For little maples, a big move to ponder

Trees are the ultimate homebodies. And with age, they become even more obdurate in their stability. Season after season, their spidery, snaky roots auger ever deeper into the dark womb of the earth. Hardwood trees, like oaks and hickories, sink vertical tap roots that often extend as far underground as the tree is tall.

That makes them about as unwilling and difficult to move as a 35-year-old video gamer who still lives in his parent's basement.

You can imagine, then, how aghast the little clump of innocent saplings must've been when I assailed them last Saturday with a rusty shovel. Especially on this quiet fall day, when their bare limbs and branches had already gone to sleep for the winter.

The specimens at hand were sugar maples, all in the 3-5 foot range, still easy to move by hand without serious injury. They were clustered like woody weeds under the hulking trunks of an Osage orange hedge across from my brother's house. The prevailing west wind had born them there as tender green seedpods, and in anchorite fashion, they'd taken up permanent residence.

It's been unusually dry this fall and once I dug past the leaf litter and meager humus, the soil was baked hard as clay pottery. I scraped, chipped and finally dug with my fingers to pry little musket ball clods away from the white, veiny roots. Then with hand pruners, I snipped off the long, rubbery laterals and wrenched the trees loose from the brown sugar-like subsoil.

By dusk, they'd all been transplanted to a new fencerow that will help shelter our beehives from the north wind. The saplings' spindly shanks made them seem painfully exposed, what with the 15 feet of elbow room on either side and the 1/2 acre of open sky overhead. But a few scoops of composted goat manure, several five-gallon pails of water, and a six-inch blanket of straw for mulch (purloined from the dog's pen) helped to finish the job rightly.

Or at least that's my side of the story. What I saw were some sorry, stunted trees that could better reach their potential on my property. Any homo sapiens with an opposing thumb and a factory-made shovel can win that argument.

Yet for their part, the trees also deserve some consideration if not contemplation.

In a world duped by the suicidal promise of endless economic growth, it's easy to project onto nature the equally flawed notion that all creatures must perform at peak market value to justify their existence. In truth, it's never just the strong who survive and bring good to the world. Even in their former location, the diminished little trees rendered some valid ecological benefits. And if nothing else, you've got to admire their stoic character. Even dwarfed and starved for sunlight they stood and served. In nature's economy, the meek can still find full employment.

As fresh transplants, my foster saplings are no doubt aware of their new surroundings. (Although at first it may feel more like a rude exile than relocation opportunity.) Trees may not be sentient beings, but there's a whole lot of applied science at work in their woody craniums.

How so? Well, they've got renewable, expandable skin (bark), and sap that can miraculously turn into antifreeze for the winter. They can antiseptically heal heal themselves from the wounds of fire, hail, insects and windstorms. They can, through daily feats of vegetative calculation, dispatch new roots to the surface in rainy weather, and plunge them deep to tap subterrranean moisture in times of drought.

Much more astutely than I, the sightless trees will come to see their new home for exactly what it is. With weekly watering in spring and summer, I'll do my part to ease their transition. But my benign interventions will guarantee nothing. Each tree must find its own answers, must live out its own adaptations and compromises with the local world. Anyone who's rooted, or wants to be, can surely understand that.

November and me -- good and grey around the edges

It's a bogus invention, day light savings time. But in June, you won't hear any complaints from the likes of me.

That extra hour in the garden and on the river – that's the beating heart of summer itself. It makes my office servitude almost bearable to know that the real, green world, and the sun that makes it so, will linger in the sky well past 9 p.m.

Tonight, the calendar pulls the rug out from under this charade. In Michigan, the sun respectfully reverts to the creator’s timetable. It’ll be dusk at 6 p.m. come Sunday evening.

To mentally prepare, I took the dog out for a three-mile walk tonight in what tweedy poets once called the gloaming.

The woods along the road were hushed, as only they can be in November (at least until deer season starts on the 15th ). It’s a lovely month, November, and greatly undervalued. The whole thing merits a true thanksgiving, not just an over-stuffed observance and consumerism feast day. The gaudy flourish of autumn has faded, scattered now around the trees like confetti in the streets after a Mardi gras party. November’s dominant hues are grey – but a good grey, steadfast and serene. November knows that there’s nothing left for the year to prove.

The dog and I drank all this in, but it was dark by the time we turned back and headed home to supper. Yet it was a comfort to see the grey still there.
It had seeped from the woods to the sky above, now pricked with stars. It was the grey sky that made the tree limbs appear black as they stood in bony-fingered silhouette against the endless canyons of universe overhead. I suppose what we perceive as grey comes from the ambient light that's reflected light by mother Earth. Good thing whoever’s in charge of light years doesn’t have to factor in daylight savings time.

Overall, I’d still rather be smallmouth bass fishing – or sweating out my workday toxins in a garden verdant with sun-warmed tomatoes and the sweet snap of green beans.

But for now, I’m content to savor the now. If I can’t be as profligate with the sunlight as I am in summer, maybe that’s not all bad. I’ve let myself get too frayed around the edges this year, with more effort than output to show for it. A good and grey November, as becalmed and reflective as an old monk, may be just the color I’ve been been looking for.

40 lbs. of honey -- why ask for more?

I've fed the bees their last draughts of sugar syrup for the season. I'm not sure they need it, although the books and experts say they do. So I bought 15-20 lbs. of the cheapest sugar I can find, mix it 2:1 with hot water and Fumigillin -- a mild antibiotic – and dispense it via one-quart feeders that sit near the hive’s entrances.

And the bees go nuts for it. They envelop the feeders in fuzzy, soft ball-sized clusters, ecstatic with saccharine lust, maniacal for the one thing that will insure their winter survival: more honey for the hive.

I'd rather forego the antibiotic, but last year two hives contracted nosema. It's basically bee diarrhea, which means they poop themselves to death. It's as messy as it sounds, inside and outside the hive, where the mustard stains from their cleansing flights speckle the snow. Yeesh.

Still, there’s much more I could do, and most would say should do, to winterize the hives. Have I installed mouse guards? Drilled ventilation holes in the upper supers to prevent condensation? Applied miticide to kill tracheal and varroa mites? Cleaned the bottom boards? Stacked straw bales to blunt the steely knives of the north wind?

Well, uh, I do plan to put up a straw-bale windbreak.

But to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, “all beekeeping is local.” Call it a fatalistic cop-out, or a lazy man’s rationalization, but I’m not so sure that my meddling helps much. After all, the practices that some veteran beekeepers swear by others swear against. What works here doesn’t work there -- even when “there” is a mile up the road. What causes these variations? The bees or us? Perhaps what we bring to beekeeping – as with most human endeavors – is largely a mirror of our own talents, desires and peculiarities.

As a minimalist, I am inclined to mistrust things overly mechanical and scientific. The pine-box simplicity of beekeeping, scarcely changed since the 19th century, appeals deeply to me. A hammer, some short nails and wood glue are all that’s needed to assemble a hive. A pair of cotton coveralls ($6 at Big Lots) elbow-length leather gloves and a veiled hat comprises all the necessary clothing.

But my sentimental favorite is the bee smoker. It’s like a stainless steel coffee can, with attached leather bellows and a conical lid that could’ve come straight from the Tin Woodsman’s head. Add a fistful of dry straw and it will puff away as agreeably as your grandfather’s pipe.

Nevertheless, the ways of a minimalist can also yield minimal results. This year, we gathered 40 lbs. of honey, enough to fill about that same number of 1 lb. bottles. A rigorous, meticulous beekeeper might get 6o-80 lbs. from the same three hives. How much more, though, do we actually need? We’ll keep a dozen bottles for personal use, more than enough, and sell the rest at Church sales or give it away at Christmas. (Maybe you’ll get some instead of a scarf or snowmobile socks -- you know who you are.)

The rain will meanwhile fall on the just and unjust, as St. Matthew (5:45) points out, and the inscrutable bees will fulfill their sacred duties for reasons known only to them. Yes, it’s true that skilled human intervention will usually increase their productivity. Yet in the end? No matter how much we fret and tinker – or don’t -- the honey that comes from even the humblest of hives will taste every bit as sweet.