#requeening

[lifeinpoetry]

Don’t talk to me of a god: / it’s not what saved me.

— Amanda Moore, from “Gratitude,” Requeening

[lazyevaluationranch]

25/09/2020 When we opened the beehive to do the autumn mite treatment, we didn't see a queen, eggs, or brood. They have a huge amount of honey, but they don’t have enough bees to huddle up and stay warm over winter. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe the Wasp Incident was so bad they relocated. Maybe the queen died. 

An extremely helpful beekeeper gave us an extra queen. The new queen is in a plastic mesh cage with a candy door. When you first put the queen in the hive, the bees get all YOU’RE NOT MY REAL MOM! STRANGER DANGER! They swarm over the cage and bite the bars angrily. But it takes them a couple days to chew through the candy door, and by then they’ll have gotten used to the new queen’s scent, and they'll decide she's Pretty Okay, Actually. 

We’re hoping they can get their population up before winter starts.

[lifeinpoetry]

Even if it would devour us, I would chew through this cage we keep our love in to make us new to each other once more.

— Amanda Moore, from “Requeening,” Requeening

[lifeinpoetry]

Turning toward home, I bend to collect a wrinkled postcard at the curb: an advertisement for the Monet exhibit. How I loved those paintings when I was younger, all of them nearly the same: haystack, haystack, haystack. The only difference the season and time of day, which is to say they are like this grief these months later: all the same but for the light.

— Amanda Moore, from “Everything Is a Sign Today,” Requeening

[lifeinpoetry]

Poison berry, potential / weapon: to be woman, / to know violence.

— Amanda Moore, from “Self-Defense Haibun,” Requeening

[lifeinpoetry]

The hills cradle my house and my half-empty bed, but I am no more a fixed point than love.

All night in bed I am unraveling.

— Amanda Moore, from “Ithaca,” Requeening

[lifeinpoetry]

Here in the blazing garden, lazy white mothdrift, roostercrow and bluster all day long, I press a single bud in the back of a book to preserve something: its color maybe, its watery stalk. I pop some leaves in my mouth to taste the name: marigold, little calendar, weatherglass, clock that ticked those hours and minutes, the seconds and me unfurling.             How I worked to open.

— Amanda Moore, from “Calendula,” Requeening

[sallyjadlow]

Queen Bee Blues

This year seems to be particularly difficult for queen health. To keep a hive from swarming, I split the hive and purchased a new queen for the new colony. A week later I checked the hive for evidence of eggs. There were none. After checking through the hive, I found no queen.  I checked the hive the split came from and there was no queen there either! I called beekeepers.com and ordered two new…

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