In Praise of the Queen of the Sun

Last Wednesday, I was fortunate enough to catch the last showing of Queen of the Sun at the Melwood Screening room. 

In 1923, Rudolf Steiner, a scientist, philosopher & social innovator, predicted that in 80 to 100 years honeybees would collapse. His prediction has come true with Colony Collapse Disorder where bees are disappearing in mass numbers from their hives with no clear explanation. In an alarming inquiry into the insights behind Steiner’s prediction Queen of the Sun examines the global bee crisis through the eyes of biodynamic beekeepers, scientists, farmers, and philosophers. On a pilgrimage around the world, 10,000 years of beekeeping is unveiled, highlighting how our historic and sacred relationship with bees has been lost due to highly mechanized industrial practices. Featuring Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Gunther Hauk and beekeepers around the world, Queen of the Sun weaves a dramatic story which uncovers the problems and solutions in renewing a culture in balance with nature. (Link)

The movie beautifully interweaves pieces showing the beauty and mystery of the beehive and the profound love inspired in the beekeepers for these industrious and majestic creatures upon whom our very lives depend with the tragedy brought upon the colonies by the industrialized beekeeping necessary to support unsustainable industrial agriculture with its monocrops and reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilizers. 

The good news is that there are things that can be done to improve the lot of the honeybee, and you can help! An obvious move would be to become a beekeeper yourself, and Burgh Bees will gladly help you get started if you are so inclined. (Note: The City of Pittsburgh recently passed a zoning ordinance allowing for the keeping of chickens and bees in the City.) Even if you are not interested in/able to have a few hives of your own there is still plenty you can do! The Queen of the Sun website offers a list of ten relatively simple things you can do to help bees, and the Burgh Bees site echoes several of those points.

Probably the first step for many people is to learn to not be afraid of bees! Don’t be nervous about encouraging bees around your home—they have little interest in you. As the Burgh Bees website states: “Honeybees are very docile unless trapped, disturbed by harassing their home or stepped on. A honeybee flying around you is just being curious and will not sting you. They only sting in defense of their hive.” Unfortunately since honey bees share a similar shape and buzz as wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets, they are guilty by association in many people’s minds. If you need a quick lesson telling the difference, click here. Honeybees, unlike carnivorous wasps, are vegetarians—they aren’t interested in you or your picnic goodies. Honeybees also die after they sting, so they are inclined only to do so when they feel threatened. Wasps, on the other hand, can sting and bite repeatedly. The best way to deal with these aggressive pests is to keep them from setting up shop in places where you and they are likely to cross paths with unpleasant results. Wasps et al are territorial and will avoid another colony’s space, so I am going to purchase a Waspinator (a wasp’s nest made from fabric) from the Ahimsa store and see if it effectively keeps these more aggressive pests away from my patio and deck.

Now that you know the bees are far more interested in your flowers than you, what to plant? When thinking about what to plant around your home or in your window boxes or balcony pots at your apartment, you’ll want plants that will attract and nourish our bees and select varieties that bloom at different times. Both the Burgh Bees and Queen of the Sun websites have information about specific plants, as does the Penn State Extension. Make sure that you also provide your pollinators with a source of water. A small birdbath (or the bottom pan for a flower pot) with rocks that allow the insects to walk to the edge of the water without risking falling in is ideal. 

Avoid using pesticides in your garden and on your lawn. Among many other reasons to avoid using poisons around your home and yard, there is increasing evidence that pesticides strain bee colonies and neo-nicotinoid varieties have been one of the major culprits in Colony Collapse Disorder (link). Bees are designed to attract pollen particles to their bodies, so when you spray chemicals, they mop up the poison along with their food and their bodies have no protection against the toxins. These toxins, in turn, end up in their honey and if that honey is collected for human consumption, it will end up in us. There are many ways to manage insect problems organically which involves creating the appropriate conditions in which nature can do her job. One of the problems with pesticides is that they are indiscriminate, so they kill all the beneficial insects as well as the pests. If you find ways to attract and care for your beneficial insects, they’ll take care of the other guys eating your plants.

Most of us appreciate a tidy and pretty yard, but a pristine yard makes a lousy ecosystem. Clover is actually incredibly healthy for your lawn and provides food for pollinators. Feeding your lawn organically with compost or compost tea provides it with the nutrients and microorganisms it needs to remain healthy through all seasons. Keeping your lawn on a diet of chemical fertilizer is like giving up eating food and subsisting on vitamin pills. In theory you are getting the nutrients that you need, but not in the most effective way for your long-term health. In addition, you are exposing yourself, your family, and your pets to toxins, many of which then get washed off your lawn and into our waterways, affecting aquatic life all the way from your nearest stream down to the New Jersey-size dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Allowing some native wildflowers that might otherwise be known as weeds to bloom in a few corners of your yard and leaving some of your winter garden clean up until spring provides food sources and habitat for many beneficial insects that will overwinter in hollow plant stalks or under some of the garden debris. (If you don’t want to do it yourself, Phipps provides a list of lawn care and landscaping professionals who are certified in their Sustainable Practices program.)

Buy Fresh! Buy Local! As if the fresh peaches, beefsteaks bursting with flavor, and sweet corn that is actually sweet aren’t cause enough to get to a farmer’s market or grocery that carries locally-grown produce, consider also that most small scale farmers do not practice monocropping. Monocropping is one of the primary reasons why bees are driven on semi-trucks all over the country under high-stress conditions. When there is only one crop growing for 5000 acres, there is nothing to sustain the bees for the 50 weeks a year when that single crop is not in bloom. Biodiversity is essential for a healthy, sustainable ecosystem, so get to know the folks growing your food. Learn about where it comes from. Support growers who use natural and/or organic practices. Feel good about what you are putting into your body. And, while you are ogling all the delicious things you might bring home for dinner, be sure to grab a jar of locally-produced raw or pure honey that has not been treated with any chemicals. Explore the many various flavors available and get to know your local beekeepers. 

Without bees, our agricultural system will collapse. These small, industrious creatures do so much work for us, and then, to top off their remarkable feats, they treat us with one of nature’s most miraculous products. In the movie, world renowned beekeeper Gunther Hauk says: "Honey was considered so sacred as a gift from the bees. The honey was not sold until the end of the 19th or into the 20th century. Most of the honey was given away as a gift. It is one of the most beneficial and healing substances that we can imagine.” Such gifts does this little insect give to us, the least we can do is to be hospitable to this kind guest. Please consider learning more about the amazing bee and seeing what you can do around your own home to make it an accommodating stop for our pollinating friends.

Add 06/01/2011: Check out this WTAE news story about a swarm of bees that landed in a North Versailles KMart parking lot. Props to the store for getting Burgh Bees out to collect the swarm rather than grabbing for the Raid cans.

Journal Entry, 29 July 2009.

A Vision of The Country of Marriage.

I want to be an old woman shelling peas with you next to our garden, it's bounty spilling over the fence, the harvest of years of our love, patience, and attention.

I want to bring in cut flowers to sit on the table where we dine together in thanksgiving for the benevolent abundance with which we are blessed.

I want to walk hand in hand through the forest, our fingers interlocking, meeting each other in custom grooves made over the course of many years.

I want to be understood, so that saying who I am isn't a constant battle of words ever missing the mark. I want to know your thoughts before you think them, but ever be delighted by welcome surprises from your engaging intellect.

I want what I have to offer to be enough, because you understand the full import of what I give.

I do not want to live out my days a solitary stranger, never to meet you, love.

Early May rain

I'm waiting.

Waiting for the rain to stop. Waiting for the soil to dry enough to till. Waiting to collect my soil sample for analysis. Waiting to get seeds into the ground.

Gardening teaches us about right relationship, about respect, about patience. If there is anything over which I have no control, it would be the schedule of rain showers. Where one has no control, one may choose to fight (images of China shooting clouds to make rain come to mind), or one can learn to dance, moving with a rhythm you did not create, synchronizing your movement with another's. In some instances, we can use force to bend nature to our will. Rather than meander over forested hills, we blow holes through the middle, creating map-ready straight lines.

But, really, you can't till mud. It just don't work, no matter how fancy your technology.

I'm in love with my soil. I'm in love with my compost. I'm fascinated by the ecosystem that thrives in one ounce of well-amended soil. In his first book, Second Nature, Michael Pollan offers the garden as a model for how humans can interact with the world in a way that is both beneficial to us, and to "nature." I use the quotes because this distinction between us humans and the "natural world" is wholly contrived, and feeds the negative dichotomy that allows us to continue to justify our dominion over the land and its non-human creatures. The alternative to dominion is stewardship. We and the "natural world" can both thrive if our relationship to this planet and the other creatures on it is one of respect and restraint. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.

I scoop compost out of my bucket with my hand, and in my palm I hold an ecosystem more amazing than anything we humans have made. This planet has been at this living stuff for a really long time, and has gotten really darn good at it. I can create the causes and conditions that allow that handful of compost to arise, but I cannot create the life within it. Even a life that I could carry inside me for nine months, I cannot truly create.

When I was nine, I went to the beach with my dad, stepmom, and some friends of theirs. The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are as different as the Appalachian and Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Pacific pounds the rocks of the slowly receding California coastline, like the western mountains jut, ragged and treeless into thinning air. The Atlantic is a more gentle ocean, softer, like the rolling, worn ridges of broadleaf deciduous forest that make up the Appalachian chain.

I was a strong swimmer as a kid, but I was, nonetheless, a nine year old up against the Pacific. Somehow I got myself caught in a hard undertow. I could dive under the waves, letting them pass over me and draw me toward the shore, but I couldn't set my feet or fight the rushing stream of water heading back out to the west. I was stuck. Bobbing up and down, trying to swim in. I could see my father and his friends on the beach, but I was too far away, and no one was looking for me. I was getting tired.

Finally, I got within range of some people standing in the surf, and as the wave started to rush backward, pulling all the sand from under my feet and tugging me away, I thrust out my hand toward this man. I don't remember that I could even manage to ask for help, though I imagine that my child's face conveyed that I was in distress.

I may owe my life to a smiling brown-skinned man who reached for the outstretched arm of a little huera child he did not know. I would not recognize him if I were to see him, but his smile and firm grip on my hand, freeing me from the ocean will remain forever in my memory. As I gasped for air, I found I could finally stand. I thanked him profusely. I doubt he had any idea that he saved my life.

I hope that he accumulated vast merit for his act of kindness, perhaps seemingly small to him, but on which the whole of my life likely hangs. The teachings tell us that karma multiplies--small actions can have huge results. May his be the seed for his enlightenment.

When people say that the world is hard and angry and closed, I feel sorry for them. My world is filled with strangers who would help an unknown child in distress, who get off the bus during the morning commute to assist a stranger collapsed in the street, people who rescue animals, people who rally behind the story of a little, lost squirrel, people who care to treat the ground under their feet with kindness, and who thank the earth for the abundance of blessings it bestows upons us, with neighbors who care for one another with a bowl of soup, a lent tool, or by lending a hand when you've clearly bitten off more than you can chew.

In life, as in the garden, we reap what we sow. The difference is that, in the garden, if I drop a radish seed here, a radish will grow after a set period of time here. If I were to plant a square of radishes and then fret and complain that I DON'T HAVE ANY CORN!! you'd call me a madwoman. In life it is the same--the seeds we plant in it will ripen, but in life our actions are bitty drops in a huge interconnected and interdependent web, so, unlike in our garden, we don't always know when and where our seeds will germinate and grow. The seeds of hatred will come back to us in the form of angry people. The kindness we give will eventually find its way back to us.

Some people pray, down on their knees, hands pressed together, heads bowed before their Lord.

So too, do I kneel down on the earth, hands cupping my precious soil, filled with life that I cannot create--a brilliant miraculous system on which our very lives depend. Stewarding this tiny, yet vast and complicated ecosystem is one long, living prayer--an act of both faith and humility. A supplication for sustenance.

Namasté.

[orginally written May 2009]

April showers bring May...rain?

It's raining--perfectly lovely spring rain; the kind that drizzles slowly from the sky, occasionally picking up the pace, but never reaching enough fortitude to pound the earth and turn the streets into concrete walled rivers. (Edit: In the time since I started this, I hear word that the situation has indeed changed...)

Rain like this is good for the garden...unless you are waaay behind schedule and missed your few brief windows of opportunity to get the tiller in and mix up all that nice new soil and compost, so snug in their beds.

M and I went out to the Urban Gardener on Saturday to check out their offerings and pick up some Seeds of Change seeds (and soil test kits!). We also dropped in at KMart because they carry Burpee and Martha Stewart seeds. Neither is a first choice, but I do give them props for expanding their organic and heirloom offerings. I'm not a purist when it comes to organic seeds; really, the weirdness factor is always the winner--I like to grow things I cannot buy in any farmer's market, let alone supermarket. That's the beauty of the home garden--you don't need to grow tomatoes that have been bred to have thick, icky skins so that they don't break as they are mechanically harvested and dumped onto trucks that will let them ripen in a fresh flow of ethylene gas on their thousands of miles long road trip to your supermarket. You can grow all the veggies that don't fit nicely into packaging and that don't store well on long road trips.

In this case, I was hoping to get some seeds that I should have ordered months ago, and stuck in the ground a few weeks ago. For now, I wait for a break between the raindrops so I can turn the soil.

Rough Times at Rough Branch. (Request for help!)

This is an e-mail I recently sent out to some friends about a garden project with which I need assistance--there's still plenty of room for helpers! If you have time and inclination, all assistance will be gratefully accepted!

From: kxm
To:
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 11:05:19 AM
Subject: Rough Times at Rough Branch. (Request for help!)

2008 was the "Year that Wasn't" out at Rough Branch,* but I'm hoping to call on some good-natured good will to see if I might turn the situation around.

Back in the olden days, when folks needed a barn raised or to complete some other big project, they called on their community for help, and folks would come together to get what needed done, done.

The Amish still do it, and so do the rest of us, albeit rarely to raise a barn. I find myself in need of some serious help, and I'm hopeful that some of you may think that the following proposition sounds like a fun time, because, you know, it could be!

Rough Branch Wall-Building Work Day!

I need to terrace my garden into three flat sections, and build a retaining wall along the north side of the garden to control water flow, as well as create a usable bed on the side of the garden which I intend to fill with native plants that attract beneficial insects. David Geisler, owner of Gorgeous Gardens and a kind friend, will be directing the project, since my math skills are abysmal, and my engineering skills are questionable at best.

If you and your kith and kin are willing to come help me, even for an hour or two, during the day of Saturday, April 18, I'll provide some food and beverage at the end of the day (you can come back for it if you need/want to). It will involve digging, lugging rocks, lugging retaining wall block, cutting retaining wall block, tamping down rock, driving metal stakes into the ground, and moving dirt, so it won't be easy work, and it's gonna take a full day.

But many hands make light the labor! (And the job more fun!)

In return for your labor, I'll provide some lunch (though this may be a bit utilitarian), and then we'll have a nice feast at the end of the day, and, yes, I will provide beer. I have to discuss details with David (like start & end times), and will provide them as soon as I know. Please let me know if you're willing and able to help out (and what time, if you know) because if I can't assemble a work crew, the project can't go forward. David is giving me a nice price, but it assumes that I'll be providing peoples and comestibles. :-)

With love and gratitude,

_/|\_

kxm
--------
Generosity begins with our recognition of our debt to others. -Master Hsing Yun

* Flagrantly stolen from one of Wendell Berry's "mad farmer" poems, "Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, the Mad Farmer Secedes From the Union," Rough Branch is the name of my "farm" (you can call it a garden, I call it a farm).

***UPDATE***

Howdy y'all!

I talked to David, and we're on for Saturday the 18th. I've tried to delete those of you who said that you are not available next Saturday, but apologize if I left you on the list and you already said you can't help. I saved e-mail responses, but I forgets sometimes when people tell me things.

So -- David says I should have folks start to show up around 9 AM, and he anticipates that we'll work until something like 3 PM or so, depending on how much help we have, how efficient we are, and any snafus. Please reply and let me know if you can help, and WHEN. I have one person down for 12-2 (that's you, Steve), and a few general yesses and maybes. Ideally, it would be good to spread folks out throughout the day, but hey, I'll take the help when I can get it!

As I say, there will be foods and drinks after we're done (mom's helping with that), and we'll have something to nosh on for lunch.

Many thanks!

kxm

Focus, not on the rudenesses of others, not on what they've done or left undone, but on what you have & haven't done yourself. ~ Dhammapada, 4