The honey house

Dear Oblogopersons,

used Found Art from Madge

Art Ranger sifted herself too thin to make post last week, or was she just percolating?  Thank heaven one person even noticed. ( It's really easy to skip out on non-paying professions such as blogging or crochet or fishing).  Did you know that there is a computer app that purposely disables your internet access for hours at a time? It's called "Freedom" and many a home-based worker subscribes.  What the Ranger found instead, was honey harvesting.  For many many hours, her hands were incredibly sticky, as was every door knob and even her kneecaps.  The harvest marathon was as effective as being in a holy wilderness way past digital rome for preventing all computer and telephone usage.

bees managing honey

For what seemed like days, we extracted the viscous treasure by centrifugal force, cranking a machine by hand that spun the honey right out of its comb and slapped it against the sides of a bin while a few curious bees buzzed around.  Then came gravity and layers of filtration to separate honey from wax residue, relying on just the right warmth for the honey to flow.

The following collection of thoughts is Art Ranger's emerging essay/rant on bees inventing art:

mosaic of pollens in the light

uncapped honey ready for the extractor

Find the Queen?

Between the hive organization structure to the one mating flight that provides the queen with up to 3000 eggs a day for three years, to the hexagonal wonderment of "drawing out the comb", to the outrageous glory of the honey taste and texture, to the thousands of uses for the beeswax, to millenia of historical developments and small innovations that have been affected by either the honey or the wax. And of course, the essential work of pollination provided by bees which bless our food supply.  And how could we forget, the waggle dance. Through beekeeping, we are engaging with an extraordinary phenomenon in nature that gets all spiritual and miraculous. We must meet our maker.  It's tiny and fuzzy.  I'm sorry gods - are you listening?  Nothing holds a candle to the bees, not even the warm inside of a dog's ear.

HONEY
oh honey
right away, love comes up
the real true kind
kind of love
Not just anyone can call you honey and yet everyone needs at least a few people sometimes to call you honey or to be your honey
keep it raw
Honey can be put on wounds
or embalm some mummies
honey
is a color that we
may not deny
honey drips
honey flows
human ecstatic joy
of consecrated sweetness
Honey slowly
adores gravity
so we can see
liquid gold
what flowed through Egyptian god veins
and lovely milky skin
honey in a voice
a symbolic or symbiotic? set of insects, domesticated in your flavor
re-organized to your anti-microbial advantage
Honey nourishes hopefully with exceptional variety
Visitations to thousands of flowers
distilled to your spoon
or soaked into where your bread breathes

Okay okay we'll get to the intertwining of humans, bees and art (cradle of civ) stuff for another installment.
For example, a Paleolithic period cave painting from 33,000 B.C. already depicts a honey hunter.
Early images of bees in Egyptian art where honey serves as a kind of currency.
First examples of lost (bees)wax casting from about 3500 B.C., small three-dimensional animal forms unearthed in Israel, and Palestine - yes I said those two interlocking places in one sentence puzzle.

bird formed out of beeswax during a meeting because it was irresistible for the humans to warm and form

Lost wax casting coincides with the beginnings of the Bronze Age, which greatly amplified human tool-building capacity as well as kickstarting human artistic expression in the form of sculpture.

On and on she could go about the bees making a lot of something from bits of almost nothing.
Until you get STUNG !
Which means it's again time for humility.