MamaStories

Today’s harvest of pepper, from the pepper plants I brought indoors. The bell pepper is from a plant I started from seed in March 2009.

We finished the last tomatoes that were still ripening after I pulled them green, in November. of all the tomatoes in that picture, 99% ripened and was eaten. The cherry tomatoes fared best in this. Very few rotted, a couple obstinately stayed green, and a few shriveled in the drought of the kitchen. The good ones were as tasty as your average super market tomato.

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As always I am having some trouble getting back into blogging. Bear with me.

Right before we left for India and for quite some time while we were away the weather was bitter cold. Aside from the winter crop in the hoop house (all doing well), the weak spot on our property where cold matters is our bees.

I decided early on in the game not to medicate, feed or wrap the hive. We’re going to need bees that can thrive in this climate. If this colony does not survive, I will try another queen, or another breed of bee altogether, until I find the one that does. That will be the queen to breed queens from.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached my hive and saw the landing board strewn with dead bees. During winter there is no rearing of brood. The bees just huddle in a ball to stay warm and wait for warmer temperatures. If the queen and enough bees survive to get started up again in Spring, the colony has survived. Bees die before then, of the cold (if they’re on the outside of the ball), starvation and preferably just simply of age. Their fellow bees do not have the opportunity to rid the hive of the bee bodies. So they pile up.

But how to check if the colony is doing well? If I open the box, I’d chill them and stress them badly. So I put my ear to the hive box and heard…

a buzz!

There are some bees alive in there. It’s hard to know how many, what shape they’re in and how much food they have left and if they can reach it. That we will know in a couple of months, as soon as we are graced with a day warm enough to take a quick peek.

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While I was checking out the hive a bee clambered out, dragged herself to the edge of the landing board, keeled over and fell down into the snow. There she shuddered, then lay motionless. I picked her up and brought her inside, wanting to see if she had any deformities or mites piggy-backing on her. Soon after coming into the warmth, she revived and I quickly put a bell jar above her. I am now feeding her some honey (from her own colony). I wonder how long she will survive.

New Delhi street view

Well, we made it there and back again, but we’re not in good shape. The trip is 32 hours door to door, in 3 airplanes, through 4 airports and too many security checks. Disturbed sleep or near-total lack of it in my case (very light sleeper and insomniac), irregular eating of warmed-over food and, especially in my case, very little of it (mild but constant motion sickness), and the folding of time itself (Calcutta is 10.5 hours ahead of Boston), and the breathing in of the dense pollution of India’s big cities — all do a decent job of lowering one’s immunity to the billions of strange germs one comes into contact with.

Goofing around in front of the Taj Mahal

Long story short, we’re all of us down with jetlag, coughs and colds, and jetlag. It’s 4 am and Amie is watching How to Train Your Dragon and coughing incessantly. My nose is running and my ears are ringing and I want to go to sleep. DH, in Amie’s room (where her bed is but where she will not as yet deign to sleep) is awake too. Amie will miss school again tomorrow.

Rajastani apiary and mustard field

But it was worth it. We got to spend lots of time with family, including Amie’s great-grandmother, her grandparents, aunts and uncles and great-aunts and great-uncles and countless friends and other family. We flew North for five days to see Delhi, Agra (the Taj Mahal had just been cleaned up for Obama’s visit) and Jaipur, and even made a short trip to Shanteniketan (Tagore’s town, a three hour drive from Calcutta).

Lake garden at the Amber Fort in Jaipur

I got to see lots of apiaries in Rajastan, but was also introduced to the sad story of Indian bees and agriculture by an eighty-year-old botanist and organic activist and a West-Bengal based NGO. The news is not good. The temperatures are unusually high for winter,  the rivers and ponds are dried up (and the rainy season only starts in June). The pollution in the cities is atrocious, there is trash everywhere – much of it Western, no doubt – and most shops don’t even sell coke anymore: it’s all diet Coke. That little detail says so much.

Along the road to Shanteniketan

There is a lot to tell, but let me recuperate a bit first.