Not bound to exploit. Not obsessed with production. No concern for profit extraction. Not driven by expansion. Treatment-free. Liaisez-faire. Non-industrial, anti-commercial beekeeping practices.
Beauty. Synergy. Cooperation. Respect. Reverence.
Not my bee, but the first native bee of the season enjoying the Texas squaw weed—plenty of forage for all around here!
If you guessed these unconventional methods are far from popular around here, you’d be correct.
I don’t even have a bee yard. I do have 5 strong, sustained colonies (aiming for 7) scattered around several acres, which is the best beekeeping decision I’ve made in about 5 years.
It is the intense crowding of many colonies into one space that is so unnatural that it then commands chemical treatments for bee health. Artificial solutions are never the best solutions. I rarely even feed my bees, I consider that a treatment. On those rare occasions I do, because my observations have led me to suspect they are without reserves, sometimes I’ve been wrong, and the bees aren’t remotely interested in my offerings. They prefer to forage over taking my junk food.
Not my gorgeous photo, unfortunately! Taken by a friend with the latest IPhone, WOW, color me impressed!
By observing intently over time and looking to mimic nature in every way possible, I’ve come to realize how hopeless is commercial-style beekeeping for the small holder, just like all our industrial ‘solutions’ are a never-ending Ferris wheel of problems and solutions, all the way around. Industry comes to drive the entire tradition-turned-enterprise right into the ground.
Well, no thank you! And I haven’t had to buy bees for several years now, thanks to my new-old methods, which is certainly another motivator for commercial beekeeper’s scorn, considering they often make a good chuck of their profits from returning customers—that is beekeepers who follow commercial methods even for their handful of hives—buying nucs and packages and queens from the ‘Big Guys’ who sell themselves as the experts on all things bees.
In other words, the beekeeping industry strongly resembles the pharmaceutical industry, and pretty much every other global commercial industry. One model for all endeavors. One noose for all necks.
All but one of my hives is top-bar, another source for mocking by conventional beekeepers of all ages. But it does seem like alternative types are squeezing their way in through the cracks. And plenty of cracks there are. Not just top-bar fans.
Hard to tell from my bad photo, but this is an observation window on a top-bar hive. I hear other beekeepers pooh-pooh this regularly. I love it! And the bees don’t seem to mind either.
I’m not on any of the popular social media sites, but I know there are treatment-free groups, full of curious kindred spirits, some with bee-loving pseudonyms instead of their real names, like poor, paranoid anti-vaxxers. Oh, lovely lurkers, come out of the shadows to stake your claim! You dare to brave the bees’ stings, surely some stings of misplaced criticism can’t scare you away?!
The bees are just one of many bustling with spring’s promises.
In other news, happy chicks are here, with no snakes in sight. (In the new, ultra-high security coop within coop, 100% snake-proof. Right?)
We are still waiting on the piglets, the rest of the lambs, and the kids, while trying not to let our anticipation get the best of us!
I LOVE cheese day and it’s been a very long while.
It’s been several months since I’ve been milking our ‘old’ goat, Summer, and it will be a few months more before I start milking her again, along with Phoebe and Chestnut, intending that all will go well with their first kidding, and I will be able to train them on the milkstand, which will be as new to me as it is for them. Big intentions!
Friendly PhoebeChilly Chestnut
I’m not too worried about Phoebe, she’s much more tame and mellow and loves to be petted. Chestnut darts off as soon as you try to touch her and is even skittish when hand feeding.
The first lamb of the season has just arrived! Now that Handy Hubby is ‘retired’ he gets to handle all the stressful parts while I pop in for the awes and photo ops. Big win for me! It’s not that things are constantly going wrong, but it does take preparation and attention and concern, because sometimes things do go wrong.
But not this time! While Hubby runs around, making sure the little lamb latches on in due time, gets the feed and stalls prepped and ready for a bunch more births, I make cheese.
It’s a very slow process, traditional mozzarella, it takes all day. Yesterday I experimented with a new cheese of my own invention, which is just about my favorite thing to do in the world. I would bore you with the details, but I fear you’d be really bored.*
Another new Hubby project has been the ultra-high security broody fortress. Walls within walls. He’d finished the Tajma-coop and hoped our predator problems were solved. He’d planned for practically every type of previous invader—raccoons, hawks, possums, coyotes—with the exception of snakes. He’d hoped between one cat, 4 dogs and constant hoof traffic the reptilian raiders would retreat. No such luck. We lost lots of chicks and Bantams to snakes.
Surely this will be the ultimate solution?
Hubby sporting his wild side, which I much prefer to his straight-laced pilot persona. Though of course I have deep gratitude for his professional efforts too, not just the relieving of them, or we’d never be where we are now. (Thanks, Brandon?! And, where else shall I send the thank-you notes??)
I used to have regular cheese days. I would drive four hours round-trip for the only raw milk available in the vicinity and get up to 20 gallons and have a cheese-making marathon for four days straight. It was perhaps a bit obsessive.
That was a few years ago, now it’s a real luxury. Since then the cost per gallon of raw milk at that farm has gone from $6 to $9. Add to that the cost of gas and time (and my personal waning energy), we really can’t afford it anymore.
Instead I’ll be milking goats and making mostly small batch cheeses, including all my favorites, which is pretty much all of them, especially Camembert, Muenster, and traditional styles of aged chèvre. I do believe I’ll be very satisfied with my new arrangement!
This time I got 10 gallons and a friend did the pick up, another win for me. She, like me, started making cheese and bread mostly out of snobbery—we are ‘foodies’ (I prefer the French term ‘gourmands’) and the selection of these staples in these parts was akin to an inner-city food desert. Industrially-produced, plastic-wrapped crap only, of the lowest quality.
Like I said, it’s a luxury at that cost, but from it we will get better cheeses, yogurt and buttermilk than money can buy.** Not only do we get the cheeses, but the whey goes to great use too, for ricotta, for soaking grains, and for the critters at just the time they are in need of extra nutrition.
Incidentally, mozzarella is not a raw milk cheese. Still, the flavor of the traditional home-made style is far superior to those which are industrially-produced, including the ‘fast mozzarella’ that most home cheese-makers prefer, since it takes about an hour versus all day. That version is also delicious, and I make it sometimes too, but the flavor and texture between the two is very different.
Our semi-feral cat, Skittles, comes around regularly now that our house dogs are no longer a constant threat. She’s getting her day in the sun at last, enjoying her curds and whey.
As there is a lot of kitchen downtime with traditional cheese-making methods, I make sourdough bread and pizza dough between steps.*** Or sometimes pestos, or condiments, or Kombucha (my latest fantastic flavor is pine needle), or soups and salads. Before I know it, an entire day in the kitchen has swooped by, me barefoot and content, and still in my pajamas.
And very happily not pregnant!
*Actually, I’d be happy to bore you in the comments section if you have any cheesey comments or questions.
**Sorry to say, but the raw milk cheeses you think you are buying at the grocery store are actually semi-pasteurized, they just changed the definition. As per usual.
***While listening to podcasts, usually. Richie Allen was on the list today, a good choice as it was a call-in show on the subject of prepping. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-richie-allen-show/id1090284266?i=1000553479020 I don’t identify as a prepper myself, necessarily, even though pretty much any American who looked at our lifestyle would say we are. The third caller on the show is a self-identified ‘doomsday prepper’ in Alaska. She was great, shared lots of good info and talked about how she grew up that way, as did her parents. I don’t really consider that ‘doomsday prepping’ either. This is a lifestyle to me, one that deserves to be continued through the generations, not just during precarious times, and I’m sure she would agree. Being prepared is important and I think everyone should make a concerted effort on that front, especially in times such as these. But I see this lifestyle is a special sort of calling and it’s not going to appeal to many folks, and it doesn’t have to. It’s enough for those so inclined to preserve it and to treasure it and to keep that flame of living intimately with nature alive. It sets an example that is much needed these days as it is not in the modern Western way of a recreational relationship with nature or the profit-driven exploitive relationship with it, but a real, old-fashioned, hands-in-the-dirt sort of cooperation. You’ve gotta really love it, really want it, or it will never work for you.
“It is impossible for any clear-headed person to suppose that the ever more destructive stupidities of war can be eliminated from human affairs until some common political control dominates the earth, and unless certain pressures due to the growth of populations, due to the enlarging scope of economic operations, or due to conflicting standards and traditions of life, are disposed of. To avoid the positive evils of war and to attain the new levels of prosperity and power that now come into view, an effective world control, not merely of armed force, but of the production and main movements of staple commodities and the drift and expansion of population is required. It is absurd to dream of peace and world-wide progress without that much control.”
“So, in relation to science—and here the word is being used in its narrower accepted meaning for what is often spoken of as pure science, the search for physical and biological realities, uncomplicated by moral, social, and ‘practical’ considerations—we evoke a conception of the Open Conspiracy as producing groups of socially associated individuals, who engage primarily in the general basic activities of the Conspiracy . . . The contemporary mind realizes the evils of production for profit and of the indiscriminate scrambling of private ownership more fully than ever before, but it has a completer realization and a certain accumulation of experience in the difficulties of organizing that larger ownership we desire. Private ownership may not be altogether evil as a provisional stage, even if it has no more in its favor than the ability to transcend political boundaries.”
“In 1932, Wells gave an Oxford speech championing a global order run by liberal fascists saying: “I am asking for liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis”. This was not paradoxical when one realizes that the rise of fascism was never a “nationalist” phenomenon as popular history books have asserted for decades but rather was the artificial consequence of a supranational financier-oligarchy from above who wished to use “enforcers” to bend their societies to a higher will.”
“Although the bodies of Wells, Russell and Huxley have long since rotted away, their rotten ideas continue to animate their disciples like Sir Henry Kissinger, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Lord Malloch-Brown (whose disturbing celebration of the Coronavirus as a golden opportunity to finally restructure civilization) should concern any thinking citizen. The idea of a “Great Reset” expounded by these modern mouthpieces of history’s bad ideas signals nothing more than a new Dark Age which should turn the stomach of any moral being.”
How relieved are we all now that we can walk the streets freely without the fear of having to step over the corpse of a “Covid-19” victim? It seems like it was only yesterday when we would have to think twice about taking a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood in order to avoid having someone […]
Great article here, please read and share! I sure do wonder whether they will call it ALL off now that it’s so obvious the total scam that’s been played on the global public. HA! Just joking. Of course they will not. ~KH
Russell would put it forth most succinctly in his “The Scientific Outlook” (1931):
“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play… all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.”
“In 1953, Russell would update this creepy piece of work and make it even creepier, writing:
“It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment… This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”
In his “The Managerial Revolution,” Burnham echoes the Fabian Society methodology and Russell’s “The Scientific Outlook,” writing:
“Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called ‘socialist.’ In those nations – Russia and Germany – which have advanced furthest toward the new [managerial] economy, ‘socialism’ or ‘national socialism’ is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite. The word ‘socialism’ is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favourable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.”
Busy days on the wee homestead as spring moves in. The seasons change, alas the chemtrails do not. The weather whiplash as well. But I must admit, I take quite a bit of hope and satisfaction that in the many years I’ve been bitchin’ about this, folks seem to finally be taking some serious notice. Either that, or my scope is conveniently narrowing. No matter. However the media tries to distract us, what’s truly important is happening in and all around us, not out there somewhere.
Insert ’gross face’
Handy Hubby has been busy in the back 40 clearing more pasture and getting the various spaces ready for the soon-to-be coming babies—piglets and lambs and kids and chicks. I’ll be posting lots of those pics when the time comes!
I’ve been busy in the garden and the bees are just starting to get busy, too. Only one colony failed over the winter, so that’s looking promising. We have loads of henbit blooming, but the bees seem to be preferring the chickweed so far. I have seen them enjoying the henbit on other occasions, so I keep plenty of it around. Such fickle little fairies. 😇
Chickweed and henbitWild violets, deliciousHenbit and garlic
The perfect pesto can be created from those three ’weeds’—henbit, chickweed and violets. It takes some patience, but it’s well worth it.
The box that kept us in salad fixings all the cold season, covered with row fabric on the frosty nights and days.
I’m pleased that the avocado and mirliton squash I over-wintered inside did really well. Of course, I’m not counting my fruits before they hatch! I’m also trying sweet corn inside under lights for the first time. We often go so quickly from frost to 90 F degrees that it’s a ’beat the clock’ situation. In the middle photo are the sweet potatoes, ginger, tumeric and another mirliton warming up on a heat mat before putting them in soil to warm some more under lights before transplanting.
Coral honeysuckle—kinda proud of this one because I propagated it from one found in the woods. I’m experimenting with a lot of propagation ‘from the wild’ these days, time will tell, I mostly fail so far. Hubby’s old tractor in the background, it’s seen an enormous amount of work but keeps on ticking, with constant upkeep and much frustration on Hubby’s part sometimes. 😩
Garlic, shallots and a few types of onions going strong! That’s row cover on the right of the photo, for the weather whiplash. On the right you can see the garden from a distance, completely fenced, with a makeshift green house (the cover destroyed during the tornado a couple years ago) that will soon make it to the top of Hubby’s to-do list, I hope! 😏
Watching a good documentary and/or presentation can be an engaging, insightful, and eye-opening experience for many people. It is an easy way to disseminate a lot of invaluable information in a visually pleasing way. For me, the HIV documentary House of Numbers was life-changing. It was brilliantly done and completely destroyed the HIV=AIDS dogma and ultimately helped me to understand the “virus” lie. I’ve known others who were convinced to immediately stop vaccinating themselves and their children due to watching the intense information and experiences presented in the Vaxxed series. These documentaries may be just what someone needs to see in order to start their own journey into questioning the massive fraud that has been perpetrated on us for the last few centuries. As with other lists, I plan to update this page as I become aware of other relevant documentaries and presentations that can be helpful. I hope you…
You know you’re getting old when someone replies to you, “So, what’s your point?” And your reply back is, “Why must there always be a point?”
Hence this post. I find increasingly I have no point, I just feel like writing something.
Santa Schwab decided one day a couple of decades ago that the globe needed to be more resilient. Is this because he is so concerned about the folk of the future? Does he use his vast wealth and influence to care for others in the here and now?
No. The future is more important than the now to the World Economic Forum class. They have triumphed over the now, the future is their next hurdle. The now is merely a tool of seduction for them in order to get those unhappy with the now (mostly because of them) to join them in their version of the future. Utopians are always scammers.
Why always lemonade? I’d like to ask them. Why are we always expected to take the lemons of life and make lemonade with them? What about vinegar and kombucha and cleaning products, and all the other practical uses of lemons?
Which brings me to why I don’t prescribe to certain popular New Age ideas even though I rarely meet a conspiracy theory I don’t like.
Conspirituality. Did you know that’s a thing? They’ve got academic papers on it, probably even a course by now.
“Everything that rises must converge.” It’s now attributed to New Ager Tielhard de Chardin, even though we were taught in school it was Flannery O’Connor who said it. They just change what’s written on the barnyard wall for the sake of the future.
Tielhard de Chardin is the supreme goofball who has called for robots to replace Jesus.
(Clip: Ilia Delio on a 2015 Tielhard De Chardin panel at Georgetown on AI hivemind and Ultra-Humanism)
I think these folks have way too much time on their hands. Idle hands are the devil’s playground. Why is it that folks with nothing to do are obsessed with controlling the future as well as the present lives of everyone else? Didn’t we used to equate this with being a busy-body? Didn’t they used to tell such pretentious and presumptuous nincompoops to mind their own beeswax? Aren’t there some starving children in Manhattan they might busy themselves with instead?
Not enough glamor in that, I expect.
What is this so-called ‘Great Awakening’ we’ve been subjected to online for a decade, at least? Is it a close relative of Santa Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’? Anytime the myth-makers stick the ‘Great’ on something, you can be damn sure the only thing great about it is the level of con involved.
Why do these clowns think they can run the world when they can’t even create a decent village? Would that not be a better starting point? Aren’t they the ones who love their hierarchies so much? Start at the bottom then dudes, prove you can run a fucking village for a decade or so, then set your sites up the ladder.
Are the ‘powers that shouldn’t be’ hiding our ‘limitless potential’ from us in order to keep us debt and wage slaves in their Matrix? Is robot Jesus coming to lead us all to salvation?
Inquiring minds want to know! But they are mostly looking in all the wrong places.
The scent assault sums it up. It’s not spirits from the afterlife or your bad karma, it’s all around you though, in ways you aren’t thinking to look.
Because you must stop looking and sniff them out instead.
Of all the senses Scientism recognizes, the sense of smell is the most primordial and the most powerful. Proust’s madeleines are the key to what the vast majority of ‘liberty lovers’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘red pilled’ seem to be totally missing.
Walking down the aisles of the local Hobby Lobby, the grocery store, the thrift shop, even the church bathroom, I am SHOCKED at the artificial smells that penetrate so deeply it’s worse than a Spanish dive bar. Not only do I need to shower after such scent assaults, but also still have clothes that reek, requiring immediate soaking. Hubby’s smells of machine oil and solvents are actually preferable. Not that I’d want any of them in my house!
A neighbor once hugged me in the driveway and her fragrance lingered on my clothes so long I had to change. She complains of constant migraines.
These smells are killing you. I would say ‘us’ but we know better here than to bath in them all day and become nose-blind to their toxicity. I get nauseated in the candle aisle of Hobby Lobby and I intend for it to stay that way. To desensitize yourself from natural aromas is to become addicted to fast food, and I’m not kidding!
Desensitizing yourself to anything is dangerous.
Scents equal cents minus sense?
I’m surprised there’s not more satirists cracking more whips when these Santa-types go on and on about how concerned they are for nature. In the proper order of things a dozen satirists would be famous on such content. Nature to these asshats equates to the view from their mansions and better hunting on their safaris.
Do you think they use Febreeze?
We hear talk of pheromones, and of course aromatherapy and now coming on board is sound therapy. Always therapies.
Because of the scent and sound assaults. The ones right under our conscious radar. The ones we are bombarded with by civilization, mostly. And turds like Santa Schwab. And then given ‘therapies’ to cure the ills they cause.
What do you smell when you walk into the grocery store? Does it smell delicious? I doubt it, unless you go to some gourmet place that doesn’t even exist in these here parts. Here they smell nothing like food, more like a hospital trying to cover any smells that might get confused with something actually coming from nature.
What happens in the minds of those who become ‘nose-blind’? In French they use the same verb for ‘to smell’ and ‘to feel’, simply making it ‘reflexive’ — je sens or je me sens — that’s how close these senses are.
My grandparents traveled in the their later years with the kind of tour groups that got a bad reputation around Europe for being entitled and obstinate. They loved it. They brought us home loads of gifts and it was my first taste of ‘foreign affairs’ that led to a couple decades of travel myself. I loved it.
One year they brought us home Christmas gifts from their tour of Soviet Russia. We got the usual souvenirs—the nesting dolls and some sweets I’m sure—I don’t remember much else except the piece of jewelry, maybe a ring? The ring, or whatever it was in that little box is long gone, but the memory of the smell I will never forget.
The whole scene that Christmas comes back instantly when I remember that smell. I made my appropriate oohs and aahs and requisite words of gratitude and was putting the gift in the pile of already opened gifts when Grandpa stopped me and said with a grin: “Smell it!”
I was very confused. Smell the ring? The box? I looked at him with a lot of hesitation, because he was, albeit a very generous man, also sometimes something of a scary one. Whatever was being commanded to me at that moment I did not want to mess up.
“Yes!” he insisted, now almost laughing, “Smell it!”
So I took a giant inhale with the box at my nose and nearly gagged, very literally.
Grandpa ROARED with laughter.
I thought he’d played a trick on me. My first reaction was one of suspicion. No surprise there. I nearly got angry (which always made him crack up) before he urged all the females of the family who had received similar boxes to smell theirs also.
Pretty soon we were all looking at him with various expressions from ‘How odd?’ to ‘WTF?’
Body odor, plain and simple. To a degree so severe that it curled my nostrils and nearly made me gag. It was the unmistakable stench of an unwashed man on the tram in the dead of summer. And somehow still clinging to the fabric of these boxes after purchase, suitcase, wrapping, and months in the top of the closet.
“But this is impossible!” “What did you DO to them all?” I gasped, still certain this was some practical joke of his.
He shook his head, still smiling. “Everything smells like that there,” he said, “Everything.”
I couldn’t believe it. No! How?! Why?!
He didn’t have those answers, apparently the gift shops and tour guides don’t offer such advisories in their brochures and he didn’t dare ask. (So much for the rude and loud Americans when it really matters.). He could only surmise that this is some sort of scented cleaner and sanitizer that they use on absolutely everything and everywhere in Soviet Russia.
About a decade later I traveled through Russia on my way to Finland in an old Soviet train. It smelled pretty bad, but nothing like that. More like stale urine.
The Soviet ring box body odor assault was leaps more tolerable than that of the stale urine or the Hobby Lobby candle aisle.
See, so there was a point in there. Or two. I think.
Ô Muse ! spectre insatiable, Ne m’en demande pas si long. L’homme n’écrit rien sur le sable À l’heure où passe l’aquilon. J’ai vu le temps où ma jeunesse Sur mes lèvres était sans cesse Prête à chanter comme un oiseau ; Mais j’ai souffert un dur martyre, Et le moins que j’en pourrais dire, Si je l’essayais sur ma lyre, La briserait comme un roseau. ‘La Nuit de Mai’ Alfred de Musset La nuit de mai, poème d’Alfred de Musset – poetica.fr
O voice from the abysmal deeps, Lay not on me this last command! Man leaves no writing on the sand When at its hour the north-wind sweeps. There was a time when love, in sooth, Rose ceaseless on my lips, and youth Was ready, like a bird, to sing; But I have suffered, as through fire, And should my silent griefs desire To speak their anguish on my lyre Their lightest breath would break the string. The Night in May | RPO
Wild hog downBottle feeding on Daddy’s lapTori surveys the tornado damageHer ’last stand’ on the cute old bridge before it was replaced with an ugly culvertTeaching the pups who’s bossUrges!Did you know pup’s require ’manual pooping’ when they are this young?!
She even learned which piglets she was allowed to kill (the wild ones) and which belonged ’to Daddy’ 🙂
It’s been a couple of weeks already but I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about it. Just a couple weeks before Papi died and that was sad enough, but to lose them both, and so close together, has been sad beyond words.
Of course all creatures are special, but she was our miracle. She was a Mastiff/Dane mix, already an odd combination. Her mother died just a couple days after delivery and her owners worked very quickly to find homes for all the pups, thirteen of them.
She was just a few pounds when we got her. We had no idea about bottle-feeding or ’manual pooping’ but we learned quickly! She belonged here in every way, she foraged and hunted and blended in with the surroundings so perfectly. She was trained as my protector, but she became one of my greatest joys in life.
It will be a very long time before we don’t tear-up every time we think of her, maybe forever.
