We all have to become naturalists — written observation and experiment.
For years I’ve known that you can get native, solitary bees to brood in a perforated piece of wood. At least so I’d heard. I drilled a number of small holes into an ancient piece of wood and stuck it into a nearby teatree bush. So we’ll see.
Perhaps because of our folkloric interests, the Picayune ‘s Creole Cookbook was the first cookbook George & I tried to cook from when we were first together and getting into food. 
What an amazing, fascinating book for us to try and learn from! Because it was first printed in the early 1900s, as a way of preserving the original Louisiana cooking created largely by black slaves in plantation and city kitchens, the measurements were approximate and sometimes whole ingredients were omitted from the list, only to be presented in the description of how to cook the dish. There were no cooking temperatures except those approximate ones for a wood stove; and cooking times varied wildly. The first time we made a King Cake for Three Kings Day, it turned out the size of a small wading pool. But oh, what glorious recipes and what fabulous descriptions of a life long gone! We still have the cookbook and we still cook from it occasionally. I was reminded of this when reading the most recent Smithsonian magazine, about the proper way to make gumbo.
Here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about–a recipe for a Dried Fruit Cake:
Note that the list of ingredients includes no flour! then the instructions tell you to “add the flour, which you will have sifted with the baking powder”! We’ve just had to wing it on the amounts……
Stuff I would otherwise wish I had written down somewhere when I remember having seen, read or heard it.
Eleanor Gould Packard, Miss Gould. The New Yorker’s “Grammarian”, “the Mozart of punctuation”. Postscript by David Remnick 2-28-05.
This will be continuing. The sections so far: Catch or Attract a Swarm, Beeswax, The Ethics of Taking Honey, Bill’s Bees for a Queen.
Catch or Attract a Swarm?
March 3. Scouts visted the empty hive. Many of them. Some carried off a scout they decided was from another hive — lots of initial tasting, others come to check and bother the interloper, one grabs a foot and they push the two off the side of the hive onto the ground. Once there, it looked like a damaged bee being dragged away from the entrance.
They seemed very suspicious of me, under the circumstances understandably.
For a moment in the late, low sunlight, I thought that the swarm might come.
Some few bees seem to have stayed the night. (On March 6, none were overnighting, though the hive smelled great.)
I wonder how big 10 gallons is and how I could manage a hive on the porch roof. And how I could manage to get a hive onto the porch roof. The potential for catastrophe is enormous. You’d want to move it after dark. Even a relatively empty hive is heavy when being hoisted with bees onto a roof after dark.
Just in case we have to rent the house, I’ll put a plaque on the hive: 2012. The bees in this hive are a local swarm. They have not been tended recently, so I cannot attest to how docile they are. They are certainly nothing like those that Bill Lewis’s queens would produce.
Put a notebook in the hive: Takings: month and year, # frames, kg honey; Observations : month and year, notes.
Beeswax
Beeswax melts at 150 °F ( 66 °C ) and changes color at 180 °F (82 °C ).
Wax taken from the hive will have lots of honey, probably some bits and pieces of bees, and some dark gunk.
An easy way to make candles, it seems this afternoon, is to heat up the wax and stuff slowly in an oven. I use a normal bucket. Once it’s all melted, set it aside and leave it to solidify. Draw off the honey (it won’t be as good as honey that has never been heated, but is perfectly okay in a hoh-hum sort of way). You’ll end up with a disk with wax on top and dark brown grainy stuff on the bottom. Scrape the soft, honey-fill portion into a tray for the bees to re-harvest. Then scrape the rest of it pretty much down to the real wax. Melt again and pour into forms with fairly thick wicks.
Ethics of Taking Honey
Honey is the energy source of bee breeding. Given some honey, the queen can muster a bunch of workers and abandon the hive to her daughter. This succession is right up Darwin’s line. Leave the best for the next and they will breed too.
Bee keepers take honey and try to retain their productive, gentle queen. The improved gentle strain gives bee keepers an argument against wild nesting bees.
Bill’s Bees for a Queen
May 6. Went up Little Tujunga Canyon to Bill Lewis’s on Sunday where a couple of dozen of us had come to get queens. A number of the people had dropped their hives off several weeks earlier and had strong hives already. The others of us brought brood boxes with 5 empty frames and bought a queen and five frames complete with some honey, brood and workers. This year’s dot to help find the queens is yellow. I wonder if that is specific to the provider or is a broader convention.
Started March 7, 2012, 5:28pm.
On Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial day I remembered that as a child I didn’t know that some folks were Black and others were White.
At five years old, I didn’t know, and I don’t think that my friends knew, that we were throwing dirt clods against the drying sheets of a family in married student housing because the family was Black. I didn’t even know it having gone to their door to tearfully apologize to the mother in the family.
We knew that we were being bad but at least I was spared knowing that I was being evil.
Forgiveness is so kind it spares the innocent. Thus, I would be a Christian to pray for those whom I have innocently hurt and who have knowingly been kind to me nonetheless.
A nice one from a publication I’d never heard of–even if he misspelled my name!
While I’m not usually a reader of “self-help” or “inspirational” books, a friend sent me an email with the title to Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s “The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty”. Since I have been a bit at sea in this life of a woman of the 60s now in her 60s, I thought I’d give it a look. Initially I was put off by what I found to be her insufferably arch writing style–the same style that made me stop reading her mysteries written under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross. But she won me over in her chapter “Time”, in which she describes the “poisonous atmosphere” for women in many academic settings. It was somehow quite comforting to know that I wasn’t the only woman who had experienced toxic inequality and unfairness in university teaching. She also had some intriguing things to say about relationships, although I think she was just enough older than me that I couldn’t relate to some of her pronouncements–they seemed pretty stuffy and old-fashioned. I must admit I had never heard of her before–a sign, I guess, that I was never much of a party-line feminist, since she seems to have been one of the godmothers of feminist writing and gender studies.
In the book, she does discuss with some detachment her feelings that suicide should be a viable option for women–but I had no idea, until I Googled her after finishing the book, that she had actually ended her life a few years after writing this book! http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_9589/
Wow. Suicide as a willful act. As someone who cannot fathom death–yet, at least–I’m just amazed that she could make such a decision. I am really a bit shaken by this revelation, even though it happened in 2003! The book, and this discovery of her death, has made me want to talk to other women over 60, about our search for “worth” in our lives.
