Dose #1

We found a new playground. We found it a week before we used it, but it was raining when we found it so we tucked it away for another day, which happened to be this past Saturday.

On Friday night, the night before the Saturday we used the new playground, if you had asked Ava what she would be doing on Saturday morning, this is what you would've heard:

First, Ava wakes up. Then Ava, mommy, and daddy go to coffee shop (shebop) and have daddy's muffin. Then go potty.... and then (excitement is building that she absolutely cannot contain) go to new playground to go slidin and swingin'! (The finale is about ten spinning circles followed by one big not-quite-jumping-jack, but close).

So when you are at a new playground, how do you possibly decide what to do first? You don't decide; instead, you do everything for milliseconds at a time so that it feels like you're doing everything at the same time. Eventually, you land on the couple things you know you really love, and that you always knew you really loved (sliding and swinging) but you had to try out the new stuff too, just to be sure.

After a little bit, a little girl, about four, on a sparkly purple bike with pom-pom-like handle bars pulled up to the really big slide. She got her daddy's okay before getting off her bike and climbing the slide.

It didn't take long at all for Ava and the little girl to start following each other around; eventually there was hand holding and ant watching.

At one point, they were on the swings together. Once they got off, Ava turned square to her new little friend, grabbed her at the shoulders, looked her square in the eyes and said, with excitement she could barely contain, "Wanna go slidin'?"

Friendship.

Dose # 2

We were visiting with some friends and there was another little girl there, right about Ava's age. Ava was playing with a little foam bat that the little girl also wanted to play with. The little girl began to grab at it and her parents scolded her. As you can imagine, at two, she got pretty upset and didn't understand why she couldn't have the bat.

Without hardly any time passing, Ava walked over to the little girl and handed her the bat. Just like that. No words, no explanation, no trying to make her feel better, just doing what she knew would.

Compassion.

One Small Step

Putting all my folded clothes away. Today.

Splurge Thursday

Oh, I don't know. Maybe an ice-cream cone tonight?

On May 28, 1998, Pakistan tested five nuclear devices in Chagai, Baluchistan. I was in grad school in New Mexico at the time, and I remember well the tension over the tit for tat tests between India and Pakistan that May. On this depressing anniversary, we can ask what did Pakistan achieve from those tests? Here is an opinion piece by Pervez Hoodbhoy, looking at a nuclear Pakistan, ten years on:

IT’S May 1998 and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulates wildly cheering citizens as the Chagai mountain trembles and goes white from multiple nuclear explosions. He declares that Pakistan is now safe and sound forever.

Bomb makers become national heroes. Schoolchildren are handed free badges with mushroom clouds. Bomb and missile replicas are planted in cities up and down the land. Welcome to nuclear Pakistan.

Fast-forward the video 10 years. Pakistan turns into a different country, deeply insecure and afraid for its future. Grim-faced citizens see machine-gun bunkers, soldiers crouched behind sandbags, barbed wire and barricaded streets. In Balochistan and Fata, helicopter gunships and fighter jets swarm the skies.

Today, we are at war on multiple fronts. But the bomb provides no defence. Rather, it has helped bring us to this grievously troubled situation and offers no way out. On this awful anniversary, it is important that we relate the present to the past.

And the threats that developed turned out to be so different from the ones envisioned at the time:

Terrorism and fanaticism, not India, shall be the real threats to Pakistan in the forseeable future. The writ of the Pakistani state has already ceased to hold in parts of the country. Terrorists have repeatedly targeted Pakistani officers and soldiers and their wives and children. Even their fortified residential compounds are not safe. Officers are now understandably afraid to drive in official vehicles, to wear uniforms in public, or even to stop at traffic lights.

It was a lie that the bomb could protect Pakistan, its people, or its armed forces. The bomb cannot help us recover the territory seized by the Baitullahs and Fazlullahs. Our nukes certainly give us the ability to destroy India — and to be destroyed in return. But that’s about it. The much-vaunted nuclear dividend turned out to be empty.

Read the full article here.

Postings have been a bit slow lately, but I totally blame Chincoteague for that.

Here is a story about the role of mind-altering incense in religion. Now, strong incense usually give me headaches (yes, absolutely no Yankee Candle trips from me). I also had trouble with frequently used incense sticks in Pakistan. But it appears that incense can also lure you to religion:

Incense might be symbolic in religious ceremonies, but it has also, perhaps not so coincidentally, played a role in gathering the faithful into the fold. A team of international neuroscientists has just announced that a component of the resin made from Boswellia trees, more commonly called Frankincense (yes, the same stuff brought to baby Jesus by the Three Kings), biochemically relieves anxiety in mice, and presumably people.

Although religion is usually considered a purely cultural construction, it might also have deep psychotropic roots.

Ok...so for some it helps reduce anxiety:

The recent research, published in the online FASEB Journal (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) on May 2, suggests that religion, or at least many religious rituals, might also have another evolutionary, or biological function. Along with the group support, the embracing identity and the place to pray when times are bad, some religions are also doling out a bit of a psychotropic drug that helps the mind find peace.

Under the influence of a good snoot full of incense, mice in scary situations, such as being put in a swimming pool, remain calm, anxiety-free. At the alter, too, people feel the same sense of peace that comes from either the comforting words of the clergy, or from the intoxicating, brain altering, smell of incense.

(I don't know if they checked mice for headaches...)

Read the story here, and here is a link to the FASEB paper.

This article is interesting both because of the problem it discusses, as well as the list of social sites it contains:How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use

Oon many websites, headlines can be the difference between success and failure. Good, clickable headlines are key. Here are some ideas:8 Different Types Of Headlines Which Sell

It is not true to say that I dust this speech off each Memorial Day; the truth is, I tuck it nearby so that I can read it any day, sometimes every day. Six years ago my dad wrote and delivered this speech at our hometown Memorial Day services, the first after 9/11. I will admit my bias, but still, I think it is the best speech I have ever heard.

Memorial Day—May 27, 2002
Norwich, NY

J. Philip McGuire, guest speaker
Combat Medic, 2/502 101st Airborne
Vietnam—1969-1971

Good Morning Friends and Neighbors—

Here we are again. Come together on a day in May to remember, to
recall the images of men, mostly young men, who went away for that
flag flying over us; men who didn't come home.

If you're like me, and I suspect some of you are, memory plays tricks
and the film in our head is hazy—filtered through the lens of our own
lives, and the vision of events and people past form dreamlike and not
always real.

The men that I remember were young. They didn't talk politics or
causes and they weren't always fighting for the same reasons they were
sent… Mostly they talked about home, about girlfriends, family, the
job they left—and girls.

Young men of course are the best soldiers. I guess not only because
they are strong and vigorous but because the recklessness of youth
lends itself to soldiering. Often the youngest volunteer to walk
point. For the young, death is a spot on the horizon—it's there, but
it's not today's concern.

Many of these soldiers were months earlier playing high school
football and wearing stiff leather shoes to the prom…they did
heroic things—exposed themselves to enemy fire and threw themselves on
grenades.

The cruel confusion of war takes some in random chance. War shows no
favorites. Our best and brightest… hopeful men that today are forever
young—frozen in time, unfinished lives.

We recall the astonished look on the faces of the hurt and bleeding: a
look that says, "I'm only 19—I can't die."

The wounded and dying don't talk of the cause or the campaign. Most
ask to go home. They ask for mom—tell her I love her, that it's
okay...

But please don't leave me on this god-forsaken hill.

It has always been so. From the carnage at Gettysburg—the bloody
beaches of Normandy—the frozen Chosin Reservoir—to the steaming jungle
of the Ashau Valley.

Our best and brightest have marched into eternity with one request.
Please don't forget us.

On last September's bright blue day, horror came out of the sky and
our enemies cut down the innocent only to give names and faces to
heroes. Men and women challenged death in falling towers and doomed
airliners that others might be spared.

Abraham Lincoln observed that it's too great a task for us ordinary
people to memorialize these brave Americans. Lincoln noted their
sacrifice was too great, too magnificent, too noble for us, caught up
in our everyday lives, to honor in a meaningful way.

But do we daydream and imagine that if the opportunity presented we
too would do the heroic thing? Don't we think we'd storm the hijackers
on our doomed plane? Race into the collapsing skyscraper? We'd face
enemy fire to save a friend--- wouldn't we?

These things we ponder—we pray for courage. As the daydream fades we
find ourselves paying the same bills, worrying about our children, and
wondering how the man in the mirror got this old.

The job of honoring our fallen warriors might seem too great until we
remember them as ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

The truth for us is that we will probably never be thrust onto the
stage of great things.

Those everyday people who fell for us weren't thinking of great ideas
at the end—not of the cause, the campaign, or the issues.

They talked of home. And home is here. Home is
you and me. Home is where we live, work, love, and join the human
condition--the USA, where we pray for God's grace to make a place for
us at the end.

Here is where we honor our fallen. By doing things denied them when
they were cut down in the spring of their lives.

What can we do? First, let's imagine them as they might have become.
Maybe he's a mechanic who would fix our car; maybe he'd be driving
that truck or patrolling our streets, or planting a field of corn.

Then, let's do this: Let's do kind things in their name. Let's be good
citizens, let's volunteer and be optimistic. Let's encourage a young
person and visit an old one. Let's do ordinary things in a special
way.

We can do it for them and thank them for their sacrifice. So let's
meet here each year and remember them. Let's carve their names in
granite and visit their graves. Let's also carve their names in our
hearts and honor them by living our lives in a way that they might
have lived theirs.

Thank you.

Here is a review of an interesting book, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, and I really like the set-up story, which is also the cover-image of the book:

In the middle of the fourth century AD, a series of earthquakes struck the port of Kourion on the southern coast of Cyprus. Originally built by the Greeks a millennium and a half earlier during the Late Bronze Age, the town had no doubt experienced its share of seismic events, but nothing prepared its inhabitants for the major earthquake and tsunami that struck just after dawn, most likely on July 21, AD 365.

Because of the early hour, farm animals were trapped in their stables, and most of the population was caught beneath the rubble of their collapsing homes. The few survivors, probably too overwhelmed to recover and bury the dead, abandoned Kourion forever. When archaeologists excavated the site in the 1980s, little had been disturbed.

Among the many discoveries was the heartbreaking tableau of a skeletal family. The man holds his wife protectively while she cradles their one-year-old child. The image, both poignant and instructive, graces the cover of Stanford University Earth Science and geophysics professor Amos Nur's new book, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, written with the assistance of his graduate student Dawn Burgess.

And it also looks at some religious stories through a geological (or seismological) lens:

In one chapter, Nur examines the record of earthquakes in the seismically active "Holy Land" (to use his choice of geographical nomenclature). Most readers, regardless of religious persuasion, will appreciate the connections between geological and archaeological evidence and sections of the Bible.

Read the full review here.

10 Lessons learned from our (almost) failed startup

It was overcast on Monday; not raining but-might-as-well-have- been kind of day. When Ava woke up I asked her if there was anything in particular she wanted to do that day, she answered, "I want a gingerbread man" as if she'd been waiting hours to say it.

I told her we didn't have any, what could we do? She suggested we make some, so, we did. (From a box, not from scratch).

After we cut them and made sure they had all their hands and feet, we put them in the oven where Ava gave them some words of encouragement. I can't remember exactly what she said, but it was something along the lines of (and in a really high pitched voice), "Hi gingerbread men, I'll see you in just a minute. Would you like a book? Yes? Okay. Here you go."

Hence, the books. I guess she figures they'd like to pass the time in the oven the way she likes to on the potty, reading.

::

A lot of times we'll be playing or reading and she'll say, "Just a minute. Ava will be right back. I have to do something."

Huh?

So, she'll head into another room, careful to notice if she's being followed, which she isn't. I'm not sure what she does (one of these days I will follow) but she comes back less than a minute later, ready to settle right back into what she was doing before "something" called. It's very funny.

::

Spent Tuesday in NYC at the National Stationary Show, in support of LobotoME and Bird Dog Press. Can you imagine it, being surrounded by paper, paper, paper? All kinds of beautiful paper in all kinds of textures and incredible designs? Sigh.

::

A Small Step

Today I am going to drink a lot of water.

Shoe Splurge

I bought a pair of shoes on Friday night's girls night out, but I think I'm going to return them.

Pastor John Hagee is scary! And John McCain has gone out of his way to seek his support. Lets see what Hagee has to say about the causes of hurricanes and his views about the future of the world (or more accurately about the end of the world). Here is a Fresh Air clip that includes some of Hagee's explanations for natural events, followed by a reaction of an Israeli journalist to the Christian Zionism of Hagee et al. Hmm...suddenly, end-of-the-world via Large Hadron Collider doesn't seem like such a bad idea...

Here is a case, where "purpose" clearly played a role in design. See how (and why) creationism was replaced with "intelligent design" in the creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People (tip from richarddawkins.net)

So what percentage of US science teachers are creationists? Hmm...16%!!

Well...here is the graph:
There you go...Now we can cry together. And these are not just proponents of Intelligent Design nonsense. These 16% actually believe in a 10,000 year old Earth!! Yikes! (Although, they still look good compared to the 48% of the general public who are young Earth creationists)

And it turns out that 12% also teach ID or creationism as valid scientific alternative to evolution:

The researchers polled a random sample of nearly 2000 high-school science teachers across the US in 2007. Of the 939 who responded, 2% said they did not cover evolution at all, with the majority spending between 3 and 10 classroom hours on the subject.

However, a quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".

The results are published in Plos Biology (go Plos!!) and the paper is titled: Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait

The authors of the study conclude that requiring high school teachers to complete one evolutionary biology class can significantly improve the situation:

These findings strongly suggest that victory in the courts is not enough for the scientific community to ensure that evolution is included in high school science courses. Nor is success in persuading states to adopt rigorous content standards consistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and other scientific organizations. Scientists concerned about the quality of evolution instruction might have a bigger impact in the classroom by focusing on the certification standards for high school biology teachers. Our study suggests that requiring all teachers to complete a course in evolutionary biology would have a substantial impact on the emphasis on evolution and its centrality in high school biology courses. In the long run, the impact of such a change could have a more far reaching effect than the victories in courts and in state governments.

Read the full paper here, and the New Scientist story here.

Here is how Pokeutd.com got started:

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

On Thursday and Friday I attended a conference sponsored by the US Department of Education. The conference was follow-up to a report that was just released by the National Math Panel, which was convened by the President to a) understand how the US can regain its competitive advantage in the math, science, and engineering fields and b) to provide recommendations on how to make math more accessible to everyone. That’s right, even you and me.

There was a lot that came out of the report, and by association the conference, much of which we already kind of know one way or another when it comes to education. In short: that the quality of a child’s teacher matters to the quality of that child's learning

But there were a couple of other things that came out of the report that I’m not sure we know:

1. That EVERYONE can do math (That's right, even you and me).
   
2. That we must stop making excuses for our mathematical limitations, especially as a way to accept the mathematical limitations of our child, student, neighbor, little sister, etcetera (that is, "I can't blame him for not doing well in math, I was never good at it either!").

I deduced one thing from those two things that could be applied to most aspects of life. To illustrate what I deduced, I am going to tell a story. A true story that actually took place about two weeks ago, before I even knew a math panel existed at all.

I was talking to a friend about high school teachers—ones we liked, loathed, maybe laughed at. Math teachers came up repeatedly as by and large good teachers, when my friend said, “I was good at math up until 9^th grade and after that I sucked at it.”

He was good. He was good enough to be in advanced classes in middle school through 10^th grade, at which point he’d met his requirements for a diploma and saw no reason whatsoever to continue down the path of mind numbing theorems and quadratic (quadratic sounds like something big and green that skulks in a sea and every now and then raises its fifteen heads out of the sea to slime and scum everything around it, doesn’t it?) equations, which he was naturally bad at.

I accepted his belief at face value: he just stopped being good at math and it was as black and as white as that.

Only after thinking about a couple of things I heard at this conference, I am not so sure that is true.

Because what I deduced is that natural ability will take you so far, like the 9^th grade, but then you have to kick in some effort to get the rest of the way (which, of course, will vary according to individual).

There are some things that come to me very naturally: like knowing when I have a really good cup of coffee in my grip (though not knowing what, exactly, makes it good), like seeing gaps in things (arguments, concepts, teeth) and flashes of how to fill them in, and, making up alternative endings in my head to movies with really bad ones.

But I’m going to be especially conscious of putting in a little extra effort to push beyond what comes naturally and see just where it can take me and my family (I’m thinking bigger than just adding a twist to our breakfast for dinner standby).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to go crazy with effort, just going be a little more conscious of it (and continue to shower my husband with respect because he is one of the few who pushed on with mathematical effort when natural ability ran out).

One Small Step

I'm going to start with trying really really hard to get birthday cards out on time and even sending random how are ya doing notes to friends and family once in a while.

Splurge, Soil, and Spray

We now have, finally, a respectable (though I wouldn’t quite call it manicured) flower garden in our front yard. Thanks to: Leslie W., Lowes, Frank’s Greenhouse, and, of course, day laborer Pete (husband). We bought, he dug, he planted, we sprayed. Everything. A lot. (Don’t forget, little love has mastered the righty tighty lefty loosey concept, which she applies regularly to the hose).

The blog Ars Technica recently sold for $25 million:Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars TechnicaFrom the article:Comscore says Ars Technica has just 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views, but our understanding is that the actual number of unique visitors to the site is around 4.5 million. The audience demographic is very similar to Wired, although our sources say the overlap is

What were the builders of Chartres Cathedral thinking and what were they trying to convey? Here is a review of an interesting book, Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind by Philip Ball (by the way, the US edition is titled: Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral. Hmm....so if you want a more exciting title, get the imported version).

Chartres cathedral is a marvel but also a mystery. Nobody knows who designed it or what they were trying to express. Begun in 1200 and finished in 1226, it was the crowning example of the gothic style and marked, Philip Ball suggests in this lucid and resplendent book, a shift in the way the western world thought about God, the universe and man's place in it. Romanesque churches with their vast walls and narrow windows had been dark and inward-looking, and signified, he argues, monastic seclusion. Chartres changed all that. Its walls were diaphanous membranes of glass set in cobwebs of stone. On the outside, flying buttresses propped them up to prevent them collapsing under the soaring vaults of the roof. It was “transparent logic”, a celebration of the light of reason, banishing the old gloom, and progressing from an age when God was feared to one where his works could be understood.

That, at any rate, is the theory. Ball makes no pretence to have thought it up himself. It had been aired in the 19th century, and was elaborated in the 20th by the great German art historian Erwin Panofsky. What makes it plausible is that the school of Chartres, in the decades before work on the cathedral began, had become one of the great centres of European learning, a principal conduit for Arabic science and mathematics, and a pioneer in the rediscovery of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid. It was progressive and humanist, encouraging a rational understanding of the physical world, advancing geometry, and promoting the belief that the universe was a system of eternal order based on numerical proportions.

Ok, this does sound very cool. But the reviewer has some doubts regarding this theory:

Is this what Chartres cathedral was trying to say, and if so how were these ideas imparted to the people who actually built it? Ball finds Panofsky's vision inspiring, but sees difficulties fitting it to the facts. Nine successive teams of contractors seem to have worked on the building, so continuity of design must have been imposed by someone, but there is no evidence it was anyone connected with the school of Chartres. The idea of an architect in the modern sense had not yet developed, and decisions may have been taken piecemeal by clerics or patrons or by the master builders, whoever they were. No plans survive, and quite likely none were made, as there was no tradition of architectural drawing. The builders may have carried the design in their heads like mental arithmetic.

There is evidence that bishops were spurred on in their building projects by pride and envy, and it seems possible that the brilliantly ostentatious architecture of Chartres was conceived to satisfy these passions rather than to convey universal rationality. Ball's idea that the building of Chartres began “the age of reason” is the shakiest part of his case. As he points out, the cathedral's most precious relic was the tunic that the Virgin Mary wore when giving birth to Jesus. A later acquisition was the head of Mary's mother, Anne. These rarities attracted pilgrims and wealth, but it is hard to see them as congruent with rational thought in any other respect.

But there is a Muslim connection also:

His section on how to build your own medieval cathedral, backed up by stylish diagrams, is a model of explanatory writing. It makes clear, even to the least mathematical, how the vast tonnage of masonry in a barrel vault can actually strengthen the building under it, and why a pointed gothic arch is less likely to fall down than a round one. Pointed arches were common in Islamic architecture from the 8th century, and they may have been brought to the West by Muslim workers. The superior masonry skills of Muslims have been detected in the 12th-century stonework of Winchester Cathedral. This is typical of the fascinating data that Ball unearths.

And on faith and reason:

The impulse, after finishing Ball's book, to catch the next Eurostar, and head out to Chartres from Paris, is strong. He says that if you sit in the cathedral late in the day, when the tourists have gone, you can believe that the place embodies the last moment when a reconciliation of faith and reason seemed possible. It seems likelier that it embodies a time when no reconciliation of faith and reason seemed needed, because it was assumed that reason, like faith, would lead the mind to God.

While the reviewer is somewhat right in pointing out that no reconciliation was needed between faith and reason, the philosophies of Aristotle and Averroes still loomed large and had to be brought within the Christian thought (i.e. a reconciliation of reason and faith) - and this was done by people like Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham in the later decades of the 13th and early 14th centuries.

Read the full review here. (tip from 3quarksdaily)

At a time when hundreds of thousands of people have died in the Burmese cyclone and the Chinese earthquake, Peter Singer questions the (supposed) goodness of God.

Do we live in a world that was created by a god who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all good? Christians think we do. Yet a powerful reason for doubting this confronts us every day: the world contains a vast amount of pain and suffering. If God is all-knowing, he knows how much suffering there is. If he is all-powerful, he could have created a world without so much of it - and he would have done so if he were all good.

He goes through and briefly analyzes the standard list of reasons cited to rescue God in this context. Singer also recently debated conservative commentator, Danish D'Souza, and cites D'Souza's last excuse on behalf of God, and then responds to it:

Finally, D'Souza fell back, as many Christians do when pressed, on the claim that we should not expect to understand God's reasons for creating the world as it is. It is as if an ant should try to understand our decisions, so puny is our intelligence in comparison with the infinite wisdom of God. (This is the answer given, in more poetic form, in The Book of Job.) But once we abdicate our powers of reason in this way, we may as well believe anything at all.

Moreover, the assertion that our intelligence is puny in comparison with God's presupposes just the point that is under debate - that there is a god who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all good. The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the God who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler.

Read the full article here. (tip from 3quarksdaily)
Here is a (slightly) lighter look at the problem of evil.

E-mails will never really match up to this (sigh!). Einstein's letter in which he talks clearly about religion (no abstract metaphors...) has been auctioned off for $404,000. Richard Dawkins tried to buy it, but didn't get it at the end (also hear Dawkins discuss this letter and Einstein's concept of God on BBC). Thats too bad...

A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.

The Associated Press quoted Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, as describing the unidentified buyer as having “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.” Among the unsuccessful bidders, according to The Guardian newspaper, was Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist.

The price makes the Gutkind letter one of the best sellers among Einstein manuscripts. That $404,000 is only a little less than the $442,500 paid for the entire collection of 53 love letters between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, at an auction at Christie’s in New York in 1996. At that same auction a paper by Einstein and his best friend, Michele Besso, attempting a calculation that would later be a pivotal piece of his crowning achievement, the General Theory of Relativity, went for $398,500.

Read the full story here.

[This is a blog and the information contained within each entry is time sensitive, meaning prices are subject to change and information due to new discovery can change as well.]
Before our next lesson on the importance of having an observation hive, I want to show you how we removed a hive from a house last Friday.
As more and more people learn that you are a beekeeper, you'll eventually be asked to remove a swarm from a tree or a hive from a house.
This is a great promotional opportunity for honey bees and a great occasion for you to educate bystanders about the important role honey bees play in our survival. And you'll probably get a front page spot in the local newspaper like we did. Front Page Paris Beacon News Article Online
Removing a hive from an existing structure requires much work. Shaking a swarm from a branch is easy compared to removing a full grown hive from a structure, having to tear out walls and remove every bee including the queen.
Last Friday, with the help of my father-in-law, Bill Henness, we removed a hive from a house. I want to share the step by step process with you so that you can tackle these removals with confidence.
First, we have the owner sign a release form giving us permission to remove the hive and for them to repair any damage.
Next, we gather up essential tools for the job. This is critical.
Having done my share of these removals, I have found that several tools are essential for me, but you may not need them all. Minimally you will need a smoker, a bee suit, gloves and tools to remove whatever is covering the bees. But, for me to get the job done, I use a bee vac, an alternate power source such as a auto inverter or a generator to run my saws and bee vac, a saws-all, a good bee suit, containers for the brood and honey not to mention demolition equipment such as crow bars, hammers, ladders etc.
Here's the entry point of hive at the corner of the house. You can click on the pictures to enlarge the photos. This is a courageous undertaking. It is not for the weak or timid. It is very tedious and time consuming because when you first start all you see is where the bees are going in. You don't know if they are going up or down or sideways. You really can't listen to the wall and determine much either because of the way sound travels through wood. So you just have to cowboy up and start tearing away either the inside or outside wall. We prefer to do it all from the outside. It makes too much of a mess from the inside. The house will smell like smoke and you'll track honey and propolis in the house too. So do it from the outside when possible.
Next, we started by removing the outside siding to expose the comb. In this picture we were fortunate enough to venture a good guess at where the hive was and you can see a new section of brood comb freshly made just below the existing section of older comb with brood intact. Notice the crowbar as Bill pries off another piece of wood siding. It's impossible to be gentle or quiet in this sort of work, so suit up well! Although the above picture makes it look easy because other than the two bees on his back, there are no bees on the comb.
That's because with the bee vacs we sell and use, we safely vacuumed them into their holding cage. Here is what it looks like before we used the vac. Trust me, without a bee vac, it is almost impossible to herd 80,000 away from their home.

With the bee vac, we can clean off all the bees and then remove the comb. It is very tedious because you just have to peel away sections at a time, carefully search for the queen while vacuuming.

Piece by piece pieces of the comb are handed down, brood comb placed in one container and honey in another. I carefully inspect for any diseases such as heavy mite infestation, American Foul Brood, Small Hive Beetle or other noticeable problems.
Like most hives the honey is store far away from the opening. I started at the bottom, now I'm about four feet from the top and finally I've reached the honey frames protected by the bees which are on the comb in the picture, soon to be vacuumed safely into their transportation cage.
In fact, this was our second cage and look at all the bees! It takes two hands to hold this package! Bill makes our bee vac with a special "secret" so that hardly no bees are killed by being vacuumed into their cage within the bee vac's outer box. This "secret" is visible in the picture, but if I told you he would have to kill me :) But I was impressed that I noticed only about a handful of dead bees several days when I inspected them in their new hive. Way to go Bill!

Here's a new bee, about to emerge from her cell and wondering what all the morning racket is all about! Workers are not helped out of their cages like drones are. Instead, they must wiggle and climb their way out all on their own and then they have to clean their own cell.
That's a lot of brood foundation. This was a pretty large colony.
Sometimes we take the brood and place it into our own frames and then place it into the hive. This is essential if you cannot be sure the queen is save with the bees.
Of course, the treat of raw honey is wonderful, and you never know how many pounds of honey you'll get from a job like this. But, not as much during early spring because the bees consumed most of it during the winter and have not yet had time to replenish their supply.
Finally, the job is done, the bees are safely caged away and the space between the studs is clear of comb and bees. My father-in-law sprays some soapy water to keep the stray bees from coming back or another swarm to decide to move in.
So, get ready beekeepers! It's up to you to help save honey bees rather than have them destroyed. Go get 'em. Just make sure you have some spare hives sitting around so that you can put these captured swarms and hives into a new home. If you don't have a spare hive, call us today and place your order, or order a bee vac before you get your first call! 217-427-2678.
Our next lesson will address the need for all beekeepers need to have an observation hive. I believe it is essential for your success and I'll tell you why, and how to keep one going.

For now, this is David & Sheri Burns thanking you for joining us today and remember, BEE-Have Yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
217-427-2678
Email: david@honeybeesonline.com
WEBSITE: www.honeybeesonline.com

Here is a discussion of web spam so you can avoid it:

Please check out this excellent op-ed piece by Ken Miller on the ID-nonsense movie, Expelled.

"Intelligent Design," the relabeled, repackaged form of American creationism, has always had a problem. It just can't seem to produce any evidence. To scientists, the reasons for this are obvious. To conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Intelligent Design is nothing more than a "phony theory." No data, no science, no experiments, just an attempt to sneak a narrow set of religious views into US classrooms.

Advocates of Intelligent Design needed a story to explain why the idea has been a nonstarter within the scientific community, and Ben Stein has given it to them. The story line is that Intelligent Design advocates are persecuted and suppressed. "Expelled" tells of this terrible campaign against free expression, and mocks the pretensions of the closed-minded scientific elite supposedly behind it.

After going through specific examples of false information and/or blatant lies in the movie (including the idiotic connection of Darwin with the Holocaust), Miller gets to the heart of the matter:

Why is all this nonsense a threat to science? The reason is Stein's libelous conclusion that science is simply evil. In an April 21 interview on the Trinity Broadcast Network, Stein called the Nazi murder of children "horrifying beyond words." Indeed. But what led to such horrors? Stein explained: "that's where science in my opinion, this is just an opinion, that's where science leads you. Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place. Science leads you to killing people."

According to Stein, science leads you to "killing people." Not to cures and vaccines, not to a deeper understanding of nature, not to wonders like computers and cellphones, and certainly not to a better life. Nope. Science is murder.

"Expelled" is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word "expelled" may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

Read the full article here.

Einstein's quotes are appropriated by both religious and non-religious in defense of their respective ideas. But it has often been hard to paint him in a black & white picture (oh...nuances...why do you have to make life so complicated?). Now, at least some of the confusion has been cleared and we clearly know his views, at least about conventional religion, towards the end of his life (he died in 1955):

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

And to be more precise, he considered religion a "childish superstition":

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

That still leaves some room for some "cosmic religious feeling", however one views it (check out an earlier post on Einstein's God):

In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.

His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

And here is John Hedley Brooke on Einstein's religion:

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

Read the full story here.

As part of Hampshire College Lecture Series on Science & Religion, George V. Coyne from the Vatican Observatory gave a lecture on The Dance of the Fertile Universe in late March. There are many misconceptions regarding the Vatican observatory - many people have this idea that the Church is still upset with Galileo or that the purpose of the telescopes must be to search for God's hideout, or something like that. Well...check out this talk. George V. Coyne is the Director Emeritus of the Vatican Observatory and you can get his views directly here. He is an excellent speaker and he is very funny. If you don't have time to watch the whole talk, please listen to the Q&A session (about 50 minutes into the video) and you will get a very good idea of Coyne's views about science and religion - and the value he places on scientific inquiry. Here is the abstract and the video:

Abstract

The Dance of the Fertile Universe

Did we come about by chance or by necessity in the evolving universe? Did God make us? Can we conclude that there is Intelligent Design to the universe? To what extent can the natural sciences address these questions? As to chance or necessity the first thing to be said is that the problem is not formulated correctly. It is not just a question of chance or necessity because, first of all, it is both. Furthermore, there is a third element here that is very important. It is what we might call the 'fertility' of the universe. So the dance of the fertile universe is a ballet with three ballerinas: chance, necessity and fertility. What this means is that the universe is so fertile in offering the opportunity for the success of both chance and necessary processes that such a character of the universe must be included in the search for our origins in the universe. In this light I am going to try to present in broad strokes what I think is some of the best of our modern scientific understanding of the universe and then return to the questions above.

George V. Coyne, S.J. is a Jesuit Priest and an astronomer. He is Director Emeritus of the Vatican Observatory and Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Wayfarers in the Cosmos: The Human Quest for Meaning.

We've had rain for the past 36 hours but I didn't even mind it. I got the laundry washed and folded (that's right, it's not put away) and caught up on my black sea of emails. I had tea parties with little love and out of the rain, we found ourselves some trains (our bookstore has a train display for little ones and Ava spent more than an hour playing with it and even then I had to prod her away).

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LobotoME gave a sneak peak of some must-see products that are soon to be released. You must check them out.

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I've decided that cup holders are to a car what storage space is to a house: they are easily overlooked when you're busy falling in love with with the ooh ahh elements but are quickly discovered when the honeymoon is over (or maybe not even started). Agree?

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A small step

Yesterday little love was frustrated because she couldn't screw a top back on the bottle (mind you, she's JUST two). Her poppy taught her "lefty loosey, righty tighty" on vacation and she figured it out on the hose within three tries. Now she's moved onto bottles, which are a little more difficult because it requires some exaction on the line up. Anyway, when she gets frustrated she does this shaking thing with her hands--sound doesn't usually accompany it because she's too busy holding her breath while she does it--so I decided that it is not too early to teach that little one to breath. So all day yesterday we breathed in through our nose and then out through our mouth. I told her that every time she started to feel frustrated, that is what she should do instead.

So today, I'm going to take my own advice.

Splurge Session

I signed up for a writing workshop with the author of The Writer Mama. It starts in August and I can't wait!

Intelligent Design/Creation proponents often whip out a list of scientists (numbering around a 100) who doubt evolution of species via natural selection (i.e. natural selection cannot account for the complexity we see on Earth). [Of course, this prompted Project Steve - and they just registered 884th scientist named Steve that accept biological evolution]. There is a newer list of dissenters, but the overall message is the same. But who are these scientists who reject evolution? And do they really? Here is an analysis of the list. (tip from Open Parachute)

A few months back I had posted a link to an interview with Shalom Auslander. I recently finished reading Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir, and its fantastic. Its dark humor (and yes, its very dark - but always very funny) reminded me of Catch-22. If you have some time, give it a read. In the mean time, here is a short clip from the book:

Natural disasters happen - but at least lets not blame the victims. It appears that God was responsible for Hurricane Katrina, then punished people with the Tsunami in East Asia and expressed His displeasure by killing thousands with an earthquake in the northern areas of Pakistan. Not to be left behind, it seems that bad karma is now responsible for the cyclone that has killed 100,000 people in Myanmar (Burma):

About 80 percent of Myanmar's estimated 52 million people are Buddhist, and many there rely on the principle of karma to explain the storm, scholars say.

Specifically, many Myanmar people believe Cyclone Nargis is a karmic consequence of military rulers' brutal crackdown on Buddhist monks last fall, said Ingrid Jordt, an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who was once a Buddhist nun in Myanmar and maintains ties there.

"The immediate explanation was: This is retribution for killing monks," Jordt said. "In any cataclysm, human beings seek to make sense of something that completely destroys the continuity of life. It's an attempt to bring the world back into harmony."

Dear Karma: There must be another way to punish these rulers without drowning, say... a 100,000 people.

American Zen Buddhist and author Brad Warner said blaming Myanmar's cyclone on bad karma hues uncomfortably close to those ideas.

"To me it sounds like we're just substituting karma for God," he said.

And with so many innocent victims, karma seems a harsh and indiscriminate explanation, Warner said.

Hmm...yes. Obvious on both points. Or may be just stick with natural explanations for natural phenomena - without any wrath or karma. Didn't Voltaire lay to rest some of these issues in the 18th century? Not the full Candide, but here is Voltaire's poem, The Lisbon Earthquake, written after seeing the destruction of Lisbon caused by an earthquake in 1755:

OH WRETCHED man, earth-fated to be cursed;
Abyss of plagues, and miseries the worst!
Horrors on horrors, griefs on griefs must show,
That man's the victim of unceasing woe,
And lamentations which inspire my strain,
Prove that philosophy is false and vain.
Approach in crowds, and meditate awhile
Yon shattered walls, and view each ruined pile,
Women and children heaped up mountain high,
Limbs crushed which under ponderous marble lie;
Wretches unnumbered in the pangs of death,
Who mangled, torn, and panting for their breath,
Buried beneath their sinking roofs expire,
And end their wretched lives in torments dire.
Say, when you hear their piteous, half-formed cries,
Or from their ashes see the smoke arise,
Say, will you then eternal laws maintain,
Which God to cruelties like these constrain?
Whilst you these facts replete with horror view,
Will you maintain death to their crimes was due?

Vacation is so good for you, but it can be oh so bad for you too.

I'll start with the bad and stick with the major (as opposed to the minor, like finding sand in places I didn't know existed for the next three months).

The Bad

Most who know me well know that I love breakfast (make the "o" extra long in love). I especially love eating breakfast out, like at one of those Formica counter-topped diners with big streaky windows and pictures of famous people who are not famous to me hanging crooked on the walls. Those places.

So when my husband asked me if I wanted to go to one of those places for breakfast this morning in honor of Mother's Day and I said "no" he studied my face like he did when we first fell in love. Not in the "you are the most perfect person in the world to me and I want to know everything there is to know about you" kind of way--but in the "I know everything about you already but you saying no to breakfast out makes me think I ought to pay a little more attention" kind of way.

It's not that deep though--he doesn't need to worry. I said no because we are ten hours back from a week long vacation that, sure, was filled with sand and sea salt, flat fast runs and fresh smells; but it was also filled with too much cheese and extra fries, a little nacho here and a little nacho there (which, adds up to lots of nachos period), and an ice cream cone (or two) on top (figuratively, of course).

Ta da, major bad number one:

When it comes to vacation. what is lost in stress can easily be gained in fat.

Applied: Just the thought of breakfast out after vacation makes me want to binge on water and muesli. (I don't really know what muesli is, but if it is how it sounds then I'm thinking grainy and earthy .)

The Good

Now for the good, which there is plenty of but it's not nearly as dramatic, so I'll keep it short:

1. I read two novels. I haven't read A novel in more than two years and I will say that even if I have to wipe out my 2008 goals to read two more, I just might do it. The two I read (and I selected them because I snagged them for $3 a piece in the overstock pile at the bookstore) included:

• Harvesting the Heart, Jodi Picoult. A good hard story that had me shaking my head in disbelief (and disgust) on one page and feeling a bit of sympathy on the next (a wee bit). I didn't "relate" to most of the main character's decisions, but that is where I disagree with many on what makes books good: I don't have to relate, most of the time don't want to relate. Give me another experience, one that I haven't had or won't ever have and make me believe that someone else has.
  

• Love Walked In, Marisa de los Santos. Okay, I picked this book up because of the price and because of the cover (I know, I know, two very shallow reasons). And it was good. I loved the tone, the style, and the tempo of this story but it had too many holes to make it into the great category (which, so far, is owned by Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time). Again, it gave me some experiences I've never had and most likely never will, but I wasn't satisfied with the character's preparedness for and response to those experiences (boy does that sound risk management-y).
  

Good number one: Vacation should be renamed Relax.

Applied: Relaxation--it's the purpose, it's the point, it's the pleasure. Reading is a pleasure and I'd forgotten just how much. Vacation helped me to remember and I'm going to try hard not to forget.

2. Little one had a smile on her face from the minute she woke up in the morning until the minute she fell to sleep (she might have even been smiling then, but it was dark and I couldn't see). I get peaceful at the ocean, but always peaceful and happy little one became even more so, if you can imagine it. I can't attribute who she is to anything or anyone in particular, but I do know that sunshine, Mother Nature's rhythm, and family at every turn enhanced the rays of her light.

Husband felt it too. He doesn't require much, never has. But when we were sitting at the beach he'd turn his head and look at me (I think he was looking at me, he has these fancy sunglasses that make it difficult to tell) and just smile and not say a word and then look back out at the water again, I knew he felt that everything he has is just the right amount. Not too much, not too little, just enough. That is satisfying.

Good number two:

Watching those you love love the moment they're in.

Applied: Whether on the beach or the backyard, we have a lot to learn from people who know how to love the moment they are in. It's just that vacation gives us that opportunity to see how life can be everyday when you put first the big things, like loving and being loved.

3. Vacation has meant the same place for the past 15 (or is it 16 years). It's something my parents started for us as kids and that we've all kept up as adults. Tradition. And while there are all kinds of new and exciting places to explore, sometimes all you want, all you need, is the one place that is familiar.

Good number three:

Protected time and space to spend with those you love.

Applied: We've been going on vacation to the same place (different houses though) for more than 15 years and we keep going back. We look forward to it together, we experience it together, we remember it together, and we miss it together.

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A Small Step

Making more time to read

Splurge Sunday

I do feel like a hot drink from the coffee shop, but not coffee. So I'm going to get myself a tall decaf skim extra hot mocha. Six words seems like five too many where a drink is concerned, doesn't it?

There have always been questions about the finances of the organization run by Adnan Oktar, known usually by his pen-name Harun Yahya. Last year he made headlines by sending his 800 page Atlas of Creation, free of cost, first to French public schools and then to biology and anthropology departments across the US. The science (if you call it science), of course, is lifted from the US creationists, but the printing quality is fantastic (I recently acquired a copy from an anthropologist at UMass). Hmm...how does his organization finance itself? Well, the news is that Adnan Oktar has now been sentenced to 3-years in prison "for creating an illegal organization for personal gain" (tip from Secular Outpost).

Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.

In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.

It is not clear how it will impact his movement. He is certainly the most prominent creationist in the Muslim world. His books (probably written by a pool of authors) are widely available in different languages and his organization has made "science" documentaries defending his brand of creationism that run frequently in Muslim countries (in fact, daily on one of the channels in Pakistan). I hope his finances gets disclosed but there is also a potential of the Turkish government turning him into a martyr. Stay tuned.

13 Tips for creating a successful new online productFrom the article: "There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to speak, proposes that

Here is a good example of science-religion cooperation: Saving "Gods's creation" unites scientist, evangelical leader:

A Nobel laureate scientist and a leader of the evangelical Christian movement walk into a restaurant.

It sounds like the setup for a joke, a scenario that is screaming for a punch line that plays off the seemingly endless disagreements between faith and science.

But this is a true story, and Dr. Eric Chivian and the Rev. Richard Cizik have come up with a zinger no one could expect. They went to lunch together to agree on something - the need to curb negative human impact on the Earth. And the partnership they formed that afternoon in 2005 has led this odd couple of the environmental movement to be named, today, to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

"I must admit I approached that meeting with some anxiety," said Chivian (pronounced chih-vee-an), director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, "I'm involved in evolutionary biology. I support stem cell research. I have gay friends who are married. I felt I had positions that would be at odds with his."

Cizik (pronounced sigh-zik), vice president for governmental affairs for the 45,000-church National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, D.C,, had similar reservations. But, as they point out, they were not there to discuss their differences. What brought them together is what Chivian calls "a deep, fundamental commitment to life on earth."

Together, they formed the Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative, which aims to unite the two communities to help bring an environmental message into the large and powerful evangelical movement.

But evolution can still be a problem for evangelicals. Here is an example where many reject science altogether:

The problem, according to Cizik, is that many in the evangelical community have built a barrier between themselves and the scientific community because of the way they have been treated for their belief in creation over evolution. As a consequence, many have made what Cizik calls the illogical decision to turn a deaf ear to what science has to say about climate change.

How did they make this thing work without a conflict:

On the whole, both Chivian and Cizik said their scientist-evangelical partnership has gone smoother than either anticipated. Before bringing both sides into the same room, Chivian consulted with conflict resolution specialists; they never needed them. The scientists have agreed to refer to the natural world as the creation, and evangelicals have painted the broader issue under the umbrella term "creation care." (Chivian, personally, thinks "Armageddon in slow motion" is a more apt description.)

So is there a problem for scientists to call the natural world as "the creation"? Hmm...its a close call (how about - "the creation" [of the Earth from natural processes]?). Environment is a serious issue right now - and if this is what it takes to bring a large segment of the population on board, then perhaps its ok. Of course, there should not be any compromise on evolution or on mentioning the age of the Earth in billions of years. Carl Sagan in the late 80s and in the 90s reached a similar conclusion and considered environmentalism to be an excellent place for science & religion cooperation. The Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative is one example of how this cooperation may look like.

Read the full article here.

50 More Excellent Blog DesignsFrom the article: "Designing blogs is easy. Designing blogs in a unique way is hard. Whatever blog engine you are using, there are literally thousands of templates available which you can apply directly, without any significant code modifications. That’s efficient, but it’s not creative, because using a default blog-template you risk to end up with some wide-spread

A nice short segment on the evolution of the eye from the National Center for Science Education. This is part of Expelled Exposed. (tip from Greg Laden's blog)



and while at it, check out this news about a squid with eyes the size of a soccer ball (hmm...fried calamari eyes...)

Without the queen the hive will perish, and perish fast! New beekeepers fail to realize how crucial it is to have a healthy queen, and how fast a hive will die when the queen perishes. Sure, the colony will try to raise another queen, but to do that several factors have to work perfectly. Needless to say, we do not live in a perfect world and the colony does not always get the job done in time and remain queenless and perish--and fast!
Because of this, queens are in short supply and in extreme high demand.There are plenty of apiaries that sell queens, but usually you have to wait two weeks or more before they can ship. Here's the problem: Queens that die now, say in May, are hard to find replacement for until June. A hive will be too far gone if a they have to wait more than two weeks for a queen.
You must have a queen supplier's number in your speed dial! You must have a good source for queens or else you could lose your hive fast. Think about this for a moment. We pay as much as $100 for a package of bees, but if we lose the queen, we can lose the entire colony and the entire cost of the package. Queens sell for between $10 to $30 which is a small investment to keep the hive alive and growing.
For the most part, queens stay out of trouble and avoid calamity. But, not always. As she ages, she can be ousted by the bees due to her poor performance in laying eggs. Not to mention our inspections pose the greatest threat to her. Moving frames, smashing lids down, prying hive bodies apart and smashing them together can lead to the queen being killed. I accidentally smashed and killed a queen Sunday. I know to watch carefully, but this time I never saw where she was and smashed her dead. It happens. We must be more careful not to kill the queen when working our hives.
I've never been too keen on marking queens. For one, it is costly and time consuming. And since there are no Africanized hives in Illinois, I'm not worried about my queens being superceded by Africanized queens. Without marked queens, you can never tell if your original queen has been replaced.
But I'm changing my mind about marking queens. A marked queen is beneficial because it aids the beekeeper in identifying the queen more quickly, thus knowing where the queen is so as not to accidentally kill her. It also allows us to keep detailed records on a specific queen, particularly her age and performance.
Also, when making splits, the queen can get moved around, so by having her marked and numbered you'll always know the history of that particular queen no matter where you place her.
In the past I would occasionally mark certain queens by picking them up and holding them by their legs and mark their thorax. Even whiteout works fine. Testers model paint works better but takes a few minutes longer to allow it to dry.
But I decided that I needed a better way to track not only my queens, but specific bees in my observation hive. I'm building this awesome and huge observation hive that holds 8 deep frames. In it I hope to study various habits of these marked bees. So, I've decided to number all my queens and specific bees for my observation hive. Everyone should have an observation hive. Really, it is a blast!! I've studied the whole observation matter for some time now, and at first shied away from it because it can be hard to operate. However, after attempting to overcome some common problems, it really is a great research and educational tool for the beekeeper. Not to mention it is a huge attention getter! I'll do my next lesson on the "how to" of an observation hive.
Also, I've number a great number of my bees, and I can actually watch their behavior and even find number 15 out on a flower.
Let me show you how you too can number/color code your queens yourself. It is very easy and you'll feel like a professional entomologist when you're done.
First, you must know that there is an International Color Code system for marking queens. Do not just mark your queens any ole color. You'll forget what year you started with them.  Here's how the color code works:

So, this year, queens should be marked in red. The span between years is 5 years. It would be next to impossible for the queen to live that long, so you would not have to wonder if the red dot meant 2008 or 2013.
So how in the world can you mark a queen. We sell the complete kit for marking your queens or bees too, but let me walk you through step by step.

Okay, first open up your hive and locate your queen. Here's mine. I found her fast because it was a newly install package, and not a full hive.
Next I gently chase her down and pick her up by her wings or thorax, the middle section just behind her head.
In the field, I have my marking system in hand, which is a plastic tube with a removable plunger in one end, and a screened opening in the other. I place her in there while holding everything over the hive, incase she falls off, she's back in her hive and not in the grass somewhere.
Next, I slowly push up the plunger being careful not to snag a leg or wing. I wait until the queen stands on the plunger, then I slide her up to the screen. When she is close to the top, I slow down and carefully slide the plunger until the top of her thorax pokes up through the screen. It may seem like you are smashing her, but you don't want to push any harder than just to hold her thorax in a screen square as in this picture. You can click on the picture for a larger view.
Next, I punch out one of the numbers from the numbering kit that comes with this complete marking kit. For this queen, I've chosen number 4 and of course in keeping with the International Color Coding system, I've chosen the color red. This kit also comes with non-toxic glue. I put a little glue on the back side of the number, and carefully place it on her thorax. I press down gently to give it a good seat. I hold her in this position for a minute or two allowing the glue to dry. I have big hands so I wear a jeweler's magnifying glass for better placement and control. We sell these as well if you need one. At 48, my close up eyesight is not what it used to be :)

Now, she is numbered and ready to be returned to her hive. I make sure she is over the hive, very close down to a frame before pulling out the plunger. Some times she does not immediately drop out so I gently shake her out on to the frames.
For your sake, I pulled out the frame to show you how proud she is of her new number and notice how impressed all the other bees are as they stare and marvel over her new red number four.
Also, now I can keep a notebook and make any kind of notations on queen number 4 that I want. If she is ever replaced, I'll know it as well, because her replacement will not wear the number 4.
Marking worker bees is a bit harder because this system is made for a larger queen and the smaller workers squeeze through the top screen. But, with a little patience I was able to pin them at just the right moment and number them.
You don't have to use numbers if you don't want to mess with the glue and numbering system. We sell a paint pen, so that when you pin her thorax up through the screen, you can put on a touch of paint.
In summary, a marked queen is not essential. However, there are benefits that make it worth the while as you have discovered in this lesson. The marking systems are affordable and easy to use.

To order the queen marking kit, just give us a call at: 217-427-2678.
Thanks for joining me for another beekeeping lesson.
Remember to BEE-Have yourself!
David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
217-427-2678
www.honeybeesonline.com