News From Around the Root Simple Compound

This week a crew will descend on our backyard to begin phase one of a backyard landscaping reboot. First they will break out the word’s ugliest concrete patio and remove the infamous grape arbor, a.k.a. rat canopy. Then they will dig down to adjust the grading at the back of the house so that water flows away not towards the house.

I struggle for words to fully describe the ugliness of this concrete patio. It’s a cracked abomination made of red tinted concrete with a layer of flaking gray paint. It’s the first thing you see when you exit the back door and it’s driven me nuts for years. Our contractor likes to reuse concrete but but I doubt this stuff is savable. He plans to replace it with a new patio made of broken concrete. Then he’ll replace the arbor with a more carefully constructed one minus the grapes.

Meanwhile, in the workshop, I’ve had a kind of awakening to the use of hand planes. They’ve been in use for thousands of years and don’t send you push notifications or collect your most private thoughts or “likes.” In addition to using those hand planes to finish a new kitchen table, I’ve been experimenting with the oddball practice of fuming oak. Full report when the projects are finished.

And, yes, we’re really late with the next episode of the podcast. I’m on it.

Saturday Tweets: Passover/Holy Saturday Edition

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Open Floor Plan

In a stunning bit of hypocrisy, we’re busy making the floor plan of our house a bit more open in spite of our rants and raves about the practice. Allow me to explain.

Many years ago, when I installed our living room floor, I pulled up a baseboard and discovered that the wall between the living room and bedroom was of recent vintage. What we now use as a bedroom was originally a sitting room or dining room. And the two closets that share a wall between the two bedrooms used to be one big closet with a window. The window is visible from the outside but plugged up on the inside.

I’m pretty sure that the house we live in was a kit offered by the Pacific Ready Cut company. Style #48 in the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut catalog closely resembles our floor plan with the dining room and living room flipped and the closet in a different orientation.

We have a kind of rule about home remodeling at our house: if it’s missing we replace it, if it’s broken we repair it. I like that our house is one of the few bungalows in our neighborhood that managed to escape the horrors of post-WWII remodeling trends. Restoring the original dining room and putting the closet back to the way it used to be will be the final major work we plan to do on this house.

Why bother with a meticulous early-20th century re-do when current design trends dictate that everything shalt look like Dwell Magazine? At the risk of sounding like Prince Charles, I’m just not a fan of post-1940s vernacular architecture. I like a house that looks like 1920 both on the outside and the inside. This puts me in cranky territory.

The professional gatekeepers of the architectural and design worlds would hold that you can’t go back to some golden era of the past. And yet, I suspect I’m not alone in feeling that something is wrong with the way things are. The problem reminds me of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “ratchet effect,” the idea that once you learn something (such as modernism and post-modernism) you can’t un-learn it. I don’t have an answer to this conundrum and I could also go on to site Jurgen Habermas haunting speech “An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age,” but that would delay all the work I’ve got to do over the coming month.

Clearly it’s time to put the philosophy books down and do some “deconstruction” with my new Harbor Freight reciprocating saw.

What is and is not a “Swarm” of Bees

Root Simple reader Luis wrote with a simple request: a blog post with which to refer neighbors who freak out at the site of bees in their yards. It’s hard for those of us who garden and love nature to wrap our head around this fear, but I thought I’d offer a concise blog post when this issue arises.

What is a swarm?
This is what a swarm of bees looks like:

Image: Mark Osgatharp.

Swarms are the way honeybee colonies reproduce. As with all matters related to the biology of the honeybee, it’s easier to think of a colony as a single super-organism rather than thousands of individuals. Swarming takes place when a colony decides to make a new queen. Once the new queen hatches, the old queen takes off with about half the workers. Typically, they will land somewhere temporarily (such as a tree branch or the underside of a table) while they look for a permanent home. In this state they are not aggressive because they are not protecting babies and honey. Leave them alone and they will move on within a day or so. Very rarely you might spot a swarm in flight from one point to another. In this case the swarm will resemble a dark cloud. Like a resting swarm, a swarm in flight is also harmless.  For more information on swarms see this longer post.

Worker bees pollinating a flower. This is not a “swarm.”

What is not a “swarm”

Let’s say you have a flowering plant or tree and there are hundreds of bees landing on the flowers. They literally may be crawling all over the tree, but they will be working as individuals, not clustering together in a bunch. That is how you know they are not a swarm. Seeing so many bees in one place may be a bit frightening for some, but remember, those bees are working at gathering pollen and nectar (and as a side benefit helping the plants reproduce and make fruit by distributing that pollen). The bees you see hovering and landing on flowers are singularly focused on their work. They have no interest in you. It’s unlikely that they will sting, but it can happen if you brush up against one. Worker bees gathering pollen and nectar in your yard will never work as a group to sting you. Multiple stings from a group of bees will only happen if you disturb the place where they live as a colony.

What does a bee colony look like?
Bee colonies prefer to live in dark enclosed spaces such as a tree cavity, a crack in a wall, an electrical box or in the boxes beekeepers provide for a colony. If you see bees coming in and out of a hole in a wall, tree, etc. during daylight hours you’ve likely found their home. The activity at the entrance to the colony will look a lot like the landing pattern of a busy airport with bees coming and going constantly in an orderly fashion. Inside the colony you’ll find thousands of workers (all female), a queen and few male drones all crammed together in a tight space. If you find a colony leave them alone. If you have a colony somewhere where you don’t want them, please call a beekeeper. Please see my post on how and why you should find a reputable beekeeper.

What if the bees are “Africanized?”
Don’t let anyone try to scare you with Africanized bee hysteria. Read my longer post on this subject.

Wasps and hornets
Not all black and yellow flying insects are honeybees (Apis mellifera). There are also wasps, hornets, bumblebees and 4,000 species of native bees in the United States alone. These are often mistaken for honeybees, but their habits are very different. Collectively the evolutionary family tree that includes these insects are known as HymenopteraThe 150,000 known Hymenoptera have a beneficial roll to play in the web of life. In addition to gathering pollen and nectar many Hymenoptera species, such as wasps, eat other insects. Read Kelly’s blog post on a common Southern California wasp and why you should not freak out about it.

But I’m allergic!
Every human being is “allergic” to bees in that if you get stung you will experience pain, swelling and itchiness. Taking Benydryl immediately will greatly reduce swelling and discomfort. A small percentage of the population is severely allergic to bees and will go into Anaphylaxis and require immediate medical attention. If you get stung by a bee and experience trouble breathing, a weak pulse, or dizziness you should call 911.

The bottom line
Without bees and other pollinating insects we’d all starve. Even if you don’t like bees it’s not like they are going to go away. Nature is beautiful, wondrous and inspiring but she also has her stings. Stop trying to control nature, relax and you’ll enjoy the show.

Saturday Tweets: #FlyingLess, VHS Making a Comeback and Alanis Morissette Impressions