How this Blog got its Name

If you visit the New Dictionary for Cultural Literacy Third Edition (2002) you get a definition for the phrase "sweetness and light" which hits the high points of Matthew Arnold's philosophy and even glancingly mentions Jonathan Swift, but the whole thing would have earned a B minus -- at best -- in Sr Samuel Conlan's 19th Century literature class because it fails to anchor the image with the grounding metaphor that Swift employed. (In The Battle of the Books) Arnold's take that sweetness is 'moral righteousness' and light is 'intellectual power' comes across as...well...pompous and dull, to be honest (and that's so unusual for the average 19th century writer). And the phrase itself seems a bit cloying until you find out that what Swift was talking about in his own metaphoric flight was honey and wax, the two primary gifts to humanity from a beehive.

But of course, for us with less need for beeswax candles these days, the bees we've purchased are being welcomed into our garden for their promised ability to increase crop yield by up to 30 percent. And the more I study about the current state of the Honey Bee, the more I realize how significant these little creatures are. The list of plants pollinated by bees is formidable. And to give it some perspective, I like this quote from a US Gov't site: "Bee pollination is responsible for $15 billion in added crop value, particularly for specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables. About one mouthful in three in the diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination."

And now there's this situation that people are starting to pay attention to: the decline of the bee population. The Colony Collapse Disorder as it is called. People watching the bees started making serious noise about it in 2006. In 2007, there were the television documentaries (we watched a few) on PBS. And there's quite a few websites on the story now. It's evidently serious and yet there's still no clue as to the cause.

But what struck me was the way this is happening. People aren't walking out to their hives and finding dying or dead bees...they're simply finding no bees at all! It's an abrupt disappearance of the entire hive. In England, they're calling it the Mary Celeste phenomenon. The situation is very eerie: the hive appears to be healthy and thriving and then...it's gone.

You alone will appreciate that I was thinking about all this and suddenly landed on my own metaphor for the phenomenon (I might even have to use it in our newsletter article or any other writing I may find myself doing on the subject.) But it's this: these mysterious things which have co-existed with us for millennia and have been tremendously beneficial for our lives in so many ways are now abandoning us.

They're going sideways to the sun, aren't they?

At any rate, it gives a little extra sense of purpose to the project. There's all sorts of encouragement from everyone on this: fellow-gardeners offering to help with the expense, the local Farmers market honey merchants giving advice, the Cal State Agricultural site offering resources, the store we're working with in Sebastopol giving classes -- everyone around here is all for the bees. We'll see if Jef and I can handle this particular task. (I also suspect Jef has landed on it as a way to break the computer's monopoly on my social autism. I do get fascinated by the mechanics of the hive.)

Don't yet know the breed, but I suspect it will be Italian. We visit the store again today to look over supplies and perhaps will even get the gloves, netting, hat and so on. Jef is already out in the garden now working on the space and we'll be building a 'bee fountain' as well. Originally it was to be 3 oak wine barrel halves -- a $150 proposition -- but my idea of a galvanized tin tub on bricks brings it back under $50 with spare change for some ferns and water plants.

So that's the latest on the bees. I'll update with all the major moments on the project.

(Correspondence originally written on February 9, 2008.)