Category Archives: Bee Keeping

Living Life: Do You Really Need an App for That?

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Amongst the sea of photographs and notes on our fridge is a magnet holding up a photo of nephews and nieces. It reads, “Try Organic Food! Or, as your grandparents called it, Food!” Such is the excitement in our lives that we frequently laugh when we see it. Just as often, we reference it in our conversations about the world of technology we live in.

Usually the conversations’ theme is something along the lines of how reliant we all have become on technology as a substitute for observation — how the abandonment of, in the words of Wes Jackson, “eyes to acres” shortcuts our overall understanding of our individual lands (e.g., applying a chemical spray when closer scrutiny might have yielded a different and less harmful alternative). No doubt, shortcuts can be useful; nothing is inherently wrong with them. Yet is there even one among us who would prefer to jump directly from birth to old age, skipping all the living that comes in between? It’s the journey, after all, that provides what is needed to understand and enjoy.

The elderly neighbor just over the hill has always planted by the signs. He keeps a close eye on the phases of moon, the signs of the zodiac, the lengths of the days, and what he observes informs his decisions to plant crops, harvest hay, or cut green manure. Planting by the signs is backed by walks on his land, local custom, a lifetime of farming, and generational knowledge from those who came before him.

But, if you have neither the benefit of instruction by an elderly farmer nor the time in your busy life to acquire such skill, help is at hand: A planting by the signs app is available. Another is there to remind you when to rotate your pastures. Having trouble getting out to the garden? Yet another reminds you of when to pick your produce.

It would be funny, this “farming out” of our observational skills, if it weren’t. Our over-reliance on a technical interface undermines our knowledge of our land and environment. The shortcuts of our lives prevent us from taking the time to live our lives. That we have begun to confuse understanding with outsourced expertise is not a surprise. The apps are merely the latest indicator of our disconnect from the natural world.

Last fall, I was standing in the woods with a younger neighbor as we mapped out a fence line on our property boundary. We were looking for the terminus, an old white oak tree, according to the deed. The neighbor whipped out his phone and fired up a survey app. It was all very impressive, the glowing screen clearly marking where the line was, leaving no room for mistake. But as we stood in the quiet woods, eyes glued to the device, something did occur to me. He didn’t know the difference between a red oak and a white oak. There was simply no need. And if there was, well, you and I know the drill: just download a tree identifying app.

A beekeeper friend of Cindy’s uses the power of observation to monitor the state of her hives. To determine whether the colonies have started raising brood, for instance, she watches the incoming foragers to see if they’re bringing in pollen. She knows that brood need pollen to survive, and she knows the foragers won’t gather pollen if there’s nothing to feed it to. She also routinely tracks by sight the direction of flight by the foragers — which, because she intimately knows her surroundings, informs her of the types of pollen being gathered and allows her to predict what plants she can expect to bloom around the same time each year. Of course, if all of that sounds just too time and energy consuming … well, you guessed it, there are some clever bee apps to do the job for you.

This is all well-trod ground: What might we gain if we sacrificed our perpetual drive to outsource every bit of our lived experience, to take the shortcut on every path? I cannot say for sure, but I think it might just be worth finding out.

Farm Buildings: our chicken coop

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We built this structure around 2001, replacing the first coop built in 1999, which is now used to store bee equipment. It was built into the open end of our barn, separated by a breeze-way, from the main structure. It uses the existing barn roof. The siding and flooring is white oak harvested and milled on our farm. The coop is divided into two rooms: the main room and a smaller brooder for chicks (to the left in this picture, with a small access port on the front and a door on the back). The glass window, zinc leaded, was rescued from the predecessor to the current Jacob’s Building at Chilhowee Park in Knoxville, TN. That building, the agricultural exhibition hall was built around 1900 for one of two Appalachian Fairs held on the grounds. It burned a couple of decades later. We liked the idea of incorporating the glass into the hen house. It faces east, so the morning sun pours into the coop through that glass waking up all but the most sleep determined girls, usually a couple of aging Speckled Sussex pensioners.

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Reading this weekend: Savage Gods (Kingsnorth). A hard to characterize short book that is part meditation on the loss of community and part account of losing the belief in the power of words. The kind of book, for me at least, that seems to echo each misplaced footstep of my own.

Respect Your Cuisine: revisited

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Bedding and manure pile: 50 x 12, 7 high.

We have spent the past couple of days in intense farm work, including the annual cleaning out of the barn (see pic). And, today we are off to a homesteading conference to help staff a table for the local bee club. Where, Cindy will also be giving a presentation on the hive. So, once again, I leave you with one from the archives that relates to last weeks post. I hope you enjoy, it is one of my favorites, from May 5th, 2014.

 

Sir, Respect Your Dinner, Idolize it, enjoy it properly.

You will be many hours in a week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life, happier if you do.

(William Makepeace Thackeray)

Odd, it seems Southern cooking is being celebrated everywhere but in the South. I’m a bit obsessive about cooking magazines, tending to pick them up whenever I’m in a store. And Southern cooking is always being touted and referenced as the touchstone of American cooking. And it is important, or it was at one time. But its importance does not survive in the glossy pages of a magazine or an upscale restaurant.

Don’t misunderstand me, there are great restaurants in the South. And there are great purveyors of food in the region. But good Southern cooking has always been a home-based cuisine. I tend to think of cooking styles like I do an indigenous music style, like bluegrass. Once it becomes precious, moves off the front porch into a regional music festival it is near death. Much like the ancient language that is down to nine elderly speakers; time to stick a fork in it, it is done. And Southern cuisine will soon be down to those last nine elderly practitioners.

I’ve always thought of Southern food as peasant food. After all, we have been an agrarian culture since Europeans and Africans settled these lands. We brought foods from our homes and we adopted from the locals. And we embraced the tomato, corn and pepper from points further south. There has always been a highbrow component to our cuisine, the cuisine of the planter class. But that was a food culture that, although flavored with local ingredients, aspired to be something else than what was native. A dinner plate designed to make them feel a superiority that could only be purchased.

The genesis, the glory of our food culture was in the garden, the hunt, the field all enjoyed in a warm temperate climate that allowed multiple crops and access to an unimaginable range of foods. My childhood was filled with gardens in the summer, catfish trotlines and duck hunting in the winter, speckled trout caught on the inter-coastal in the fall and Satsuma’s in season and eating so much shrimp that you were sick of seeing them on the table. Sprinkle in crab and crawfish harvests, venison sausage, gumbos, smoked goose, and pork in all its wonderfully varied uses and the Southern cuisine of my youth was worth celebrating.

But today we have given up that rich heritage of the locally harvested for a faux cuisine that has become the precious heritage of food magazines, suburbanites and Brooklyn-ites. The real food of our culture comes from the soil and dirt under your hands. It comes from the muscle ache in your back from working oyster tongs all day and shucking oysters deep into the night. It is the numbness of your hands on a December night as you pull wriggling catfish into the jon-boat. It is figuring out a way to cook okra because it exists.

It is a DIY food culture of butchering pigs and using everything but the squeal. It is staying up late to salt all your cabbage for kraut before it goes to waste. It is a real old-fashioned church supper with 200 competing dishes handed down from mother to daughter and you with only one stomach to tackle it all.

It is not found in a Walmart, a fast food chain, a high-end restaurant or, god forbid, Garden and Gun magazine. It is found on a dinner table with a family connected to the land and enjoyed with a homemade biscuit in one hand and a plate of love in front of you.

We are getting close to knowing those last elderly nine. Get your hands dirty, practice the language.

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Reading this weekend: Localism in the Mass Age, a front porch republic manifesto. A collection of essays devoted to degrowth, localism, and a politics and culture suited to the same. I found it, mainly, stimulating stuff.

The Seasonal Beekeeper

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A friend of mine recently described his beekeeping status like this: “I’m a seasonal beekeeper. I buy bees every year, keep them for the summer season, until they leave or die in the fall and winter. Then I start again the next spring.” One of our area hive inspectors, who knows a thing or two about beekeeping, has already lost all of his colonies this winter. A natural beekeeper I know who adheres to all the latest trends in chemical-free beekeeping lost 40 of his 48 hives in 2017. And according to the state apiarist, up to 80 percent of Tennessee’s honeybee colonies died in the 2016-2017 period.

As Mr. Salatin would say, “Folks, this ain’t normal.”

East Tennessee has a temperate climate and is not home to vast commodity crop fields and their corresponding high pesticide loads. It has a diverse, pollinator-friendly range of flowering flora. Yet, the best we are offering is just not enough. Bees are, well, dropping like flies. 

The new reality is that what has worked for hundreds and thousands of years is now in free fall. Blame it on neonicotinoids and our polluting ways, blame it on climate change, blame it on Trump — but a fundamental of human agriculture is in collapse. How far down will things spiral? That is impossible to say.

Bees, native and managed, pollinate about 75 percent of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables we Americans rely on to sustain our population. Cross-pollination supports at least 30 percent of the world’s crops and 90 percent of wild plants. Yet in rural China, abuse of pesticides has decimated bee populations to the point that humans now have to pollinate by hand the enormous pear crop. No, it is not normal, and it is not sustainable.

Here at Winged Elm Farm, we love keeping bees. We love working with and for them, harvesting their honey, and hearing their reassuring hum everywhere in our soundscape. We look forward, when the temperature on a sunny day hits 50 degrees, to homing in on the distinctive buzzing of one of our girls. When we lose a colony of bees, it is almost as painful as losing a favored ewe. Losing all of the hives is akin to losing our whole flock. Devastating.

Yes, there are plenty of things all of us can do to help the bees.

  • Plant rich and varied sources of nectar and pollen.
  • Ditch the pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides.
  • Create and preserve habitats for non–honeybee pollinators.

But I’m still not sanguine about turning things around. The technophiles blather blandly about a 10 billion–strong human population and bee drones to feed it, and the talking heads at the UN say we need to double our housing stock to accommodate the growth. Our species has already put the climate at risk, likely fueling a sixth mass extinction, so excuse me, my friends, if I don’t believe more of the same is the answer.

Recently I stumbled across someone who offered up this advice to save the bees: Everyone should put sugar water out on their porch to feed them. Which is akin to a plan to fight world hunger by putting a Dunkin’ Donuts on every corner of every village and town. It misses both the point and the scope of the problem. Meanwhile, the political realm offers the usual partisan solution of either redoubling our faith in the god of market forces or bolstering our inventory of band-aids to mask the problem.

That neither is adequate to tackling the crisis at hand is an understatement. Yet the last major political leader to warn us of the costs of our profligate ways was sent packing back to his peanut farm.

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Reading this weekend: Assault in Norway, Thomas Gallagher. And We Die Alone, David Howarth. Two fantastic and inspiring books of true-life heroes.

Listening to Bees

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A frame of capped honey

The smallest livestock on our farm are also the most fascinating to observe, from their daily diligence and complexity of social organization to the extraordinary “waggle dance” they use to communicate the location of nectar and new homes. Today, as we prepare to harvest the last of this year’s honey, I’m reminded that the bees have a lot to teach us. We only have to listen.

  • Work together today to provide for tomorrow. Winter is coming and those food stores don’t harvest themselves.
  • Expect your responsibilities to grow as you mature. Clean your room as a kid; be prepared to run the farm as an adult.
  • Be vigilant. A weak line of defense invites invasion, disease, and death.
  • Communicate. Use your best waggle dance to share critical information with those you care about.
  • Socialize. Nothing beats hanging out on the porch with your neighbors at the end of a busy summer’s day.
  • Don’t sting unless it’s absolutely necessary. Fight when the future depends on it, then fight with selfless fury.
  • Remember that you’re a member of the community. No matter how self-sufficient you imagine yourself, you can’t make all of the honey.
  • Don’t move into a mansion when a cottage will do. Live within your means, and learn to recognize, and heed, when enough is enough. A too-big house is harder to heat and cool, harder to clean, and much harder to protect.
  • Build a strong foundation. Be it bridges or buildings or banking systems, a shaky infrastructure puts the whole community at peril.
  • Render unto Caesar. Be prepared to yield an appropriate honey tax. And, be prepared for a revolution if the powers demand too much.

And one final lesson:

The canary in the coal mine. Tennessee bee losses last year were estimated to be as high as 80 percent, attributable only in part to the extreme drought. This catastrophic statistic is set against the background of increasing colony losses across the globe in recent decades. If we listen, the message these tiny, exquisite social creatures are sending us will be clear: the mine has become dangerous. And the fault — and the solution — lies at yours and my collective doorstep.