I have been mulling this over for the last couple of weeks. Trying to figure out heads and tails of concept, feeling or just inkling of how dogs (hounds, in my case) enter your life and then exit.
If you have a dog live to be twelve, and you end up living to be eighty, that dog will have been in your presence about 16% of your time on this earth. That leaves 84% of the time that the canine was not part of your life. Yet, if you are a dog lover, and those who know me know that am I, you will have multiple hounds pass through your life. They all have personalities, some were hot headed and some were gentle souls who had gotten the short end of the stick for part of the life before wandering into mine.
Hounds have phantasmal qualities, as well. They can communicate with you, but at the same time, the communication is not straight-forward and simple, it is often as cryptic as a ghost's writing on a fogged up bathroom mirror. We often mentally claw at and grapple with what is going on in their heads. Are they in pain? Do they need something?
Often, as soon as we think we understand them, just that little bit, they pass through our lives. We are forced to grapple with the void they leave and the questions that may remain unanswered about them. But, we move on, and soon, another hound has begun their own passing through.
Honey & Bee season has closed. The Ahrens' bee-yard was winterized a week or two ago, and the hive (yes, singular) here in Proctor was winterized yesterday. On the honey production curve, when looking at the number of hives that we had going into the summer versus the honey produced at the end, it would be seen as a terrible year. The caveats abound, however. We generally do not pull honey from new, first year hives; that would have ruled out eleven hives. We did have a bit of a swarming issue with our experimental Russian bees, and I hope to detail that in a separate post. In the end, we harvested sixty pounds (27.2 kg) of honey from our two hives at the Proctor bee-yard.
Prior to just a few days ago, winter was no where to be seen; the snow, frost and freezing daytime temperatures were stuck to the north of us in Canada. We had been taking advantage of the oddly nice (by our standards) weather. We were in a sort of weather purgatory; it was nice out, but it would have been great to be nicer but it is not going to stay this nice very long. By January-weather-standards, this sunny and 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) is fantastic, but the recent weather was much like April weather; while we are able to comfortably work outdoors with a light shirt, jeans and regular shoes (no boots), it was still dropping below freezing at night. I look at photos of the yards, and of the grass and foliage from June, and all are lush and deep green; a deep green color that only comes with countless "applications" of nitrogen rich urea from the hounds. With daylight each day, getting shorter by minutes, we leave for our day jobs in the dark, and arrive back home in the dark. This arrangement is not conducive for working outdoors and often results in worm tunneling around with a flashlight in the dark trailing hounds in an attempt to keep up with their "deposits". I have been tending to sit inside, with a hot cup of coffee and my laptop.
When the cold weather arrives, I tend to tinker with this or plan for spring about that. Spring seed catalogs have started arriving in the mail, as well. But, the recent nice weather did allow for a very strange sight: gardening, in northern Minnesota, in mid-November. We actually put in another garden.
There had been fencing around a row of grapevines, but having since removed a large, ramshackle compost bin from one end of the stretch, the hounds had found ways of getting into the vineyard area. This was unacceptable. Three feet (one meter) out from the wire fence, we sunk new fence posts into ground and secured them in concrete. We stretched new wire fencing, and fill the new enclosure with black dirt. With a couple hundred crocus and allium bulbs on hand, Melissa set to work making a nice flower-border that should look nice in the spring.
As the honey & bee season closed out, a new, hopefully continuous season started: eggs. The chickens started to lay last week, and are currently at a plateau of four eggs per day.
We are in Troy, MI, at the moment; attending Michigan Basset Rescue's annual fundraising event. We left Minnesota at 3:30 AM CDT yesterday morning. Across northern Wisconsin and into Michigan's upper peninsula, we rolled across the Mackinac Bridge nine hours later. Upper Michigan has the same look and feel of far-northeastern Minnesota - very rural, paved roads but mostly single lanes, scenic overlooks, and poor cellphone reception. It is very pretty in that rustic, pine-bog way - comfortably familiar to those of us who grew-up and continue to live in the boreal forest region of the upper midwest (see Taiga).
Here, in lower Michigan, it is more low, rolling hills mixed with farmland and deciduous forest. Near the hotel, I spotted a black walnut tree (and empty shells). On the hotel grounds, all the flowering crab trees are in bloom - complete with their wonderful smell.
Before leaving Minnesota, much had to be done with the bees.
During the winter, when planning out this season's bees, I had planned out eight new hives. The two at the house were still doing well, and so, we were not going to have do anything new with them. One of the two at the house failed to make it through winter (as I have mentioned on this blog before). I put in a second order for a package of Italian workers with a Russian queen.
Last week, one of the newly installed packages of eight at the Ahrens' bee-yard, swarmed. This left down one package. However, the second order of a package of bees was arriving on this past Tuesday. That would suffice for the Ahrens' bee-yard, but it still left us short one hive at the house.
As it would have it, Theresa, of Fifth Avenue Farm, in Rice Lake township, in a bit of a panic, ordered a new Italian queen. She was worried that one of her new hives of Carniolans was in the process of beginning to swarm; she could not find the queen. I stopped out at the farm on Tuesday after installing the package at the Ahrens'; The queen was there (see bee photo), and the rest of the hive was working hard to bring in nectar and pollen - not getting ready to swarm.
This left Theresa's Italian queen still arriving on Thursday. We settled on the idea of making a split of the Italians that wintered over successfully and using Theresa's queen.
In between packing for the trip to Michigan, we began to get things ready for the queen's arrival. Mixed a pail of sugar syrup; loaded dog crates into the truck. Cleaned out a hive deep, selected four drawn frames of wax; loaded luggage and miscellaneous hound gear.
We had never made a hive split before. For those unfamiliar with this concept, it is basically take a number of frames with bees, comb, pollen, honey and all that from an existing, strong overwintered hive and putting them into a new hive with a new queen.
With the truck mostly packaged, and the arrival of the Italian queen in its fancy "Beeware!" box from the postoffice, it was time to get a split made and the queen installed. The donor-hive was stronger than I had thought it was be; three hive boxes full of bees, larvae, pollen, and honey. From being a struggling hive last May; needing to be requeened because of no queen and a drone-laying worker. We even combined the hive with a feral hive shortly after last season's requeen.
The split went well, and it is a just a matter of seeing if the queen and workers mesh well once the workers free the queen from her candy-cappedcage. We will have to check once we return to Minnesota.
Back here in Michigan, senior-hound, Gertrude, fell ill. She was lethargic, refused food and was running a fever. Luckily, this being a large gathering of dogs, there was a dog-doctor in the house. A visit from the doc, a few pills, some homeopathic treatment, and Miss Gertrude is doing better. Her fever broke, and she ate dinner; now she rests and sleeps.
The winter solstice seems to have come and gone; I will admit, I missed the lunar eclipse on the solstice. I am somewhat disappointed in having missed something that last occurred in the year 1638. It is not like I had any pagan rituals planned, moreover, it is not like I had anything planned.
Somewhere between a Roman holiday celebrating the winter solstice and the birth of a baby (who would eventually have a religion formed around him), coniferous trees, garlands, cookies & milk, a whole lot of money spending, and the former Bishop of Turkey, e.g. St. Nicholas, all got involved with what is now known as Christmas. Eventually, and somehow, St. Nicholas went from being the Bishop of Turkey to being a fat man of western European descent who lived at the North Pole with elves and reindeer; his name also changed to Santa Claus. Some European cultures never advanced the idea of magical reindeer and elves; David Sedaris tells in Six to Eight Black Men that in the Netherlands, St. Nicholas roams from house to house with a small posse of former slaves to give good children small gifts and to kick and beat bad children.
Roger Miller's King of the Road played on the tape deck. My sister, Meghann, was asleep in the passenger seat. We were shooting across Montana, heading for Oregon and the left-coast. It was August 2000. I was just 19; Meghann was 22 and she had recently finished her undergraduate degree. She wanted to take a trip before starting graduate school in the fall. The trip was one of a few I took as a teenager, and it cemented my love of road trips.
All around, the last couple of weeks have been stressful. In the non-hound, non-bee and non-garden realm (read: work), it is the kind of stress that comes from dealing with things and people that down-right piss you off. In the realm of hounds and bees (and gardens), we had the unfortunate need to have one of the hounds make his final trip to the veterinarians' office. In the circle of folks my wife frequents, this is referred to as "heading to the bridge"; like during their lives, the animal's journey to the bridge is embellished, dramatized, and/or anthropomorphized. Homer caught a ride, to the bridge, in the back of our old red truck. (which most likely has, since selling it, died, too) Homer would not have taken a bus; some people will say their pup took a bus. Homer hate all vehicles with air-brakes or most likely fueled by diesel - something with the low-rumble set him off.
April 10, is quickly approaching. It is the day we head to Stillwater, MN to pick up the bees. Until then, we have been busily preparing things. On Friday, there were two large boxes of stuff sitting on the front porch. It was the unassembled frames, wax-coated foundations, two new bee suits/jackets, a new smoker, and several other miscellaneous things. It looked like we would be assembling frames over the weekend.
I could not help but think of Mr. Wu, from HBO's series Deadwood. In the series, Mr. Wu was the go-to guy for disposing of unwanted bodies. Mr. Wu would feed the corpses to his pigs - the pigs would leave nearly nothing behind.
I was standing on the back steps of the house, watching two of our hounds have a mid-day snack; they each had half of a rabbit head. Three of our four dogs eat a raw diet (the fourth dog has digestive issues and requires a higher fiber, lower fat diet than what is provided by raw). Throughout the winter months, we tend to have issues with rabbits. It has not been particularly bad this winter; we have actually only had the live-trap out for a brief time in January. The one and only rabbit caught this winter was from in January; humanely dispatched, it hung in the garage - frozen - until this past weekend when I quartered it up for the hounds.
