Summer Is Not Over.

Summer isn't over! Yes, I'm wearing more clothes at this very moment than a rugged mountain man might wear in mid-October in Montana. (Remember socks?!? They're so April 2009!) A farmer at Added Value expressed to me that summer was already far behind him, a piece of fluff in a dryer vent. (Like compost, I amended and ameliorated that last part.) I disagree, vehemently! I present you with cold, hard, proof that summer is not over yet.

Exhibit A: The Calendar. Summer does not officially end until September 22. This should be enough to convince the reader that I am right and the farmer is dead wrong. Nonetheless, the following points serve to illuminate summery season signifiers from the LAST TWO WEEKS. Does this look like autumn to you?

• I didn't think so. This is what sunset looks like in summer: golden glow. The sun's heading down, but against her will. She wants to stay and play, so she lingers for as long as possible.

• This is me teaching teenagers about honeybees, surprised by how competent I sound on the subject. Do you see a classroom? No. Because its summer vacation.

Some responses from teens:

-To the drone's loss of genitalia and life when he mates with the queen: "Yo, why she gotta do that?"

-In response to the honey-tasting portion of the lesson: "I'm gonna get diabetes from this."

-To the fact that the worker bees, the majority of the hive, are all female: "That's sexist!"

-Student: "Is this a picture of you as a little girl?" Me: "No, that's a picture of me from March."

• My original intention was to find out the name of this flower and it's growing season to prove that it is still summer. However, technology has, once again, failed to live up to my genius ideas, and there exists no contraption wherefore to download this photo into a flower database and retrieve its common name.

I like to know the names of things, which is why I have been compiling my own flower database of sorts, that will go up once I identify some of the tricky ones with my team of experts. (My dad.) Once I find out the name I will revise this post and thus strengthen my argument! Wha-ha-ha-ha!

• Picnics. Need I say more?

Yes, you say? Fine. Would an elderly painter set up shop outside if there were the chance of catching a chill? I think not.

Whoa, elderly painter 1-2 punch!

• This delectable nectarine, sweet with tangy juices, was grown locally. Booyah.
  

I think I've made my point loud and clear: don't believe the farmer when he tells you summer is dead and gone. Let's not mourn just yet. We've still got some fire in us, don't we? 'Cause if being pumped and rearing to go is wrong, I don't wanna be right!

I've decided to form a team called Summerbusters, made up of highly skilled funsultants with can-do spirits. Don't you want to be somebody's funhero in these waning days of summer? (Funshero if you're a girl.) Delivering 100% pure fun to whomever is lucky enough to hang out with us, bustin' out the funglasses like it's nobody's biznass, you know, normal funsultant work. (Contact me for an application.)

How to Defeat the Evils of Nepotism

As you've probably noticed, I'm quite fond of comparing honeybees to humans. We both exist in complex social systems that aim to sustain us. We both love honey. We humans love to name things. (Do honeybees have names for us? Perhaps certain buzz frequencies that signify "human?") We distinguish between individual things and the groups in which they congregate. A colony of bees. A gaggle of geese. A parliament of owls. An army of frogs. A knot of toads. (The list goes on...)

But what of ourselves?? A family of humans? A culture of humans? A society of humans? We map family trees based on sexual relations that produce babies. Is this the only way to distinguish our kin?

The family tree of a honeybee colony would resemble a thick, round shrub more than a towering oak: a drone might be his mother's lover. Although the prolific deadbeat dad has challenged the patriarchal system of organization, most women in America still change their last names upon marriage to signify membership in a new system of kinship. The idea of family is defined in this way: the Griffins, the McChards, the Plakiai...

The queen bee's mating flight lasts for two to three days and intimately involves between 10 and 25 drones, depending on her penchant for doing the nasty. This rowdy sexcapade is productive enough for the queen to never mate again. She carries the sperm inside of her, and deposits sperm and egg in a honeycomb cell to create a female worker bee, and egg alone to create a male drone. She will continue depositing egg and sperm into honeycomb cells unceasingly for the remainder of her life.

In the bee world, if a mother queen dies unexpectedly, worker bees will feed royal jelly to a handful of larvae. Imagine you are a female worker bee. Your mom just died and you must replace her. You are in charge of choosing the cells in which you will deposit royal jelly. Cell A contains the larvae of some random chick. Cell B contains the larvae of your sister. Interestingly, entomologists have noted that you will almost always choose your sister's larvae. Bees are nepotists!

Natural selection does trump nepotism. Remember that you must feed royal jelly to more than one larval bee. When the virgin queens emerge, they duke it out to the death, and the last one standing becomes royalty.

Nepotism is, therefore, a natural-enough tendency. But I've got problems with it. When I was in middle school, I was a "bad influence." Or so it seemed to the mothers of my female friends. In reality, I was incredibly unhappy, as most teenagers tend to be, and did not need to be excommunicated from my only friends by overprotective moms. (Seriously, if I didn't peer pressure your daughter into smoking weed, somebody else would've. And that somebody might have been a scary old man instead of sweet little me.)

Of course moms are protective of their kids, but calling a 13-year-old on the phone and forbidding her to speak to, let alone be friends with, her daughter is just plain cruel. I'm not the only bad influence to have this happen, either. The result of the mother bee's overreaction is a super-strong, super-small kinship system that excludes anyone who doesn't share a last name.

Does this mean that it is wrong for the worker bee to choose her sister to become queen? Well, this is the point at which my argument falls apart.

We 'Mericans tend to like our circles close-knit, uniform, and exclusive. But kinship need not be familial. When like-minded, inspired individuals work together to create a supportive, productive community, a new kind of family is born. Like a honeybee colony, each individual is important only insofar as she is part of a whole.

When people work together toward a common goal that is both satisfying and fruitful, something magical happens.

We're no longer alone in this confusing world!

In this way, life bursts forth from concrete, life free from nepotism.

At Added Value, when we harvest, cook, and eat meals on the farm together, we say this blessing:

We thank the sun and the air,

the water and the soil,

the many hands it took to grow this food,

and the many hands it took to prepare it.

I love my many families.

Ode to New York City Summers

Even though your humid skies sag like wet diapers, I love you, New York City summertime. Thick, lukewarm air spits through the fan in my uptown apartment, mocking the archaic mechanism. Existence alone is cause for perspiration. Lady Liberty exemplifies the obstinate disregard for sweat that we New Yorkers must adopt.

I believe your subways are more conducive to men in heavy wool business suits than urban farmers in cutoffs and tank tops; they blast sterile bursts of cold air through loud AC systems and force me into the fetal position. (Although I must admit, your icy embrace has prevented me from waking up in the Bronx or Queens on several occasions.)

Girls have never been prettier than they are when they are walking down your streets in August drinking 40s in coffee cups.

Your expansiveness is overwhelming. Your opportunities are so numerous that they inspire guilt in those who fail to take full advantage of them.

Your summers illuminate little-known details that would be hastily ignored in meaner weather.

There's nothing like drinking a cold, locally-brewed beer on your Red Hook roof deck, New York. It can be a mystical experience.

View of you from Governor's Island:

View of you from Queens:

View of you from inside:

You're beautiful, New York City, no buts about it!

The reason I love you the most, though, is because you are a grown-up playground that brings friends together.

The Sisterhood of the Waggling Hammer-Pants

Astute observers who live in the Northeast will have undoubtedly noticed that June, that famously splendid month filled with beautiful blossoms, BBQs, and bikinis, has been a real Betty Bummer this year. As I consume my own version of "bee tea" and wax melancholy about the rain, I cannot help but worry about my flying friends.

When it rains, honeybees seek cover, just like us. Some of them stay home on "lookout duty" (see above,) while others are hard at work cleaning comb, nursing brood, and tending to the queen. The young'uns (0-10 days old) usually perform these duties. The teenagers(10-20 days old) have more complicated chores like storing nectar brought by foragers, building comb, and making sure that the brood chamber stays properly heated and ventilated. The adult honeybee (20-30 days old and aka "The Fearless Forager,") is most likely to display behavior akin to that of the adult human, dipping under leaf coverings and bar awnings, respectively, to take a "time out" until the rain passes.

At times, it rains for so long that honeybees, like humans, spend more time in their temporary shelters than they had originally anticipated. This proves costly for the honeybees, as each moment spent waiting out the storm means less honey for the colony, and come winter, they could starve. Similarly, each moment an adult human spends waiting out the storm means less money for the landlord, and come winter, they could starve. (Analogies, like plants, require sunlight to grow. Perhaps the reader would prefer a more explicit yet formal induction? Human: Money::Bee: Honey)

The Fearless Foragers wait patiently for gravity to ease up on the raindrops, then scramble to collect as much nectar as possible before the next downpour. Fearless Foragers constantly gather information about flower patches, rain or shine. Dodging fat raindrops, they'll return to their hives with samples of nectar for their friends to try. If the nectar tantalizes their tiny taste buds, they'll pay attention to said Fearless Forager, who will most certainly be performing an intricate dance at that very moment.

Honeybees can fly up to 3 miles to find a sublime patch of honeysuckle or the like, so succulent nectar sources require in-depth directions. The Fearless Forager will perform a "waggle dance," (known in some circles as a "figure-8 dance,) on the dance floor located immediately inside the hive entrance, in front of an eager audience.

For those of you who are kinesthetic learners, follow these steps:

1. wiggle while advancing slowly ahead

2. turn to the left, full circle

3. repeat step 1

4. turn to the right, full circle

5. repeat steps 1-4

The dance conveys a boatload of info:

-the more vigorously a honeybee waggles, the better quality the nectar source. (Whatever naturally blooms at any given time of the year is simultaneously the honeybee's number one choice.)

-one full waggle (steps 1-4) is equal to a certain number of feet, and a bee usually waggles between 1 and 100 times! We humans use units of measurements like yards and miles and funlongs... honeybees use waggles.

-the honeybee angles her body during the dance to precisely triangulate the nectar source using the sun's position at the given moment. Imagine a gigantic protractor drawing straight lines from the sun to the flowers-in-question to the bee's tiny dancing shoes. Now that's some kind of delightful math that I never learned in school!

Honeybees are most concerned with sharing. A honeybee will provide her friends with samples of found riches, assess the quality of the riches and opine her conclusions, then provide detailed directions to the source of the riches. Charmingly, all this is expressed in a sassy little dance!

The honeybee's survival depends on other honeybees. She cannot exist alone; without her sisters, she becomes wholly obsolete. Btw, I'm not just tossing around these feminine personal pronouns to mix up the status quo, I'm saying that the honeybee colony is 85% female, and all the males do are laze around, bang the queen, and die. They can't even sting. They live off the labor of their busy sisters and fulfill their singular purpose efficiently. Just sayin. Let the ladies lovingly labor at leisure, and lovely things will likely happen.

The rain's ghost infests the air completely. If I were a cow, I'd be lying down with my girls. If I were a bee, I'd be a senior citizen. But I'd be a brave forager. And even I, brave, senior honeybee that I'd be, would stay inside tonight.

Bee, humpin.

Such was the subject of the email I received from my friend Alex this afternoon. She attached this photo and explained it was as close as she could get to the "little dude." (Note that the honeybees that we humans usually come in contact with are overwhelmingly female, as the drone rarely leaves the hive except to relieve himself or to impregnate a queen and die.)

Upon first glance of the photo, I knew this was no honeybee. Its fuzzy cuteness and chubby roundness screamed "bumblebee!" even before I zoomed in on the little perv with my high-tech zooming device.

Two minutes later, I received another email entitled "Still going," with yet another photograph of the lil buzzer, posing the rhetorical question, "Do you think he knows it's not even Hump day?" I chuckled heartily and closed my browser, thinking "Cased Closed."

Boy oh boy was I wrong. Alex, a soon-to-be candidate for a doctorate in philosophy, has an unquenchable curiosity, and she soon hammered my Facebook wall with the public challenge, "just sent you some bee porn. Seriously, if you can figure out why a bee would spend like 20 minutes gently humping a leaf, I'd love to know."

Alex obviously knew that in order to solve this mind-boggler, she'd have to ask an expert. My studies on the Cuckoo Bumblebee enriched my knowledge bank with numerous bumblebee fun facts, enabling me to respond confidently to Alex's query in the following manner:

Dear Alex,

I'm so glad you sent me your email, "Bee, humpin." You pose an interesting question! (Must be the Philosopher in you! Lmao.) The bumblebee's "gently humping" motion that you describe is most likely a male "scent marking" an object with his pheromones in order to attract a young queen. Unlike male honeybees, male bumblebees leave the hive shortly after birth, never to return. The sole purpose of the male bumblebee, (also known as the Mumblebee, a personal nickname) is to lure a young queen to his bachelor pad and dance the horizontal polka with her. A bit of a manwhore, the Mumblebee's stinger isn't barbed like the honeybee's, enabling him to hump his way into the heart of many a queen.

The honeybee male, however, is fated to be a one-woman man. He loses his hindquarters altogether when the queen snaps off his stinger, still inside of her, and flies away, instantly killing the him.

Different species of Mumblebees "hump" for different periods of time, from a few minutes to up to 3 hours. Your Mumblebee must be a 20-minute man.

As for the question re. Hump day, only the big man upstairs knows the answer to that one, and He's not exactly known for His loose lips, if you know what I mean! (Who heard from Him last, anyway? That Mormon dude?)

Anyway, hope this clears up the Mystery of the Bee, Humpin. (SO Nancy Drew!)

Keep philosophizing, duderonomy!

C-Legz