Third Person Post--Bee Story HAWMC

She wakes from a dream of falling, organ failure. The correspondences between numbers and foods are warping and winding, and the "or else" doctor visit is drawing closer. "Should I stay or should I go" insistent, through her head. Poems, growing things, intimate glances, are bringing tears to her eyes far more often than wontedly. Loved ones are leaving town and she's running out of manic, even boosted by contraband caffeine. She can't crash yet!


Whoa! Wake up! It's a beautiful, sunny day! The sun is shining, the ground, tired from its long snowload, greener every day.


Today's prompt: write about a memory from the third person perspective. Don't use "I" unless you include dialogue.


Ela got back to the farm community late Sunday afternoon, after visiting with friends, helping out on their farm. The "lead woman" on the farm, with whom she had an uneasy relationship, came to meet her, somewhat friendly, and told her there had been a lot of bees around that day.


Next morning after the rain, she was out on her walk around the farm with wheelbarrow and fruit-picking equipment, harvesting fruit, seeing which trees' crops were maturing, checking up on that ripening jackfruit. When she came back to the homestead area, barrow loaded with avocados and two racks of bananas, the woman ran to meet her. Many bees were buzzing around, heading toward the office and packing shed which doubled as her bedroom.


The two women stood, looking up into the air, gradually joined by several other community members. There was a throaty hum, like voices in an auditorium before a grand entrance. The whole sky darkened briefly--an airborne life form composed of thousands of four-winged beings, one mind, one intention. The colony landed on the wall of the office, her bedroom, and milled around, quieting, gentle.

She ran over to the next-door farm, where a self-styled "bee rustler" and carpenter was staying, and invited him to join the party. A small crowd had gathered at a respectful distance from the colony on the wall. There were "wows," oohs and aahs. One skeptical voice worrying about stings and allergic reactions. One puzzled voice, obstreperous from the break in routine, "Why are they here?" A confident response, "I guess Ela called them in." Ela and the bee rustler showed the crowd how calm and docile the colony was, how you could put your hand into their midst and have their velvet legs crawl over you. Some community members hung back, others were delighted to join in. The property owner noticed scout bees checking out some cracked timbers, working their way into the building; expressed concern. Bee rustler got up on the ladder with a Sawzall--a surprisingly common beekeeping tool--and opened up the timbers so that there was no hidden spot for them to build into.


Ela brought a hive box and set it beside the colony, filled with frames redolent of old honey. After clearing a spot for the hive to rest, out by the farm pond, she spent most of the day hanging out with the colony, singing to them, playing her flute to them.

this was in AZ, but a similar image

When the sun began to set, still in shorts and flip flops, she took a soft brush and dustpan, and gently brushed the bees down toward the prepared box. She aimed for the center of the clump, where the queen would be, and when that part of the colony had dropped into the box, the rest followed, like a silk scarf. As darkness fell, she gently covered the box and, with the help of a strong man with some bee experience, carried the hive out to their new location. Next morning, she woke to the sound of some bees straggling outside on her wall. But out by the pond, the hive was full of bees, entering and exiting, getting to know their new territory.


Over the months that followed, Ela visited with her bees often, but didn't make huge efforts to increase their colony, although theirs was a small group and she had heard that despite the area being full of fruit farms, there wasn't enough nectar and pollen at any given time to sustain a large colony. She felt some guilt. Just as people suffered from deficiencies in this hugely abundant climate and didn't address them because of their dogma about eating only from the land, so she was hesitant to interfere with the bees' needs. It was "natural" to them to forage from the surrounding trees and vines, not to be fed white sugar. She never took any of their honey. Still, the guilt persisted. But were they really "her" bees? She hadn't even been home when they first scouted the place out. Yes, they came to her bedroom in swarm, but again, she was out harvesting fruit when they first started to arrive. And of course, it wasn't "her" bedroom at all--just a bed in the corner of an office where she shook down at nights, a person with very few needs or demands. Was "letting nature take its course" a form of cruelty, both to the bees and to her own body?

Bee Musings

Happy Midweek everyone! Mittwoch - that's what Wednesday's called in German - no getting over the fact that you get past today and you're on your way home, so to speak. I like how I see people calling it 'hump day' - a different visual for the same concept.

I'm at the Safeway and the internet is much faster than it was at the library yesterday, so no browser-collapse mayhem and I've successfully uploaded the pictures for yesterday's post - a very stubby maca plant and two oddly angled photos.

Today, I wanted to talk about bees a bit. I spent a large amount of my time working bees when I lived in Hawaii, and I got into it because I found myself eating a lot of raw honey. At that stage, it really seemed to help my digestion. Specifically - and I have no good explanation for this - it seemed to enable me to digest fat better than I had been able to. At that point, I was a high-fruit raw foodist and deathly afraid of fat, partly for the good reason that any kind of fat made me feel sick. In Hawaii, eating honey, I found myself eating more avocado and coconut without difficulty and built some muscle for the first time in a very long time. Probably the best explanation is that it was partly in my head, partly that local avocados and young coconuts were more easily digested than the nuts I'd been eating in California, and partly that it stimulated my appetite a bit and enabled me to eat a bit more. That said, the communion with bees piece, the connection with such a different species that can teach us so much, was a big draw for me too. I read The Shamanic Way of the Bee and some other books like that, and was very influenced by that too. But for many people it's just another form of farming. And some of the diseases that afflict modern honeybees send one into a vicious cycle of overmanagement and overdependence.

I still love bees. But I can't eat honey anymore - I don't know if I ever will, although I eat some bee pollen, and I truly believe in honey's magical and healing potentials. And now I live in Alaska. I'm very mixed about the whole thing...

Bees. There are people who have been keeping bees up in Alaska for decades. The Russians first introduced them here in the early 1800's. So it's a well-hallowed practice. But rather like growing tomatoes in a greenhouse here, you can only keep bees in very well-insulated hives, and even then many hives don't make it through the long winters. Homer's maritime winters, which often feature spells of thawing lasting up to two weeks, are even worse for beekeeping than the bitter months of unbroken 40-below of the Interior. In the latter case, the bees simply hibernate solidly for more than half the year. But in the freeze-and-thaw scenario, they can often wake up, move around, feed, only for the temperature to drop again, at which point they can often either freeze or run out of food and starve. And this is even when they're well-managed. 

In other words, of course there are no feral honeybees in Alaska. Yes, people keep bees over winter successfully, but most bees are brought up from California in the spring. Just like the tomato, growing something that can't live wild here is something that I feel uneasy about. And even more so, because of the level of interference in their natural cycle of activity involved in managing them. 

When I took advantage of the sunshine on Monday and went to work a friend's pair of strong overwintered hives, what I was essentially doing was castrating the hives. Bees want to swarm in summer. A colony of bees is an organism that reproduces itself by rearing a new queen, who flies out to mate with drones - hopefully a non-incestuous union bringing in new blood - and then the old queen flies away, taking many of the old bees with her, to found a new colony. Swarming is discouraged in the lower 48 (and elsewhere) too, because it interferes with the honey harvest - making a new home and putting stores in the current one are two opposed activities. But if they swarm here, there are no wild drones around to mate with (although in there may be drones from managed hives if you're not too remote), and more importantly, once they've flown off, there's nowhere for them to set up home that they could possibly last the winter - or even the late summer night time temperatures.

So, there I was, barehanded but with a veil over my head, going through every frame of the two hives, removing every drone cell and queen cell that I could find and so retarding any efforts at colonization in this inhospitable land. I was doing 'the right thing,' as no swarm could ever survive up here, and the colony left behind would be weakened by their departure to the point of diminishing its chances of survival too, but it felt so…rude. On the one hand, I'm being as gentle with my hands as possible, trusting them barehanded and seeking the thrumming bee communion that I've always loved about working bees, but on the other, whenever I find drone cells or queen cells (which was extremely often on Monday - on almost every side of every frame, in fact), I'm brushing aside the bees to scrape off their inanimate infants with the sharp point of the hive tool!

I've heard that some folks up here remove the queen and a skeleton staff of workers when the flowers are in full bloom, so that the workers can focus on gathering as much nectar and pollen as possible, rather than being distracted by the reproductive/swarming business. But I've never known hives to be happy not having a queen for long…

Meanwhile, my own two hives with their difficult start and nightmare journey here… I need to merge them, their numbers are so depleted they don't have a chance as two separate entities… But I've been dragging my feet over getting it done, partly because I was going to do it at the same time as moving them, which is best done at night and I'm generally wiped out in the evenings, and partly because I was loath to kill the queen of the weaker hive, which is what I'd have to do to merge them. When I checked them on Monday, the weaker hive no longer had a queen. Did she swarm? She'd certainly made some drones earlier on… She wouldn't have had a moth's hope in a candelabrum if she did that. 

It makes me a little sad, but despite today's sunshine it's been a cool and wet summer so far, which is unlucky for trying out something so chancy. 

The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here/Two Poisons/Strawberry Shortcake Party
We had company this weekend and before that I was cleaning and caulking up a storm, so I haven't been near the internet for three days and am so behind! Sorry, everyone! And this week I'm getting ready to go on my trip to Fairbanks, which is so exciting and so daunting from so many perspectives. I'll write more about it this week, for sure.

Two kinds of poison for me this afternoon - the sun finally came out yesterday and today has been gorgeous, so I went out to the beehives and did some more swarm-prevention. Two very strong hives, one of which was beginning to remonstrate with my intimate attentions. I was working with a veil but no gloves (you're much more sensitive that way) and got just one sting - from a dead bee, I think - I was replacing a frame in the hive and a stinger apparently not attached to a bee caught my finger. Then, driving back toward town, I got caught behind the road-painters, of all things, going at 10mph! What should have been a 5 minute drive was a 20 minute drive - I was so relieved when they turned off.

You can see the 'wet paint' sign on the back of the truck, and the shiny yellow line in the road. And boy, did that paint ever stink! It made me dizzy. Interesting that both bee venom and whatever's in that paint would be considered poisonous and yet I'd rather have the beesting anytime and certainly regard it as a lesser toxin.

One of our favorite friends in town is Phil's ex-wife from long ago, his daughter's mom. Over the weekend, she threw (at the home of other good friends) a 'strawberry shortcake party' - we were all given strawberries from her overflowing freezer and instructed to make some goodies for a potluck dinner! Well, I made some strawberry-themed goodies and also a big green salad, almost entirely stocked with greens from our garden, without strawberries (since I can't have them).  It was challenging for me not to feel left out in the midst of all the abundance from which I'm barred, but making beautiful things and getting to indulge my creativity made up for the eating part.

Here are the greens from the garden:

Peppermint leaves front right for the strawberry soup and the first accidentally-harvested maca on the left...
And here's the salad itself:

I also made strawberry-peppermint soup. I used regular cream and yogurt because of the audience for whom I was making it, but ordinarily I'd use coconut kefir and almond cream, I think:

It was very well-liked. How strange that my 'irregular' way of making it is everyone else's 'normal...'

I also stuffed miniature peppers with home-made (homegrown) arugula pesto and drizzled with strawberry vinaigrette, and roasted:

'Drizzle' got sloshed around a bit in the truck on the backroads getting there - oh well...
I also made strawberry muffins (not pictured) with no gluten/dairy/eggs 'but despite all that scary-sounding information they taste really good' was the sponsorship they received from their intended recipient when I announced them like that! That's the prevailing attitude here - even as creative as I can be at making things, people are just not that open to the no sugar/dairy/grains/etc thing - and if they don't have to be, why should they, I guess? I just know that if anyone ever does start to notice food allergy issues, they'll know that they can come to me for help!

Up For This Week


I hope I didn't lose everyone immediately with my post about 'art and truth' on Friday! My mum told me over the phone that it was 'tangled' indeed. I'm hoping to get some more of my thoughts out about it here this week, hopefully with greater clarity also.

So much to think about re bees, and rather than try to summarize it in today's post, I'll try to get something out in more depth and clarity.

And of course, I keep hinting about my big trip coming up but have barely said a word about it on here! It merits a post of its own asap, if only to help me plan how I'm going to stay sane and keep my energy level for two weeks away from home in a place I've never been before, and how I'm going to feed myself under those conditions also!

And that will probably be plenty.
much love.

Bees and a Near-Miss with Photos; Eighty Percent Raw Interview!

Happy July everyone! Now that it's July, I can reveal that for this month's issue of Eighty Percent Raw, I conducted a lengthy interview with none other than the Father of Raw Foods, Viktoras Kulvinskas! You can see the interview here. He was very generous and gracious with his time - it was a great experience and I'm excited to get to share it now. It's a funny thing in the publishing world, when you have to contain your excitement and avoid stealing your own thunder!

I just got back from working bees with some friends. My own two hives really haven't built up very much at all - they had such a rough journey up here and then it was cold and then the dandelions bloomed late and short... I'm going to merge them together and move them to our place, where they'll have a lookout on the roof of our bunker, safe from bears. But we were working a friend's two overwintered hives - bees everywhere, beautiful queens, doing great. No smoke, no gloves. Loads of drones and some queen cells hanging off the edges indicating that they're considering swarming. No point in doing that here, and we don't want them to do that, so there was a scene of drone destruction wreaked. I got stung once - by a nettle! But then right at the end, a little bee crawled onto the center of my hand and, quite deliberately, stung me. I said 'oh, sweetie, you don't want to sting me!' but everyone else agreed that that was most likely exactly what she wanted to do.

And - I'm embarrassed to admit - I took the camera along but didn't take any pictures. It was just starting to rain, and that added to the 'get it done and put it back together so that we quit disturbing them soon' vibe. Soon, though!

I saw the naturopath this morning and have started the DMSA chelation for mercury and lead - three months of that and then, he says, we can finally really start addressing the yeast. I'll write more about what we talked about, or about food and writing and how they're mutually reinforcing for me, maybe tomorrow. I know I've been very reticent about the whole subject recently, partly due to uncertainty about level of interest or how helpful it might be to others. But it's a big deal in my life and so I probably should.

Love to all!

Pictures and rhymes

They say a picture speaks a thousand words,

but 'blooming willow' here requires its caption

and who can photo major or minor thirds?

this frozen lake's known better with description.

Perhaps you can see what I had for lunch

but this won't tell my joy to find radicchio

as for the coconut cheese, I have a hunch,

its whiteish, milky look could easily trick you

without my explanation - and who'd know

these bees had waited, jammed by regulations,

to fly north to Alaskan homes and so

begin their cautious willow pollinations?

Bees in the airport, no sleep, blizzard's cruel glory

A picture speaks, but not the total story.

*****

'What Was I Thinking?' Ending In Tears - A Blessing No one Was Hurt

[Written last night]

Before I left town, I asked myself out loud on here what I was thinking volunteering myself for an all-nighter in my current weak state, especially with a mercury removal as the immediate sequel. It turns out that it was the right question to ask. To be honest, I really believed that even though I have been having such depth of fatigue, with my customary grit and determination I would be able to pull off a performance exceptional for my current abilities, to borrow from myself to help everyone out, with just a little stimulation and intention.

It was going so well, too. Getting the bees released from the cargo area took a long time, during which I got to know another really cool beekeeper from the Anchorage area, and both of us fielded all kinds of questions about bees from the cargo staff, who were fascinated and excited: there was definitely a 'buzz' when the two huge carts full of bee packages were wheeled out! I got very cold during that time, and kept the truck chilly, so as to keep myself awake. I left the airport, and the three local folks still hard at work, unpacking bees, around 2.30am.

[No internet time right now, but I will update with a couple photos I took.]

My eyes were peeled for moose. I negotiated miles of heavy rain, and then some miles of thick fog over the mountains. I successfully delivered two packages to people further north on the peninsula who waited for me in their trucks. The bees were in good shape. I made Soldotna (72 miles north of Homer) around 6am: driving through the inexorably gloaming dawn for the previous hour, despite the extreme moose hazard and having to hit myself to keep from getting sleepier, was an almost mystically beautiful experience, with snowbanks receding, the purple of naked alders everywhere, willows rearing up blooms sticky with pollen (just right for my passengers); stands of scrubby spruces in swampy lowlands with the ice mostly melted out.

6am and indubitably light, and back on relatively familiar turf - I really felt like the most difficult part of the journey had been successfully negotiated and was looking forward to getting home around 8 and having a comfortable cushion before my 10am dentist appointment. I walked around and stretched legs, got a cup of hot rooibos tea, and continued my slow and steady progress homewards.

Nemesis for Hubris?

Well, maybe that sense of confidence was hubris? But there's no doubt that driving in daylight is so much easier… A few miles further on, I encountered some more heavy rain, which was falling as sleet after a couple of minutes, and then within a mile I was in a blizzard! Springtime in Alaska: one of the major challenges of driving here, especially in spring and fall is the suddenness of weather changes.

I was so grateful for the hours spent practicing ice-driving on Beluga Lake this winter: I was in two-wheel drive and our truck is light in the back (read 'skid-prone'). In the moment that I was thinking I should look for somewhere to pull over to click my hubs for 4-wheel drive, the most awful thing happened. The truck skidded badly enough that I lost control, swerved into the oncoming lane (there's only one lane in each direction this section of the highway), headed for the ditch. I had been going pretty slow and  managed to wrest control back and was almost completely back on my side of the road. But for an unfortunate piece of timing (the fact that it could have been timed even worse for maximum carnage is salutary to remember), someone else was coming the other way! His front driver's side collided with my driver's side rear end just as I was getting myself straight. So, knocked perpendicular to the highway, I ran up the steep bank off the road, propelled by the force of the collision.

Somehow I managed not to turn the truck over, to steer it along this steep bank, even to avoid the pole sticking up out of the bank that was right in my way, and to get it back onto the road.

(In all the trauma and disaster feeling of the whole experience, I can't help but feel a certain admiration for how I handled the vehicle: I don't know how I did it, but it certainly made the best possible out of the situation.)

Of course, I was so worried about the bees, and shocked and traumatized and horrified, and full of recriminations at having had it happen. But only one of the ten bee packages was ruptured (and the bees just clustered around the queen on the outside, as they do). They were a little disturbed, what with the whole truck bed having been canted right and all the glass on the left of the canopy being shattered, but I fed them some honey water and snugged a tarp around them, and they were fine. It turned out that the other car had a lot of bodywork damage on the front driver's side: it looked really bad! But he wasn't hurt, and was really nice about it. We waited for two hours out there in the snow, talking to the trooper who finally arrived and getting everything sorted out. Phil and his daughter's fiance drove  up and brought me and the truck home: Phil called me not ten minutes after it happened, waking up suddenly anxious about me. What a blessing to be supported like that, and I was shaken enough to be glad not to drive more. 

Tearstained Blessings

Not surprisingly after that, on top of mercury removals and lack of sleep, my fatigue reaches a whole new level. It's hours  since I last cried about it, but I still look like I've been crying! I was taking a big risk, and taking on a responsibility, and it ended in tears. The message that I am not 'up to' pulling off something 'over and above' like that at the moment was so painful to me: the idea that I can't take on responsibilities… It's a notorious stretch of road: averages 50 accidents every winter. Was it nemesis for my hubris?

But really, horrible though it was, I have to look at the blessings. No one was hurt. The bees were fine, and they didn't get too cold with all the waiting around either, as I was worrying they would. Damage to both vehicles was extensive, but involved bodywork and not vital engine parts.

My sweet, wonderful husband came to my rescue, and was so helpful throughout the day getting me to my appointments and helping get the bees to their owners. And down in Homer, it was a gorgeous, sunny day! It seemed almost other-worldly to relate that I'd gotten in an accident in a blizzard that morning.

(Update Today)

Today, just got through hiving the bees. They have the runs! I've never been shat on by bees so much before. I hope they'll be ok - not surprising that they have travelers' diarrhea after such a traumatic journey but hopefully they'll be ok now that they have a good home. Beautifully sunny here again today.

I'm toast and we have to be somewhere else. Soon more.

Crazy All-Nighter and Product Review From the Road - Personal Water Filter

What am I Thinking?

Greetings from Anchorage! The springtime weather pattern, whereby the vibration that one normally associates with noon finally kicks in around 6 or 7pm, seems to be coming into operation, with the back-kick that it is getting so light in the mornings that it's hard not to wake all the way up around 5am with that exciting feeling of the sap rising. 

Fatigue still keeps my life-experience fascinatingly psychedelic and occasionally fugal, and what am I thinking driving through the night tonight? The beekeeper who picked up the huge shipment of colonies for beekeepers all over south-central Alaska has had one boondoggle after another down on the West Coast, and will finally make it up from Portland at midnight tonight (instead of yesterday). So, since I'd already come up to town, I said I'd hang around and pick up the bees for our end of the highway tonight. Have a mercury removal to get back for tomorrow morning.

What am I thinking? I'm thinking raw cacao, peppermint, guarana/kola nut capsules, bee pollen, and possibly even resorting to some green tea! My adrenals can't really afford it at the moment: that kind of 'jump start' is short-lived in its effect these days, and I pay back with interest. But I will need to be alert for those moose in the dark, who think that they can barge into anything with impunity owing to their bulk.

Personal Water Filter

The other thing I'm thinking is a nap if at all possible this evening, and lots of water. And that's one of the things I was thinking about when I mentioned products that, despite their being 'stuff,' feel somewhat life-enhancing to me. We're active and we move around a lot, go out in town and also out in the wilderness. I've been wanting a portable water filter for both those purposes, because I really cannot drink the chlorinated water that comes out of those ubiquitous drinking fountains - but if I had a way to filter it, then I wouldn't be having to carry gallons of water around. There have been a few times both in town and in wilderness that I've been caught with inadequate water and really suffered for it.

After doing a lot of research, I ended up buying the Sport Berkey personal filter through Amazon. Back in Hawaii, where most folks were on catchment water (with risk of leptospirosis, giardia and possibly worse), the Big Berkey was the filter of choice, so I knew that this was a good name. It claims to be good for about 640 uses on city water and about 150 uses with wilderness water.

Since receiving it, I've been better hydrated when out and about! The filter doesn't add a lot of weight to the bottle (which is sometimes a problem) and although it doesn't produce the most delicious water I've ever tasted, it's definitely drinkable and doesn't taste of chlorine. The bottle doesn't hold an enormous amount, so I imagine that in the wilderness I'd carry a half-gallon water pouch for untreated water and pour in as necessary. 

My one concern is with the bottle itself. Generally, I avoid plastic as much as the next health-conscious person (within the limitations of being on the go in situations where broken glass would be inconvenient). This bottle is a plastic that is soft enough to be squeezable. I don't detect any plastic taste; however, I wonder whether my recollecting of the stainless steel Big Berkey as an imperative to trust that they know what they're doing is misleading.

Another thing that I should say is that the functionality is a matter of taste. You flip up the top (which doesn't leak) and a funny little wiggly drinking straw pops up at you, which connects to the filter. You suck through this and up comes your water. I like this just fine, it works great for me. But I had Phil try it and he didn't like it - said it was too slow for him. I'm a sipper, he's a gulper, so the value to you of my recommendation may rest somewhat on whether or not you fall into the same category as I do! 

Yes, I am grateful for this...