"UFO", #inktober52, #inktober

There are definitely unidentified flying things in my yard.  I know this because they attacked me.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to live after the attack, but there was a bit of time when I was wondering if my rapidly swelling knee was a sign I’d developed a bee allergy.  I remembered a time when I was a kid when a neighbor boy got stung.  His arm swelled like a balloon before he was rushed to the hospital.  Maybe that’s why he quit playing at my house?

The summer people behind my yard kept bees.  A long row of stacked boxes were kept right along the property line, though they possessed an acre or two of land.  I suppose this was because we had gardens and apple trees.  Dad didn’t complain.  He wanted the pollinators.  The old man showed up once a year in his bee suit, armed with his smoker, and collected honey.  I liked watching him – from a distance.  I don’t remember him ever giving us any honey.  It didn’t seem fair.  There wouldn’t be any honey without our flowers.  Millions or trillions of bees buzzed through my childhood.  I learned to live peacefully with them. 

I took a walk in the park with a friend this week and told him about my childhood bees. I smugly repeated my childhood adage, “Don’t bug them, they won’t bug you.”  Obviously, I tempted fate.

Bro4 has repeatedly directed me to paint my shed.  I’ve repeatedly promised to get around to it.  Some day…  Okay, I finally started moving my pile of old logs so I could get to the shed walls. The logs were falling apart so I got a pitchfork and started tossing them into the yard waste bin.  I noticed a few bee-like things buzzing around, but mostly ignored them.  I noticed they were very fuzzy, a little smaller and darker than the usual honeybee.  I was a little curious, but I was a woman on a mission.  I was finally going to paint the shed.  After all, Bro4 added to my to do list when he dropped off a ladder.  Apparently my next job is to clean out my gutters.  I guess they aren’t supposed to have maple trees growing in them?

Anyway, my pitchfork snagged some weeds off a log and exposed a hive of monsters.  The monsters got upset.  I had a moment of surprise and the monsters took that moment to make a beeline to my tender flesh.  OW, ow, ow, ow, OW!!!  I guess I broke the bee rule.  I didn’t leave them alone and suffered the consequences.  It’s war.  They’re going to die!  Actually, it took me a while to start thinking about drawing battle lines.  I hobbled to the house and tried desperately to remember what to do about bee stings.

I haven’t been stung since I was a kid and I stepped on a rotten apple with a bare foot.  A very angry bee was inside.  I was stung between my little toes, which is a nasty place to hide a stinger.  I tried to remember what Mom did then.  I was pretty sure she plastered my toes with baking soda, or maybe it was meat tenderizer?  Lacking tenderizer, I slathered soda on my extremely painful elbow and knee – and then a spider bit me on my other arm!  Nature hates me this week.

My tender parts are back to normal looking.  I don’t hurt anymore, but I’m going a little crazy from itchiness.  Like I said, I’m pretty sure I’m going to survive this time.  Probably.  It’s too bad I don’t have a bee suit and a smoker because those monsters have to go!  Except?  I had another recent conversation with a beekeeper and said I sometimes think about keeping bees too.  I have space and bees are good for gardens and flowers.  I think I’ve accidentally gotten my wish.  Can I unwish something?

I tried to look up what kind of bees I've got, but I'm just not sure.  Anyone know about bees?

"Bumblebee"

I play computer games while thinking about how much I dislike lazy people, specifically my neighbor, pushing aside thoughts of the illustration I need to finish.  I give myself freedom to procrastinate while remembering more lazy people who don't do their fair share.  I try to whip myself into writing a blog post and play more computer games.

The neighbor issue is simple.  We had a storm.  Her tree came down in her yard.  The electric company cut up the tree (free!) so they could get their equipment in to free up the line.  Tree was piled on my lawn.  I glared at the pile for a week.  The neighbor sat on the front porch for days watching other people clean up after the storm.

The night before the city's last pick up of storm damage I dragged the pile to her tree lawn.  She came out when I had the last limb in my hand to spew negativity.  The neighbor 2 doors down (2DD) cuts her back yard.  I cut her side yard.  She does nothing and the world accommodates her.  I could go on, but you get the point.  People like this make my blood boil.  I have to cut her grass and move her tree or I'll have to look at it forever with elevated blood pressure.  It's easier to mow and move the pile.

Lazy people depend on people like me and 2DD.  Why should they do anything when they don't have to?  2DD says our hypocritical church lady has never said thank you or offered him $10 for gas for cutting her grass for years.  Come to think of it, she's never thanked me either.  She's entitled.  She doesn't care if other people are put out or that her weeds migrate to our yards.  I'm not even getting into the mess of her far back yard that has wrecked the drainage for the rest of us and is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

This is all recreational bitching over what is a recurring but insignificant inconvenience with occasional peaks of irritation which provide bonding moments with 2DD.  The greater point is that I'd like to think of people as a hive of bees, each doing what they're supposed to do for the benefit of the hive.  What do bees do when they have a lazy member?  I bet they just get on with the work that needs to be done.  I wonder if they get irritated about it too?

Sometimes I think I should keep bees, and then I discovered I'm already keeping bees since a bumblebee is living under my front step.  I suspect that if there's 1 there's probably more.  I don't know if I should be bothered by this or not?  (Please advise if you know best actions.)  The brick steps are attached to the front of the house, not really part of it.  Bumblebees pollinate the flowers and garden.  I feel only mild concern for the mail man since bumble bees are pretty mild, but I'd hate to be responsible if he got stung.

Are you lazy or a busy bee?  What do you do when you have to do the work of someone who won't do their bit?

"Zoom"

Bees are wonderful creatures.  I’ve never really understood the people who scream and swat around wildly when they see one, even though I’ve been stung like anybody else who runs around barefoot.  My mom has a knack of catching them in a hand towel and putting them outside when they find a way into the house.  I love to watch the bees zooming around, dancing from flower to flower.  The fact that they aren’t supposed to be able to fly makes them all the more fun to watch.

There’s a flower garden where I work, and I watch the bees when I take a break.  A very antisocial priest tends the garden, and he’s walled it off so nobody else can enjoy it.  I’m pretty sure he’s unhappy I acquired a key to get in, but I leave him alone, and he leaves me alone, and we both leave the bees alone.  I’m pretty sure they’re going to sleep for the winter now anyway.

Up till this summer’s bee watching, I never really paid attention to how many kinds of bees there are – black bees, yellow bees, striped bees, bumblebees, and lots of other bees too.  I’m pretty sure the variety of bees in the priest’s garden is because of the wide variety of flowers he plants in there.  I’m pretty sure there has to be acres of honey somewhere, but I’ll leave the bees to it.

Completely un-zoom related, I recently fixed a friend’s dresser.  In fact, this was kind of an anti-zoom activity because I had to build up layers of wood putty to mend the broken bric-a-brac.  I’m pretty sure I spent entirely too much time doing this, but I have to admit I enjoyed it.  I conferred with another friend about what kind of paint to use to camouflage the putty (we decided on oils), and she suggested that I take before and after pictures.  Good idea.  Wish she suggested that before I started, but I think you can tell what I was doing from these pictures.

This dresser was put out for the trash a lot of years ago, and my friend’s husband rescued it.  I’m glad he did.  It’s very solid, and now it’s pretty again too.

What is not pretty is the dark brown puddle of oil-based stain I kicked onto my friend’s carpet.  I will take any suggestion if anyone knows how to rectify that mess.  I tried blotting and also tried turpentine, but the main thing I accomplished by that was to make myself rather high and befuddled.  She says not to worry about it, but I feel bad and would like to know how to fix it.

Coincidently, I talked to another friend recently (which is starting to sound like I have an awful lot of friends!) who made the observation that I spend too much time feeling bad about other people’s issues.  I’m not so sure his observation applies in this case since I am very clearly at fault, but it does give me something to think about – which brings me back to bees…

I watched a nature show which talked about how bees communicate, and the host said bees are a lot like how our brains work.  One bee = one brain cell or synapse.  When you put all those synapses together, it’s like a whole hive of bees swarming together as one conscious thought.  I started thinking about that, and wonder if each human = one brain cell of society, and don’t humans swarm the same as bees?  Just something for you to think about, or maybe I’m justifying feeling bad too much when other people feel bad?  On the other hand, if everybody’s happy, then I’m happy too!

"Return"

The people who owned the lot behind my childhood home kept bees. A row of white boxes were lined up just on the other side of our property line, and the bees, who don’t understand property lines, came over and pollinated our apple trees and garden, climbed all over the deadfalls in autumn, and generally thought they lived at our place. It seems like the neighbors should’ve given us some honey in exchange for our pollen, but I don’t remember any honey gifts. I used to watch as the old guy came out in his white space suit and with a smoker to get the honey. It looked like a good job to me, especially since the bees were doing all the hard work. Sometimes I think about keeping bees too.

There’s an ancient apple tree in our backyard. It doesn’t make very good apples, unless you’re a boy who likes to use apples as weapons. Our hard, knobbly, green apples made excellent bruising projectiles for unsuspecting little girls. The boys knocked birds out of the trees with apples too. Boys can be mean. They got even meaner when they realized that hitting hard apples with badminton racquets was the equivalent of a nuclear missile assault, and tennis racquets were even better. Maybe thinking about boys reminds me of why I like the bees, because the bees took their revenge on those barefoot boys.

I have a great deal of affection for the apple tree too, despite the misuse of its fruit. I climbed the tree with my sketchbook or a novel and whiled away my afternoons in a secluded bower of blossoms with buzzing bees for company. One of my brothers lives at the old homestead now, and thought he’d take the tree down since he didn’t like mowing over the mess of hard green apples. The tree took revenge too because someone had spiked it with metal. It wasn’t me, but I can only applaud the effort. I’m very glad Pete wasn’t hurt by the chainsaw, and I’m very glad that the tree is still there, still making inedible fruit, and still feeding the bees.

This is old art. It’s a 20” x 30” poster that was used for interpretive programs and for sale in the parks’ gift shops. It went over so well that I had it blown up and printed onto backlit Plexiglas for a honeybee display in the nature center. Bees could come in and out of the building through clear tubes, and the honeycombs were visible through clear windows. Now that I think about it, I didn’t get any of that honey either. I see a continuing flaw in my compatibility with beekeepers, but no problem at all with the bees. I was very happy to see a honeybee in my house this week. Well, not happy that it was in the house, just happy that the bees have returned. I gently caught the lost bee and asked it to get busy pollinating my fruit trees.

The crows are back in my yard too. I had singing crows last year, and I’m really hoping they come back this year. I wouldn’t have believed they were actually singing if I didn’t actually see them standing on either side of my road and watching their beaks moving. It wasn’t CAW, CAW, CAW, but rather a really beautiful, melodic duet between the two of them. Crows often come back to nest where they nested the year before, so I’m hopeful they’ll be back. I was really nice to their babies and reassuring to the parents, so I hope they know this is a good place to live. And since I’m talking about crows, I have an EVENT that happens every evening, shortly before twilight. Crows from everywhere come to my house to discuss their day before flying to their individual homes. We aren’t talking about 10 or 20 or even 100 crows. There are thousands of them, all talking at the same time. It’s impressive, and very noisy. I feel happy to be included.