It's Odd

[liralen]

... to watch my brain as I start the first throes of looking at something new...

I can see myself poking at the Web on beekeeping, honey bee keeping to be specific, not just blue orchard bees, but the blue orchard bees might be a nice beginning, interim step. As my brain follows links, my liking of honey, the difficulty it is now to find boxes of real, fresh honeycomb, my enjoyment of clear and clean burning beeswax candles. And...

Still... beekeeping??

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

there's a guy who's posted several entries to kuro5in about beekeeping.
here's one

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Dang, the link doesn't work...

[rmd.livejournal.com]

weird. if you search for "lessons from the hive" on the site, that should work. the author (if you can do an author search -- i'm running out the door at the moment so i'm not sure) is xC0000005.

[tagryn]

http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/xC0000005

Thanks, that fellow is a good writer! Enjoyed his writeups.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Wow, yes, thanks!!

Thanks rmd!! And tagryn, thanks for the clarified links.

Wow, he does write very, very well, now I'm looking forward to peering at all this a bit more deeply. I have a feeling that when I do get back to the Northwest and my gardening and all that, that this is going to be much higher on my priorities list. Very, very cool.

[tagryn]

I'd love to keep bees if I had a backyard to keep them in. They're good for the local environment as pollinators, beyond the uses for the honey.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Well, the Colorado beekeeping numbers are in a huge decline. Pesticides seem to be the blame for a very large number of hive deaths over the winter, and there used to be hundreds of thousands of hives and dozens of commercial outfits which have dwindled down to a bare half a dozen in the whole state. Some say that it's only the amateurs that will keep beekeeping alive at all.

It's interesting, as one does wonder what agriculture does for pollination with all the pros gone. But so it is...

[tagryn]

'Mites are choking them, pesticides are killing them, the drought's starving them...' - "Ulee's Gold."
Wonderful movie, BTW.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I used to be a beekeeper. I'd still be one, if I could keep ahead of the diseases. We used to just have to deal with the two foulbroods and wax moths (my last hive was lost to wax moth infestation), but now there are the two mites that are devastating the bees, and varroa is particularily nasty. I was putting miticide into the hive regularily when I had the last one, and that was before it got particularily bad.

But I love bees, sigh. It's not just the honey and the wax, though that's wonderful. I just love bees. (I'm actually what was referred to in "Fried Green Tomatos" as a "bee whisperer. I work hives with no protective gear except gloves (because it's just too weird to feel bees scamper under your fingers) and a hat and veil (mostly to keep them out of my hair, where they sometimes get entangled.) We get along. They're fascinating little critters, and there's nothing like the hum of a happy hive.

[writeanya.livejournal.com]

i thought the same thing when we got the little chicks,knowing, ohmygod, these are going to be chickens!

now, it's almost normal. :D

follow the adventure!