Red hands with missing fingers

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As noted in the post below, I zipped back home from the salt marsh last Friday to take care of some loose ends, One of the things on the to-do list was replenishing the bee feeder with more sugar syrup. A bit of backstory: I didn’t keep bees last year – my hives were winter-killed and I missed the windows for ordering replacement packages in the spring. This year, with plans for the Big Bike Trip well underway, it made no sense to start beekeeping again, so I didn’t. But I did leave a hive out in the back yard the past couple years, mainly because I’m lazy that way. Come early August, I noticed some bee activity in and around the hive. “Checking it out to see if they can scavenge some supplies.”, thought I. But they stuck around! I gave them a few weeks to get settled in, then did an inspection. Capped brood (iow, the hive is making new members)! A second inspection and hey! there’s the queen! At this point I realized I needed to start feeding them if there was going to be any chance of them surviving the winter. I’m not big on feeding hives; sugar syrup provides calories, but precious little else. But, just as, given a choice between Soylent (vc) and starving to death, I’ll happily consume the sludge, so too will I choose syrup over losing a nice gentle hive with what I am guessing is a wild-bred queen. They’d been going through a quart of syrup every two days, so I expected to find the feeder empty. I did not expect this:

trashed frames

divot

I was stunned. I’m pretty conservative when it comes to wildlife ID – I’ve heard too many stories about peregrines killing songbirds at people’s bird feeders – so I figured it was a big ole raccoon or a skunk or maybe, just maybe a bear. I composed myself and started cleaning up. And then I noticed a small cluster of workers in the corner of the hive body, looking very much like they were protecting the queen. I grabbed another body, put in 10 untrashed frames and carefully brushed the bees that were left (many had already relocated to the new digs) in the old body into their new home. As of this writing, there are still bees in the hive; I haven’t done a post-attack inspection yet, but the fact that workers are staying put gives me a little hope that the queen survived.

New hive body/frames

When I took a close look at the smashed up hive body, my perp ID changed. Take a look at the distance between the pairs of tooth marks:

toof marks

toof marks

I have never seen a raccoon or skunk skull with that kind of gap between canines. I’m pretty confident it was a bear. There have been bears in the neighborhood before – I hadn’t heard of any sightings this year but that doesn’t mean much.

On the ride back down to salt marsh paradise, I listened to the latest episode of Ken Layne’s excellent Desert Oracle radio show (in podcast form): Lycanthropes of the West.

Bronsplåt pressbleck öland vendeltid.jpg
By Unknown – Oscar Montelius, Om lifvet i Sverige under hednatiden (Stockholm 1905) s.98, Public Domain, Link

One of the topics? Bears, were-bears, and shapeshifting. Properly synchronous! Mr. Layne set me thinking about circumpolar bear cults – the Ainu, the Finns, Siberian shamans – and that circled me around to Gary Snyder. No, not the Smokey the Bear Sutra (though it did come to mind), rather The Way West, Underground.

You aren’t getting out of here without an explicit Smokey reference, though. My favorite psychedelic blue jeans wearing were-bear at Hilton Park in Dover, NH:

Next: 2 wheels 4evah!

P.S. bears also call to mind one of the two dog breed recommendations I’m proudest of. A friend and fellow trainer wanted a working breed – a dog that would do well in obedience work and potentially Schutzhund – but she wasn’t esp interested in any of the shepherd-y breeds. I suggested she look into Bouviers – she named her Boov puppy Osa (bear).

 

A lovely week

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A week ago yesterday I headed to the salt marsh in Scituate Massachusetts for a writer’s retreat. I didn’t write, but I did walk and take photographs and cook. Friday, I zipped home to take care of some things and had a bit of additional fun that I’ll cover in a couple follow-on posts. Saturday night, it was back to the marsh for another day and a half. Given that messing with the camera was a focus for me, this will be an image-heavy post.

rainy marsh

Last morning on the marsh

dawn on the marsh

Mornings were mostly cool and drizzly,

sunset

sunset

while sunsets tended towards the spectacular.

The marsh was loaded with great blue herons, great egrets and snowy egrets. National Geographic level.I’m not, but the way to get better is to practice!

NatGeo 1

NatGeo 2

Great Blue Heron

I got one bike ride in with Lotte the Adventure Teckel and during the ride managed to snap a photo of a gorgeous teardrop trailer that I’d been ogling for days. The sailboat reminds me of a Stone Horse – it isn’t a variant, as far as I can tell, but the flush cockpit sure calls that design out. Figuring out the name of the craft, Ataraxia, led to a shallow dive into epicureanism. It’s good to be curious,

Epicurean teardrop camper

On Sunday, K and I went to the Maritime and Irish Mossing Museum; Scituate had (has?) a small industry devoted to harvesting and drying Chondrus crispus as a source of the thickener carrageenan. A small and charming museum that is only open on Sunday afternoons – worth a stop if the timing works for you.

Irish mossing

Next up: Yogi visits Madbury.

BEHEMOTH*

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*  Big Electronic Human Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy

I was wandering around the yard with the dogs this morning, messing around with my phone: taking some pix, catching a Pokémon or 2, texting my dóttir, when I had a sudden contrast-and-compare flashback. I’m taking a few devices with me on the big bike ride, primarily for convenience’s sake, but if I wanted to go minimal, I could manage with one gadget – that selfsame phone. It’s got 2 ways to connect to the internet, GPS, 2 cameras that will do stills and video, a bucket of storage, etc., etc. The flash I had in the yard took me back to a bike project from Olden Tymes: Steven K. Roberts’ Winnebiko, Winnebiko II and BEHEMOTH. All three were (successful) attempts to stay connected while pedaling around in the 1980s. My guess is that I first encountered Mr. Roberts’ project in the pages of Whole Earth Review, a publication that bridged what I’ve come to think of as the paper hippie internet, The Whole Earth Catalog, and the the real capital I Internet. The ’80’s were full of transitional critters – the WER in print and Compuserve. GEnie, AOL, and bulletin board systems in the on-line world (for those of us – the vast majority – who did not have access to the Internet). Steven’s technomadic hallucigenia bikes fit perfectly into the Cambrian-explosion 1980’s networking stew.

via here

Unsurprisingly, the connected bike idea was catnip to yours truly and I kept an eye on the projects as best I could. It really was a different world – doing a search and pulling up all the info I would need for a post like this, let alone the ability to blog as I’m doing now, were years down the pike.

So we come to BEHEMOTH. a second system effect instantiated in a 3rd system.  Five hundred and eighty pounds, three laptops, a heads-up display and handlebar mounted keypad. I suddenly feel a lot better about the size and weight of Molly Fin plus Lotte, fishing rods, cameras, kite, and other toys.

via here

It’s now on display at the Computer History Museum.

As far as I can tell, BEHEMOTH didn’t cover a ton of miles – just too big and heavy. Then the Internet and cell phone things happened and I can hold all that capability and more in the palm of my hand. For now, anyway *wry grin*.

Deli bal

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I was sure I’d posted on this topic before, but a search is yielding no joy, so here goes nuthin’.  I first ran across ‘mad honey;’, aka deli bal in Turkey, while reading about Apis dorsata laboriosa – the Himalayan giant honeybee. A few years ago Andrew Newey’s photographs of Gurung honey hunters were everywhere on the internet.

Below is a video from NatGeo of folks from a different group, the Kulung, harvesting honey. I especially like this for two reasons: it’s a 360 degree shot and it breaks the outdoor videographer’s 4th wall – there is a photographer in frame, roped up. I encourage you to watch it full screen and pan liberally.

Many of the posts on the photos noted that springtime honey is psychoactive. It’s because the bees are visiting rhododendrons, and rhododendrons produce grayanotoxins.

Physical symptoms from grayanotoxin poisoning appear after a dose-dependent latent period of several minutes to approximately three hours. The most common clinical symptoms include various cardiovascular effects, nausea and vomiting, and a change in consciousness. The cardiovascular effects may include hypotension (low blood pressure) and various cardiac rhythm disorders such as sinus bradycardia (slow regular heart rhythm), bradyarrhythmia (slow irregular heart rhythm) and partial or complete atrioventricular block.*

Note the mention of low blood pressure. One of mad honey’s uses, at least in Turkey, is to enhance sexual performance. Oh, yes. Turkey… Nepal is one place with rhododendron forests

Rhododendron Forest

and the Black Sea coast of Turkey, where Rhododendron ponticum grows, is another. There’s also a very interesting falconry tradition in that area, but that’s for another day.

Why a mad honey post now? I’m re-reading Gore Vidal’s Creation and his narrator, Cyrus Spitama (grandson of Zoroaster), tosses off an offhand comment referencing it.

Mr. Vidal is way more well-read than I, but this reference isn’t a deep dive; there are many classical accounts of mad honey poisoning. My favorite is Xenophon, because it is from the Anabasis, a rippin’ yarn in its own right and the story that The Warriors is based on.

After accomplishing the ascent the Greeks took up quarters in numerous villages, which contained provisions in abundance. Now for the most part there was nothing here which they really found strange; but the swarms of bees in the neighbourhood were numerous, and the soldiers who ate of the honey all went off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhoea, and not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men. So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed. On the next day, however, no one had died, and at approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey they began to come to their senses; and on the third or fourth day they got up, as if from a drugging. *

I’ll end with a picture of a walk I took with friends almost exactly a year ago from Van Cortland Park to Coney Island, hitting many of the shooting locations that the movie iteration of The Warriors used.

Thálatta! Thálatta!