Great read here from the Asylum, hope you’ll take a moment!
I will add my personal touch to the opening paragraph about understanding among long relationships. I think there’s an ‘astral’ or cosmic element to this—a kind of repel and attract, that’s part of a greater field we’ve no real control over. I know that sounds rather mystical, maybe that’s what often comes with age?
But as an example, when Hubby and I are ‘on’ as in ‘connected’ we communicate easily even without words sometimes, completely effortlessly, like two seasoned dancers in a perfect duet, gliding through the day together.
And then, another time, we get nothing but stepping on each other’s toes, losing our words as if our balance, talking past each, getting aggravated over nothing—just like that—like our tempo suddenly shifted. The astrologers might suggest Venus went retrograde, or something like this.
Or, the conspiracy theorist in me might muse, someone might be deliberately altering our frequencies with Directed Energy Weapons.!
Baffling reality. 🙂
“People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.” ― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard If you’ve been with your significant other, for any substantial amount of time, the above quote is something you’ve probably muttered to yourself in some fashion or another, and then quickly forgotten the misunderstanding […]
I know this woman does not buy her own B.S.!She’s a tool of the Club of Rome and a nitwit to boot, and I say that in the nicest way, since I think the lot of those ‘running’ with her are total SODS.
How do I KNOW she does not buy her own B.S? Good question.
Because she knows it’s not about race, because she lived in southern Texas and she lived in Michigan, and unless she’s totally delusional, she knows there are no race wars happening here, at all, since, like 196-.
Give me a damn break, please!
I was just at the laundromat, I go regular now, since our washer broke, again, because unless you pay $1,000 you get a pile of crap.
Anyway, I like the laundromat, to be frank.I learn a lot.
What I learned this last visit?I did not understand but every 10th word from my local kinsmen in rural East Texas. “Bingo” that’s what was being discussed. Literally, Bingo, the game, that’s one of the only words I understood, and I speak a conversational level of several languages. This was, apparently, English.Bless their hearts, they even tried to include me in the conversation.
“But, I’m not a ‘game person’,” I tried to explain, and the elderly black woman who I could hardly understand, generously trying to include me, with sweet yet cataract eyes, speaking my own language, in my own town, said, ‘me neither!’ For shame you so-called spiritual leader pretending there is conflict here, or there, of just a color nature!
I’ve NEVER felt threatened here, or anywhere, just by some ‘black threat’. Nor them from my ‘white privilege’. We are at the laundromat together, you f*cking brat.
And this so-called “spiritual teacher” Marianne Williamson, is a fraud of the highest degree.
”May We Engineer the Climate? Not only is the science of climate engineering uncertain; the legal issues are also highly uncertain. Although existing international law does not specifically limit the freedom of states to undertake climate engineering, the international community would likely demand a say should climate engineering move from the realm of speculation to concrete proposals. The experience of other environmental regimes, however, suggests that developing an international decision-making mechanism would be difficult, and that the international community might opt for a simple prohibition on climate engineering on grounds of ‘precaution’.”
And, ready now, steady now, last one, folks! Take your time here, it’s the wild card, how will you play it, will you get the picture? And, if you get the picture, will you see the forest f/or the trees?
Is our culture in a bottomless well, free falling since, well, I don’t know when, exactly?
But the decline sure seemed to accelerate sometime during the decade of the 1980s.
Aptly named album: “The Road to Ruin” — song: “I want to be sedated” — That about sums it up, no?
I think there’s only two lines of lyrics yelled to a monstrous ‘melody’ that gets stuck in your head like a really bad TV ad. Included here for illustration purposes only. Please, don’t listen, unless you have an immediate and effective brainwashing remedy to get the slime out.
What sophisticated music fills my adolescent memories?Bach? Tchaikovsky? Dvorak?
Well, I was enamored with the ballet for a while, so I’m luckier than many. And, of course there was Bugs Bunny. I fear the kids today don’t even have good cartoons anymore!
In more ways than I can currently count, I think Crrow777 is spot on when he repeats the old adage: “All roads lead to Rome.” Unfortunately it seems to mirror the lame cliche: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”
For those in the rest of the world trying to figure out what kind of insanity is happening in this country, let me assure y’all, we have only a few clues, and please do understand, Americans are the most propagandized population in the world, I’d be willing to bet.
George Carlin had it as close to right as I’ve heard so far: American Bullshit. Brilliant.
Nonsense.So many of these old adages should be read as the exact opposite.
The Truth will burden you mercilessly.It will chain you down.It will promise to crush you.
That’s why most folks can’t handle the truth, don’t seek it out even momentarily, and change the subject if you try to broach it, even when it’s coated in marzipan.
But it rarely comes candy-coated.
If you’re an animal lover it will come in the form of a video clip from Siberia of a mink being skinned alive and shrieking in tones that will haunt you for a lifetime.
If children are your greatest weakness it will come in the form of the decades of elite pedophiles and abusers regularly affronting you in the news, with nothing of consequence ever being done about it.
If nature is your refuge you will see, over and over, images of its destruction, forests burning, waters poisoned, skies sprayed with toxins, atmosphere altered in horrid alien ways.
If you are a foodie, an aesthetic, a lover of beauty, a Dionysian even, you will watch it all destroyed to make way for concrete and cardboard, and synthetic, tasteless, lifeless, gaudy goo.
If you’ve been cursed with the trait called ‘sensitivity’ you’ll be harpooned with each of these in turn, flashing in neon, at all hours of the day and night.
The truth is, you can’t handle the truth.
I can’t handle the truth.
I work at it, constantly.
It promises to break me, daily.
One aligns with Truth, not because it will set you free, but because it conquers all.
Here’s one I point a finger at men, primarily. I know that sounds illogical on the surface, but consider this please. She was a smart, very attractive young woman, who rose in a man’s game.
And she used that her entire career, even when she got vicious and ugly, to manipulate men in power. She might be a woman, and I call a woman down as easily as I will a man, but this shyte’s mostly on the man, imo, for promoting a wolf in sheep’s clothing just because she seduced y’all.
Of course now, because of her rise to power, she’s popular with (amoral) women based primarily on the fact that she f**ked the f*cker.
When will a true hero come and take the high ground?
The kabuki theater stunts between the two-pronged hydra-head of the one-party political class in America knows no bounds. After Mueller was shot down for his lame and easily disprovable case against Trump, the tide turned against the Democrats. Now it’s Hillary’s turn in the hot seat, not that it really matters. As I noted on…
If you plan to join the growing number of hobby beekeepers the very first step should be to define your goals.I learned that the hard way.
It’s a wonderful thing to see the popularity of beekeeping keeps increasing.I love beekeeping for many reasons, but when I was first starting out the learning curve was very intimidating. And that’s coming from someone who usually adores learning.
Not only was there loads to learn about the bees themselves, but also about how to manage their colonies, which changes depending on your hive type, which is dependent on what your goals are as a beekeeper.
The first question to answer for yourself as a newbie is if you are interested in beekeeping as livestock or as habitat provider, or maybe both.
I had several mishaps in my first years because I hadn’t asked myself this most fundamental question.I hadn’t asked myself this because in all the books, forums, courses and club meetings I’d attended, no one asked this question.The general assumption is always that the beekeeper is interested in bees as livestock, because that’s what most want.
In this case, follow the commercial standards, using their Langstroth hives and peripheral equipment, their treatment schedules for pests and diseases, and their feeding programs and supplies, and you should be good to go.You can buy nucs (nucleus colonies) in the spring, and if all goes well you’ll have some honey before winter.This is by far the most popular route to take in beekeeping.
Our only Langstroth hive on the homestead, bedazzled with old jewelry.
But it’s not for everyone, including me, which took me a few years to figure out.Honey, pollen, wax, propolis, royal jelly, queen rearing, and other processes and products from beekeeping are the main goals of this style of beekeeping and there’s lots to learn from the commercial operators who have mastered many of these skills for maximum efficiency and profit.
However, if you are interested more in providing habitat and learning from the bees, and creating truly sustainable, long-term, self-sufficient colonies in your space, following commercial practices is really not the way to go, and can lead to a lot of expense, confusion and frustration.
In the hopes of encouraging more beekeepers to become honeybee habitat providers rather than livestock managers only, here are a few tips and resources.
The bee yard of Dennis Kenney of Jackson-area Beekeepers Club, with his preferred horizontal hive style. Horizontal hives differ from Top-bar hives in that they have full frames with foundation. Benefits of full frames is ease of management and stability of comb. Drawbacks would be the added expense and the artificial, manufactured foundation and its potential contaminants.
The conventional practice is to keep all your hives in a ‘bee yard’ for reasons of convenience and space.This is antithetical to bee colonies’ natural proclivity to nest far from one another. It creates problems of diseases and pests that spread rapidly in conditions of overpopulation, which is why so many treatments are needed, and then feeding when nectar/pollen flow is scarce, as well as being hyper-vigilant in your regular hive inspections to find issues immediately before they spread.Now that I have spaced my 6 hives out around a very large area I’m having far more success. But, only time will tell!
What else I’ve learned:
The typical Langstroth hive is made for easy transport and standardization purposes for the industry mainly, but they are not ideal for the honeybee habitat provider, because they are made with thin walls in order to be lightweight. This means they are poorly insulated and so not suitable for the long-term stability of the hive—getting too hot in summer in southern climates and too cold in winter in northern climates. Our top-bar hives and nucs have thick walls and insulated roofs.
If you want your bees adapted to your area and climate you don’t want to do the conventional practice of buying new queens every couple of years.Ideally, you’ll want your colonies to produce their own queens.Queen-rearing will remain an essential skill for a more advanced beekeeper, because occassionally you may still want to make splits to increase your numbers or to replace weak colonies, or to re-queen another hive displaying poor genetic traits.
When the colonies are weak, depending on the issue, they may need to be culled. This is rarely suggested by professional beekeepers who promote regular treatments on which the weak colonies then become dependent, while still spreading their weak genes on to subsequent generations and their diseases and pests to other colonies.
Just like the faulty logic of ‘herd immunity’ in the vaccine debate among human populations, many commercial beekeepers use the same complaint about those of us who want go au naturel,that is, treatment-free, with our bees.
Many scientists and researchers are trying to raise public awareness that this is not how herd-immunity works, not in livestock or in humans, and I applaud their efforts. I personally find referring to populations of people as a herd to be insulting. I think it actually trains individuals through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to think of themselves and each other not as unique and separate individuals, but rather as cattle to be managed.
You’ll also want to mostly forgo the conventional practice of swarm prevention.The goal is for the bees to become self-sufficient, as in the wild, where colonies can live for decades with no hand from man to aid or to disturb.Some of these colonies are enormous, like one we found in an old oil barrel, there for over 15 years and thriving with multiple queens in the same colony, which most likely swarmed annually.
Swarming is a natural, bio-dynamic process performing many different functions for the colony, hygiene being an essential one. Everything the beekeeper takes away from their natural processes is a stress on them which must then be alleviated by other, most likely artificial, means.
Plant perennial and annual crops the bees like for your area and climate.Here in the south there are plenty of plants that bloom at different times most of the year, giving free bee buffets from early spring to late fall, like: bluebonnet, white clover, hairy vetch, wild mustard, vitek, morning glory, trumpet vine, yaupon, and lots of garden herbs and crops, too.It is my greatest pleasure to harvest cucumbers, peas, beans and arugula surrounded by forging bees—they love them as much as we do!
Experimenting and observing is the most fabulous feature of the honeybee habitat provider!
I know a homeschooling homesteader with an observation hive in their house that the children treasure.Not only do they learn from these fascinating creatures about how they operate in the hive, but how they are connected to the seasons and to their environment.They’re learning constantly from the colonies’ successes as much as from their failures.
I practice slightly different techniques with each hive to discover which methods work best here on the wee homestead: one hive has a screened bottom board, one I keep with a reduced entrance all year, one’s in full-sun and another partial shade, and so on.Not that this will necessarily solve the mystery of colony failure, but every bit of data helps!
Some unconventional resources:
Books
The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters by Simon Buxton (2004)
The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Beeby Karl von Frisch (1953)
Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health by Les Crowder & Heather Harrell (2012)
Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture by Ross Conrad (2013)
Our biggest long-time favorite here on the wee homestead at his finest—funny, musical, ethical, caring, clever, creative, stellar researcher—a true rock-star journalist and boundlessly inspiring man.
Thank you for raising the bar, James, and inspiring millions young and old.
