from a hive in slow motion sound and vision...
.....a honeybee-hive entrance, 14th June 2015
I inspected our two beehives on 14th June and again on 21st June. One of the resident colonies was doing very well in that it had a very fecund queen, a large population of worker and drone bees, and an increased quantity of capped honey stores. What was very encouraging about this colony is that it did not seem to be making much of an effort to swarm. Our recent weekly inspections have found only a few queen cups and just one drawn out queen cell; which was empty, as in there was no egg laid in it.
Both of our colonies are based on new queens produced as a result of our bee colonies swarming in 2014. The second and lesser of our colonies did not over-winter well, and emerged in the spring, as it did, weakened by a varroa infestation and an inappropriate over-wintering hive arrangement. That said, it (the colony) seems to be recovering. The queen has developed a good (egg) laying rate and the number of brood frames occupied by the colony nucleus has increased from three (in April) to seven and a half (8).
The slow motion video clip (top) is of the weaker colony. A full, healthy and vibrant colony of honey bees would be a lot busier than this at its hive (or nest) entrance in June. The relative paucity of bees made observation of the coming and going of the field bees easier. I was surprised by the clumsiness of the bees manifest by the frequency of bumps and crashes between them. The collisions do not, it seems, adversly affect the comings and goings of the foragers. The slow motion facility enables us to see the foraging bees returning with their pollen sacs 'filled' with various types of pollen collected from the flora within a certain range of the hive - perhaps up to 8 miles. There is some debate as to how close to their hives bees will forage. I assume our bees do forage within the bounds of our allotment site. You could try using this pollen colour chart to try and identify which plants those bees have visited. The photograph above shows a small area of pollen storage, the different coloured holes or cells, within the brood chamber of the hive. I'm not sure how different types of pollen are stored (separately/mixed/layered?) or, if and how different bees foraging from the same plant will share the same cells to store that pollen.
I am taken by how the slow motion recording facility (of an iPhone) has altered or affected the sound of the bees and more so, the calls of the birds. There is a gentle eeriness in the field recording which resonates with other experiences I have had of the sounds of bees foraging around plants. There is a wild plum tree on site which, earlier in the spring, attracted such a profusion of honeybees and bumblebees it hummed quite distinctly - apart from the prevailing ambient noise of the roads and motor cars nearby - and of the airliners overhead.
I have just finished reading the chapter, 'Self Heal' from the book, 'Weeds - The Story of Outlaw Plants' (Richard Mabey, Profile Books). A significant part of this chapter is an account of the life of Nicholas Culpeper and his book, 'The English Physician' (1652), a popular herbal intended to reach the poorer classes. Culpeper used readily, cheaply available English native plants as the basis for his 'Method of Physick'. His tome represented a reaction against what he regarded as the quackery and arcane bogus mysticism of other herbalists and healers of his day; although the plants in his herbal are labelled with references to astrological influences in which finding them requires finding 'planetary hours'.
Culpeper writes in the preface,
There is a way to cure diseases, sometimes by sympathy, and so every planet cures his own disease, as the sun and moon by their herbs cure the eyes; (Saturn) the spleen, (Jupiter) the liver, (Mars) the gall and diseases of choler, and (Opposition) diseases in the instruments of generation.
Culpeper has used various symbols to denote astrological signs, which I have omitted or substituted because I don't have them available to me on my computer keyboard.
I understand 'sympathy' to mean a process involving the resemblance of one thing to another which signifies a healing ability or relationship. An example of this is the plant, Lungwort, with its spotted leaves, hence it is used as a remedy for respiratory ailments and diseases. There is the field of sympathetic magic in which all sorts of elaborate connections are made between things, often for the purposes of maintaining oppressive power and control over people. Despite the mystical influence of astrology in 'The English Physitian', Mabey concludes that Culpeper's legacy was 'the democratisation of medicine', and that 'outlandish and objectionable substances' ('pounded swallows') would not have a place in pharmacopoeias.
Culpepper's day was one of great turmoil and violent change, defined by the English Civil War. Culpeper was wounded, fighting for the Roundheads, and never fully recovered from his shrapnel inflicted chest wound. Perhaps the battle in which Culpeper was wounded was also that from which some of the characters in Ben Wheatley's film, 'A Field in England', had fled?
The film portrays a psychotropic and psychotic immersion in the violence of that period set against a pastoral landscape often manipulated for menacing effect. Sorcery, magic and alchemy are all invoked by various visual techniques and tricks. The characters' disturbed states (battlefield post traumatic stress included?) are also accentuated by the soundtrack - the sound design of Martin Pavey, and the composition by Jim Williams. Of course, what we hear in that film is nearly all by design and direction. Most of the sound alternates between the close spoken dialogue of the characters and the sonic rendering of their psychedelic episodes. Other than that, the landscape, the setting of a field, is very quiet - the natural ambient sounds of flora and fauna are quite absent. I wondered if making the film required filtering out ambient sound partly because it may have been of a very 21st century nature. How would the ambient sound of the same field in the mid 17th century compare to that field of the 21st? I wonder if the same characters were transported to the 21st century field they would be overwhelmed by a relative silence, an eerie absence of the sound of e.g. insects and other creatures. What place does the song of the skylark have in this apocalyptic cine-field trip?
And in that supposed absence I am expressing a very typical anxiety about a deteriorating natural (and rural/urban/suburban) environment. The contemporary medium of film is an obvious one with which to reassemble and re-present contemporary anxiety and dissent 'as spectres, shadows or monsters' - to quote from, Glimpses and Tremors; Robert Macfarlane's analysis of the contemporary English eerie. The contemporary popular accessibility of technology, enabling slow motion close-up re-presentation or re-creation of something as banal as honeybees flying in and out of a hive (an ailing hive?), makes for a lost and found 'sense of omen or portent'. Unmediated loss of experience is interrupted by a compulsion to capture, record and replay. A photographic image makes a ghost or memento mori of its subject.
Honeybees in their decline have come to signify an omen or portent of contemporary disaster but also an attribution of a sort of benign mystical healing power. Consuming raw honey produced by bees which have foraged in the area where you live will alleviate the symptoms, if not cure you, of hay fever - some people assert. (The mysticism of specifically local herbal cures for local bodies is something Richard Mabey recounts in 'Weeds' and the chapter on Culpeper). The truth of this assertion about 'local honey', as might be established by the sorts of processes of reason and enquiry formed in Culpeper's 'age' - the Age of Enlightenment - is subject to a popular culture of anxieties about technological advancement or progress in medicine and bio-engineering. That progress is no less mysterious, magical or inexplicable than folk lore and herbal remedies determined by planetary hours - or the healing potential of pounded swallows. I think the hay fever healing properties of raw local honey is a myth however I can no more present a rational dismissal of that healing potential than I can for the hay fever alleviating properties of anti-histamines. I believe more in the modern remedy but that belief comes with anxieties about the broader implications of modern systems and instruments of production and consumption.
Both of our colonies are based on new queens produced as a result of our bee colonies swarming in 2014. The second and lesser of our colonies did not over-winter well, and emerged in the spring, as it did, weakened by a varroa infestation and an inappropriate over-wintering hive arrangement. That said, it (the colony) seems to be recovering. The queen has developed a good (egg) laying rate and the number of brood frames occupied by the colony nucleus has increased from three (in April) to seven and a half (8).
The slow motion video clip (top) is of the weaker colony. A full, healthy and vibrant colony of honey bees would be a lot busier than this at its hive (or nest) entrance in June. The relative paucity of bees made observation of the coming and going of the field bees easier. I was surprised by the clumsiness of the bees manifest by the frequency of bumps and crashes between them. The collisions do not, it seems, adversly affect the comings and goings of the foragers. The slow motion facility enables us to see the foraging bees returning with their pollen sacs 'filled' with various types of pollen collected from the flora within a certain range of the hive - perhaps up to 8 miles. There is some debate as to how close to their hives bees will forage. I assume our bees do forage within the bounds of our allotment site. You could try using this pollen colour chart to try and identify which plants those bees have visited. The photograph above shows a small area of pollen storage, the different coloured holes or cells, within the brood chamber of the hive. I'm not sure how different types of pollen are stored (separately/mixed/layered?) or, if and how different bees foraging from the same plant will share the same cells to store that pollen.
I am taken by how the slow motion recording facility (of an iPhone) has altered or affected the sound of the bees and more so, the calls of the birds. There is a gentle eeriness in the field recording which resonates with other experiences I have had of the sounds of bees foraging around plants. There is a wild plum tree on site which, earlier in the spring, attracted such a profusion of honeybees and bumblebees it hummed quite distinctly - apart from the prevailing ambient noise of the roads and motor cars nearby - and of the airliners overhead.
I have just finished reading the chapter, 'Self Heal' from the book, 'Weeds - The Story of Outlaw Plants' (Richard Mabey, Profile Books). A significant part of this chapter is an account of the life of Nicholas Culpeper and his book, 'The English Physician' (1652), a popular herbal intended to reach the poorer classes. Culpeper used readily, cheaply available English native plants as the basis for his 'Method of Physick'. His tome represented a reaction against what he regarded as the quackery and arcane bogus mysticism of other herbalists and healers of his day; although the plants in his herbal are labelled with references to astrological influences in which finding them requires finding 'planetary hours'.
Culpeper writes in the preface,
There is a way to cure diseases, sometimes by sympathy, and so every planet cures his own disease, as the sun and moon by their herbs cure the eyes; (Saturn) the spleen, (Jupiter) the liver, (Mars) the gall and diseases of choler, and (Opposition) diseases in the instruments of generation.
Culpeper has used various symbols to denote astrological signs, which I have omitted or substituted because I don't have them available to me on my computer keyboard.
I understand 'sympathy' to mean a process involving the resemblance of one thing to another which signifies a healing ability or relationship. An example of this is the plant, Lungwort, with its spotted leaves, hence it is used as a remedy for respiratory ailments and diseases. There is the field of sympathetic magic in which all sorts of elaborate connections are made between things, often for the purposes of maintaining oppressive power and control over people. Despite the mystical influence of astrology in 'The English Physitian', Mabey concludes that Culpeper's legacy was 'the democratisation of medicine', and that 'outlandish and objectionable substances' ('pounded swallows') would not have a place in pharmacopoeias.
Culpepper's day was one of great turmoil and violent change, defined by the English Civil War. Culpeper was wounded, fighting for the Roundheads, and never fully recovered from his shrapnel inflicted chest wound. Perhaps the battle in which Culpeper was wounded was also that from which some of the characters in Ben Wheatley's film, 'A Field in England', had fled?
The film portrays a psychotropic and psychotic immersion in the violence of that period set against a pastoral landscape often manipulated for menacing effect. Sorcery, magic and alchemy are all invoked by various visual techniques and tricks. The characters' disturbed states (battlefield post traumatic stress included?) are also accentuated by the soundtrack - the sound design of Martin Pavey, and the composition by Jim Williams. Of course, what we hear in that film is nearly all by design and direction. Most of the sound alternates between the close spoken dialogue of the characters and the sonic rendering of their psychedelic episodes. Other than that, the landscape, the setting of a field, is very quiet - the natural ambient sounds of flora and fauna are quite absent. I wondered if making the film required filtering out ambient sound partly because it may have been of a very 21st century nature. How would the ambient sound of the same field in the mid 17th century compare to that field of the 21st? I wonder if the same characters were transported to the 21st century field they would be overwhelmed by a relative silence, an eerie absence of the sound of e.g. insects and other creatures. What place does the song of the skylark have in this apocalyptic cine-field trip?
And in that supposed absence I am expressing a very typical anxiety about a deteriorating natural (and rural/urban/suburban) environment. The contemporary medium of film is an obvious one with which to reassemble and re-present contemporary anxiety and dissent 'as spectres, shadows or monsters' - to quote from, Glimpses and Tremors; Robert Macfarlane's analysis of the contemporary English eerie. The contemporary popular accessibility of technology, enabling slow motion close-up re-presentation or re-creation of something as banal as honeybees flying in and out of a hive (an ailing hive?), makes for a lost and found 'sense of omen or portent'. Unmediated loss of experience is interrupted by a compulsion to capture, record and replay. A photographic image makes a ghost or memento mori of its subject.
Honeybees in their decline have come to signify an omen or portent of contemporary disaster but also an attribution of a sort of benign mystical healing power. Consuming raw honey produced by bees which have foraged in the area where you live will alleviate the symptoms, if not cure you, of hay fever - some people assert. (The mysticism of specifically local herbal cures for local bodies is something Richard Mabey recounts in 'Weeds' and the chapter on Culpeper). The truth of this assertion about 'local honey', as might be established by the sorts of processes of reason and enquiry formed in Culpeper's 'age' - the Age of Enlightenment - is subject to a popular culture of anxieties about technological advancement or progress in medicine and bio-engineering. That progress is no less mysterious, magical or inexplicable than folk lore and herbal remedies determined by planetary hours - or the healing potential of pounded swallows. I think the hay fever healing properties of raw local honey is a myth however I can no more present a rational dismissal of that healing potential than I can for the hay fever alleviating properties of anti-histamines. I believe more in the modern remedy but that belief comes with anxieties about the broader implications of modern systems and instruments of production and consumption.
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