As you can see, the ladies now have a duplex of their very own. When I saw that they’d fully drawn out about 6 of the 10 frames in the bottom super last week, I figured I’d have to install a second super on my next visit. A week later, they’d finished drawing out 9 of the 10 frames. Whew, close call!

I swapped the one undrawn frame in the bottom super with a drawn frame next to it, so the bees would be more likely to draw it out instead of just moving upwards. Now they have tons of space into which they can expand their brood nest. Get to it, ladies! The sooner you build up the colony, the sooner I can start pilfering your hard-earned honey!

My other task this past weekend was dealing with an unfortunate mold infestation that started in the sugar syrup in my hive top feeder and on the inside of the outer cover over the feeder. I washed off the cover and the feeder with bleach and water, then rinsed them and put them back. All the syrup I’d fed the bees the week before was gone, so I poured in another gallon. This time, however, I mixed a teaspoon of bleach in with my 1:1 sugar syrup to keep the mold down.

I’m told by one of my local mentors that bees can handle even two teaspoons of bleach per gallon of syrup, but since I wasn’t being meticulous about scrubbing everything out after the cleansing, I decided to play it safe. Hopefully this’ll do the trick, and I will never have to bleach the bees again. The great and terrible Clorox genocide was a nightmare, as bees kept flying into my bleachy cleaning water and dying in there faster than I could get them out. I lost a dozen or two, easy. Ladies, ladies, I can only protect you from yourselves up to a point!

There’s a lot of beautiful capped brood in my hive, in a perfect brood pattern curving up from the bottom center of the frames. My first new bees should start emerging in the next week or so. Since my queen came from a different hive than the rest of bees, and I have no idea what sort of drones she may have sown her wild oats with, the new bees could be quite different from the ones I started out with.

The bees I have right now are astonishingly gentle. Even with a laying queen and improving morale, even with my clumsiness and unfortunate beeslaughter by bleaching, they haven’t stung me once. They’re just pretty chill, is all. But as they die out and are replaced by bees from different genetic stock, will hive remain as calm? I just don’t know. My queen was also bred for gentleness, but only time will tell.

I’m fascinated by the idea that my hive’s personality could shift drastically over the next few weeks, as the new queen’s offspring take over. Who knows who it might become?

My brother came up to visit the ladies with me this time. Everyone looks great in a beekeeping veil!

I discovered that my local fishmonger is willing to sell me squid as tentacles only. Brilliant! So of course we had to finally try to make fried calamari. Turns out that it helps to soak the squid in milk for an hour first. But then I bumped into the bowl and it shattered on the floor, spilling shards of pottery, milk, and squid tentacles everywhere!

Very sad.

I’d been threatening to make these for years, and the new apartment was just the push I needed to make it happen. These are from a now defunct card catalog from Columbia University, as delivered to me a few years back by my friend Virgil, who carried them to Brooklyn in two huge bags full of a multitude of charmingly gift-wrapped bundles of cards.

It can be so hard to choose the best version of each photo.

But it’s like Yamamoto’s concert in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.

Pages 176-7:

For the next seven and a half hours Yamamoto played Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor, & sometimes he seemed to play it exactly the same five times running but next to the sound of a bell or an electric drill or once even a bagpipe and sometimes he played it one way next to one thing and another way next to another. Some of these sounds were produced at the time and others were recordings, and after six and a half hours he stopped stopping to start the other sounds: a tape began to run & he kept playing. The tape was of traffic and footsteps & people talking and he played Op. 10 No. 1 nine times while it ran, and naturally you could see that you couldn’t really hear how he was playing it or even how he was dealing with the two phrases. At 5:45 the tape came to an end and the piece came to an end and there was silence for 20 seconds or so, and then he played the piece so that you heard it after and over the silence. This went on for six minutes and then he stopped and there was a moment of silence and then he raised his hands to the keys.

You expected to hear Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor for the 60th time, but instead were shocked to hear in quick succession Op. 10 No. 2 in D major, Op. 10 No. 3 in B minor and Op. 10 No. 4 in B major, and you only heard them once each. It was as if after the illusion that you could have a thing 500 ways without giving up one he said No, there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes, tears were streaming down my face as I heard these three pieces each with just one chance of being heard if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.

These two cowls are made by sewing yarn instead of knitting or crocheting it. I really love the way it preserves all the texture of the yarn, and the way I can hook strands over my ears directly to keep them warm!

The top one is made of my handspun yarn, and the bottom was my prototype with storebought yarn.

Instructions: I wound the yarn into a good cowl circumference, then basically spread out point of it between layers of tissue paper. Pinned it down, sewed a long line perpendicular to the yarn. One more on the other side. Tore off the tissue paper. Done!