I am such an idiot. I know how to do stuff but sometimes I’m just a dope. Take, for an example, that “Support” button just over there to the left. As those of you more astute than myself pointed out, it didn’t work. For all I know there may have been thousands of you desperate to send me one dollar clicking away to no avail. The button just didn’t do what it was supposed to. Some of you were persistent enough to find the exact same button over on my website, where it does work. To you, I will be eternally grateful. When I found out about the problem I went into my test system and pushed the exact same button and it, too, worked. Just fine. After beating my head against the problem for some time I did something that, for me anyway, is so foreign to my way of thinking that I had to bend my very definition of reality to pull it off.
I asked for help.
Now, this sounds like it would be a simple task, but for me requires a level of personality suppression which would take a half-dozen valium, a couple of Xanax, and a Quaalude to induce pharmacologically. Because, not only did I have to ask for help, but then, when they gave me the wrong answer over and over – which I knew they would, I had to be nice.
As if.
Anyway, I sent in my help request and waited the estimated seven-hours, six-minutes for the reply. A reply which, when received, had been simply cut out of the canned help system and pasted into the message they sent back to me as “help”. It said, in short, “Do it exactly like you’ve been doing it. It’ll work.”
One deep breath.
I replied back that their software doesn’t work like that and that maybe if they had bothered actually look at my blog page they would see what the problem is. So I cut and pasted the HTML code from my blog and showed them EXACTLY where the problem was occurring. The response I got back the next day was “Nope. That will work.”
Two deep breaths. Bullets in the Glock.
I then sent in the code I have in my blog page along with a copy of the HTML that I pulled off their system after it had arbitrarily modified what I entered, highlighted the obvious differences, and waited yet again. “Nope.” Came the reply. “They’re identical.”
Three deep breaths. Rack the slide. And nicely reply: “Go…to…my…blog…and…pushthegoddamnedbutton.”
My obvious frustration must have rerouted the help request from Mumbai to California because the helpful – and final – response was: “Dude. Chill. The blog software doesn’t support the <form> tag.”
Oh.
Armed with that answer I have made some modifications to work around the offending software and now, when you push the Support button, you’ll be taken to a page on my website where you’ll have to push yet another Support button whence you’ll be whisked to PayPal where you can leave your one dollar for me. I’m sorry about the extra work but that’s what the “experts” told me to do. Thank you in advance.
This goes to show you that, even when speaking with so-called “experts”, you just don’t know who to trust.
And so it is with the bees.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about our trip to Florida and our unexpected inclusion in the Elite Access class of travelers. Elite travelers are the people who would typically cross the street against the light if they saw me coming, certain in the knowledge that if they met me head on I would start pestering them about giving me a dollar. Our return trip was better. Now armed with Elite knowledge and experience, we were able to take advantage of all the additional perks that allowed us to jump to the front of the line and get our baggage out first. It was a great flight and we didn’t have any stinky people sitting nearby. Our vacation over, we are now back on the micro-farm where spring is rapidly approaching.
And we have a lot of work to do.
In anticipation of the increasing workload on the micro-farm, you might imagine that I took full advantage of the hiatus in Florida and spent many a lazy hour grilling myself under the carcinogenic sub-tropical sun. Nope. You can probably picture me splashing in the water, riding in boats, snorkeling through clouds of colorful tropical fish, staring out to sea as the sunset flashes green over the tranquil waters, or drinking ice-cold Coronas and eating blackened-mahi sandwiches. Well… Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Yup.
What I really did, when not drinking beer and pouring ketchup on my fries, was read about bees. And study bees. And think about bees. And troll through dozens of bee-stuff websites.
I think I might be addicted.
All the information I gleaned from the “experts” was so confusing and contradictory that I was left riddled with doubt. Should I invest $75.00 in a top-bar feeder or just slap down a Zip-Loc filled with sugar syrup? Should I use a Queen Excluder (something they no-doubt use at Republican Party functions) or not? Do I need to treat for such frightening plagues as Varroa Mites, Foulbrood Disease, Small Hive Beetle and Wax Moth, or should I adopt a philosophy that the bees know best and the important thing is to keep them happy? Every “expert” had an opinion on every subject; and every opinion was different.
In reading through all this “expert” stuff I was reminded of a saying regarding the equivalence of opinions and anal openings and I came to the conclusion that beekeepers – or “beeks” as they call themselves – must be, as a class, disproportionately well endowed. If you get my drift.
The cause of this overwhelming variety of opinions seems to be that beekeeping attracts participants from across all social, educational, philosophical, and rational spectra. This is great, except that a graph showing the number of participants from each such spectrum would have anomalous spikes at the extreme ends. Beeks, it seems, could have been the archetype used when the definition of “lunatic fringe” was decided upon. To give you an idea, imagine taking the highest dollar contributors of the American Beef Council and the National Rifle Association and putting them in a room with similarly ardent supporters of Greenpeace and PETA (which I learned just the other day doesn’t stand for “People Eating Tasty Animals”). Now, give them a couple of beehives and tell them to go have fun. And they do! They argue a lot but they do have fun.
When people disagree with each other from day-to-day they get along by choosing not to interact with each other, right? Not so in the beekeeping world. Because of the nature of the beast everybody knows everybody else’s business and everybody is more than happy to advance an opinion on such business despite knowing basically nothing about it. You should have seen the responses to an online post about bee-sting allergies. The suggestions ranged from “see a doctor” to “emanate positive force as you approach the hive so your quantum energy being can be fully in touch with the bees and calm them.”
No. Really.
Clearly, as a soon-to-be-beek, what I needed to find was a guide through all this mess. A mentor to help me as I tried to wend my way through the confliting opinions. A guru who could show me the secret path to bee-vana.
And I found him.
His name is Michael Bush and if you are interested in bees at all he’s got a great website and, if you want to delve further, a book: The Practical Beekeeper, Beekeeping Naturally. Now don’t get me wrong, in the land of beeks, Michael’s fringe beekeeping philosophy is about as far away from “generally accepted practice” as one could get without being dragged in front of the National Honey Board and questioned using enhanced interrogation methods. But his apparent open-mindedness, well thought out arguments, and explanations of why he does what he does struck a chord. He, pointedly, makes sure what he believes doesn’t get in the way of what he thinks and he’s got a sense of humor dry enough to make you wonder which is which. He is someone I hope to meet someday.
The thing that clinched the deal was his well-presented thinking about beekeeping. His ideas had a feeling of truth about them; all backed up by scientific data that goes back to the roots of modern beekeeping in the 1800s. I will attempt to summarize his point of view and apologize here to Michael if I’ve screwed it up.
First, current accepted beekeeping practices have completely messed up the honeybee as a species, made it weak and unhealthy, and introduced all manner of antibiotics, miticides, and chemicals into the honey you buy at the store. Yuck!
Second, if you want to get lots of good quality honey, you have to have happy, healthy bees.
Third, to have happy healthy bees you can’t manage the bees. You have to let the bees manage themselves because they’ll do it better than you can and they’ll be happier doing it.
Fourth, when you let the bees manage themselves there’s really not a whole lot for you to do other than go out and get the honey. Which means:
Less work.
That’s what I’m talking about.
My only regret is that I didn’t find out about Michael before I bought all the bee-stuff. I would have done things differently.
But now I’m ready to begin. My job as beekeeper will change from being a manager to being a cheerleader. I basically have to give the bees a place to live and a bit of sugar syrup to get them started; sort of a welcome-wagon cookie plate only without the flour, butter, and eggs. Once they get going I’ll just leave them be and get back to what I had always hoped to do as a micro-farmer: Sit on the patio, cocktail in hand, and watch the whole place take care of itself.
Time to get busy.