Bessie's Gifts

Bessie was the previous owner of our homestead.  Now 94 and living in an assisted living center in town, she and her husband spent many happy years here raising their family.  I have never met Bessie in the flesh, but I feel I've come to know her from the gifts she left behind in the form of the trees, bulbs, and flowers of every description and variety that populate the property.  Every weekend we make a new discovery or two.

 Lilacs, on the bush and in a porcelain enamel pitcher on my kitchen table.  Their heady perfume filled the house.

Pear tree in bloom.  There are several, as well as apples, cherries, and plums, all bursting forth with blossoms.

Onions coming up in field beside the house.  They came up on their own, most likely from seed from a mature plant.  Who knows how long they had been waiting for an errant bit of moisture?

This caught my attention when I was clearing trash out of the garden.  It's a very old grape vine.   The dead and brittle vines I cleared out of the fence above it spread all along the fence, so it was a prolific plant at one time.  In the year the homestead had been vacant it had received no water, yet managed to hang on through the blazingly hot summer.  A well-established root system and decent winter snowfall were its salvation.  We planted four concord vines just last week.  I wonder what type of fruit this old-timer will yield?

Bessie would know.  I wish I could ask her.

 

My Attempt at Refining Beeswax

Since beekeeping is high on the list of priorities for the homestead, I was excited when Smoky brought this home:

It's a bit hard to visualize against the orange of the Home Depot bucket.  This is better:

Beeswax!  Smoky found it inside an electrical panel.  It was an abandoned hive.

Amid visions of handcrafted candles and little pots of sweet-smelling unguents, I searched the internet for information on how to best extract and refine the wax.  I found an excellent blog post
at The Lone Star Homestead.  The trick is to slowly melt the wax with water, allowing the impurities and wax to separate.  The theory is that the dirt and bee parts will sink to the bottom and the pure wax will rise to the top.  It's necessary to repeat the melting and cooling process with water a couple of  times before carefully melting the pure wax and straining it through a piece of nylon stocking or cheesecloth.  A pan dedicated to the melting process was in order (you won't want to use it for anything else), so I hopped down to Goodwill to find one.  $8 was more than I wanted to pay, but what I found was heavy gauge stainless steel vessel with a cover and a pouring lip - perfect!

I filled the pan halfway with water and added the wax.  You don't want to overload the pan.

As I was adding the wax, I noticed that it was webby and what looked like dead mites or larvae.

With a sinking heart but hopeful still, I began to heat the pan on a medium-low setting.  Maybe all the webs and whatever-they-were would sink to the bottom.

But no sinking was apparent.   Beeswax was obviously in there, but so were pieces and parts of I don't know what.  Perhaps they were dead bees?

It was a mess.  Still hoping, I put the pan out in the garage where it was cold.  After the top layer hardened, I removed it in pieces.  This is what it looked like:

Obviously, there was beeswax in there (notice it on my fingers), but extracting it was going to be tough.  I decided to try the melting process another time and gauge the results.  Maybe the chunks would fall to the bottom.

They didn't.

With not much prospect of successfully extracting (much less refining) any beeswax, I sadly threw the clumpy stuff away.

No candles.  No creams.  No lip balms.  (Sniff!)

I read up a bit, and have come to the conclusion that this wild hive suffered a wax moth infestation that led to its demise.  Too bad for the bees and too bad for me!  I will have to wait till we have our own hives before I can try this again.

Thoughts on Hurricane Sandy

I have a question in to our realtor about the large wash running through the corner at the back of the property.  With the recent drought we've been having in the southwest, the wash hasn't run in years but the owners confirmed that it has run in the past.  The very fact of its existence confirms that large volumes of water - either from excessive rain or snow melt - have run through it at some point or another.  As the house and outbuildings show no evidence of water damage we're not overly concerned about future flooding but we do need to know how the county designates the land:  flood plain, flood fringe, or flood way.

In Arizona, we tend to extremes in many things.  Flooding is one of them.  I remember watching in disbelief in 1997 as my parents' cars bobbed gently down the street in the overflow of the swollen Verde River. (Their house was designated flood fringe.)  You never cross a wash that's running and you certainly don't build a house in a flood way.

Which is why I am having a problem generating much sympathy for the victims of Hurricane Sandy who lost their homes due to flooding.  (Actually, "recipients" is a better term than "victims," which implies suffering due to no fault of their own.)

Don't get me wrong; I do sympathize with their plight.  I can only imagine the horror of being forced out of your home, having all your dearest possessions destroyed, and then having either no home to which to return or one that was irreparably damaged.

But I have to ask:  why did they purchase homes either right on the water or in imminent danger from the water?  Surely it was no secret to them that they lived in an area prone to hurricanes.

Certainly it was their right to purchase homes wherever they pleased.  We all have that right.  But if that is your choice then you must accept the accompanying liabilities and make responsible provisions for them.

Translation:  if you live in a home at risk of flooding you buy flood insurance.

The indignant response heard from advocates of hurricane victims has been, "Well, these are working people!   They just could not afford flood insurance!"

If they could not afford flood insurance then they should be living somewhere else.  Depending on how our property is designated we have, as we see it, just two choices:  buy the property and accept that it might flood and we lose everything, or, 2) buy flood insurance.

Notice that expecting the government to bail us out of having made a bad decision is not one of our options.  Neither should it be for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.  All notions of accepting responsiblity aside, we simply can't afford it.  Our government can't even fund itself.  From where is the $60 billion dollars for a proposed aid package supposed to be found?

I tell my middle school students to own what they do.  Do not blame others for the consequences of your actions.  It's advice grown-ups should heed as well.