Peter picked up his bees from the chimney of Bernard and Carina. There was a nest in their chimney which they wanted to get rid of, and Peter wanted bees. So Peter rid Bernard and Carina of their bees, and at the same time collected the hive for himself. He smoked the bees from the fireplace, and they went out on the roof, and then he went on the roof to collect them. I guess that it could mostly come to a fireman's mind to do such a thing. Bernard told me the story last Saturday when he and Carina came to bring the milk, and he said that his mother, witnessing the operation, said of Peter that he is "un homme fantastique". Homme fantastique or not, he managed to get several dozen bee stings on his ankles, because that's the place the bees managed to get to ("first they go to the face, then the chest and neck, and if they can't get that, they will find any place where the clothing is light"). He did feel a bit ill afterward. Indeed, bees have a venom, like snakes, but unlike ants or other biting insects, did I learn.
Peter is fascinated by bees. He seems to know much about their behavior and about how to handle them. Some things which struck me: 1. If you kill the queen of a colony and destroy the nest, you kill the colony, because the colony can only make a new queen from its eggs (by giving an egg the queen diet). You can however replace the queen of your hive by a foreign one! - So, really, what is the organism, is it the individual bee, or the whole colony?? Another fact in this respect, is that the whole hive can be displaced as 'one'. You can take it in your hands, as a single dense looking but surprisingly light mass, and you can pour it out, like sand. When the colony wants to move house, the bees first all get out and wait somewhere, then all move into the new nest together. 2. The males do not work; you have thousand of males in the colony, and all they do is being fed, and one of them will be chosen to fertilize the queen, (the others are killed? I don't know if that's a desirable life, or not...) 3. If the queen is active, it will patrol the nest and kill any new baby queen that it finds. But if it's not so active, it won't patrol, and this permits a new queen to grow, and I guess overtake the old inactive one? 4. Each colony has its character. Some colonies are more active at producing new colonies, in that case they won't produce much honey. Some colonies are unusually active at producing honey. Peter once had a hive which produced 120 pounds of honey through a season! 5. You can tell if your colony is doing well by the sound that it makes. A happy colony makes a nice buzzing sound. An unhappy colony, hungry or something, makes a furious disharmonious sound, and in that case you better 'fuck off'. 6. The bees dance to each other to communicate information about pollen sources (how do they make the honey??). 7. It is customary to talk to the bees about what's going on on the farm, especially important life events like births, deaths, and perhaps marriages too. It is said that if the bees are not kept informed, they will not be happy.
***
This afternoon I went into the barn for the first time. It was amazing. It felt like the cows were still there last week. The hay and straw still lay on the ground, fresh as if from yesterday, although it must have been there for at least 25 years. We found three pairs of really nice wood and leather sabots and a pair of glasses in a hard leather case (which looks like a toothbrush case), which must be at least a hundred years old. Lots of old wooden equipment is still there - the harness, the gigantic wooden trailer wheels...
The barn itself is magnificent. All oak, stone, and slate for the roof. Inside, looking up at the high ceiling and the beams supporting it, you almost get this feeling of awe that you would get in some nice churches. You can see how much thought and care was given to it. You can feel, as said Peter, how it was the "center" of the farm. It had the animals, the grain, the hay. It was the "supermarket" of the times. You can feel that this was a precious place for them, that they were physically connected to it. It was pleasant not only to the animals, but also to the humans. Today you could convert it to a gorgeous house. Nothing to do with the ugly modern metal and concrete huge things, from which nobody would ever want to make a house...
(How can it occur to us to eat something which has lived in a place in which we would not want to set foot ourselves? I think, really, the problem is that the consumer is not even aware of where the food he eats comes from.)
The barn has been really well maintained, and it was a bit mind-blowing to think that this barn, which had been constructed probably at least 150 years ago (actually, nobody knows exactly when, and I would be really curious to know) with the most simple hand tools, still was being used as such and unchanged, 25 years ago, with just a bit of modernization.
They renovated some parts with concrete, which Peter complained about. But it was nicely done, and you could see that in the mind of these people, they were doing a nice thing. "Yes, agreed Peter, I guess they really were looking for something that did the job, and not for aesthetics". Exactly. But, why do we find concrete so ugly? Yes, there is something repulsive about it. I think it's its feel. It feels dead. It doesn't smell nice. It feels hard in an odd way. Stone is hard too, but in a different way...
One word about cows, by the way. I wondered how come people bothered keeping cows, which seem like such a pain to keep. Why not smaller animals, I asked. Peter said: cows are a great converter of grass into meat. Right... Or course... If grass is the only thing that will grow on your soil, then you haven't got much choice, than to put an animal that can eat grass on it...
