Six Arrows Farm Update

“How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour?”  - Isaac Watts

Ben “suited up” and cleaned our bee hives with Charlie yesterday in preparation for the two new swarms we just picked up.  I attended the operation with camera in tow to capture the process of establishing the hives.

A few dead bees from last year still clung rigidly to the frames and some leftover honey dripped lazily from a crack in a corner.  Last year’s leaves and dirt, the workers and the yield, mingled and languished in sordid decay around the base of both hives.  The whole picture would have cut a terribly melancholy figure if the steady punctuated hum the of the waiting swarms hadn’t added a distinct element of urgency.  Thousands of bees caught up together in a teeming net can make a respectable quantity of buzz.  A few solitary workers had escaped the general trap and were settled along the lid and around the outside of the net droning on a slightly different note than their kin and already sporting tell-tale bulging pockets at the knees. Charlie and I made a timely retreat to a safe distance just before Ben released the bees, since we aren’t sure how “bee-immune” we are and weren’t inclined to find out with a confused and over-crowded swarm.

Amazing to me is the passionate desire of the bee to work.  They do it to survive, but there is no “bare minimum” of labor for the intense little reapers.  They all work as one with rapidity, skill, and voracity.  Bees not only do what they must, they love to do it, eating up the space between flower and hive with a high-pitched song.  The glory of God is made evident in the bee.  But someone else said it better than I in the words of a child; which is what one tends to feel like after hearing the first thing about bees.  I will let her tell you:

“Now, here’s something to remember about a bee itself – say a worker bee, because it would be the one that would carry the pollen.  …a worker bee has got two stomachs, a little one more inside for itself, and a way bigger one more on the outside for the hive.  Back on its abdomen every worker bee has got four pockets to secrete wax, and every worker has got baskets on its legs to gather pollen in, besides the nectar that they carry in their stomach for the hive.  …  Every one of them is covered with hair that is long for a bee and it is soft and fine and when the workers go down into Mr. Male Iris to get nectar for their two stomachs and to fill their pollen baskets, the hair all over them fills with the pollen, too, and it is the law, because of God, that when any bee starts out to gather nectar and pollen, it never mixes one flower with another.  You can see it now, can’t you?  When  the worker bee gets the pollen from Mr. Iris all over his hair and then goes on to get pollen from Miss Iris, the hair is going to scatter the pollen for her, that’s going to make the good seed come, ‘cause the bees do the flower’s courting for them.  That’s a reason besides honey as to why bees are so useful.”

“One time I asked the Bee Master if I couldn’t see God and if I couldn’t touch Him, how was I going to know that He was here.  And he said, ‘Because of the hair on a bee.’   So that’s one of the ways you can know.

Then there are a lot of ways you find out about God on account of how He made Queen bees.”

“The way a Queen comes to be a Queen, is this way: In a little cell all fixed up for it, the Queen bee of a hive puts an egg and she tells the workers, ‘I want this egg to be a Queen.’  The workers get busy and make the royal jelly.  That’s another thing the people who write the bee books haven’t figured out.  They don’t know just what royal jelly is or how it is made.  But the workers know.  God showed ‘em how when He made ‘em.”

“…the new Queen goes to the door and she walks out of it backward.  She goes away a little piece and she comes back to it three or four times.  God told her to do that so she would be mighty sure when she came home from the first long flight she has ever made she would know her own door.”

“[The Bee Master] says the only name for that Master Mind is God.  He doesn’t see any use in trying to dodge God and side-step Him and call Him ‘The Spirit of the Hive’ and Instink and Nature and things like that.  He says a great scientist, one of the best, almost went crazy trying to do that very thing.  His name was Charles Darwin, and the Bee Master says C.D. would have been a heap better…if he’d been willing to put God in where He belongs.  He says when God does anything ‘with such care, and puts so much thought in it, and deals out such splendid justice’ as there is in a beehive, that a wise man will just take off his hat and lift his eyes to the sky and very politely he will say, ‘Just God.’”

~from The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter

I concur with the “Bee Master” more ever day. 

The bunches of onions are banked in rows, sleeping until warmth and light and rain pour coax them to life.  Herb pots in the greenhouse are supplied with sturdy little plants reaching eagerly for the sun, beautiful in form and casting savory aromas.  If you want to hear a good sermon on the nature of God on the farm, all you have to do is step outside the door into His world and listen.

With Gene Stratton Porter “I say, ‘Just God!’”

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

A Six Arrows Farm Update

I love fires.  Ultimately, I would not be a true daughter of my father if I didn't.  Family tradition here includes spring cleaning in the woods.  The first day of brush-burning is more a celebration than anything else...the reveling in good hard work. I realize the nature of the "warm fuzzies" that most people get when they think of big heaps of flaming brush probably has very little to do with sentiment and a great deal to do with the physical heat.  Nevertheless, most of us around here get a little thrill at the thought of burning something…within reasonable and “legal” boundaries of course.  That is the somewhat nostalgic and practically maudlin side of the question for me.  Feelings aside, fire does hold some charm for me unrelated to family tradition.  In fact, this sentimental view of fire grew in part out of a love for the very essential and economical side of burning things.  But I digress…

When Daddy announces spring cleaning in the woods, nobody has to think or plan much.  The dispersal of forces is almost wordless.  Out come work clothes with their familiar stains and tears, last year’s smoky, earthy scents still hanging about them and a bit of last year’s dead leaf or bent twig clinging to a sleeve.  Heavy boots swallow your legs up to the knee and an old hat or scarf settles with its own angle like a habit on your head.  Ever heard “That fits you like a glove?”  Well, somewhere in a motley heap of leather gloves are the two that, with long use, really do fit the shape of your hand almost like your own skin and testify to our common aphorism.  And just in case you were wondering…there really is no hand in my glove pictured on the left; complete with grass and bark and mud stains.

It doesn’t take long for us to settle into a job vigorously once we decide what it’s to be.  The voracious roar of a saw tends to be the cue and almost at once someone is dragging out dead kindling while another hacks at thorns.  Dust and chips fly about and a silent curtain of smoke rises up from the crackle and blaze of a strategically built inferno.  We were all raised to be unabashed “pyro’s”, but watching us for just ten minutes will reveal a broad range of styles.  Nourishing it like a famished creature, we douse it with great armloads of sticks, add a steady train of skillfully tossed logs, and patiently feed in gangly branches.

There is always another limb to drag, another tree to saw, another pile to rake, but if all else fails, each of us has cultivated the skill of “poking.”  I don’t know of another family that relishes sitting beside a fire and poking at it more than ours.  That bough needs to be shoved further in, this branch is sticking out, that flame is dying down.  A skillful prod here and jab there will make an unsightly mountain melt away to feather-light deserts of ash. Red and hungry, grasping and swallowing, glowing and shimmering, this thing of terror and glory lives for a flashing moment of transformation and then dies away to nothing along with all that is left of its food.  

Most people don’t fully appreciate a good fire.  But then most haven’t heard of “killer vines”, “buckthorn”,  or “stinging nettles”…unless of course you have lived out here for a while.  The terrifying rush of heat and devastating path of destruction that are so often associated with fire can almost eclipse the cleansing and rejuvenating influence it has on creation.  Death again and again gives birth to life.  On this theme every day the whole of creation is whispering and shouting over and over until the one who listens can’t help but take notice.

So I am officially taking note…and signing off for now.

A Six Arrows Farm Update

I threw the windows open this morning to let in spring and I wish you could be here.  The quiet sky is casting a soft gray blanket and filtering gentle light over a brown world misted with hazy green.  Things can't wait to come alive now.  Everything is reaching and striving and opening into the warmth.  It is all so vulnerable and hesitant, soft and new.  Composers have been writing music for spring for centuries.  Some of my old favorites...Vivaldi's Spring, Mozart's "Spring" String Quartet, Copland's Appalachian Spring are dedicated in title to the season.  But even these fall short of the real symphony that swells between last year's death and this year's life.  The story of spring is almost too delicate for any expression louder than a whisper.  While seemingly cavalier, the relentless and yet winsome power obviously on display makes carelessness and pomp equally graceless.

Poetry meets prose where pleasant weather meets reality.  Talk goes back and forth, some eager, some dubious.  What does a Minnesota grower do with a March Spring?  The orchard owners are justly concerned that an April or early May frost will kill the buds which are so enthusiastically bursting.  Last year, a similar weather pattern eliminated much of the fruit crop in this region.  On the other hand, if the frost wipes out the first of the weed bed in the garden before it goes to seed, we will of course be grateful.  And a lengthened growing season with good rain and sun can only help most crops.

Daddy announced a desire to do some brush clean-up over lunch and the prospect of grubbing around out of doors was so tantalizing that I enlisted myself almost before he finished laying out his plan.  I love to be in the middle of it, when all the world is living the first creation again; when the newborn green creeps up like an old friend and fills my senses with memories come alive; when my eyes drink the lush colors to their dregs.  I glory in the comical way the hens peck and cluck out their satisfaction across fresh turf while the rooster crows stentorianly simply because he can.  I am mesmerized by a single bud, standing there willing it to grow when I know for a surety that I can do nothing to make it mature or drink when I water, and yet it surely will because it lives avidly in obedience to it’s Creator.

To tear away at the old to make way for the new; to rake out, sweep up, and carry away what is chaff and press down and train up and feed what is good is in our nature.  Man is made neither as a foreign creature to destroy, nor a passive member to let lie the world in which he is established.  He is made a husbandman to make it better.  All around the farm are evidences of “natural” decay.  The beauty of untouched wilderness is not in its native disorder, suffocation, and barrenness, but in the potential it is blessed with: a will to grow and come alive under the hands of skilled and diligent caretakers.  That which languished in rampant chaos begins to take on the beauty of shape and form.  The accumulation of death and decay are set aside to give way to redoubled life and strength.  

The soil obeys the laws written in it and knows the hand of man as it’s appointed ruler.  It responds with fertility and abundance under a good steward and withering and desolation under a lazy or greedy man.

Proverbs 20:4 says “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.”
So here we go to "plow in season".

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows