Tag: Farming

The Ebb and Flow of Honeybee Governance

~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

Nobody has ever accused me of being an expert in economics or modes of government, or really anything for that matter, but the best I can tell is that, with communism, everybody is miserable, but with capitalism at least 1% are filthy rich (and presumably happy)–and that gives the rest of us 99% hope that we could be the 1%. And hope is a wonderful thing. It could be a little misplaced in scratch off tickets or the dream of becoming filthy rich by beekeeping, but I’m a firm believer that hope is better than no hope. 

Sometimes I wonder if honeybees hope. They do odd things from time to time, like sail over the horizon in October (strangely I caught a swarm a few weeks ago), that make it appear as if they are sometimes influenced by some sort of delusional hope, much like the pilgrims sailing over the horizon in hopes of a new society. What discontent must have been brewing in that hive for those bees to swarm in October, to take their chances on the hope that new environs would be more conducive for their happiness. It is not their genetic instinct to swarm in October. Maybe a rabble rousing and inspiring bee instilled hope in her sisters. Maybe they decided to pack up and go on a voyage to flee an oppressive and tyrannical system of governance. 

People have often been curious about the governing structure of honeybees. Aristotle thought bees were a monarchy ruled by a king bee (Matt Phillpot at Honey Histories has some good posts on the king bee theory). Then other folks came along and said I’m pretty sure that the king bee just laid an egg, at which point, people believed that bees were a monarchy ruled by a queen (and that Aristotle should have stuck to metaphysics). Then Charles Darwin came along and pointed out that the queen is really just a figurehead used for breeding purposes, that the monarchy is just performative, kind of like the current British monarchy (though both get perks like a lot of royal jam and jelly). Darwin basically posited that, underneath the facade of monarchy, bees were communists at heart, made up of individuals who work for the good of the group, not for personal gain. Then Cornell Professor Tom Seeley came along a few years ago and posited that, underneath the facade of monarchy and underneath the sub-facade of communism, bees are actually red-bloodied, freedom loving bugs who prefer democratic self-governance. You’re darn tootin’.

But who the heck really knows. My theory is that bees’ form of government ebbs and flows over time. Maybe at the time when Aristotle was writing about king bees, the bees really were governed by a series of kings, many of which were named Henry, who turned out to be pretty murderous fellas, so they decided to let a couple of queens have a go at governing, only to find them slightly less murderous, so they tried a new system of government led by bolshevik bees, only to find that job opportunities were pretty limited in scope: you were either an abdomen-licking attendant bee to the Supreme Leader, a peasant worker bee, or a drone who got murdered in the winter. Then the bees experimented with democracy for about 250 years, only to find its great strength–hope–was also its ultimate downfall. A huckster drone, peddling authoritarianism disguised as hope, coalesced a large following of bees, disillusioned by the price of eggs, to vote for him again, at which point he started doing a lot of fun authoritarian things, like rounding up non-native bees, deploying national guard bees on the citizenry, and accepting lots of untraceable foreign honey for meme crypto tokens.

Of course, this pretty much brings us to the present day, so time will only tell what happens next–but here’s hoping the bees can get their act together, before they go back to square one and replace hope and freedom with a system of oppressive and tyrannical king bees.

Is it a king, queen, president, or orange authoritarian? Time will only tell.

Helpful Farm Definitions

~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

The other day, I happened to be riffling through the dictionary for a word when I randomly flipped to the page that contained the entry for tractor. I couldn’t help but stop and refresh my memory. According to Merriam-Webster, a tractor is a powerful motor vehicle with large rear wheels used chiefly on farms for hauling equipment and trailers.  

What a terrible definition! It’s almost as if lexicographers, trained in etymology and semantics, have little real-world knowledge of the defining qualities and singular characteristics of the mighty tractor. As an English major, who happens to own two tractors (or be owned by two tractors–I’m not sure which), I feel uniquely qualified to offer a slightly more accurate definition. A tractor is a sedentary piece of machinery with large flat rear tires used chiefly on farms to play roulette by guessing which hydraulic hose will burst next.

This farmer just hit the jackpot.

This pairs well with my definition of a farm: a farm is a rural open air casino where people can gamble wholesomely on the propagation of crops, but where Mother Nature and the Banker always win in the end. From this bedrock definition of a farm, you can then derive many other farm terms:

A farmer is a person missing a finger who is addicted to gambling on the propagation of crops. 

A farm hand is a young in-law who primarily performs grunt work and dangerous tasks and whose fingers and hands are still intact but generally considered disposable. 

A farm dog is the dog that runs off with the finger after the severance. 

A regenerative farm is dedicated to the regeneration of soil and missing fingers through adherence to  ancient and wise agrarian texts. 

A goat is an animal that trained at Houdini’s School for Escape and Get Away. 

A pig is animal certified in farmer psychoanalysis and talk therapy. 

A cow is an animal with four stomachs, but with such poor sense that it fills them all with grass. 

A chicken is the smartest animal in the barnyard kingdom, due primarily to its ability to scam farmers into building elaborate coops and enclosures in exchange for a few fresh eggs.

A fox is a wild animal that has evolved to infiltrate elaborate coops and enclosures and ruin the asset-to-income ratio for the production of a few fresh eggs. 

A farmers’ market is where a happily married man goes to sell produce and a few fresh eggs, only to have a fight off a bunch of presumptuous women who keep asking him about his spraying habits. Apparently, the sight of homegrown tomatoes is an aphrodisiac. 

An old farmhouse is a multigenerational domicile whose primary function is to provide shelter for annoying ancestral ghosts, all of whom are extremely opinionated about the never-ending home improvement projects of the living inhabitants. 

Hopefully, these definitions give you a clearer picture into the true nature of life on a farm, or at least my life on a farm, which, I admit, may not be indicative of others’ experiences, especially for farmers more competent than I am. Oddly, despite the generally harrowing nature of the above definitions, I would define farm life as a generally pleasant and rewarding way to spend one’s days on Earth.

Happy Allergy Season!

~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

I suppose there are advantages to living in a desert. For one, allergy season is probably pretty short. Without vegetation carpeting the landscape, the human immune system must have little to overreact to. Here, in the borderlands between the subtropic and temperate climes, my white blood cells are currently waging war against any trace of pollen trying to invade my pores and orifices. My body’s attempt to expel the invaders has mostly expelled lots of bodily fluids through my runny nose, watery eyes, and rapid-fire sneezes. 

dessert sand dune
The only way to escape allergies

Still, I’m trying to find the silver lining in the pollen cloud–maybe there are advantages to having allergies, evolutionary speaking? For one, if I ever get lost in the middle of the night in a hayfield, I’d be more likely to survive since search and rescue would easily locate me because they’ll hear me sneezing from a mile away. Two, bad allergies provide a legitimate excuse for skipping events with in-laws without incurring the full-force of a spouse’s wrath. Yep, even for a trophy husband like me, my wife doesn’t mind if I miss a family function when I’m under the influence of allergies and can’t speak coherently without sneezing and sniffling. 

The biggest advantage, however, to allergy season is that sales of our honey go through the roof. I feel a little bit guilty on this count. I’m not sure there is much truth to the theory that local honey actually helps with allergies. Case-in-point, as someone who ingests an inordinate amount of honey from my own farm, my allergies have only minimally improved, progressing from wretched to merely miserable. 

That said, I know many good upstanding people who swear that local honey helps their allergies. According to my allergist, I’m mostly allergic to pollen from the grass family, and supposedly bees don’t pollinate grass species because they’re wind pollinated, so maybe I’m not the best case study (that said, I see a lot of bees pollinating my sweet corn, which is definitely a member of the grass family). 

Sometimes I wonder how my ancestors from bygone days survived allergies without the use of Allegra and Zyrtec and Benadryl. If I lived back then, the month of May would have eventually taken me out, with my headstone memorializing the exact date in May that I finally lost my battle with hay fever. 

Anyway, here’s hoping you survive allergy season this year!

That’s Farming

~ sanebishop ~ 9 Comments

I am not sure what’s the bigger bane of my existence, dead batteries or flat tires. Both have a way of taunting me that is entirely unbecoming of inanimate objects. Just yesterday a tractor battery went, “chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, click” which translated into English means, “You dimwit farmer, did you really think you were going to quickly crank up and go get a hay bale, then be back inside ten minutes later eating supper with your family? Think again, sucker.”

Ten minutes later, I not only had one dead tractor battery but two. I had now drained the battery in the other tractor by trying to jump off the first tractor. That meant I had to get my truck involved. Thankfully, my truck battery has proven more reliable than my tractor batteries, meaning it only dies bi-annually instead of annually. With the truck, I finally resuscitated the tractor and could now get a roll of hay for the cows. So twenty minutes fooling with batteries, ten minutes fooling with a hay tarp, five minutes opening and closing gates, ten minutes chasing a cow that snuck through a gate, and five minutes cutting strings off the hay bale equals thoroughly cold food when I finally made it back inside to eat supper. 

“What took so long?” my wife asked. 

“Dead battery,” I said. 

“You’ll probably want to stick that in the microwave,” she said. “and by the way, can you check the air in my tires. My light came on today when I was driving home from work.”

Alas, a poor dirt farmer like me basically spends six hours a day sleeping, eight hours at work to pay for my farming addiction, and my remaining hours trying to keep my farm from falling apart, which isn’t easy when unruly batteries and tires are involved. 

I take consolation in the fact some farmers have it worse than me. My neighbor keeps a battalion of broken-down tractors in the weeds just to keep a couple of tractors running and operational. How he remembers which parts he has already robbed off of which tractor is beyond me. He more or less mimics the frantic searching method of a bird dog, bobbing in and out of overgrown tractor thickets, to flush a needed part. On a good Saturday morning, he can bag his daily limit of parts and have them marinating in WD-40 by lunchtime. On a bad Saturday morning, he’ll have to go an actual tractor dealership to acquire his needed part, at which point someone will need to resuscitate him from sticker shock, but that’s farming.

Gluttons for Punishment

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

Not to get religious, but one thing I find interesting about the story of Adam and Eve is the fact that God punished the first couple by farming. That seems about right. Out of all punishments in the primordial soup, and I’m sure there were some tasty ones in there, God chose boring old “soil cultivation” as his foundational punishment. Eventually, God added some spice with plagues and floods and such, but those wouldn’t add nearly as much misery without farm crops to ruin. 

The point here, though, is farmers are gluttons for punishment. Year after year, farmers come back for another round of woe and bear the weight of original disciplining. In my innocence, I used to think farming was fun and exciting (a belief quickly dispelled when I planted and picked a quarter-acre patch of strawberries by myself), and I see a lot of new farmers come into the agriculture office where I work thinking the same thing. But most quit after a few years–sadly, can’t take the pain.

Not to get even more religious, but I’ll bring up another point. Right there in Genesis, written thousands of years ago, are the first documented descriptions of the two farm paradigms: (1) the organic, ideal, untainted, natural, sustaining garden planted by God and (2) the cursed and fallen land outside it, destined to be worked by the toilsome efforts of man. Whatever you make of Genesis, the point here is the two conflicting paradigms of agriculture are accounted for thousands of years ago. 

Humanity has been in a state of cognitive dissonance ever since. Which is kinda reflected in my own thoughts about agriculture: I support farmers who shoot for a higher ideal (we may not be able to get back into the garden, but maybe we can get closer to it). Meanwhile, I also support conventional farmers who undergo the toilsome and often thankless labor of feeding the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants, and in so doing bear the brunt of original disciplining while the rest of us eat and critique their farming methods. 

The way I look at it, there’s no perfect paradigm of farming, no perfect farm, no perfect farmers. Just people, most of whom are exhausted and trying to make it through the day, doing the best they can with their particular helping of primordial soup.