Weep, Hippies

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how bees, which are supposedly addled by nicotinoid pesticides, could set up housekeeping in a yard full of imidacloprid. It’s in the lawn, the trees, the shrubs, and the vegetables I’ve planted. Yet the bees had no trouble making a home here and finding their way back to it over and over.

I think I’ll be waiting a long time for that explanation.

A beekeeper came last week and plugged the places where the bees were getting in, and he blasted the cavity they were exploiting with poison, presumably doing in the queen and all bees inside the house. But the remaining bees–thousands–weren’t ready to give up, and they swarmed on the chimney. I suppose they could still smell the queen, dead though she was. They make special poison that shoots a long way, for the specific purpose of killing bees and wasps, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a beekeeper. So the swarm got a good dose of it, and now there are dead bees all over the place. I only wish the ghost ants were as easy to slaughter.

The experience got me thinking. It would be nice to have a bee gum. Honey is expensive, and the bees will give it to you for nothing. But I wonder if it’s possible to keep bees here. It’s not that I wonder if they could survive. I just wonder if the honey would be worth eating. If you put bees around the wrong plants, you get pretty weird honey. I’ve seen very strange honey at my grandmother’s house in Kentucky. Some was very dark, like dark corn syrup. I’m not interested in accumulating bad honey.

I am only familiar with the flavors of three types of honey. Clover, orange blossom, and sourwood. I like them all, but the last two are the ones I like best. I’m not sure how you get sourwood honey. The sourwood tree is not very common. Maybe there are beekeepers who plant groves of it. The honey is very clear, and it’s bright yellow.

I learned about sourwood from my grandfather. We used to wander around in the woods from time to time, and one day, he pulled a leaf off a tree and told me to chew it. It had a very sour but not disagreeable taste. I suppose that’s where the name comes from.

The bees down here are very small and dark. I didn’t recognize them as honey bees. Evidently they all look like that here. The bee guy thought they were completely normal.

It’s too bad the bees didn’t tell me they were coming. They would have been welcome in a regular hive. In the walls? Not so much. It feels weird, exterminating useful bugs, but it beats having the house ruined.

Interesting news: the hippies are not as excited about imidacloprid as they used to be. Now there is evidence that a natural fungus is damaging bee populations. Also, the damage isn’t as bad as some of the nuts would have us believe.

Glad to hear that. The global warming myth and the ethanol farce are about to drive us into a recession. We don’t need any more Chicken Littles right now, removing wonderful pesticides from the market and driving food prices even higher.