I have seen it. I have seen it up close and personal. A couple weeks ago as I was helping remodel my girlfriend Mora's cottage we had to call in a bee keeper! There was about twenty square feet of honeycomb about an inch thick just dripping with honey. Like Novella says in her book Farm City "most people- scared of bees but drawn to honey" . And it is true. Who actually likes bees buzzing and stinging and scaring little children. Virgil in his poem Georgics praises the bee and the beekeeper, but did he keep bees himself? History shows that Virgil was a poet and likely that he did not have to do much if any actual farm work. When I saw the bee keeper with his special vacuum for sucking up the little bees and his smoke pump I was excited, yet I still would not go within ten feet of the man until I knew the coast was clear. The honey is so worth the fear though. I think bees are an essential part of the garden that are often over looked.
I know that when I finally am able to have a place of my own that I will have two things for sure vegetables and bees. To me bees seem versatile. They live in all sorts of climates and there are many different types of honey producing bees. They pollinate your plants so that they can bear fruit and they create liquid GOLD. Pure HONEY! I absolutely love the taste of hone. I have honey every day wether it be just honey in my tea or the honey in the bread I eat my sandwiches on.
Could it be hard to over come my fear of bees? I hope not. Everyone is probably scared at first of the stings and the failure of a collapse, but everyone over comes that fear; if they want to be a bee keeper that is. I can imagine the bounty of honey that Mora has (now in jars). If only I can recreate the same thing except not in the middle of a wall because that removal was just way to difficult. I think if Novella can do it so can I. Maybe I need a trip to my personal Trees 'n Bees? Unfortunately Both time and location play a big part in gardening and bee keeping. I just do not have either the time or the place here at the big old Hayes Heally. My dream of liquid gold will have to be put on hold so that I can get a college learnin' first.
11 comments:
Exciting post, Marshall! I know you'll get your bees and one day be swimming in honey.
I feel the same way about bees, and bee hives. I love to eat honey, but I would never want to get close to a bee hive because I would be too scared to get stung. I think many people feel the same way. It is also interesting that you brought up the point that Virgil was a poet and not a farmer, but he still praises the beekeeper and the bees. I think that he too might be hesitant to do the work bee keepers do. It is a hard job, with a lot of patience, and one should not be scared of them.
Why have we all come to be so afraid of bees? I am certainly not saying I'm not, but i find it weird that we are all so frightened of these little insects that are probably terrified of us. Honey is amazing and i wish you all the best in your bee keeping endeavors, Marshall!
Ever since I was a little girl, I have been deathly afraid of bees and this fear has been especially problematic in the summertime because my family’s above ground pool is near our fruit trees and bees love to swarm their branches. The bees make themselves at home and in the past, this has discouraged me from getting into the water. Throughout the years though, I have learned to manage my fear enough to swim in our pool despite the buzzing and the occasional flash of wings above my head. This is because I have discovered an effective coping method. I merely dunk myself under the water whenever one of the flying insects gets within five feet of me. Or sometimes ten.
I believe my irrational fear stems from an experience I had when I was around six or seven. At that time, I was playing basketball on a local team, and so we had a hoop set up in my family’s front yard near the sidewalk. Every afternoon, I would go outside and shoot hoops in my little jersey before my dad and brother got home and joined me. Well, one hot afternoon during the summer, my basketball got stuck between the rim and the backboard of the hoop and always being the independent one, I was determined to get it down myself. So, I scurried into our garage and pulled out my dad’s step latter and set it up beneath the hoop. The idea to use this large piece of equipment seemed brilliant to me at the time but in hindsight, it was about the dumbest thing I did all year. At first, all went as planned. I gingerly stepped up the latter and reached the top step without falling to an early death. My problems began when I started prodding my basketball with the pole of an extended duster in an attempt to nudge it from where it was stuck. This is because while I worked, I unintentionally provoked a hidden bee hive nested at the back of the basketball hoop. And now anyone can guess where this story is going. To avoid boring my audience, I will therefore get to the ending of the story: I ended up with at least fifteen bee stings up and down my arms and legs and went to school the next day looking like a walking advertisement for Neosporin and Band-Aids. Despite this incidence and my resulting fear of bees, I do feel as though I am slowly overcoming my phobia and someday, I hope to “raise” my own hive and experience the gift of “home grown” gold. Bees here I come. Well, slowly.
Hi Marshall (and fellow bloggers),
I saulte your passionate endorsenment of beekeeping! Who knows, the day may soon come when all citizens are urged to keep bees- and the flowering plants that sustain them. After all, bees are vital to our national (food) security.
The thing I love about Novella Carpenter's book is that it challenges our assumptions about what's possible- and what's appropriate. Not only does she garden in the city, she also keeps bees, chickens- including "meat birds"- pigs, rabbits... And it's not as if she knew how to do all of this stuff. She learned by doing- and sometimes by failing. It's really a book about empowerment. We don't have to be helpless and dependent, just because we live in urban environments.
Marshall, I hope you "get the gold" someday!
I think Novella Carpenter sets a great example for beekeeping. I'm definitely afraid of bees, but maybe that's just because I never really wanted to interact with them. I've always had the assumption that they would sting me. But I've never been stung by them! I like how you're going to try beekeeping out in the future. Good luck with that! I might try it, but I'll need a garden first.
It really interested me where you addressed the lack of time you have to bee keep. For me, later in life i think it would be so amazing just to have my own garden and live of what I could grow, or raise bees. But it seems like in our culture today it is almost impossible to be able to do this unless you live in the boonies off of nothing. I admire your desire and plans to bee keep. For me, while i'd like to do it, I can't ever imagine having time to do that and be able to work enough to have enough money.
I think this is a really cool post Marshall, I really enjoyed reading about your experience with bees and then seeing how you related it to Virgil. It very original! You bring up an excellent point concerning our hesitance to interact with bees but our enjoyment of the "pure gold" that they produce. This reminded me of one of the topics brought in up Farm City which we discussed in class. The fact that most of us love to eat meat, but couldn't bear to watch the animal from which that meat comes be butchered, much less butcher it ourselves. I used to do quite a bit of backpacking and hunting where we would kill our own food, butcher it, and eat it for dinner with keeping some cold to bring back for later. It really is a task, quite a disgusting one at first, to gut, skin, and quarter an animal- my least favorite was always boars, they smell awful. Anyway, that was a bit off track but I think it relates very well to the idea you presented in your post. Are we willing to put in the work and overcome our fears in order to reap the benefits of any given creature, whether it be a boar or a colony of bees?
Katelyn, If Novella Carpenter shows us anything, it's that we don't have to live in the boonies in order to grow some of our own food and keep bees. As I mentioned in class, there are urban beekeepers in pretty much every city in the country and every neighborhood in San Francisco. countless people are growing food in their front yards or backyard gardens, and keeping chickens in your yard is legal in most cities. So if you can dream of having a little scrap of a yard somewhere, or a corner of a community garden, you can do it.
Patrick, you might enjoy Pollan's chapter in his The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which he hunts and field-dresses and cooks his own boar. He also makes his own bread, using yeast he captures out of the air (!) and forages for mushrooms in the woods and fruit from the trees in his neighborhood. See, you can even hunt for food on your own city block. Anyone want to come hunt my 'possum? I hear they make a tasty stew.
Katelyn (and everyone else),
Another option for city-dwellers is community gardens- remember the USF garden? These are gardens that everyone in the neighborhood can contribute to and benefit from, and are a great solution for people who don't have yard space. Since I live on a boat, I'm considering joining a community garden in Sausalito. I don't know if they keep bees, though...
I know that I fear bees almost as much as I fear spiders, but its only because of the association of the pain of getting stung. I have been stung a couple times. But unlike spiders, I can suppress my fear for the understanding that bees are essential for plant-life and the environment. I also love honey and think that if everyone had a better understanding of bees, that perhaps they would be more welcome into our lives. I know that it would certainly help with my fear of bees.
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