aggienaut | Entries tagged with for the abj

Notes From the Bee Club Meeting That Might Bore You With Jargon

   Last night, Friday night, I attended the Geelong Beekeeping Club meeting for the first time since November. They meet 8:00 to 10:00pm on Friday nights which I find quite rather inconvenient, especially since it's an hour drive for me. But having not been in some months I felt I should make an appearance.
   As always, regardless of who was speaking the meeting was dominated by two guys who, even when they didn't have the floor were strongly of the belief that everyone needed to hear their opinion. The feature presentation of the evening was by the former president, a nice fellow, about "pack down." I was a bit curious to find out what htey meant by this because they really seem to go on about it this time of year (the end of summer).
   Apparently it hinges on the assumption that they've been heretofor for some reason giving their bees too much space and it involved merely taking off the top box and rearranging the frames inside in some hotly contested manner (one of the two opinionated guys voiced his opposing opinion on every point from the back). The general opinion in the club seems to be to automatically do pack down on some (hotly contested) specific date.
   I call this doing of things sight unseen by dates "paint by numbers beekeeping"
   Me I'm still _adding_ boxes as many of my hives are _still_ expanding on the sugargum bloom, which is great. When they stop expanding I'll stop adding boxes and when I see its become cold nd the bees have consolidated out of the existing 3rd and 4th boxes I'll remove them, but hey what do I know?
   Talking to a friend after the meeting I found myself frequently laughing and mentioning new things I've tried this year which may or may not be a mistake. I changed a fair few things this year -- relevant to "pack-down" I started putting queen excluders over the bottom brood box instead of the bottom two -- I suppose I will remove the QXs once honey production ends.
   After the rest of club business was over the loud guy from the back asked to speak for two minutes and proceeded to harangue the entire club about how he's been misquoted and there's rumors going aorund that he was completely against feeding the bees sugar syrup to get them through winter, that he is NOT against that but he IS against that BUT only in the following complex specific circumstnaces and... ::collective eyes glaze over::
   One of the reasons he listed against this was that then the sugar syrup ends up being harvested as fake honey, but the universal advice is of course that you never feed sugar syrup when you're going to pull honey. It's just to get them through the food deficit in winter. I mention this though because another experimental idea I had already thought of is mixing blue food coloring in with my sugar syrup so it makes "blue honey" which I'll know not to harvest if it somehow stays around till harvest time (since I'm now harvesting from the 2nd box (in re QX over 1st box as mentioned above) there is now a remote possibility of this that there wasn't before.

I can't believe Ii don't seem to have posted this picture before?

Continuing Nicaragua Article
   Continuing the article from last entry. This is kind of the heart of the matter, trying to disguise a travelogue as a technical account. ;) (but seriously)
   As before, I'll use strikethroughs not to denote deletions but what you've already seen. Also have included the final two paragraphs because they're just two short paragraphs. I might post another entry dedicated to the conclusion because I really want to strengthen it.

   Ironically, despite spending some 30 years of my life in Southern California, I had made my first visit to Central America by traveling the wrong way around the world, traveling two thirds of the way around the globe from Kyrgyzstan to Nicaragua via Australia. This occurred because the Nicaragua project had been planned and tickets purchased before the Kyrgystan project (see June American Bee Journal), and changing the flights turned out to be exorbitantly expensive, so I had to return to Australia (where I've been living), not even long enough to return to my house before catching the flight on towards Nicaragua.

   Partners for the Americas is a US based non-profit NGO founded in 1964 dedicated to development and aid in the Americas. Among other things, they administer USAID funded Farmer-to-Farmer programs. After a day off to “adjust” during which I joined Vincent and Dr Van Veen, I was off to the north of the country!
   It was a four hour drive from Managua. Halfway we stopped for lunch in the town of Esteli, where a wall covered with a mural depicting the civil war (1978-1990) was also pockmarked with bullet-holes from that same war. An air raid siren began its banshee wail and I quickly scanned the horizon thinking one of the numerous smoldering volcanoes had finally erupted, but no one around me seemed phased.
   “They just do that to mark noon” my driver said after it ended and conversation could resume. Then the bells of the nearby cathedral began to toll. “they do that too” he added.
   “I much prefer the cathedral bells” I commented. [***like this bit, too obviously in the realm of travelogue? May possibly delete the cathedral bells. I general I think the bullet holes and air raid siren are relevant ot the sense of potential euroption of violence pervasive to the place***]
   To get to where the project would be based we continued up into forested mountains in which pink-tiled adobes peeked out from among the trees, until we came to a town named Somoto. It had quiet cobbled streets with more pedestrians than cars, in which shopkeepers and residents often could be found sitting on their streetside steps in the evening.
The local host organization was Fabretto – named after Padre Fabretto, a much beloved priest who had worked tirelessly and selflessly to improve conditions for the children and youth of Nicaragua. When he died suddenly in 1990, the Fabretto organization continued to operate the many schools and projects he had run.
   Marcus, my Fabretto liaison, gave me a tour of their Somoto headquarters, which was also a primary school, and then we headed out to visit some beehives! A few kilometers out of town, by a mud adobe house, we pulled on yellow bee suits as chickens pecked around us. And then … we pulled on second bee suits over the first. Yes. Africanized bees.
   From my personal experience, purebred African bees in Africa are not as bad as the hybridized Africanized bees I became extremely familiar with in California. The bees in Africa are certainly more aggressive than good gentle European stock, and I always approach them fully suited, but I can usually take off my gloves if not the veil, while around me beekeepers are usually wearing all kinds of haphazard homemade suits. Approaching an Africanized hive in California I always wear a full suit with duct tape over the zippers and ankles and wrists, and often that is not sufficient as the angry whirlwind of bees pelts my veil like someone is throwing gravel at me, and by sheer force of will bees end up in my suit anyway. No one has ever proposed wearing two layers of suit in Africa, but here we are, in Nicaragua.
   In California we still fight it. We religiously requeen any swarm we catch in Southern California, we make sure we have the marked queen we know isn't Africanized, and if we find they've requeened themselves we re-requeen with a marked European queen. Not here in Nicaragua; they've accepted that Africanized bees are what they have, and so, double suits. On the plus side Africanized bees are much more resilient against pests and they don't seem to have to worry about varroa.
This first set of bees we looked at, I could tell the hives were very badly looked after. The dark burr-comb connecting frames was so thick and solid it was clear these hives hadn't been inspected in months. One was laying on its side nearly submerged in tall grass; another leaned precariously on a failing stand. Several didn't have enough frames in them, the extra space filled with robust buttresses of burr comb.
   “Let's fix this toppled hive,” I say
   “They say they will do it later,” says Marcus.
   “You see a problem like this, you should fix it immediately,” I say.

   “They call him 'el Gato'” Marcus tells me the next day as we're headed to another bee site.
   “The cat?” I ask.
   “Yes, the cat” he says, chuckling.
   “Why?” I ask.
   “His eyes.”
   We meet el Gato by his family home, another adobe farm-house in the quiet shade of large trees. Unusual for the area, his eyes are green, and they gleam intently. Cat-like. He is very young, maybe 18. We look at the fifteen hives he runs. They're perfectly maintained, standing straight and clean, everything in order inside and out. His enthusiasm is apparent in his gleaming eyes as he answers my questions through Marcus' translation, and talks about his bees. We grin at each-other, the mutual love of a craft transcends language.
   In these training projects I sometimes talk about “aptitude” for keeping bees. You can train someone without the aptitude until the drones come home, but someone who isn't enthusiastic, can't overcome their apprehension of working with bees, will never become a beekeeper. Someone like el Gato is a real resource. He'll do great, he'll inspire, encourage, and ultimately train others around him. Later Fabretto transferred the hives from the first family to el Gato's care. I never did learn his real name, no one called him anything other than el Gato. At least he still has a name other than “the bee guy,” as so many of the rest of us are known in our local communities.
   El Gato also showed us two stingless bee hives, they were small and oblong, like a large shoebox. He had gotten them pre-made from another organization. The bees (a melipona species) were only filling a third of the box and seemed uninterested in the rest. I was able to transfer some knowledge I myself had only picked up the other day – in Dr Van Veen's stingless bee presentation the hives had all been longer vertically than horizontally; I suggested that maybe these hives were made for a different species and the local stingless bees would prefer a more vertical arrangement.
   We were able to try some of the stingless bee honey (they produce only a few cups of honey each per year), which was very tart. I've always found it very interesting how different stingless bee honey can taste from honeybee honey from presumably the same plants.

   On the weekend we drove an hour deeper into the mountains to the tiny mountain town of San Jose de Cusmapa, draped over some ridges high in the mountains. In this very quiet town there seemed to be fewer than half a dozen vehicles, and the clip-clop of horse or donkey down the cobbled streets was very common. While Fabretto's headquarters is in the national capital, this small town, founded by Padre Fabretto himself, I gather is kind of its heart and soul. I stayed in a guest house with several European volunteers working for Fabretto as teachers at the local school. One day while exploring the outskirts on horseback with a french volunteer, our local guide said
   “It's two more hours this way to Honduras”
   “By car?” I asked naively,
   The French girl laughed “no one drives here. By horse.” [again not beekeeping related but I feel like I have the momentum for it to carry through here]

   We did drive on one of the days, up and down some absolutely hair-raising narrow dirt roads on the mountain slopes to a very remote community called La Naranja. There, at the end of the road, we found three adobes with the cracked plaster of a zorro film, under a lush tropical canopy and surrounded by banana trees (but no oranges that I recall, despite the name). Several young men came to receive bags of flour and supplies that Marcus was unloading from the back of the landcruiser for them. Then he looked at me with surprise,
   “This boy says he knows you”
   It turns out he had been at the Sweet Progress training I had gone to. Small world.
   As Vincent later explains to me, Sweet Progress actually partners with Fabretto, inviting Fabretto beekeepers to come down to training seminars and including Fabretto honey in their packaging since they are able to leverage a better price for the beekeepers.

   The hives in La Naranja were pretty good, though with a bit more small hive beetles than I'd quite like to see. I prescribed rotating out the dark comb a bit more. Small hive beetles really love dark comb.
   Back in San Jose de Cusmapa, we later visited the Fabretto hive-making carpenters in their workshop. Sometimes there is a big disconnect between people making hives and the beekeepers, but it was nice to see they had already tweaked the design and were very willing to discuss potential improvements. Returning to Somoto we visited some other beekeepers, and another nearby organization that made and sold beehives. Both the technicians this organization sent to the field with us were women, and we worked for the longest sustained time of this trip going through hives. I had been concerned in the tropical heat it might be impractical to spend hours working bees wearing two layers of suits, but it proved doable.
   I made a presentation at the Fabretto headquarters. It was supposed to be for the students but apparently there was a miscommunication and no students were informed. Instead all of Fabretto's teachers came. My computer, which had worked an hour earlier, of course chose the moment we started to fail. Par for the course in aid work. Presentation goes on without powerpoint. The fallback plan for a fallback audience. This is aid work.

   As I watch the volcano smoke plumes recede below from my airplane window, I think about the turbulent recent history of the country. The violent civil war from 1978-1990, illustrated with bullet hole riddled walls and murals, and personal stories everyone has. The unrest in 2015 and 2016 which affected me by the cancellation of my project. Despite this violent background, the persistent kindness of people like Padre Fabretto and Vincent Cosgrove, the charitable organizations they build around them, and the volunteers that flock to help are truly an inspiration.
   In mid 2018 violence again erupted. 300 protestors were killed in the course of three months, paramilitaries besieged a church in which protestors took refuge, more black columns of smoke in the sky. But Sweet Progress, Fabretto, Partners for the Americas, and many others keep on working to help the people.

*"drones" was originally "proverbial cows," this isn't too contrived a hijacking of the usual phrase is it?

   So there you go. I guess really I am more interested in thoughts on the pacing, thematic arrangement, various big picture things like that, then commas and grammar which I'll sweep up as I go through it. Anything ring off to you? Anywhere you think I could insert a better description? I really want to strengthen the end a lot more so I still might post another entry dedicated solely to it. The end is important.

Update from Venezuela
Power apparently has been restored to much of Venezuela. and today after not hearing from her for three days, as I sat in a grassy forested glade overlooking a lake to jot down notes in my beekeeping log I received facebook messages from Cristina. Apparently she missed me (: Connection is still only sporadic, we tried to talk on the phone but after about a minute it devolved into weird noises and disconnected.

Here's random picture I don't think I ever posted from later in the Nicaragua trip.

Back in Nicaragua
Continuing my plan to post my next article in segments. This next bit I'm particularly concerned about because writing about Vincent's organization almost entirely from second-hand information its hard to keep the feel of an in-the-moment travelogue-esque narrative. And all this is kind of frontloaded in the whole narrative but I can't think of a better way to structure it.
In the below quote I'll use strikethrough to denote not deleted segments but parts you've already seen yesterday.

   In the back of the truck with me is Vincent Cosgrove, a cheerful and energetic American who runs an organization called Sweet Progress in Nicaragua. Vincent had first come to Nicaragua in 2013 as an entrepreneur in the healthcare industry. He found himself in Tipitapa, a satellite town of Managua, and there was a problem. 62% unemployment, 82% among the women, meant that no one had money for even much needed healthcare services. ~~Where others might have moved on to somewhere with more money, he instead started thinking about how he could improve the lot of locals.~~
   One day while Vincent was on his way to visit a USAID water project in Tipitapa, at an intersection a little girl approached his beat-up ford ranger to sell him a bottle of melipona (stingless native bee) honey. He suddenly remembered working with the beekeepers of the Middlesex Beekeeping Group in Boston twenty years earlier. He had been a chef, they'd regularly come into his restaurant and ultimately taught him beekeeping. Beekeeping was the answer! He bought the bottle of honey.
   He started helping locals form co-ops, especially of women's groups. They needed equipment and training, he set about tackling both these issues. For equipment he realized just giving people things would be unsustainable and not create a sense of ownership, so Sweet Progress organizes micro-loans for equipment that are paid back in the form of honey over four years, with no interest. In this manner the groups are able to get necessary resources without becoming trapped on a repayment treadmill. Vincent came originally as an entrepreneur, but he doesn't make a profit out of this, I believe he has found the greater satisfaction of helping others.
   As to training, Vincent has worked tirelessly to bring in volunteers for training and organizations as partners – among them non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and universities in the region and in the US. Volunteer teams have taught seminars (342 of them apparently) on not only directly beekeeping-related activities but also business management and leadership and some activities not related to beekeeping at all. In 2018 for example Sweet Progress delivered 27 classes per month to a total of 344 women, 83 teenage girls, and 143 teenage boys.
   As of this writing (March 2019) Sweet Progress, working with the American Nicaragua Foundation and Professor Van Veen, has started construction on an FDA registered honey processing plant expected to triple the annual earnings of the co-ops. He anticipates within five years the co-ops will be producing 3,800 tons of organic honey per year, infusing $9,500,000 into local communities. They are also finalizing the export of 54 tons of raw honey, which he notes with his Boston accent, “marks the first time a charity organization has connected a honey project to the global market in the Western Hemisphere.” I am impressed, export is always a goal I strive for. Merely selling honey to neighbors doesn't actually bring wealth into the community, but exporting does.
   I first came into contact with Vincent in 2014, when I was answering the phone for the Orange County (California) Beekeeping Association, and he called asking if we would be interested in organizing a team of volunteers to come down. I was quickly able to assemble a “dream team” of five experienced beekeepers enthusiastic to go. Sadly, international events intervened and the planned trip dissolved amid clouds of tear gas and the clatter of stones against riot shields – the Nicaraguan government nationalized a vast swath of land as part of an ill-conceived China-funded scheme to build their own “Panama Canal” across the country, the result: thousands of farmers kicked off their land, marching the streets, clashing with government forces. This was 2015 and 2016. Cows now graze in the recovering scar where the canal was barely begun. In 2017 I finally found myself in Nicaragua … for reasons entirely unrelated to Sweet Progress.
   I was able to spend my first day in the country with Vincent and Dr Van Veen though. On this occasion Dr Van Veen was giving a presentation at the National Agricultural College near Tipitapa. As other students herded cattle past outside, some thirty students sat in a classroom while Dr Van Veen made a powerpoint presentation about beekeeping, in Spanish. It was almost unbearably hot, the numerous ceiling mounted fans only granting a little relief if one was directly below one. The beekeeping presentation seemed very interesting with a lot of specific information about different types of flora in the area, and I wished I could understand it but it was of course in Spanish, which I didn't speak. After the general beekeeping presentation, by popular demand he made a presentation about native stingless bees, which I was even more regretful I couldn't understand because I find stingless bees fascinating. Stingless bees are kept in artificial hives in Nicaragua, as I would see later, and their honey harvested.
   After the presentations, we had to hurry to make the airport, and got mired in traffic. Eventually, desperate, we followed other cars into a side street and navigated the labyrinthine city sprawl, sometimes having to go around pigs sleeping in the street, or reverse around corners with barely centimeters to spare on either side after coming to an impassable chokepoint in the narrow streets. Miraculously we made it to the airport in time for Dr Van Veen to catch his flight.

   I have it in my head that it can be improved by both (1) describing it as actions Vincent is portrayed taking, which I've done a bit with substantial improvements over the first draft I think, and possibly (2) putting parts of it in his own words as if he's telling me this in the back of the truck. This would also serve to distance me from claims such as regarding the "first time in the Western Hemisphere" which I assume is true but can't verify and that freaks me out, or his anticipated future production. but the problem is that especially the part about the processing facility pertains to now-present events he couldn't have possibly told me about in 2017... I'll no doubt keep dwelling on this.
   Its an interesting exercise because it resembles the kind of writing I suppose journalists are always doing, but I've actually managed to heretofore entirely avoid.

   There follows the one paragraph transition paragraph between the above and getting into the actual project and I was there for:

Ironically, despite spending some 30 years of my life in Southern California, I had made my first visit to Central America by traveling the wrong way around the world, traveling two thirds of the way around the globe from Kyrgyzstan to Nicaragua via Australia. This occurred because the Nicaragua project had been planned and tickets purchased before the Kyrgystan project (see June American Bee Journal), and changing the flights turned out to be exorbitantly expensive, so I had to return to Australia (where I've been living), not even long enough to return to my house before catching the flight on towards Nicaragua.

I feel like I can already hear people saying this is unnecessary and convoluted but I want to link into the similar reference to the convoluted journey in my earlier article, and as a series of travelogues which will hopefully include many more installments, I have a travelogue theory that it's important to develop oneself as a character and this going through convoluted journeys and now being peculiarly far yet close to/from home I feel is part of the character of the protagonist of these narratives.

What I'm Reading After What I Was Reading
   So a bit ago I posted about what I was reading, notably a remarkably bad book called One Second After which I wasn't even done with when I wrote that. It continued to be just as eyerollingly bad through the end (additional notes: surprise surprise the bad guys turn out to be satanists, and while I wasn't surprisedto find out he teaches at the same college his protagonist does, I had assumed he had had a similar military career as his protagonist, until he described a battle and with my high qualifications as an arm-chair general of RTS games (please read that very sarcastically) (::sucks on the nub of a cigarette and looks grizzly:: kids today think they were hot shit if they fought in Arrakis in Dune 2000. Man I was there for Dune II ::thousand yard stare::) I immediately became suspicious of his military credentials. Looked him up and no he doesn't have any military career as far as wikipedia mentions. So his promoting his socket puppet self to the rank of colonel was just a colossal self aggrandizing wank). After finishing it I kind of wanted to see a professional reviewer rip it to shreds but a brief search of reviews only brought up some good reviews and I gave that up, disgustedly (admittedly I didn't search too hard, after the first two or three the disgust set in and I aborted).

   Then I read Alas, Babylon! on wpadmirer's recommendation, and got literary whiplash from the difference in quality. Especially coming right off One Second After I just couldn't believe how well written it was. Published in 1959 it follows a small community of characters in Florida through nuclear apocalypse. It's surprisingly upbeat considering the topic.

   And then, also from comments to my earlier entry, I started reading Paolo Bachigalupi - first a collection of short stories ("Pump Six and Other Short Stories" I believe it was called), and now I've started the book length "The Wind-Up Girl" and I am definitely a fan! Some of his stories remind me of William Gibson's Neuromancer series, but it's definitely not derivative. His short stories seem to take place in one of several different post-apocalyptic options that are intelligently and creatively thought out extrapolations of current trends. I definitely recommend.

I think this is also taken at that time in Managua

What I'm Writing After What I Was Writing
   I don't know what's come over me. I've always been such a procrastinator. Maybe I'm procrastinating procrastinating. That Kyrgyzstan article? The Editor had said maybe he could use it for August and here I wrote it in February. He decidedly didn't invite me to write a second article even after I strongly hinted I could write more such "gems" (he didn't discourage me from doing so, he just didn't address the point). I figure I probably shouldn't submit a second article to him for at least a month.. and here I've already written it! So now I guess I have a month to dwell on it and keep tweaking things.
   I don't feel as good about this one as I did about the Kyrgyzstan one, and since he really seemed to like that one I want to show that that wasn't just some fluke but a quality I can consistently deliver. This Nicaragua one, Nicaragua jumbled around in my head for awhile as I tried to figure out what the thematic arrangement of it all was until I felt like I literally had a eureka moment: the trip would be bookended with volcanoes/violence. I would start with being stuck in traffic in Managua with a volcano ominously billowing behind us, talk about my friend Vincent's organization (necessary because I feel I don't have really enough to say otherwise), then do the usual mix of travelogue / beekeeping observations, then talk about how there's unrest there again and conclude by lauding people like Vincent who stick through it all there trying to help people.
   So that is/was the plan and what I have written. Since we have ample time and people are better at digesting smaller bits anyway, I propose posting here for constructive criticism the article piece by piece.

   Introductory paragraph:

August 25th, 2017 - In the back of the pick-up, I keep nervously glancing between the billowing plume of smoke rising from the volcano behind us, and the traffic in front of us. The line of cars and trucks grinds to a halt. The only vehicles coming the opposite direction on this two lane highway, it becomes evident, are ones from our lane that gave up and turned around. On either side, the road is hemmed in by the leafy verdant outer sprawl of the Nicaraguan capital; bougainvilleas blending with colorful laundry waving on lines, cinderblock houses almost hidden by the irrepressible branches that tumble around and over them. People get out of their cars and chat with one another. Not speaking Spanish, I don't know what everyone is saying, but I gather no one is actually concerned about the volcano, the volcano is normal, the traffic is not. We're a bit panicked because Dr Van Veen, head of the Entomology and Apiology Department of the National University of Costa Rica, has a plane to catch and time is ticking away.
In the back of the truck with me is Vincent Cosgrove, a cheerful and energetic American who runs an organization in Nicaragua called Sweet Progress. Vincent had first come to Nicaragua in 2013 as an entrepreneur in the healthcare industry. Finding himself amid the impoverished community of Tipitapa, a satellite town of Managua, he realized the locals were far too poor for him to make a profit in healthcare. Where others might have moved on to somewhere with more money, he instead started thinking about how he could improve the lot of locals.
...

There follows about a page which I assembled from his promotional materials and asking him questions about his organization, but I'll post that hopefully tomorrow! But because it's directly related, here is the end of the section about Sweet Progress / being stuck in traffic:

After the presentations, we had to hurry to make the airport, and got mired in traffic. Eventually, desperate, we followed other cars into a side street and navigated the labyrinthine city sprawl, sometimes having to go around pigs sleeping in the street, or reverse around corners with barely centimeters to spare on either side after coming to an impassable chokepoint in the narrow streets. Miraculously we made it to the airport in time for Dr Van Veen to catch his flight.

   Discussion topics: Is it a good start or too much of an immediate deflation / shameless attempt at a hook that I let the reader think we're fleeing a volcano for several sentences and then say we're not? Between the initial description and the details in my second blockquote, does it give an adequate sense of a city that looks like this? Keeping in mind they don't get the second part until a page after the first part so does the first part stand alone well enough? Any other thoughts??

If you for some reason want to see the whole thing it's here, I'm definitely changing it a bit every day and hopefully I'll render those changes to the google doc too.

Meanwhile in Venezuela
   Venezuela has been without power for going on five days now. I really don't know if they'll be able to get it back again. I'm glad Cristina is on her comparatively safe little island. They still had power there last time I talked to her but I assume their telecom network runs through the mainland and it's been out so I haven't been able to communicate with her in two days ):

   Its ironic in a not-very-funny way that the bad book I recently read is about a total failure of electrical networks and thats exactly what is happening to my girlfriend's country. And also in the "rah rah rah America!" book by this point the oh so meritorious protagonist was already conducting summary executions, as in, big bad Venezuela is turning out to be more civilized?