the advertising.

 

See those little star shaped flowers starting their lives as white pearls that are hiding in the inner core of the cluster? That's where its really at. Cool eh? Botany rocks my socks.

 

 

Comb Honey and September Rain

The world is a sodden, dripping place today. We are having one of those gently, sifting September rains I am so fond of. I remember the year that I abruptly started to like autumn after years of being a whiny complainer whenever it wasn't springtime.

I was taking a culinary arts class and I remember getting up very early in the morning and driving off to school with my knife kit and my gigantic recipe book in my chef whites thinking glowingly "How had I never noticed that September rain was a hidden, unnoticed loveliness in life?" I had never noticed before how vivid all the colors are in the rain and how the world slows down, such a lovely thing after the harried panic of school-starting-up-season. I love the mist that comes tip-toeing ahead of the rain in the early morning and the chilly, dankness inside once it really begins to fall....just daring you turn on the kettle and get a good book out. Everyone loves the way rain smells and I love the fact that September rain is often gentle and soothing, a reason for migrating birds to stop their flight and take a pleasant, little congregational water break.

Image via Wikipedia

Bird Migration Patterns of the world, our birds head to South America.

This morning the boys and I pressed our noses against the window and watched a flock of robins stop in our backyard on their way to Brazil or Argentina. They were singing some beautiful rainy day tunes and taking turns hopping around the gravel drive looking for weed seeds and other tidbits. I hope the find all the crabgrass seeds. Ru cocked his head and asked me, "Mommy, why do birds get so happy when it rains?" Maybe he needs to wait awhile for his own autumn epiphany.

First Harvest, my first frame of honey from my own hive.

I screwed up my courage and broke into the bee hive again to check on their stores and also harvested a little taste of honey. I won't really take in any quantity of honey this year at all, the bees need all the boost they can get just to be sure they are able to harvest enough honey to get them through their first winter on our property.

Beautiful natural comb.

I took one frame of honey and we are eating it, sliced in thin, melting globs or cut into golden, sticky squares and ferried to our mouths with dripping speed, right in the comb. The honey is very pale blonde, almost clear, just the gentlest yellow with a very high floral flavor, not at all heavy or dark. The first bite was legendary, transcendent eating.

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Summer Coming In

We're into the real stuff now....hot nights when we lie on top of our beds listening to the fan whir away without even untucking the sheets, epic salads for dinner served in our big wooden salad bowl, days that stretch out longer than they have any right to be. Real summer.

Mango lemonade with mint

I have a window-box of fresh herbs on the back porch and its getting a lot of use. I drop snipped bits into our dinner salads, and snip them over all our meats and every glass of whatever we're drinking is better with a sprig of mint, right? I love fresh herb season. Next year I have to remember to make sure cilantro and thyme make it in. (Help me remember that, will you?)

Our corn went from this....

To this!

And here come the tassels...the male parts of the plant!

The corn/lawn experiment, in which I planted corn right in our turf grass and then mulched over the top once there were rows of green leaves..... is going well. I have never grown corn. My parents always did when I was growing up, but I've never done it myself. Fun to have the space and the sun. My dad always planted our corn when I was a kid, it was his special garden project, he pounded in stakes with taut string between to be sure of perfectly straight plantings, and then he put in the corn. I remember that we always planted from little paper bags full of seed that we got at the feed-store. Not a feed-store in sight here and I still seem to be managing to pull of my own tiny corn patch! Hooray!

The apples on our apple tree are swelling and starting to show just the barest hint of a blush...still wondering what color they'll end up, how big they'll be and if they'll taste good enough for eating. A few weeks ago I ate a jar of applesauce my aunt made, thinking wistfully that I hoped this fall we'd be eating our own. And apple pies, and dried apple rings and maybe a few apple turnovers for autumn picnics to boot! The boughs are starting to bend downwards with the weight of the fruit which makes me smile.

And the bees are happy about summer. They're buzzing around pollinating our cucumbers and tomatoes, and zooming over the hedge, to yards beyond our range of vision. I have been into the hive a couple of times since introducing the bees to their new digs. They're building beautiful comb and filling it with all kinds of good things, and I am hopeful that they'll find enough fodder in the neighborhood to make sure they are all lardered up for the winter. I have plans to build a small fence, with climbing, flowering vines planted on it, to enclose the area where the hive is, and create a little protected bee yard. We're working on teaching Dee to stay away from the hive but he did recently discover it and is now on closely monitored probation to ensure that he never get out of eye-sight. Time for a little landscaping to solve the problem. I'm thinking a short fence of some kind with honeysuckle on it, and maybe pots of jasmine in the summer to make it really highly scented. Mmmmm!!!! I'd like a barrier like that around my house, wouldn't you?



Closing with this song which is humming in my mind, on perpetual repeat, Sumer Is Icumen In, sometimes also called The Cuckoo Song. Can't remember where I first heard it but I know it was a long time ago and I know rings in my mind merrily and makes me smile. Its a very old song, one of the oldest written songs we have in English, written about 1260 or so....a little ode to "sumer." It says "Summer is a comin' in, loudly sing cuckoo, groweth seed and bloometh meadow and springs the wood anew..." Summer is a pretty timeless affair.

Un-Poetry Friday: The Bees Arrive!!!

Happy Un-Poetry Friday!! Too busy staring open-mouthed at my new bees to be able to think up a poem today!!!

The girls, all one to three thousand of them, arrived last night. I took an after-dark, multi-hour, solo road trip to go pick them up and drove home with the big plasticized carton they came in, slightly warm to the touch and faintly humming in the back seat behind me. The bees and I stayed awake listening to country music hits, and gulping McDonald's drive-through coffee...okay, so that was mostly me, but hey, they stayed awake with me while I sipped and sang.

Once home I opened their sealed front door, in their make-shift home and, after just a little bit of staring at them via the light from my iPhone, I turned in, hardly able to sleep for the excitement.  This morning I took a deep gulp and installed them in their new hive, the boys all watching from the dining room window. It was astounding to be handling writhing frames of my own dark honey for the first time in my life. I am so worried that I will hurt them or displease them and somehow jeopardize my almost ten year long dream. Too much pressure!

If I don't answer the phone or the door or my emails, just understand that I am either outside staring at the hive or inside Googling, some new niggling bee question. Sometime soon real life will go on...at the moment, there are only bees!

Equipped For Beekeeping

 It's a great day for a first time beekeeper. The weather was balmy, it smells like spring, yesterday a huge flock of crows swooped into the neighborhood from parts further south and congregated on a big beech tree across the street, noisily recounting their many travel exploits. Spring is on its way and we are ready.

We have a beehive in our house.

  It came to our door in two gigantic cardboard boxes and sat, intimidatingly in the entryway for a while before I had the bravery to open the containers and lift out the glowing wood and deliriously fragrant comb foundation. The whole thing smells like honey...rich, ambrosial, golden honey. I can't wait until it is really full of liquid gold.

 All these mysterious tools and gadgets, glinting, twirling things that are so exciting and require much trying out. Can hardly wait to take my boys down to the buzzing hive and let them see the bees spinning industrious gold while they see what those tools are really about.

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Poetry Friday: An Apiary Poem

Today an older poem that I wrote piece-meal over a few years, all about my first encounter with an actual beekeeper, after having fallen madly in love with the idea of owning my own humming hive. I was with a youth group when the beekeeper's wife impulsively invited us to all feel free to peek in if we liked and see her husband using the centrifuge machine to spin the year's honey out of the combs from his bee hives.

I will never forget the feeling in that room. So wonderfully warm and sweet and golden high. Someday that will be me. Hopefully, this coming fall.

I plan to order my first hive this winter.

The Bee Man

He was a wrinkled elder with optimist eyebrows floating over timid glasses

Drifting amiably out of the sanctuary in rangy steps

He had faith (they all say) in young men,

That made them turn out alright in spite of themselves

But I was turning myself out

And besides,

I was a girl

All flaxen hair and laughing ambition.

We were picking in his orchard, a boisterous group

Impulsively allowed to see him spin his yearly gold

Each stuck a head inside the door and winced appreciatively

Escaping quickly from the nausea of sugar + insects

I opened the wooden portal and saw

The sweetly toasting inner sanctum

A gleaming frame held to the window,

A white suit, sunshine radiant,

His grin, a modest veil of bees

And curl of smoky, honey fumes.

My small feet creaked in on his floor

---And the room paused---

I swear to you, the bees hung still in jealous silence

There was a shuffling of sticky tools

A shy ducking of the head,

A small wave of his hand

And I was dismissed

The only females under his wing industriously buzzed his honey into hexagonal gold,

And then hummed protectively around him in the glow of that October afternoon.

You can find more Poetry Friday participants entries at Alphabet Soup, the host blog for this week's edition.

Beeing...

We were up at the farm this week again (as we are every week) and I was reminded of a special obsession that I have and will hopefully finally get to live out. We were sent to a new field we've never visited to pick cherry tomatoes (Sun Golds, my favorite ever by the way!) and we accidentally stumbled on the farmer's bee hives in all their glowy white glory, humming away by the stone wall, not far from the side gate. For years now I have dreamed of keeping honey bees and in the new house we will finally have a yard of our own and enough space to make my dream a reality.

This afternoon we'll be going over to our new house with A's family who are visiting and taking lots of pictures. I will be looking at the house with lots of thoughts in mind (is there room for my giant dresser? where to set up the sewing machine...or can I set up both of them? where could we wedge a dishwasher into the kitchen...etc. etc. ). There is no real end to this sort cozy, nest feathering train of thought. But in the yard....I'm going to be dreaming about where to put the bees.

I promise to update on this topic once the bees have been ordered and a location settled upon.

Believe it or not...that is how you get honeybees these days. You order them. In winter, so that you can get them in the mail in a humming, alive package in the spring. I cannot wait! I am dreaming of ridiculous amounts of homemade baklava with our first honey and little pots of honey butter for spreading on winter loaves, hot out of the oven. Christmas presents all round? I cannot wait!

Weekend Re-cap

Great weekend....lots of good stuff in it:

Long awaited tacos and one torta at the taco truck in our new city where we'll live in just a couple weeks!

Mmmmmm.....

Some kissing....

Some simple....

....everyday beauty.

A "Dali Sky"

Some elfin cuteness.

Tinker flowers!

Cheese and honey....Thank you Drake! (La Tur with honeycomb for those who wonder)

And a little catapulting giraffes off of garbage cans.

Life is just chock full of great things!