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May 18, 2011
Illustration: Offering
Offering An illustration by Jory Dayne
A few weeks ago, our paper rep from Zellerbach/Xpedex contacted me about a promotional project they were working on, a gift box of mini-prints on sustainably harvested paper in celebration of Earth Day, and asked if I’d be interested in participating.
The deadline was insane, so I pulled out my sketchbook and thumbed through to see if I had any ideas that would fit the theme. Fortunately, sustainability and stewardship are both things I think about a lot, so I fleshed out a sketch I had done a while ago, and had finished art off to our rep in about three hours.
Today I got a sample print back and I’m pretty stoked. The Mandate Press handled the job, and I’m really chuffed at how my drawing turned out letterpressed — I was nervous about the size and metallic ink; had I known Mandate was at the helm I would have just chilled out about the whole thing. I have no idea how the kit is being distributed, so I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for any details.
In the meantime, remember kids: if you have the option, always ask for FSC certified papers for your projects, it’s one of the only ways to secure a sustainably produced sheet, and has a profound impact on the environment. And put out your campfires. And don’t talk to strangers!
Posted by Jory at 12:02 AM
May 13, 2011
A New Hive
A New Hive Adventures in Apiculture by Jory Dayne
About six years ago, when I was living on the Big Island of Hawai’i, I had the opportunity to visit the hives of Big Island Bees. That was my first exposure to the world of beekeeping, and I walked away with more than a jar of their white organic Ohi’a Lehua honey. I left wondering if I could ever do something like that — I had felt a weird affinity there, strangely at home with the idea, despite the fact I’d never owned so much as an ant farm growing up, and had always been a little timid around bees.
Fast forward a few years, and I see the staggering New Hive from the guys at Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons. I learned about colony collapse disorder and the real threat it posed to the bees and the animals whose food depends on bee pollination (read: all of them, including us). From that point, I did what I always do whenever I get keen to something: I started reading anything I could get my hands on, and annoying everyone with an endless barrage of tidbits that I’d just found out. I learned about the history of beekeeping, honey productions, and even the worship of bees; I read up on beekeepers today with hives on their apartment rooftops in big cities, about large-scale pollination operations, and different Honey varietals: tupelo, clover, wildflower. I started collecting honeys where I could find them: amber mountain honey from Mendon, Utah, Black buckwheat honey from New York, and deep-red honey from Taiga Cedar in Russia. Partly I was wondering how different they could possibly taste (very) and partly it seemed like a very small way to support the beekeepers doing what I thought I could not.
About a year later, I discovered Sunset magazine’s One-Block Diet, an effort to espouse locavore trends and revive a lot of skills that had been slipping from the American landscape: serious gardening, canning, and beekeeping. Here were people with no real experience just jumping into apiculture, and I though “well, if they can do it…”
Intersecting all this interest in such a niche process was a deep seated longing that had been growing in me for a while. I’ve spoken with a lot of friends who work in the digital industries, and we’re all sort of uneasy with how fickle the whole thing is. Our work is unbelievably ephemeral. We push plastic buttons all day for a living. A few weeks ago, Calpernia Addams jokingly asked via Twitter, “What would your helpful #ApocalypseSkill be If a zombie apocalypse happens?” And I think for most of the designers I know, the answer would be similar to mine “Food. I would be food.” Contrast that with my dad, who at four years younger than I am now, had built a two-story home for his new family from scratch. He just knows how stuff works. He can make things happen. Meanwhile, I know teenagers who (no lie) literally did not know that you could make cookie dough at home. I know folks older than me who didn’t know that simple gravity was the chief provider of pressure for most of our tap water.
As a society we’ve lost a lot of knowledge that was critical for survival just a few generations ago, and we’ve become largely segregated from many processes crucial for basic life. This all just boils down to me wishing that I knew how to do more with my hands. That I knew how to make something, anything. I feel like I, and most of our society, have lost most of the tethers to our land, and that loss registers palpable somewhere within me for reasons I don’t really understand. Somehow, bees feel like the beginning of a solution to that problem.
So for the past months I’ve been making all the necessary arrangements, and being pretty vocal about it: I told everyone about my plans. This wasn’t simply me being loud, obnoxious me — to be honest I didn’t want to chicken out and I knew that my own pride would keep me going if my actual determination didn’t. If I kept telling people I was going to keep bees, I would eventually have to start keeping them, if only to save face. I got my first hive, a great little garden top with a copper roof, painted it a crisp white and set it into the garden at my folks’s place out in Riverton — it didn’t seem like a great idea to set up at my house: I’m only renting and there are a bunch of little lawsuits kids in the houses around mine. Meanwhile, my parents have a huge yard with tons of fruit trees and a sprawling garden; their neighborhood is surrounded by farmland and sits right against the mountains — the bees would have plenty to eat and little to disturb. I got my equipment, read a half a dozen more books on the matter, and waited.
Last week my bees finally got here, and despite all my planning, I was still more than a little nervous. I’d planned on attending a few workshops but the weather has been so cold here, making any hiving prior to this last week all but impossible. I realized that despite all the preparations I’d made, my actual experience with bees amounted to exactly zero minutes and zero seconds, and here I’d have 8,000 on my hands in a matter of hours. Then I remembered something Novella Carpenter said in this mesmerizing Urban Farming video from Chow: when she needed to know how to butcher a coney from her backyard farm, she looked it up on YouTube and found ample resources. So I did the same, and about 30 minutes later I had watched three videos on hiving a package of bees — seeing as they were all different, but all worked, I figured there was probably relatively little that could go wrong, and I just settled down about the whole thing. I drove down to Hansen Hives in Sugarhouse, picked up my shoebox sized package of bees, and drove them back to the hive.
And it went off without a hitch. Better, actually. I kept the bees calm with some sugar-water, and they poured down into the hive without hysterics. I thought I would panic when they were all humming around me, but frankly, I was totally smitten with the whole bunch. They were crawling all over my hands, but none of them were being aggressive at all, and the whole rigamarole was over in a matter of minutes. I didn’t get stung once (not that I’m afraid to be, I just expected to be) and I only squished three. I don’t know how serious I am about harvesting honey, I just really love the bees, and more than content to just be a steward. Right now they are working the Hawthorne trees around my house like there’s no tomorrow, and my folks are just as taken with them as I am. I think this is the beginning of something big for me, but I don’t quite know yet what.
Posted by Jory at 1:02 AM