I checked on Gamma Hive on Saturday. I opened the cover and….ekkk ANTS!

So many ants.

Ants everywhere.

I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to find a solution to how to keep them away from the Girls of Gamma. Then I thought. Why? Why kill them? Why stop them? Why are they there?

Honestly, I’ve got no idea. They may be beneficial. To the bees but to themselves. Maybe others also. I have no idea. I do know that I’ll be the one most likely to cause harm if I go crashing about smashing ants.

One thing I’m finding, Beta hive and Gamma hive have more vertical walls than Alpha hive. With these walls, the bees are attaching comb to the side much more often. I pulled open a bunch of brood cells that made me feel terrible. I think in the future, we’ll go with less steep sides.

Also, there is more cross combing in Beta and Gamma where I used pop cycle stick comb guides. I think I’ll use the up-side-down cove molding I used on Alpha hive.

I do like the end entrances of Beta and Gamma however.

Last night I did an inspection somewhat late but they were pretty calm. There is four bars of comb with three of those bars with the top inch filled with capped honey and the rest – about seven inches-  filled with a good amount of brood.

Here’s the problem: We’re playing a game of demographic beat-the-clock. When the bees swarm they leave their old hive. They have to 1. find a new place to live (which I gave them) and 2. survive. Survival includes building brand new comb, making sure the queen lays eggs in that comb, and caring for the eggs until they hatch.

The life span of a worker bee during summer is 6 weeks tops. It takes a worker egg 21 days from being laying to hatching. How long it takes to build comb is not quite known. So if the majority of bees in that original swarm was 3 weeks old and it took 1 week to build comb before eggs could be laid, the babies would still be in their little cells needing care for another week when their older sisters start to die. If the older sisters survive through the first round of hatching, the colony will survive. If not, the colony dies – the older workers from old age and the babes snug in their cells from inattention.

Right now is critical for them.

In Alison Wonderland there is no rabbit hole or looking glass to toss you into a new world. You only have to dip into the prose of author Helen Smith to enter a world recognizably ours but has been jumbled up. It’s as if God had bumped into the table that holds the world.

I was charmed by the book – the stories, the characters, the plot and the occasional acts of fellatio.

The reader may want to keep Mark Twain’s warning at the beginning of Huck Finn in mind when reading this book….”persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” There is a plot – thin as spider’s silk – but the joy in the novel is the characters and the writing.

I’ve never read a beating scene such as this:

Alvin, gym-muscular under the fat, is fit enough to remain conscious while the shit is kicked out of him. He curls up to protect his belly and his balls and puts his hands over his head. The silent man kicks his arse, his kidneys and his hands where they grip his head. Alvin feels nauseous and afraid. He didn’t ask, and perhaps they wouldn’t have told him, but he has no idea who they are. They could be anyone. They could kick him until he dies. When he thinks they won’t stop, they stop.

That’s just fun to read.

Then there are just nice little sentences scattered throughout the novel. Such as:

Smoking makes me feel guilty and the guilt makes me feel melancholy.

or

I never realized before that taking care of someone else makes you love them more than when they take care of you.

The book is slightly mad. It’s characters are mad. Mad like a quirky aunt. Or a hatter. Mad in the best sense.

Normally, I’d be ok with each but with a sore bad mistakes were more likly and once the temp goes past 90 the comb of the hives gets a bit pliable. One mistake and ruin comb.

I did look in on Alpha hive on Saturday. They seem de-populated by the swarms but seemed busy. Again, they are leaving alone the old, cut and crop comb and building new comb at the other end of the hive. I think I’ll just let them be until Memorial Day when I’ll look in and maybe harvest some honey.

The temps are suppose to drop later this week so I’ll give Beta and Gamma hive a check then. My only real goal with them is to make sure they’re building straight comb. Once done – and fixed if needed – I’ll not bother them until Memorial Day.

This place should be a new Cincinnati institution.

Street pops now has a store front. It’s the old Fork-Heart-Knife location and the charm of F-H-K seems to have carried over to S-P-.

This is simply a great popsicle. I went Friday and Sunday! On Friday I had a spicy orange honey pop. It was wonderful. I have no idea how they manage those flavors at that cost. I could taste orange. I could taste honey. I could taste spice. It wasn’t an ephemeral flavor either. It wasn’t sucked out quickly leaving flavorless ice. The joy went right to the stick.

They’re great also for their quirky flavors. Sure orange spicy honey is an unusualy flavor but on Sunday I tried Beet and Blood orange. Yeah, not my favorite but it’s hard to hold it against Street Pops. They did put Beet right in the title. But still. I felt like I was eating beets sweetened with blood oranges. Again, not my favorite but I did finish it.

That’s the thing. I like that they have the gumption to offer a street pop with the word beet not only in the flavor but in the title. Good for them. I imagine great things coming out of that little shop.

My family instituted a rule long ago when the kids were little: no one is allowed to order chicken fingers and french fries. No one is allowed to dumb down their taste buds.

This has turned the family into a critiquing group of foodies.

My oldest daughter is the usual enforcer of this rule. But since she was gone…we tried a place that we’d normally pass by. A secondary rule to the one noted above is ‘no corporate chain restaurants’. I felt a little sense of breaking a taboo walking into a place that’s a nationwide chain and serves up plenty of chicken fingers.

You know, this place wasn’t so bad. Honest food for an honey price.  You’re not going to be surprised (or disappointed) by this food. It is what it is. That’s why I gave it 4 stars. It succeeds in being what it sets out to be.

I split a rack of ribs with my 10 year old daughter. She liked them. A bit too sweet for her tastes and mine. Under the fructose was a lot of bland but the ribs were meaty. The cole slaw I passed on. It looked a bit brown in the lighting but tasted fine. Brown puts me off.

We hit this place on a Friday at 7:30 or so. No wait. No crowd. That put me off. What do folks know, I asked myself. But it was just fine. No obnoxious server, no obnoxious junk hanging on the wall. The bar was a bit obnoxious. It looked like Cold Spring-middle-aged-divorcee-hook-up-spot. That’s fine. Where else they gonna go?

Over all, this place was three star AOK but since they exceed at being what they aim to be they get four stars.

Here’s my review for Aladdin Cafe:

A Turkish restaurant in Cold Spring, Kentucky? What’ll they have next?

The wife and I dropped in on a Saturday at 2 and the place was almost empty but there was a stready stream of customer’s getting take away.

We ordered their gyros which were AOK and since we get a gyro craving and there’s no place close to get one we like this place very much. This is a Turkish restaurant (I believe) so when I asked if they had a gyro with Tzatzki sauce I felt as if I might have picked at the scab of the centuries old wound in Turkish-Greek relations. I went with what they had.

They were good. Rice was good. It was cheap. We’ll be back.

*****

It’s been years since I read Austen’s Emma and I’ve never been able to read Don Quixote but I’ve always been attracted to the theme of the novel. So when A Body at Rest was proposed for a book club I delved right in.

And was somewhat put off by the protagonist. Wikipedia quotes Austen on writing Emma, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” I liked Emma, so unlike Austen, Susan Petrone accomplished Mrs. Austen’s goal with me..

Her character Martha acts so selfishly throughout the book from start to finish that I began to wonder if she was a sociopath. A truly horrible character with no redeeming values that I could find. But then I realized, no, she’s not a sociopath but is, I thought, possibly be a true representation of an overly educated but still skilless generation of people who are smug with self-satisfaction even though their curriculum vitae gives them no reason to be. Maybe they’re all sociopaths.

There are several episode of pure selfishness. One example early on brought this into focus. We have an aside about the importance of fully funding free clinics and national health care. Whether you agree or no all I could think was to tell the character, “So you’re white and educated yet you choose to not to get a job with health insurance but work as a cocktail waitress engaging in the risky behaviors of promiscuity and smoking and you want ME to pay for your health care? Go to hell.”

Heck, I think immature Emma was a teenager but Martha is pushing thirty. Ugh.

Anyway, the A Body of Rest’s Martha has no George Knightley to correct or critique her behavior. Everyone just seems to uncharacteristically roll along with the selfish behavior. They act as if her selfish behavior is just AOK. This made them all unbelievable. I could detail a dozen or so acts but don’t want to give away much more of the plot. Martha seems at the end just as selfish as at the beginning. So why make this trip?

Complete off-putting narrator aside (even Hannibal Lecter had some charm, for god’s sake!), I expected more to be said in a novel with two very different characters as inspiration. I also expected a sally or two but there was no real action. Quixote was pushed to the side for a large section of the story so we could bath in the narcissism and condescension of Martha. There were some good bits in there but what I thought was a wonderful premise to say so much about the human experience or today’s world versus 1800’s England or 1600’s Spain was squandered.

The prose was uneven and and times trite. The formatting (which I don’t hold against the author) of the ebook needs plenty of work.

Lesson learned. Always suit up…even when doing a quick inspection. I thought I’d peak in on Beta hive yesterday to see if their queen 1. existed and 2. was laying brood. She exists and she is. Lots of nice activity. Very small hive but I’m thinking they’ll make it now. Like I said, it was a quick look but one bee came out of no-where and got me on the neck.

Then I went up to Alpha hive. I don’t understand. There were lots of swarm cells and queen cells. Most were empty. A few bars of comb that did have honey was now empty. I did see something that made me nervous. In the section where I did a chop and crop were lots of bugs and few bees. The bees seem to be ignoring the old comb and packing honey into the new comb. Fine by me. All the bugs made me think Mites so I doused them with powdered sugar to help control that. I also pulled one of the chopped combs off to see what’s what with that. Nothing much. I had a bit of honey and will render the wax soon. UPDATE: For whatever reason I forgot to note that with all the swarm cells I saw that opened up the brood chamber per something I read somewhere on biobees.com. I put in 4 bars to spread it out a bit.

I then went over to Gamma hive and doused them with sugar. They are very contented bees and gave me no trouble. They were also very active. I think they’ll be AOK also. Oh, and Harper was helping me and took her first sting. She took it well.

Overall a very good few days of beekeeping.