What Star Missed Today...

1. Rain: it rained today. Not anywhere near epic conditions, but there was rain and I did walk in it for unusually long distances. Also, everything had big, fat, happy rain drops squatting on them.

2. These flowers: who also had happy rain on them.

Gorgeous. They were tucked away behind the Lab buildings on the way to the O-farm. A lovely little surprise in the beginning of what promises to be a very long day.
3. The Walk to the O-Farm: Here is the path, and here are the leaves that line the path (note the happy rain is here as well).
This is what happy rain looks like.

4. My Tea: Oh so pretty in its very own mug.

Ahhh.. blackberry tea.

So tastey.

So I went to beekeeping this morning and learned about...

bee disease!

(if you say this out loud it mostly rhymes).

Anyway, it turns out the bees are dying. Who knew? There are a variety of things causing this: Varroa mites, tracheal mites, American Foul Brood, and of course the Colony Collapse Disorder which is the main source of the bad news. About 32% of bee colonies failed last year, 29% of those were caused by CCD which at this point, remains a mystery. Everyone is panicking about it, including Haagen-Daz (the ice-cream company and also the main contributor of funds towards researching this epidemic. Our ice-cream is IN DANGER! Don't you people realize how frightening that is? Contribute dammit!).

Oh, and we also learned a little bit about the animal predators.

Skunks:Will walk up to a hive, scratch around on the side panels to get the bees nice and angry, and then saunter to the front. Here, they wave their luxuriantly rank tail in front of the hive entrance. The bees then attack the tail, get stuck and then the skunk just turns around and picks them out as if they were little popcorn kernel snackies. Crunch crunch crunch....

Bears: Don't really want your honey mr. bee, all they want are your babies. The bears like the brood (which are apparently quite edible, but a little tangy... I really wouldn't know).

Lizards: And other small critters can sometimes just hang out inside of the hives and pick bees off as they buzz on by. Jake (the bee-instructor) was telling us about a lizard he found in the bottom of a three story hive. He had popped off the first two supers (the boxes bees hang out in) and found a little, fat lizard on the floor of the bottom one. The lizard had been there SO LONG that the bees had covered him in a thick layer of wax with just his head free. He was calmly and quite contentedly snapping up bees the walked past his head and showed no desire to move in anyway. Jake popped him off of the floor, a change that the lizard wasn't too happy about, so he wound up just staying in the hive anyway. His little wax mummy casing was pretty nasty because of the months of dead skin sheddings that had accumulated. Gross.

I think that's all I'm going to tell you for now.