Living on the canals

Things I learned from my first week as a beekeeper

First of all, everything you do will be wrong, at least according to someone, and that’s okay.

Take, for example, when you choose what kind of hive to get – by “hive,” I just mean the wooden box and the pieces inside, as you have to set that up before you put the bees in. All of those modern square hives come in two models, one smaller and one larger, and since every piece is made for a hive of one size or the other, beekeepers stick religiously stick with one model and swear by it. I picked the smaller version, thinking it would be easier to lift when laden with wax and honey – but when I told a local beekeeper, he talked to me about my decision in the delicate but grieving tones usually reserved for a terminal illness.

Then you need to decide where to put this wrong hive, and your spot will also be, according to someone, wrong. Most books, for example, recommend placing your hive where it will be warm and dry, protected from wind and rain. Those books were not written for people in Ireland. Who live in a bog in Ireland.

Thus, we make do -- I chose a place in a corner of our woodland, facing the bog-land and its fields of wildflowers, but wove trimmed stalks of elder between tree stumps to form a wattle-fence around part of it, sheltering it from our fierce winds.

Next you need to fill the hive with wooden frames, those rectangular slices of honeycomb that beekeepers remove to get the honey. Most hives come with slides of wax to help get the bees started, and you have to slip the wax into each wooden frame and secure them in place with wire or nails. When you have done this for all ten slides and put them into the hive one by one, you lift the hive off the shelf, set it down gently. Then you listen to the sound of several wax slides come crashing down, and do it right the second time.

You will also need a smoker – basically a cross between a watering can and an accordion -- to slow the bees down before you open up their home. Despite being the smallest animal we’ve domesticated, they are the only ones we have to sedate before approaching.

The bees will need sugar-water to get them started, before they figure out where all the flowers are in relation to their new home. This is easy to make on the kitchen stove – a kilogram of sugar per litre of water – and most hives, like ours, have a feeder attached. You don’t need to feed them continually – that would rather take away from the point of getting honey – but it does help them through the early days and again through the winter months.

You also need a bee suit, a one-piece outfit which will seem to consist mostly of zippers. Do try to seal all the zippers completely, or the neighbourhood children will see a strange, white-clad figure flailing and dancing the hokey-pokey out of the forest.

Now comes the intimidating bit: you need to buy bees and put them into your new home. You will probably do this by buying a swarm nucleus, or “nuc,” a mini-hive filled with a queen and skeleton crew of her staff to get a hive started. Whereas a full hive will have ten to twenty frames of honeycomb, a nuc will have four or five, which you remove and place in your hive. The rest of your hive will be filled with empty frames – empty but for those wax slides you put in – ready for the bees to use as they expand their population.

 Remember those two basic models of hive I mentioned earlier? Since the honeycombed frames of the nuc have to be removed and placed in your hive, the nuc’s frames must be cut the same size as your hive’s. This is why beekeepers stick with only one model – I had to find someone else with the same kind of hives, who was also ready to sell nucs.

Eventually I found an old beekeeper in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland, and drove out to his farm. He cheerfully plopped into my arms a wooden box, secured all around with duct tape and with a wire mesh at the top, and right under the mesh, a swarm of bees writhing like a single organism.

 “How long will they be safe in there?” I asked, looking up at the threatening sky.

“Oh, they’ll be okay for a few days,” he said, “Just make sure they don’t get cold and are kept out of the wind and rain.”

The freezing sideways rain began on my way home over the mountains, each bump further shaking the box in the back seat, which buzzed ever more irritably with each bounce. If you must drive over mountain passes in near-zero visibility, I learned, it’s better not to hear an angry swarm of bees behind you, box or no box.

When I got home it was still lashing rain, and I learned that most bee suits are not waterproof. Nonetheless, I did set up the nuc next to the hive, their entrances parallel. Bees have amazing sense of direction, but they don’t use landmarks like we or most mammals do; they use the position of the sun and moon to create a kind of GPS. With it they can track and find the positions of hundreds of thousands of flowers each day and communicate them to the other bees – an amazing skill far beyond our abilities – but everything hinges on having the right starting point. Move the hive twenty metres to the left, and they are like cars following Google directions from a slightly wrong street – everything will turn out very badly.

Through the next few days of rain I sprayed sugar-water through their mesh to keep them fed, until the sun came out and I was ready to don the bee suit, smoke the bees and put their honeycombs in the proper hive. That was Plan A. After smoking the nuc well and removing the duct tape, I realised that the box was actually held together with screws that would require some tools and tugging to remove – Plan B.

Through all this the box was wobbled around a lot more, causing the bees to get quite agitated when the smoke wore off. Plan C was to smoke them again, until the burning material in the smoker suddenly ran out; Plan D, to stuff more in and re-light it, failed when the lighter jammed.

Plan E, finally, worked -- for my daughter to run in, get matches, run to a nearby stone, leave the matches and run the other direction while I, trailing a cloud of bees, retrieved the matches, ran back, lit the smoker, and finally calmed the bees down while I moved them. Last I checked, they were settling in fine.

Perhaps the most important thing to learn, though, goes beyond beekeeping. Many of us are trying to learn a lot of new skills, often with little proper training and limited supplies. Everything you do will be wrong, at least compared to the ideal scenarios of how-to books and videos. Don't worry about it: you'll learn as you go, and most of the time, you'll come out okay in the end.

Photo courtesy of Wikicommons.

Update

First of all, we have bees; I got a swarm nucleus over the weekend, and put them into the proper hive last night. This morning, before I caught the bus to work in the city, I walked back into our woodlands, put my ear against the hive, and they were humming away peacefully.

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Grit magazine has published my piece on the edible calendar -- check it out.

The Food Calendar

Gardening involves taking plants’ natural bounty – roots and tubers, leaves and stems, fruits and nuts – and stretching them to meet our ends. We start them early indoors as seedlings, prepare beds of earth, place cloches over them to keep out frost, weed out their neighbours, pick their pests and prune their misguided growth. We pamper our kohlrabi and celeriac like breeders groom their horses -- and they need it, for generations of breeding have made them more bountiful and more fragile than the bitter lovage and wild sea kale from whence they came.  

Foraging wild foods, however, keeps you on a tight schedule. Those mushrooms that appeared today will likely be slimy tomorrow, and those edible leaves will likely be inedible next week. We picture Stone Age people living by a leisurely rhythm of the seasons, but in fact they needed to manage their time precisely according to their own calendar. 

If September through November give us most of the garden’s bounty, these months of April and May are the truly rich foraging months here, when The Girl and I rummage through the bog-country and return with bushels of foodstuffs, ready to be dried, pickled, frozen and made into wine for the coming year. 

The beginning of April here sees the first hawthorn shoots, tender enough to be eaten raw for two weeks, or sautéed and added to dishes, or chopped and thrown into soups. Around the same time as the hawthorn shoots appear, the blackthorns burst into flower – they bloom first and beat the rush, only later growing their leaves. In that blackthorn window, however, we can mark their position along the canals – most times of year they are unobtrusive and hard to spot amid the other trees, so you must know where they are first to search for the prized black sloe fruits. 

The blackthorn flowers are long gone now, and the hawthorn leaves are getting tough, which means the hawthorns are ready for their turn to bloom. For this reason the hawthorn is also called the May plant; the lyric “here we go gathering nuts in May,” refers to the tree, not the month, as nothing grows nuts in May. 

A week or so after the hawthorn shoots appear, the first nettles grow large enough to pick, and the last six weeks have been prime nettle season for us. I’ve written before how nutritious nettles are, and how they can be eaten as a vegetable in their own right, like spinach, or made into tea, beer, soup, kim chi, or put into any number of dishes. I’ve been freezing bags of them to eat this winter, and drying them into tubs of tea to consume through the rest of the year. They are also useful for fibre – I saw an entire wedding dress made of nettle fibre once – but that doesn’t come until later in the year, and fibre is not my specialty. 

I pencil in the first two weeks of May in my calendar long ago, for that to us is cowslip season. These yellow flowers, hanging like tiny golden bells from short stalks, illuminate the forest floor here like fireflies for precious short time, taking advantage of the spring window when the weather is warm and the forest floor is covered in dappled sunlight. They are already fading now, as the trees regrow their canopy and the forest grows dim. 

We’ve been picking as many cowslips as possible in great bags, freezing as many as possible until we had enough, and last weekend I began cowslip wine. I boiled several litres of water – enough for a carboy and several wine bottles down the road – and mixed in sugar and the juice and zest of two lemons, and finally mixed in the cowslips. I let them boil for five minutes, turned off the heat and mixed in a champagne yeast my friends gave me as a gift – cowslip wine has a definite champagne feel, so the result should be quite good. My last batch of cowslip wine, from last year, and it didn’t turn out as fragrant as the flower deserves, so I’m hoping this will be an improvement. 

Also fleeting are the daisies that peek out of the grass; the sweet woodruff that can be dried and used to flavour wine; the bramble shoots we use for evening tea; and the wood sorrel massing like disciples around the feet of the great trees.

The best part of May, though, are the nightly linden salads. The tree right outside my window is a lime or linden tree, and when the leaves first appear at the beginning of May they taste rather like spinach. Every night I’ve been getting home on the bus from Dublin, riding my bicycle from the nearest town, coming home, and picking myself a salad from our tree. 

Now that May is leaving us behind, we are seeing the first inchoate elderflowers, green and folded in a fist, but ready to unfurl to a June of elderflower champagne and pancakes. The first meadowsweet stalks are unfolding along the canal, preparing to grow their August tufts, which we will collect for next year’s wine. Fish in the canal will peak as the days stretch to eighteen hours, then fade back again as the days shorten. The garden will erupt with bounty, and we will gather and preserve everything we can before the year plunges into darkness again.   

Interviewed on the C-Realm podcast

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For seven years the C-Realm Podcast has taken fringe and fascinating ideas from all over the political, religious and ideological map. On any given week the topic might be organic farming, science-fiction futures, drugs, or any number of other things, always with some new point of view I don't hear in the mainstream. Most weeks its interviews are only of passing interest to me, but when it hits a subject that fascinates me - perhaps one time out of five -- the result is one of my favourite things to listen to.

For the second time in six months, I'm honoured to be a guest myself, talking about my piece on peak oil.

Published at Front Porch Republic

If you've never looked at the web site Front Porch Republic, you should -- it's one of the few online magazines where the traditionalist right meets the conservationist left, and find a lot in common. Both down-home and intellectual, earthy and spiritual, it fills a much-needed void in modern culture.

I'm pleased to say they've published a few pieces of mine over the years, on old movies, living together, Irish funerals, and the ethics of eating meat, and as of today, my piece on teaching the Trojan War.

The Great Conversation

Pop quiz: What ancient Greek legend begins with the kidnapping of Helen of Troy, and ends with Greeks sneaking into Troy inside a hollow wooden horse?

If you said “The Iliad,” you’re wrong, as I discovered reading trying to read it to my daughter. I knew that the story didn’t begin with Helen; that was back-story, as familiar to Homer’s audience as the US Civil War might be to Americans. I also knew the story begins in the tenth and final year of the war.

Until I read ahead, though, I had assumed that the Trojan Horse was the climax of the story; instead, it ends with the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles, his body dragged around the battlements. The Trojan Horse part, I discovered, was mentioned in the Homer’s Odyssey and many other sources – most commonly Virgil’s Aeneid, written by Romans perhaps a thousand years later. Nor did the Iliad include the story of Achilles’ heel, or any of the other half-remembered bits of mythology I associated with the epic.   

The same is true of many other classic stories of Western culture, I’m discovering as I read some of them for the first time; not only did we not learn them as children, but we misremember what little we know.

By abandoning the classics, we break a line of culture that stretched through civilisation’s rises and falls, prosperity and Dark Ages. The same Greek classic that was once read by Alexander the Great as a child might also have been read by Marcus Aurelius several hundred years later, and by medieval monks several centuries after that, and by Victorian school-boys centuries still later. The canon gradually expanded – from Romans and Hebrews, French and British – but later works referred to the ones before them in a great conversation through the ages.

Teacher’s journals or education guides from 19^th-century America demonstrate an amazing breadth of learning, with even poor farm children learning Shakespeare or Plutarch at young ages. Of course we can’t know how much was absorbed, but it’s telling that children’s guides from that era are often beyond that of college students today. In teaching my daughter the Iliad I tried to use Rev. Alfred Church’s 1892 children’s version (“for Boys and Girls … in Simple Language.”), but even I find it requires more concentration than the iGadget world allows us.  

Like most modern Americans, I never read such cultural standards as a child, and knew only Disney versions or other bits of hand-me-down pop-culture flotsam. I found a few ancient stories in my childhood – Pandora, Baucis and Philemon, and of course the Bible – and that’s a few more than my peers did. Most of the canon, though, I had to approach as an adult, and some I’m only reading now as I home-school – or “after-school” – my daughter. 

Even the versions I read, though, had strayed far from their original meaning. Take the story of Pandora’s Box, for example; in every simplified version you read, Pandora lifts the lid from the box – actually a jar, but we’ll let that slide – and accidentally releases all the troubles of mankind. When the curses scattered, however, one thing remained, that left the box last: Hope.

I had always assumed, as in the illustration of my children’s book, that hope was a tiny angel that came out after all the demons had gone to plague the world, and the lesson was clear: you might have all the troubles of the world, but at least you have hope, and that makes it all better.

I told my daughter that this was how people today saw the story, and she saw right through it. “That’s a terrible lesson!” she said. “Hope doesn’t make anything better – and if it’s false hope, it makes everything worse.”

Sure enough, that, I think, was Hesiod’s intent three thousand years ago. Accepting what you can change and what you can’t – “and the wisdom to tell the difference,” as the saying goes – is difficult for all of us, and misplaced hope can interfere with that. Hesiod’s intent, I believe, was that hope was the worst of all the troubles – if he had done his own illustrations, he might have drawn it as a monster with the others.

Even familiar Bible stories like Noah linger misunderstood in our cultural memory. When the world was flooded and he needed to see where land was, Noah let ravens loose and they never returned – sadly, our Sunday-school teachers told us. Only when he let the dove loose, and it returned with the olive branch, did he realise there was a place for them to land. 

It was only later, studying medieval history, that I realised I had misjudged the ravens; they bore the good news. Vikings and other seafarers commonly brought ravens with them, knowing they could not land on water and had to find solid ground; when they did not return, they knew land was near. 

More modern classics also become jumbled or misrepresented in pop culture, so Gulliver’s Travels becomes a children’s comedy, and Romeo and Juliet a love story. Modern audiences, I suspect, find ancient stories difficult because we look for what we think we’re supposed to see, when the real story is far more instructive.

Sometimes, of course, we must view the stories with different values than their creators intended; we are not, for example, Bronze Age warlords. At one point in the Iliad, Agamemnon boasted that his men wanted to keep fighting, weary as they were from ten years of brutal combat. He tested them by suggesting they get in their ships and return to their families, and the men cheered and ran for the ships, and we feel for the men, not the king.

Homer might have meant this as suspense, a moment when the heroes’ spirits falter. To my daughter, this scene played like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and she acted it out like one -- Agamemnon running after his men, shouting “NO! NO! Bad warriors! Get back here!”

When Agamemnon stops the men from running away, moreover, one man – a lame hunchback and “man of the people” -- speaks against the king, and Odysseus silences him with a punch. Everything about the man – his underdog status, his handicaps, his populist defiance of power, cues us to take his side; you can see him played by John Qualen in a Frank Capra film, beaten down by the plutocrats and becoming a martyr for the people. In Homer, however, there’s not a trace of that – he clearly meant his audience to cheer for Odysseus. My daughter found it hard to sympathise with any of the Greek heroes after that.

Reading these classics to a pre-teen girl, moreover, brings another problem into focus. Almost all characters, in every ancient story, are male – and not just in epics engraved in cuneiform. From Gilgamesh and The Iliad up to Treasure Island and The Hobbit, hardly a story in history would pass the Bechdel Test.  

Even more seriously, such stories bring home how much of human existence has been sadly based on rape. The Trojan War began with the rape of Helen and ends with the rape of Cassandra, the Iliad opens with Agamemnon kidnapping the daughter of a priest of Apollo, other Greeks rape other women, and so on. The same thing is true of most ancient texts – just the first few chapters of Genesis alone have straight rape, gay rape, gang rape and many other things I've skipped over rather than talk about with my ten-year-old. I wonder about all the children who grew up reading the Good Book without someone to walk them through it. 

I only filter some of this for her, which means I discuss things with my daughter that would shock many people – she knows that much of history was brutal and selfish, and that humans return to that state easily. All the more reason, I say, to look at what these characters actually do and try to understand them – but don’t be afraid to judge them with our moral compass. 

She takes this and runs with it; when Paris kidnaps Helen, The Girl is appropriately outraged, and is pleased to see him finally meet his end. Instead of lingering, as Homer does, on the conflicts between Agamemnon and Achilles over possession of yet another kidnapped girl, I talk about how Cassandra reacted violently when Paris brought Helen into the city, outraged at her brother’s actions. My daughter naturally sees Cassandra as the heroine and moral compass of the story, a perception only enhanced by the fact that she is a.) a girl, b.) is right, and c.) no one believes her.

If Cassandra, in The Girl’s interpretation, is basically Hermione from Harry Potter, then Paris is Draco – Draco Malfoy, not the actual Draco from later in Greek history -- cruel on the surface, but cowardly underneath. When Agamemnon challenges Paris to a duel to end the war, she acts out the part of Paris, preening in front of his men, the ladies of the city sighing as he passes.

When he sees Agamemnon, however, Paris turns tail, and Hector, the brother who did not desire the war yet faithfully protected his city, beats Paris up in front of his men.

“Good for Hector!” she said. “Why didn’t Paris’ men rise up and kick him out, if he was such a bad leader?”

The same reason people don’t do that today, I said. If one person stands up, they can be punished or killed, like the hunchback who stood up to Agamemnon. It’s in everyone’s short-term interest to attack such a person, even if it’s in their long-term interest to stand with him against the leaders. It's called a collective action problem, like the Tragedy of the Commons.

“It’s like Spartacus, isn’t it?” she asked. “But he got some people to follow him, for a while.”

You’re right, I said – people can rise up against bad leaders, but it usually means following other leaders, rebels who can also be brutal, and aren’t usually successful.

“What if they all decided to create a democracy?” she asked.

There were none yet in the world, I said – but right here, among these people, is where it would start. And you look at all the times that people in this story are speaking against their leaders, like that hunchback. To me, I tell her, it feels like the seeds were already being planted.

I don’t know what a classicist would think of this, but I wouldn’t teach the canon any other way. My daughter finds the characters maddening, and the ends tragic, and she argues against everything they do. I encourage her to argue, and not just accept their actions passively -- but I also try to get her to put herself in their sandals, and learn from their mistakes. And so we gently argue, night after night … and we slowly find ourselves part of a great conversation that began long before us, and that we hope will continue for many to come.  

Photo: From our day at the seaside near Howth, County Dublin.