I have no objection to slave labor of the animal variety. Our chickens wouldn’t exist unless we humans had long ago endeavored to domesticate them for their eggs and their meat, and I think we’ve struck a deal with them. Our end of the bargain is to give them a good life and a humane [...]

Bees are fascinating. Before we got them, we were fascinated in the abstract. Now we’re fascinated in the backyard.
When you first install a package of bees, the colony is very vulnerable. You begin with ten or twelve thousand bees with a queen in a cage. The queen has already been mated, and is ready to [...]

Four months ago, we made the decision to get two hives of honeybees, and ordered all our equipment and the two packages of bees. Three months ago, the equipment came, and we spent many hours building deeps and supers, painting the hives, and assembling the frames.
Yesterday, we picked up our bees.
Thanks in large part to [...]

Who’s your candidate for greatest American writer of all time? It’s a tough call, and I think there’s a case to be made for Herman Melville or Edith Wharton. Other people think there’s a case to be made for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Steinbeck. Still others say Kerouac, but that’s bananas.
For my money it’s Mark Twain. [...]

Two weeks ago, we went to our first night of Bee School. What we learned about bee habits and feeding had us wondering whether, with our wooded property, we were a good candidate for a bee hive. After a site visit from Andy (one of the instructors) and a canvas of our holly tree population [...]

Many years ago, when I lived in California, my friend Greg came to visit. I knew, at the time, that Greg played a mean game of ping pong, but I didn’t know he was interested in competitive table tennis. I didn’t know there was competitive table tennis. But we headed over to Berkeley for a [...]