Bees

I learned all about Bees And The Art Of Beekeeping yesterday. A friend at work keeps them, and gave me a short summary which was very good of him and is the way I absorb information best, in about 10 minute spurts. I am a child of the MTV generation after all. Bees have a weird and wonderful community, they're very neat and tidy and they make honey obviously which is lush. Apparently the bee population is declining because of bees being infected by mites that have been imported from other countries. I thought it was something to do with wireless, which is what I've been telling everyone for the last two years (based on a story in the paper about a guy who had a bee problem in his loft until he installed wireless and they all left). Sorry everyone.

Anyway, if you want to know how a bee hive works, read on...
It's a very organised community, all the bees have a job. They live for 6 weeks, but for the first two they can't fly, so they're nursery bees and they feed the larvae. When they can fly they make honeycombs from wax and honey from nectar, for all the other bees to eat. The Queen Bee makes and fertilises eggs. All the bees are female and work very hard, except the drones who are male and sit around all day eating honey. Every now and then they shag a Queen bee from another hive, after which they die.

So that's bees. It's one of those kind of things I've learned on a day to day basis being here, and it's easy to take for granted because it's all around you. I feel like I should have added details of more typically Mach things in this blog, , like clothes swaps and swapshop and freeganism and herb teas and people doing spells and 5 rhythms dancing and people making up their own songs and making jam and critical commute. I'll try to put a few more in. One thing is, I'm reading a great book at the moment called The Transistion Handbook. It's a bit heavy (which is why I don't pick it up much, har har) but worthy reading. Transistion towns paint a nice positive picture for the future. More about this later once I've read the book, if I remember :)

I've decided what I'm doing next year - I'm going to Loughborough to do the CREST course. Am really chuffed to be going back to the Midlands.