Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Several years ago I took the Boulder County Beekeepers' Association class for how to keep bees. It was in the Boulder County Farming co-op and it was in the dead of winter. They told us all about the thousand ways bee colonies can be killed and how to do your best to slow down the death... So I didn't really seriously think about it for quite some time. Last year, one of the big Denver pollination and honey outfits died, and they were selling their equipment for cheap, and I got six boxes, a feeder, a queen excluder, and a telescoping top for $100... Yes, the class told me everything about why getting used equipment was a bad idea, but... it was so inexpensive, and I just wanted to try.  Succeeding wasn't so much the point, as just actually having the courage to try.

It's weird having both Blogger and G+ and wondering how that works. *laughs* Anyway.... here's a link to the G+ album of the little trek John and I took to get my three pounds of bees and their queen. It was more fun than I thought it would be, especially with hundreds of bees just hanging out with the keepers in the garage. It was a very fine example of how to act around these ladies, and how gentle the bees really are when they're not in their hive, yet. All of these commercial bees were bred for gentleness, so I'm actually very happy to have experienced exactly how not-dangerous these girls are.

I remember being a judge of a fanfiction story contest a while back, the people running it picked me because they liked my fanfiction stories, because I had been published, and they thought I knew something about the art of fanfiction, so that I should be useful as a judge. I couldn't fault them for their judgment on that! I mean, yes, I know how to write. I know how to put together sentences, and I know the general structure and reason and ways in which a story should or shouldn't be. But writing is an art, and like with my painting, my writing is all about what I choose to Make Be. It's ALL about constant judgment calls on what I want or don't want in a story or on a page. And the very same judgment that makes me a good writer is the one that made me feel like an awful judge about the relative merit of people's work. Because when I choose, I choose what I want, what I like, what I have a bias for or against.