The Raccoon Wars Resume

After a long season of detente, in which the raccoons constrained their foraging to the darkness while the chickens busied themselves in daylight, the peace was suddenly breached.  It has happened before; August seems to be the month when raccoons step out of bounds.  An early evening dinner guest recently stepped away from the table and into the sunroom to answer a call where she noticed through the window a chicken, clenched in the jaws at the opposite end of the ringtail, being dragged toward the fence line.  In broad daylight.  Our friend raised an alarm, and the group of us hurried outside accompanied by as much noise as we could generate.  The offending raccoon, concluding that safety was more desirable than supper, dropped the dazed hen and scurried into the woods.  The traumatized chicken survived, and eventually shook off the assault.  A quick census of the flock, however, revealed that this had not been the first incursion.  

War plans were subsequently drawn and set in motion.  

The battles, in the ensuing days, grew hot and then cold.  Escalating and then briefly calming, they would quickly escalate anew.  We are now three weeks into the conflict, and though it’s hard to know who has the upper hand, I can say that my efforts have not been for naught.  In keeping with my larger vocational urgings, I have evangelistically introduced 25 raccoon souls to Jesus.  

So to speak.  

I’ll spare you the details of the baptism.  And I have every reason to believe that the bushes - if not the fields - remain “white for harvest.”  

So I continue.  So I remain vigilant.  It’s not that I have any particular prejudice against raccoons - and harbor no peculiar animosity.  I completely respect the fact that every life needs and deserves its nourishment.  

Circle of life and food chain and all that.  “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as the poet described it.

I simply require that predators look for their sustenance somewhere other than in our chicken yard.  I have taken the chickens to raise and tend and protect.  It is a commitment I have made to their keeping, and I intend to keep it.  The raccoons are welcome to the rabbits which, this year, frolic in abundance.  There is a veritable carpet of bunnies these summer months, and the bunnies have been known to commit yet another farmstead sin of sneaking into the garden.  Rabbits I can do without.  I have proffered no promises to them or on their behalf.  

But the chickens are another matter. The chickens I will protect.  Should the raccoons return to their nocturnal normal I will happily reinstitute the armistice. 

In the meantime, however, I am vigilant - set, baited and watching.  

Amen.

Sweet Collaboration

“How hard could it be?” I wondered on more than one occasion as I set up the beehives last year.  “Bees have been tending to themselves for thousands of years.”  

 

Despite the latter observation’s affirmative truth, the answer to the former question is, “More than one might think.”

 

I learned that the hard way.  Purchasing two “packages” of bees and setting them up for housekeeping around the back of the prairie, I apparently went out of my way to be inhospitable.  Within a month one of the colonies was gone – dead or merely departed I couldn’t ascertain.  I did my best to nurture and cajole the remaining colony through the summer and fall, and with the outer reaches of my microscopically limited knowledge did what I could to prepare it for winter.  Through the course of those bitter months I would pass by the lonely hive, neither seeing nor hearing any sign of life.  

 

On the foundation of this astonishing failure, I began the new year by ordering three new colonies for springtime. I would execute a “reboot.”  As winter faded, I made the sad journey to the apiary to dismantle the remaining hive, only to lift the lid and find a burgeoning colony, happily undertaking a new season.  That one, soon joined by the three I had newly ordered, and eventually joined by the two successful splits from that overwintered miracle.  The swollen population meant that August honey extraction season approached riding the momentum of six healthy hives.  Not all would be ready to share their stores, of course, but some were extending their hand.  Questions arose.  We consulted teachers and mentors and YouTube videos.  We purchased equipment.  We sanitized and organized and asked a few more questions.  Finally, when we could think of or justify no more impedimenting delays, we loaded up the Club Car, gathered the promisingly loaded frames, encouraged the clinging bees to stay behind, and returned to the processing area we had laboriously staged, and got to work.  

 

Yesterday.

 

It will likely take years to master the uncapping knife, but we got the job done.  It took awhile to finesse the electric extractor, but we eventually fell into a routine.  We spun, we drained, we strained the viscous gold.  We licked our fingers when we thought the other wasn’t looking, and we filled bottle after glorious bottle until we closed the bucket’s honey gate for the final time.  

 

And then, surveying the 52 pounds of bottled harvest, we smiled.  It’s hardly “free”, this liquid largesse.  The dollars invested in beekeeping have been surprising; the labor demanded has been as exhausting as it has been fascinating and disciplining.  And yet the abundant generosity of it all is a wonder to me.  Bees, themselves, were already a wonder.  A “super-organism” that functions enviably and organically as a whole rather than a collection of individuals, the hive is a throbbing body of specialization and efficiency; nursing, guarding, cleaning, gathering, reproducing, sustaining and monitoring.  And then the honey.  Honey manifests the bees’ alchemical accomplishment of spinning, Rumpelstiltskin-like, straw into gold; transforming the myriad pollens and nectars into a life-supporting pantry and medicine cabinet.  

 

That happens to be delectably sweet.

 

A friend asked how the bees feel about being robbed of the fruits of their labors.  I can’t imagine that they are thrilled, but they acquiesce.  Industrious, they’ve already gotten about their business of making more.  And we will help – planting more flowers for the long term, filling sugar water feeders to augment their efforts in the near term, attending to their health and preparing their space for winter.  It’s a partnership, after all; a reciprocity that nourishes and delights us both – the colony in the hive, and the colony in the house; sweeter for the collaboration.