Portfolio: about.me/chacal/
This site includes occasional ramblings by carolyn rhea drapes (chacal la chaise), Designer, photographer, artist. MA, ABD PhD, Rhetoric and Writing Studies, UTEP. Social media: Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram.
Thursday, July 04, 2019
Bus rides 🚌 to Pershing Drive, shots 💉, and arroz con frijoles 🌯, with a bowl of hot, red Jello water 🥣
Thursday, June 06, 2019
Too many bees! 🐝 🐝 🐝 Or adventures in feral bee removal
as “the mutt of the beekeeping world,” Beepods
Domesticated bees are social creatures. They gather pollen to make their home, honeycombs, and honey to house, feed, and care for their queen, her worker bees, the her one-act male drones. All the while, they prepare for their new queen. As a colony, they appreciate a calm quiet place near moving water.
A drowsy remaindered bee. The next morning, she was
gone. She must have recovered, washed herself up,
and flew off to find a new hive.
|
Over the course of several years (I don’t think before October 2016 as that’s when the injured owl stood on the green box trying to be invisible) I believe the bees did their bee thing inside the green rectangular box that sits beneath a pine tree that needs trimming.
With the help of friends, I hunted for someone who could use a few new bees. That’s when I discovered the Paso del Norte Beekeepers Association.
By submitting a form on their website, I was contacted a few hours later by a beekeeper named Josh Meier. He meet up at the house, and successfully relocated the queen and her colony. It took a while because that box was packed with combs, bees, and honey.
Generally, bees have a range of between three to five miles. So from our backyard they roamed. They could get as far as the greens of the Coronado Country Club, all the fountains and swimming pools in between, to vegetation, whether native or planted flowering trees and plants. They could roam a bit up the mountainside and gather pollen from the wildflowers blooming since March, and bring back bags of pollen on their legs. Back they'd fly to their green sprinkler control box hive.
Possible range of our backyard bees. Map courtesy, Beepod, Honey Bee Forage Map |
In time, the colony grew until our neighbor noticed the bees and how much they appreciated his new fountain. This being after the house stood empty for at least five years. Before then, the pool the new owner replaced with his fountain was covered with a slipshod and highly problematic cover. There was no pool water there or routine sprinklers running.
Timestamp sidebar: In October 2016, a male great horned owl (one of a mated pair) suffered a broken wing and stood on the sprinkler control box trying to be invisible. Didn’t work. Caught beneath a sheet and stowed in a large box for transport, he was relocated to Stick House Sanctuary for rehab and was later released |
Josh Meier moves bees for you. |
Up above us on La Posta, someone lounged by a pool and played random pop songs on their tinny iPod speakers (millennial boombox.) Two doors down, a neighbor’s dog barked continuously. The late afternoon light filtered by the smoke of pine needles render the bees drunk and drowsy.
Josh cleaned out the sprinkler control box and collected about five frames worth of combs. In the end he had to vacuum the remaining stray bees who stumbled upon the bee relocation program as they were returning home from a long day gathering pollen in the neighborhood and mountainside flora. He noted any remaining bees will either move on to find another hive, or wait for the queen to return. Sadly, they will live for but a month in all, and may not have long to wait to meet the many earlier queens and other bees who went before them.
He used pine needles to create smoke that make bees drowsy (drunk). Immediately, the backyard smelled like we were smoking a brisket.
Raw combs straight from the hive. |
Tomorrow, he will cut into a wall to remove another feral hive somewhere else in this county. In addition, he noted our hive was about three weeks away from swarming.
Swarms occur when bees can no longer sustain itself due to its population and must therefore divide in two. One group heads out with the reigning queen, and the remainder stays in place with a new queen in waiting. Chances are they wouldn’t have re-established themselves very far away. Perhaps, just over the fence inside the next green sprinkler control box they found. Good luck bees. May you multiply and divide and make as good of honey as you left here today.
Thanks to Josh for his quick, careful work. And thanks to Ray for alerting us to their existence. And most of all, thanks to the rehomed bees for not colonizing in my courtyard wall, and behaving as sweet as their honey tastes.
Two jars of Backyard Honey™️ 🍯 as @prepgirl77 calls it. In all, we collected about one pint from the combs Josh gave us!
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Take your child to work day, was Take your daughter to work day
Twitterscope: You may begin a project with an assertive surge, but conditions are quick to temper your approach...Work with the cosmic momentum, not against it. You can reach your destination if you’re willing to take the scenic route.
More for Capricorn bit.ly/A5KmeJ
#ADHD that’s been happening my whole life... #cosmicmomentum (wtf?) #ego most assuredly that... #caution? Never. #ScenicRoute? Forever and a day.
BTW, everyday when i went by #scat (sun city area transit aka shuffling chicanos around town) aka the bus, to go to downtown El Chuco, to the old school retail department store where both my parents worked, was #bringyourchildtoworkday. That actually was the cheapest form of after school childcare ever.
Either Bassett Center or to downtown #ElPaso, and itoccurred at least 3–4 times a week. If i went to town by myself, I didn’t have to make supper for us.
bit.ly/A5KmeJWednesday, February 06, 2019
Lost Guitars: Google book searches, Twitter, and Milagros
Glad to hear of its return, and reminds me of #MilagroBeanFieldWar with its disembodied apendage, #elbrazoOnofre like a milagro charm depicting an arm, truck, or guitar.— 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖆𝖑 (@chacal_lachaise) February 6, 2019
Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Finally Reunites With Stolen Guitar. ^@RollingStone https://t.co/LK3sdD725G pic.twitter.com/JWAkMCoO4m
On Tuesday, Corgan’s fortunes changed. A friend of his contacted him with a picture of a guitar that looked like the stolen instrument. But he was still incredulous because he’d been tricked before. “Somebody sent me a picture a couple of weeks ago of another one of my guitars, and I wrote the guy back and said, ‘How did you get my guitar?'” he says. “And he wrote back,
‘Oh, it’s a recreation.’ He’d literally gotten the same stickers, worn them down in the same way and scraped the paint so it looked worn. You could have fooled me.” So he decided to check it out in person. Sure enough, it was the early Seventies Fender Stratocaster that he had been looking for for more than 25 years.
Corgan knows it’s his guitar because it had certain distinguishing marks beyond the psychedelic paint job he’d given it. He recognized the place where a previous owner had carved the initials “KM” into it, and he remembered the placement of certain cigarette burns on the headstock “that I always thought were unsightly.” These were things he’d never talked about in the press, so it would have been impossible for someone to copy them.
[...]
Perhaps the most incredible part of it all is that the guitar was ostensibly stolen in the first place; it’s an instrument worthy of a story by Homer. Corgan recalls that about 10 years after Chamberlain sold him the instrument a person he didn’t know asked him if he still owned his guitar. He then described the one that Corgan just got back. “He said, ‘I lent it to Jimmy, it was actually my guitar,'” the singer says. “And I said, ‘Oh, I feel so bad.’ And he wasn’t mad. He was like, ‘Oh, that’s OK. Jimmy’s my friend. If Jimmy sold it to you and you used it, that makes me happy.’
“But that’s the guitar’s circuitous history,” he continues. “Jimmy procured it and somebody procured it from me, and now it’s back. This guitar has a certain magical mystery to it. It changed the fortune of my life. So that’s why I felt it would come back to me. It was like the talisman or something, like in Lord of the Rings. It was meant to come back to me.”
Tuesday, February 05, 2019
To the Students: What Is and Why the Need for Superb Owl Sunday?
What Is and Why the Need for Superb Owl Sunday?
That's roughly $175,000 per second.
This year's host network, CBS, is charging a record $5.25 million for just a 30-second spot during the championship match-up between the Los Angeles Rams and New England Patriots, reports CNBC's Julia Boorstin.
(Huddleston, 2019)
Here is a collection of backgrounder articles and cautions at the CommLawBlog:
https://www.commlawblog.com/tags/super-bowl-trademark/
The Atlantic Photo (@TheAtlPhoto) February 3, 2019
References
Huddleston, T., Jr. (2019, January 30). This is how much it costs to air a commercial during the 2019 Super Bowl.
Retrieved February 5, 2019, from CNBC Make It website:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/ how-much-it-costs-to-air-a-commercial-during-super-bowl-liii.html
Jauron, V. (2019, February 3). A snowy owl rests on Jones Beach on Long Island in New York [Photograph].
Retrieved from
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2019/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-
iii/s25_955699818/main_1200.jpg
Salmi, Z. (2019, February 3). A barn owl in Galyat, Pakistan [Photograph]. Retrieved from
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2019/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-
iii/s09_908304352/main_1200.jpg
Tag archives: Super Bowl trademark [Blog post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from CommLawBlog website:
https://www.commlawblog.com/tags/super-bowl-trademark/
Taylor, A. (2019, February 3). Superb Owl Sunday III. The Atantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-iii/581917/
TheAtlPhoto. (2019, February 3). Superb Owl Sunday III - 28 photos of these magnificent nocturnal hunters.
If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely)...
https://t.co/G1aX9U9JFR [Tweet]. Retrieved from
https://twitter.com/TheAtlPhoto/status/1092149813766967297
Sometimes you need to get away from it all.
And sometimes, it's time to return and be part of the larger world. Between the first of 2023 and February 14, I painted many watercolo...
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Current Conditions: Fort Bliss National Cemetery Originally uploaded by chacal la chaise . While I will always try to enter photos ...
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Accompanying an announcement reminding students a draft was due soon, this image was included with a note about the deer that live nearby....