Hostess Ginger Burnham greeted us at her lovely home overlooking Cassidy Bayou a little ways down Jenkins Road. It was a perfect fall day with leaves falling right on cue.
Cindy Ellis opened the meeting with news of the district meeting in Grenada, where our club received a blue ribbon certificate of achievement and helped contribute toward a new Blue Star 10 Thousand Dollar Scholarship at Mississippi State University. Cindy had great praise for Charleston’s Magnolia Garden Club and their many achievements for active participation in community beautification.
Lynn Gates gave a Backyard Bird Study on mourning doves. Tan with brown markings and longer pointed wings and tails than the gray dove, they are seed eaters, monogamous and almost always lay two eggs. One appeared out my kitchen window after my brother died but that’s not garden club news.
We were treated to a marvelous presentation on “Saving the Bees” by Doug Sullivan-Gonzales. Doug is from Oxford, where he was the first and now retired dean of the Honors College at the University of Mississippi. Doug remains a professor, researcher and writer on Central American History and beekeeping is his hobby that keeps him very busy.
In 2009, he had read up on bees and contacted folks in five locations to “sharecrop” their location. In exchange for half the honey, he would do all the beekeeping. His honey ends up being about midgrade and could sell for about $9 a jar but he is not interested in selling honey. His interest is in the bees and I can tell you I understand why (wait for it).
Bees were not native to North America; they were imported from European settlers for mead and beverage purposes. Now one-third of American crops are dependent on bees, with Mississippi transporting bees to other states to pollinate crops. including California to pollinate their almond crop.
Did you know that bees have a way of communicating that ends up being a democracy? Yep, they fly off in different directions if they need a new place to make a hive and come back and vote on it. It’s true, you can read all about it in a handy book, “The Honey Bee Democracy,” by Thomas Seeley.
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about saving the bees? For me it was to stop using pesticides. Better answer: Stopping the Varroa mite. It carries a virus that enters the larva and prevents the bees’ wings from forming, causing entire colonies to collapse.
Varroa mites can be treated in a variety of ways, involving oxalic acid — yep, the same thing found in Popeye’s spinach. It comes in crystals or powders can be vaporized with machines for beekeepers or a liquid applied to a blue shop rag draped across a beehive, allowing the bees to prance around on it, carry the acid inside and cure the hive with the mites falling off the legs.
OK, you waited for it. Now I understand why Doug has such an interest in bees. He passed around the flats where the wax honeycombs were made in exact hexagon formation. As a poor math student, I could not draw a hexagon with a ruler, compass and protractor.
As a woman of faith, I can look at that comb and see something so miraculous that it surely has saved me. Oh, by the way, Doug is also a Presbyterian minister.
That’s not all, folks. We have to talk about art, food and fellowship. Cindy Ellis made the greatest Smith Lake cake out of some recipe book I didn’t get the name of because I’ll just ask her to make it since she said it was easy. It was served on McCarty Pottery nutmeg dessert plates, the table decoration was a festive fall arrangement of some grasses and such that Ginger picked from the field and another arrangement was made up in a large pumpkin.
While all the ladies were fellowshipping, I was touring the walls and halls looking at the art. I wasn’t being rude; it was so beautiful, it would have been rude to not look, OK? I studied it some up close and personal. I didn’t touch, except I had to pet the head of the Delta Dog who came from New Orleans. Let me tell you, he just won my heart. Thank you, Ginger, for allowing me to ramble your walls. I have to bring my art teacher, Carol Roark, who’s on the East Side.
