Tinderbox

[aggienaut]

Yesterday. appx 3pm - I am working under a sparce stand of tall yellowgum eucalyptus trees. The weather is hot and muggy. I'm wearing the light bee veil, the one that looks just a vague bag of netting over my head. And that's only because of these really annoying flies that insist on trying to get in ones eyes, especially when you're holding a frame of bees with both your hands and can't swat at the flies.
   The sky is an opaque white and visibility is only about a quarter mile before things disappear into the white haze. At the very edge of visibility giant windmills slowly turn in the smokey haze. For the last two days this smoke from the major bushfires consuming the eastern seventh of the state. Despite the sky appearing to be "overcast" more light seems to come through than if it was normal rain clouds, surreally lighting the landscape with just the faintest bit of an eerie yellowish orange tint.
   The "Vic Emergency" app dingles again with its weirdly innocuous sounding chime and I look at my phone again, but it's just another "storm warning," it's been issuing them seemingly every ten minutes for various parts of the state but here things have been calm. I go back to inspecting the hive.

   Hive Y121 Yavin has queen cells. Evaluation of various factors indicates the hive is building them to swarm (as opposed to replacing their own queen), which is very odd since it's long past swarming season and the hive isn't even particularly crowded, but bees can be quite inexplicable. I gaze at the slowly twirling arms of the nearest windmill for a moment in thought. The top appears to be more visible thna the base due to the smoke hanging low over the ground. These appear to be well-formed queen cells, I could take them back to the one hive at my house and use it to incubate them for the week it will take for them to hatch and then distribute the queens to hives that could use a new queen. I look at the four hives left to inspect in this yard.. I should move the queen cells quickly and besides I already finished both my water bottles on this hot humid day and haven't taken a lunch break yet, so I will deal with these queen cells, get more water, and come back to finish.

   Just as I close the door on my truck there's a flash that lights up the opaque hazy sky from indeterminate direction, followed a few beats later by a loud crack of thunder. As I'm driving down the dirt road the rain begins to fall. I roll down the window to smell the delicious scent of fresh rain on the fields. I rain soaks my arm resting on the windowsill but I don't move it, it feels so nice and refreshing.

   Ten minutes later I'm in the general store in the center of my village of Birregurra. I buy tonic water and a package of bacon and a milkshake, and sit down on the front porch under the awning to enjoy the milkshake as the rain pours down around me. The vic emergency app is now advising me of flash floods in various places.

   A woman comes in and says she wants to return some honey. My honey I see. I jump up and approach her at the counter:
   "What's wrong with the honey?" I ask with concern.
   "Oh, um," she says, a bit startled, as I am by all appearances just another customer "I just don't want it"
   "Oh.. nothing's wrong with it?" I ask,
   "Someone gave it to me as a gift but I prefer the liquid honey in the squeeze bottle"
   "Oh." I say, trying not to look judgey
   "It's for the kids" she says self consciously "you know, they expect the liquid squeeze bottle" uhuh sure lady. But I retreat back to my table.



   On facebook messenger my friends are asking who is going to pub trivia tonight. I've just written "Yeah I've got a lot on but I plan to go--" when the fire brigade app blaats its notification noise. I quickly enter out of messenger and read the message.
   "ALERT WSEA11 G&SC1 GRASS & SCRUB FIRE 675 INGLEBY..." which is all I read before I grabbed my purchases (and half finished milkshake), jumped in the truck, and headed around the corner to the fire station. Moments later I was looking out the window at the smoke filled fields outside town. It was no longer raining and was once again just the eerie white haze. I've been in firetrucks looking at smokey landscapes plenty of times, but usually in distant firegrounds. For my own town to look this smokey and to be seen through the window of a fire truck was very disturbing.
   The location described, "Ingleby" is an area I have a number of beehives. The location of the fire was hard to locate because while normally you can see the smoke, the smoke was in this case obscured by the fact that there was already smoke everywhere. But finally after some radio chatter to clarify the precise location we joined a line of three firetrucks entering the appropriate field. We pass singed sheep going the other way. Trucks already on the scene had already put out the worst of it and we just spent two or three hours or so putting out all the smouldering bits on the edge. At a slow moment while we refilled the tanker from the nearby creek I mentioned to our fire captain that I had a package of bacon in my truck and he called his wife and she moved the bacon from my truck cab to the firehouse fridge. "Legend!"

   It wasn't until I got home and was able to recharge my phone, which had meanwhile died, that I realized I had sent a message saying I was going to trivia at the moment the fire alert came in. Oops. Also of course the remaining half my milkshake was tepid and melted upon return to the station. I then installed the queens but I'm not sure how their several hours of uncontrolled temperature did for them.

   That evening I spent several hours proofreading my friend Billie's gender discrimination legal complaint against the forestry fire department. Last year the remote station she was posted to kept sending all the males to all the fires while all the equally qualified women were relegated to cleaning the firehouse and trucks and other menial tasks. She filed a complaint with the department and they spent five months claiming they were investigating before obtusely declaring that they had found no discrimination, and then they abruptly cancelled rehiring her. As she poignantly puts it in her conclusion:

"I am now writing this last, at home and ringing earthmoving contractors in the hope of securing a casual position offsiding, while a state of emergency has been declared, the whole of East Gippsland has been evacuated, and the fires have reached a stage of catastrophic intensity. International and interstate firefighters have been flown in, and the defence force has been mobilised, while I am unemployed, but fighting fit, qualified and experienced, 15 minutes from 2 DELWP depots, and 50 kilometres from the fire front. My ‘go bag’ is still sitting in the corner of my bedroom, packed with my freshly laundered greens and uniform, along with my helmet, now utterly superfluous. I cannot see this progression of events as any other than intensely personal."

So now she's preparing to complain to a higher authority. I hope it gets somewhere.

   This kept me up until nearly 1am. Which is why I was sound asleep at 5:17am when the fire brigade app went off again about a brushfire in the forest by Barwon Downs 9 miles due south of here.



   The major brushfires making the news are far from here and it's still been relatively green around here, but the heart of the fire season here is usually February-March so we've been saying it's not bad here yet but it will get bad when this area gets dry. This morning waking up to a second local brushfire nearly back-to-back with the previous one I wondered nervously, has the moment arrived?

Comments

[adoptedwriter.livejournal.com]

Scary!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Indeed!

[stasia]

This is all very frightening - I hope things calm down and get wet soon.

In bee news - I'm in New Hampshire and planning to get started on keeping bees. What books and websites do you recommend? I'm taking a bee class, both as a way of getting the basic information and meeting the local bee people (beeple?), but I'd love your take on things, especially since you're an International Bee Keeper.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hmmm I don't know actually, it's been so long since I read the beekeeping basics books. Definitely the best is if you can find a local beekeeper who will mentor you. But so many people when they enter the mentor role seem to immediately get it in their head that they know everything about beekeeping, so keep in mind that your mentor probably does not, in fact, know everything about beekeeping ;) Lots of people seem to learn a lot from youtube videos these days but I could never get into that, I've always preferred to read books.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Jeez, your life is exciting. Please let us know what happened with your queens, if the long wait harmed them at all.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

All three died. I waited until the day after they should have emerged, and they hadn't. BUT there's good news because it was all part of an experiment with inserting them into a hive (to incubate them) that has a queen (which would normally motivate workers to destroy the queen cells), with the queen cells wrapped in little burlap burritos, and the bees indeed failed to destory them! I dissected the queen cells and they appeared to be at the stage of development I believe tehy were when they were in the truck cab (queens anatomically formed but all white, with just a little color in the eyes). I've got one more queencell that wasn't left in a truck cab undergoing the experiment so crossing my fingers!

[jaiden-s.livejournal.com]

Stay safe!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Where's the fun in that ;)

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

I hope your friend gets somewhere with her complaint.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

It's so typical and believable and frustrating and such hypocrisy that throughout the five months this is going on she's getting the department wide emails from the upper management about how they take gender equality seriously yadda yadda but I think it's very clear that when it came down to it they chose to sweep the obvious discrimination under the rug rather than actually deal with it. It's much easier to SAY you're all about equality than to actually take action. Her current letter is to the ministerial level in which the department falls under, and she's considering talking to a lawyer about a lawsuit. I think it's definitely lawyerable as well I'm thinking the right newspaper journalist might really blow up the story.

[gingergirlslove.livejournal.com]

Sounds like life is intense for you these days. Stay safe.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Tis the busy season! Is better htan winter when it's just too cold to do anything :-[]

[md-meezer.livejournal.com]

All those fires are so scary and heartbreaking that so much is being lost. please stay safe!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

It's mind blowing that like, the eastern 1/7th of the state is almost completely burned :-O

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[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User karmasoup referenced to your post from Submitted for Your Convenience (https://karmasoup.livejournal.com/47312.html) saying: [...] Tinderbox [...]

[anwyn-elfmaiden.livejournal.com]

Oh, that sucks indeed, that your friend cannot help fighting the fires because she is a female... :O Fingers are crossed that her complaints will reach stgh in the end.

Good luck with fighting the fires.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I really hope it gets some traction. I feel this is exactly the state of gender discrimination in this day and age. The management officially is all about gender equality and always sending out emails about it and having presentations full of fluff but when someone makes a case that there is literal gender discrimination in their workplace they just want to bury the case and not do anything about it. It's so much easier to make a lot of noise saying you're for sometihng than to actually do something about it.

[banana-galaxy.livejournal.com]

What are the chances people may end up having to evacuate from the area you're in in the future?

Also your friend sounds like she was totally discriminated against. I hope she gets somewhere too.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I hope we don't have to evacuate here, it really depends on how dry February and March are looking :-[]

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Those fires are terrifying -- and worse yet for so many of them being set on purpose!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Its not true. While a certain number of arsonists have been arrested in this time frame it's important to keep in mind that at any given time arsonists are being arrested. Only a miniscule amount of the fires currently burning were started by arsonists, but the arson claim is being pushed by conservatives eager to distract from climate change.

[static_abyss]

I hope everything works out and that you stay safe. And good luck to your friend with her complaint, because she clearly has a case and should have been listened to the first time.

[rayaso.livejournal.com]

I hope your bees manage to thrive and that people stop returning your honey because they don't like the packaging.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

The problem wasn't the packaging, it was that she wanted the over-processed more-than-likely-cut-with-sugar-syrup runny grocery store honey

[rayaso.livejournal.com]

You make it sound so tasty! And remember, you get a cute squeezable plastic bear. What's not to like?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

They don't actually do the bears here! It's just a boring shaped bottle!

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

It's always unnerving and unhealthy to be that close to so much smoke. Having it be too smoky to pinpoint the smoke from other fires is really bad!

I can certainly see your friend's point, as firefighters are clearly very badly needed right where she already is. :(

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah we were having air quality hazard advisories all week. I made a vague effort to look up the AQI but couldn't find it (in an admittedly quick search on my phone), but I'm pretty sure it was pretty bad!

[karmasoup.livejournal.com]

I also hope Billie gets some justice. And, I want to say, if I can do so without seeming weird or creepy, I know your life is pretty simple, from many perspectives, but it's also pretty incredible, and I do enjoy reading about everything from an adrenaline pumping adventure that must tax your nerves like this one, to a casual day with the bees. It really is a totally different world you live in. As March is just ramping up, I hope Birregurra and Ingleby stay safe.