I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced.
— Sue Hubbell
For a long, long time, nearly 40 years, I never had any bees. I can't think why.
My crickets found me.
In the wild, those traits that are adaptive for survival and reproductive advantage are brought out through natural selection. So cats that were fierce, furtive hunters, alert to the snapping of every twig, with coats that gave them good camouflage, would have been favored by evolution.
I am an early riser.
I spend a lot of time sizing up a tree before I fell it. Once it's down, I clear away the brush around the tree before I start cutting it into lengths so I won't trip and lose my balance with the chain saw running.
All chain saws are formidable and dangerous.
I've never been much for becoming a member of a group.
Spring starts in January in the Ozarks, lurches on in a complicated way, with spurts and setbacks, until May. Then, early in May, there is a cold spell known as blackberry winter because it comes when blackberries bloom. It is a worrisome week for anyone who farms.
Strictly speaking, one never 'keeps' bees - one comes to terms with their wild nature.
We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in a world of little things.
It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end.
Maine is a movable music festival in the summertime.
Sometimes, I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest-building has lost its charm.
Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds.
Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.
I started collecting crickets to study them. Now I expect they will be my companions for many years to come.
Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.
Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils. They can be kept anywhere.
It gets cold here in the Ozarks in the winter. There are often warm winter days, but there are also weeks when the temperature never climbs above freezing.
My bees cover one thousand square miles of land that I do not own in their foraging flights, flying from flower to flower for which I pay no rent, stealing nectar but pollinating plants in return.
You have to take springtime on its own terms in the Ozarks: there is no other way. It can't be predicted. It is unsteady, full of promise, promise that is sometimes broken. It is also bawdy, irrepressible, excessive, fecund, willful.
I've lived all over the country - Michigan, California, Texas, New Jersey, Rhode Island and, now, Maine - but I never understood springtime until I spent 25 years farming in the Ozarks.
Healthy camel crickets spend a lot of their waking hours grooming, so I have learned to recognize the ones that will soon die because they walk about encrusted with sand and bits of litter, having lost all interest in keeping clean.
We live in a world in which there are many live things other than human beings, and many of these things can seem beautiful and amusing and interesting to us if they can catch our attention and if we can step back from our crabbed and limiting and lonely anthropocentricity to consider them.
Our family was like no one else's. My schoolfriends had fathers and grandfathers and uncles who did things, but in my family, women had been the doers.
I know a number of coastal trails in downeast Maine, all of them interesting.
Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but nighthawk migrations tell of shortening days and a season's end.
Nothing gives a person more confidence... than to be zipped snugly inside a bee suit.
Crickets are immaculately clean, harmless animals.
Fiddling with the genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we had become human. We are the fiddlingest animal the world has ever seen.
Everyone should have two or three hives of bees.
Every spring, I begin cutting my firewood for the upcoming winter. It should be cut months ahead of time so it will dry and cure.
My maternal grandmother, Annie Sparks, lived with our family during the while I was growing up. When I came home from school, after having made a detour to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and fix a thick peanut butter sandwich on easy-to-tear white bread, I would go up to her sitting room.
The Ozarks are old and worn mountains from the geological past.
Greer is Missouri's second-largest spring. It is a place of pounding, frothing waters and of greeny-cool moss-covered rock, a place of fern and cliffy splendor.
Otherness is what I have always liked about bugs.
I married a university professor, raised a son, and worked as an academic librarian. My husband and I moved to the Ozarks, bought a farm, and started a commercial beekeeping business. And divorced.
A rule about portages: the longer and harder they are, the fewer people will make them.
Great Wass Island Preserve is a 1,579-acre Nature Conservancy jewel, a place of spectacular botanical interest, and Jonesport is situated on a postcard-pretty harbor. Tourism is not serious business in those parts - boat building and fishing are - and there are no signs telling how to get to Great Wass. But I know.
