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Two of my favorite things! Art and cake. Wrecked.

William L. Coggshall and Roger A. Morse’s Beeswax: Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products is an excellent resource for artists who want to understand the science and process behind beeswax production in detail. It’s got comprehensive information about the physical properties of wax, harvesting, testing, bleaching and a thirteen page chapter on the uses of beeswax in art and industry.

Check out the two electron photomicrographs of beeswax scales on page 34. Gorgeous, eh? (The layers just slay me.)

Enjoy!

Isn’t beeswax beautiful!?! It’s harvest time and we (actually… he)
are busy rendering the last of our in-house wax in preparation for the new to come in. It’s an abundant time of year.

Beeswax comes in a range of colors from lemon yellow to golden brown. The lightest wax is cappings wax. That’s the new wax in the hive that the bees use to cap over their honey. The darkest wax is from the brood chamber. It’s older wax from the part of the hive where the bees live and raise their young all year round. The golden color comes from the footprints of thousands of bees tracking pollen and propolis around on their tiny feet. I treasure all the colors. The lightest wax makes a beautiful painting medium with high translucency. The darker wax makes richly fragrant candles.

If you’re a painter or cosmetics maker seeking a high grade source of local beeswax ask your neighborhood beekeeper for cappings wax. He or she will know exactly what you mean.

Ha! This is brilliant. It’s a NYTimes story about Berlin artist Christoph Niemann’s adventures in making fine art reproductions out of bathroom tile. If you ever wanted to see Joseph Beuys’ butter art reproduced in a bathtub… today’s your lucky day…

Are you the kind of person who likes hearing new music but doesn’t have a bunch of time to seek it out online? If so, try Paste. I joyfully renewed my subscription last week. It’s a music and culture magazine. Each issue comes with a free CD featuring new music by twenty or so artists – some known, some new.

The Paste CDs have been great company in the studio all year long. I don’t love everything I hear but there’s enough that’s good to keep my anticipation stoked each month.

Ah, dear readers. Have you seen Man on Wire yet? It’s a wonderful documentary about the magical power of art and tells the story of Philippe Petiit’s death-defying tightrope walk between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. It’s not just a daredevil story. Petit’s a true artist and the years of dreaming, scheming and planning that went into pulling off his mind-bending performance are an inspiration. It’s also a poignant coda to the horrors of 9/11.

There’s an interview with director James Marsh in the Summer 2008 issue of Filmmaker Magazine. May it whet your whistle.

One of the compelling subjects Michael Schacker tackles in A Spring without Bees is the perplexing way colony collapse disorder has been covered by the U.S. media.

Here’s a quote:
Rather than giving CCD the serious investigation that it deserves, the U.S. media sometimes has even presented the ongoing catastrophe as a joke or an oddball type of story.

And another:
In a syrupy tone of voice usually reserved for the birth of baby pandas, CNN newswoman Frederica Whitfield exclaimed, “Where have all the honey bees gone?” “No one knows” was the answer given in her report. In light of having just studied the history of the French IMD/honey bee controversy, watching the broadcast was a surreal moment. Nowhere had the media reported the true history of the insecticide battle in France, especially omitting the fact that the French bees came back in 2005. Colony collapse disorder is typically presented as a mystery in the U.S., a puzzle that no one on Earth can definitively give the answer to.

Hmm… There are clear reasons why those with money to lose would prefer CCD to stay shrouded in mystery. It’s less clear why the media, especially TV and video, haven’t done a better job exploding the mystery meme.

As a person with a foot in each world – beekeeping and filmmaking – this is especially interesting to me. Here are three reasons why I think TV media has so far failed to report the full story about pesticides and CCD.

THE MYSTERY IS SEDUCTIVE
There’s something about the CCD mystery story that’s… seductive. The idea that our honeybees are – poof – disappearing has a dark magic about it. It alludes to all the things that make us anxious about the environment while rendering us helpless.

SCIENTISTS ARE MORE CREDIBLE THAN BEEKEEPERS
So far, the story U.S. scientists are telling about CCD (that it’s a tough-to-crack mystery with multiple causes) is different from the story some beekeepers are telling (that there’s a problem with the crops bees are foraging on and it looks like pesticides). Both speak from observation. But their conclusions are different. Whom to believe? My guess is that a soft spoken scientist riding the research train is going to sound more credible to a university trained filmmaker than an impassioned beekeeper. Both may be interviewed. But the scientist’s side gets more weight.

Why scientists & beekeepers aren’t quite matching up is another story… better told by Schacker in A Spring without Bees.

NO JOURNALISM DEGREE REQUIRED
Stories get told differently on TV than they do in print. (Filmmakers are more story-arc oriented than newspaper reporters are.) Documentary filmmakers may care about truth and approach the facts of a story with the same time and care as a newspaper reporter but arrive at the process with a different point of view and training.

So you throw those three things together… a culturally potent story told by a story-sensitive filmmaker with pro-scientist bias and you get…

Something less than probing.

Fall is nigh. Here in Boulder, Colorado we’re having our second consecutive day of cool temperatures and desperately needed rain. Can I stave off winter with this warming picture of summertime bees flying toward the hive? Probably not. But it makes me feel good to see them.

Hooray! Horse Feathers has a new album on the way. Their 2006 release Words Are Dead is a favorite of mine in the studio. Can hardly wait to hear the new songs. Here’s one. Curs in the Weeds.

Yikes! It looks like officials in my hometown – Boulder, Colorado – are recommending imidacloprid (IMD) for black walnut trees besieged by the black walnut twig beetle. This doesn’t bode well for honeybees. According to the research Michael Schacker cites in “A Spring Without Bees” IMD sprayed on soil and seeds can show up in next year’s pollen and nectar resulting in colony collapse when these foods are gathered & eaten by honeybees.

This is a concern. Will let you know when I find out more.

When I wrote about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in September 2007 it appeared as though scientists had identified a pathogen (Israeli Acute Paraylsis Virus) responsible for the massive bee die-offs of 2006 through today. Alas, it didn’t take long for scientists to disprove IAPV as the primary cause of CCD. Since then the prevailing story’s been that CCD is a complex syndrome resulting from multiple stressors working in concert to kill the bees.

Well, dear readers, I just finished reading Michael Schacker’s new book A Spring without Bees. It feels as though the scales have fallen from my eyes. Shacker makes a compelling case that a single substance, the chemical pesticide imidacloprid (IMD), may be responsible for the bee deaths currently categorized under CCD.

A few of Schacker’s points:

• In the United States and France there are strong geographic links between IMD and colony collapse disorder.

• The advertised benefits of the IMD product PREMISE (for termite control) closely match the symptoms presented by a collapsing colony of honeybees. According to the PREMISE label the termites “stop feeding and are unable to maintain their colony” and “makes termites susceptible to infection by naturally occurring organisms.”

• American media has grossly underreported scientific research and policies coming out of France (and now Germany) that show a strong link between CCD and IMD, choosing instead to emphasize the mysterious aspects of CCD.

This is an important book. It’s passionately and clearly written. Carefully researched. A pleasure to read. Highly recommended for anyone seeking new insights into what’s ailing the honeybees.

I love looking at new paintings. Especially encaustic. So taking in Daniella Woolf’s presentation – Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility at the Montserrat Encaustic Conference – was a real treat. She served up an hour’s worth of lush encaustic imagery… almost all by artists new to me. Here are a few sparklers.

Carlos Estrada-Vega
Vibrant grids made of small pieces of encaustic coated wood.

Fanne Fernow
Slushy encaustic grids reminiscent of antique quilts.

Michelle Marcuse
Lush texture and illusion.

Cynthia Winicka
The accidental mycologist.

Here’s an intriguing story about the beguines – a medieval order of Catholic Sisters that may have represented “the world’s oldest women’s movement.”

A choice quote:

Unlike sisterhoods that required a life spent apart from society under vows of chastity, these Catholic women looked for holiness outside monastic norms. Although they lived and prayed together within an enclave, partly as a form of mutual protection… beguines were not confined to the cloister. Many ministered to the poor and sick outside their walls. Lifelong celibacy was not required either. They could leave the order and marry (but not return).

“Holiness outside monastic norms…” I like that.