and one of these weekends it’ll happen.

…but that was back in the sixties.

For the wine barrel I got one of mom’s funnels that was slightly larger than the opening of the wine barrel and taped it securely on top of the hole. Then I got some greenhouse plastic and made a funnel that completely enclose the package of bees. I attached the small end of the plastic funnel to mom’s funnel and then the shaking began. So no be could escape except into the barrel. Well, turns out the hole isn’t big enough and the bees hang on to each other like they’re gonna drown if they drop into the barrel. So after a long time I decided this isn’t going to work. I knifed the plastic funnel apart from mom’s funnel and turned the barrel upside-down. Thankfully I had sawed a hole in the bottom of the barrel to clean it out and had only used screws and a piece of board to close it up again. I dumped everybody in there, closed it up and set the barrel upright. All the bees were mad and I didn’t have a protective suit on either. I had some amazing plantain salve that keeps stings from swelling at all. I put that stuff on everytime I got stung. It’s weird, but everytime I get stung I get a runny nose and teary eyes. To fasten the queen cage to the top of the inside of the barrel where all the bees would cluster and build comb was a lot less hassle. I had drilled a very small hole in the top of the barrel and stuffed a wire down which I then fished out the entrance hole. I took the cork out of the queen cage where the candy was, attached the cage to the wire and pulled the wire back up to the top. I thought that was a smart idea.

The log hive was easier. Except when I took the queen cage out of the package of bees I saw that at staple had split the wood and the screen to hold her in the cage was loose. And she flew away. Now what. There was better than a 50/50 chance that she would come back. I knew if she would come back she would probably be killed by the bees who were not familiar with her yet. After some time I found a cluster of bees on the ground nearby and figured she was with them. After pushing all the bees back I found her dead body. Without the queen, the hive would eventually die off. That same day I met up the guy from Yule’s Apiaries who graciously gave me another queen. So now they are all buzzing around. The calves in the meadow knocked over the wine barrel before I put the bees in so I put stakes up around it. They knocked it over again so I put more stakes in. Maybe they’ll survive.

To put it simply: when we are wrong, it feels so right and at home. But feeling that we are on the right side of things has dire consquences at times. So why are we so frightened to apply this kind of thinking onto beliefs to which we’re so emotionally and intellectually attached? Why is being wrong so scary if that realization could help us develop?

Christian fundamentalists seem to be on the alert for doctrinal compromise. They rightly argue that truth comes only from God and His Word. Our emotions and gut feeling cannot be trusted. What they seem to overlook is that the certainty about what is true and what is not true is strong bundle of strong emotions and gut feeling. The Christians are right. We cannot trust our emotions to discern what truth is. The struggle to embrace truth is much more involved than coupling our strongest emotion with the facts that seem most evident to us.