Colman's Helpful Pets

There are guide dogs and companion potbelly pigs and bomb-sniffing honeybees; there are dogs who will bring you your slippers and a dead squirrel, and cats who will bring you a dead bird; and all of these are very useful pets. But Saint Colman of Kilmacdough (Irish, 7th century) had three rather unusually useful helpers.
First there was the cock who awoke him early each morning to pray his night office.
Then there was the mouse who kept him from falling asleep while he prayed his night office.
Then there was the fly who acted as his bookmark, keeping his place in the missal.

How did the mouse keep him awake, you well may ask. The legend does not elaborate.

What we all need

Not to take away from those of you who are at this very moment enjoying the your home entertainment center, or working out in your home gym or sweating in your home sauna, but while you were otherwise engaged, the world of real estate exigencies has moved beyond your passé must-haves. And what is this latest sine qua non of a fully–equipped home? Why, it is a WINE CELLAR CUM APIARY.
In the course of our autumnal hive inspections, we noticed that some hives were rather weak and it seemed doubtful they would make it through the winter. Plus there has been an unfortunate spate of hive robbing of late, and weak hives are especially vulnerable. So CSB conceived this plan of bringing the weak hives inside. But where inside? In the wine cellar, of course.
Our basement harks back to the early 18th century and frankly, has not advanced much in the intervening years. In particular there is a region we call the back basement, where the floor is still dirt and cobblestones (The story goes that the cobblestones were brought over in the 17th century as ballast in Dutch ships. I cannot comment on the historical accuracy.) and rodents have been known to roam. Among the objects in the back basement are a decrepit coal furnace and a pile of glass x-rays, presumably of urological tracts because for most of the twentieth century the resident of this house was a prominent NY urologist. Who knows, maybe your grandfather’s digestive tract is preserved, in negative relief, in our basement. Maybe not.

In the past, on jerrybuilt shelves in the back basement, next to the pit containing the coal furnace and bedrock, we have stored wine bottles (both empty and otherwise) and odd alcoholic confections people kindly bring us from around the world (Chinese herb liqueur, Polish fruit brandy, Costa Rican coffee aqua-viva, Amazonian chichiwasser and the like). Calling this damp cobweb-draped chamber a wine cellar is like calling the snarky emails my daughter and I send each other Belles Lettres.
Now we have beehives there as well, and so can call it an Apiary. CSB made these wooden boxes you see and installed the nuc boxes inside; there is a hole on the other side of the box and plastic tubing going out the window, so the bees can get out for cleansing flights when they need to. The hope is that the will stay warm, huddled around the queen, and emerge triumphantly alive in the spring.
Plus, if you put an ear to the outside of the box, you can hear them buzzing. Soon everyone will want an apiary in their basement.

1924?

In 1924 Lenin died, the 8-hour work week came to Belgium and André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto.

Arguably, these are not related events. Although the very existence of surrealism makes connections possible that are not.

My father was born in 1924; his birthday was 2 days ago. Marlon Brando was born in 1924. He died 4 years ago. And Robert Mugabe, tyrant of Zimbabwe, was born in 1924. (I know this because this week’s New Yorker has excellent articles about both Mugabe and Brando, illustrated. No article about my father.) In the accompanying photograph, Brando is young and sultry and handsome; Mugabe’s photograph was taken this year, and he looks remarkably good for his age, so much so that I have to suspect something Dorian Grayish is going on. Somewhere in the $10 million Harare mansion, there is a closet filled with skulls, old machine guns, and a life size portrait of a hunched over Mugabe, with dried blood under his fingernails, wrinkles so deep that whole families of nits can live inside them, and a flock of crow’s feet. Or else plastic surgery. We must always consider plastic surgery.

Chances are good my father doesn’t know who Marlon Brando was; that was nothing to do with memory loss and everything to do with a lifetime of single minded focus on the vicissitudes of the textile industry, and – oh yes - indifference to popular culture. My father may actually know the name of Robert Mugabe because he reads the Times religiously and watches the Lehrer Report religiously, but the country he knows is Rhodesia. Zimbabwe has disappeared into the maw of occluded vessels, along with Myanmar, Mumbai and the end of Pan American.

The Death of a Hive

Some of you may remember our observation hive, last seen in these pages in its incarnation as a Coptic Cross. (More or less, see my mother’s comment for clarification.)

This week, the hive died. For a while we suspected something was amiss in the hive, as the population was declining precipitously. That is not unusual for this time of year when the queen has stopped laying and the bees are getting ready to hunker down for the winter. But it was disturbing to notice that the normally tidy (if they were my relatives, I would label them OCD) bees were not dispatching the dead bodies, but instead leaving them to lie & rot on their front porch, bleak intimations of mortality.

Because there are only four frames in the observation hive, they never get up to the numbers of a normal hive (60,000 at peak of the summer) nor do they store up honey for the winter. So as the nectar dried up we started feeding honey to the bees. (CSB devised an ingenious screened porch off their front porch that works quite well for pouring in honey, local of course.) But we think we made it too easy and that the hive was robbed. We saw a couple of deadly battles outside the window pierced by their entry hole, but the truth is, the observation hive was just too few and too weak to resist.
One day there were more dead bees piled up at the base of the hive than there were living bees despairingly walking across the honeycomb. And the next day there were none.

I know it’s Nature’s Way and all that, but it still terribly sad when a hive dies. It is a loss both singular and multiple. We think of each hive as a single functioning organism with a single intelligence and a single purpose; Rudolph Steiner wrote of the hive as analogous to a human brain. But it is impossible not to notice that there are thousands of individual bees in there. When I watch a bee balancing on the stamen of a cleome and collecting pollen, it is one bee I am watching. So I am mourning her. Many thousands of her.

All over the Place in Dreamland

Last night I dreamt that my novel (Absent a Miracle) had been adapted into a play, and I was in the audience watching it, and 2 seats over was John Updike. I watched and I watched and half the characters were missing and there were NO SAINTS. The saints had been completely expunged from the story.
Later John Updike told me he liked the play because it was essentially the story of Princess Anne and then he offered me his office to work in and he dropped tomatoes all over the floor.

When I told CSB about this dream (because he is the lucky audience to all my dreams), which an emphasis on the NO SAINTS part, he muttered something about an uphill battle.
(That would be Sisyphus who does not appear in the Oedipus plays were are now reading.)

And certainly it has nothing to do with the expunged feast of Saint Ursula, October 21, removed from the calendar in 1969 for the flimsy reason that she probably never existed. What can we say about someone whose apocryphal story has given such brilliant material to so many artists, from Caravaggio to Memling to Carpaccio to anonymous Puerto Rican woodcarvers? You have beautiful young women, gruesome deaths, any landscape you like, and the critical mass of 11,000 virgins. The fact that the cult of Saint Ursula was suppressed (along with another favorite, saint Christopher) in no way diminished her popularity.

Why John Updike you may well ask? Presumably because I’d just read a review of his Widows of Eastwick. And before that, in a review last week of a book about witchcraft, which I will probably never read, Germaine Greer referred to Saint Melangell and her hare. That perked me up for a whole morning of otherwise surreal conversations with my father as I narrated for him my personal (slanted) version of the last 100 years of Cuban History, because Saint Melangell of Pennant Melangell in Wales, who was introduced to me by Tristan Hulse, hagiographer par excellence, is a favorite of mine and just so happens to appear in Absent a Miracle. (Notice how I managed to refer not once but twice to the title of my new book.)

My Apicultural Clipping Service

One of the great unanticipated pleasures of becoming a beekeeper has been discovering the existence of my personal worldwide clipping service. I had no idea this existed. I honestly believed that for the rest of my life the only clippings I could look forward to would be from my mother, in the vein of articles in the local paper about a Plague Among the Horseshoe Crabs in Duxbury Bay, because that is where my ex-husband and his family sail.

I was wrong. Things have taken a decidedly felicitous turn. It seems this Apicultural Clipping Service only needed the bees, the crisis among the bees and the Internet to emerge fully-grown from the collective brain of my family and friends.

Now my mother sends me articles about the Beekeepers of Wadi Du’an from Aramco World.

A friend sent me a picture of a South Korean beekeeper wearing all his bees. Warmer than polar fleece.
A culinary friend sends me every mention of honey in Gourmet magazine.
Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat, a brilliant and also hilarious book about obituarists, sent me a link to an alarmist British article predicting that English honey will run out before Christmas. (This arrived just a few days before the recent Times’ piece about the British recall of edible sex toys, mostly chocolate. Is there a connection between these two critical events?)

I don’t have to read the Economist, because my sister, B, does, and she sends me every article about Bees Detecting Landmines and the Discovery of 3000 year-old beehives in Israel, and of course, the ever-worrisome CCD.

But the tone of these clipped articles was seriously ratcheted upward this past week, when my brother M was cleaning out his files and found a couple of articles for me in his scholarly clutter. The first was: The Social behavior of the honeybee: Classical Physics or Quantum Mechanics? Here is a typical sentence: “This section briefly describes experimental data demonstrating that physical fields and quantum effects, both endogenous and exogenous, are involved in the behavior of social insects and in coordinated interactions among elementary components of living matter.”
Also: “A well-known example of this is the “misdirection” in the orientation of the honeybee’s recruitment dance caused by the subtle fluctuations in the intensity of the earth’s magnetic field. [So &So] find that bursts of magnetic fields at a frequency of 250 Hz cause jumps of misdirection of up to ten degrees.”
In case you are disinclined to read to the end, I will clue you in. The answer to the question posed in the title is Quantum Mechanics.
The second article M sent is called “A Mathematical foundation for the dance language of the honeybee” by Barbara Shipman of the Math Department at the U. of Rochester. It is 30 pages long and only 3 of those pages are NOT studded with mathematical formulas and equations that are sublimely beautiful in their unintelligibility, like Arabic calligraphy or Norse runes. Were it not that I am sure he is simply trying offload all this paper, I would be flattered that my brother actually thought I might understand this.
The truth is that I love watching the bees perform their perfectly mathematical waggle dances, giving each other directions to the latest trove of nectar. If that is quantum mechanics, so be it.
And to all of you in my clipping service out there - and all of you who might consider entering those hallowed ranks - consider this my expression of heartfelt gratitude. And wonder.

The Trees are Taller Now

This week’s theme could very well be: The Trees are so Much Taller Now. Blessed as we’ve been with Indian Summer all week, we’ve walked every day, my father, my granddaughter and I. In Hingham there are several lovely woods with meandering paths, but 2 of the finest are World’s End (more about the global proclivity for World’s Ends later) and the GW Town Forest. My father grew up here and now lives in the house he grew up, and he has walked in these woods and along these paths all his life. And because Hingham, like so much of New England, was once entirely agricultural, all the forests are second growth (at least).
Because of his strokes two years ago, my father has forgotten huge chunks of the last fifty years, while the first twenty or thirty years are his life are still vivid. And every day he forgets yesterday and last week and last month, anew. But he is undaunted. At times bizarrely cheerful.
And the trees are so much taller now, than they were then. Each day we can rediscover this.
At World’s End, four coastal drumlins extending into Hingham Harbor, he comments that the trees along the shore were never so tall; there used to be an unimpeded view across the water to Boston. Now we see the skyscrapers in the interstices.
The trees ARE much taller. In 1889, a John Brewer owned all of the peninsula. After farming for 30 years he had the idea of developing his land. So he hired Olmsted (the very same) to design a subdivision and according to his plan, cart paths were laid out and over 900 trees were planted. Happily, the proposed subdivision never came to fruition. The adolescent trees of the 30’s and 40’s are now stately oaks, maples, walnuts and chestnuts.The vistas are ineluctably altered.
Ditto with the Town Forest. In 1922 the town acquired over 100 acres of farmland and planted mostly white pines. Those white pines are now mature and we walk along soft paths of fallen pine needles.
For my father, all the trees are taller than remembered. For my granddaughter, it is all new and colorful and she buries herself in a pile of pine needles, again and again, to emerge triumphant.(That's her in the plaid shirt.)