Bees!

Hi!

My name is Ryan Reber, Architect in Urbana, Illinois.

The Archi.Blog will be a repository of architecture, design, and anything else that I find cool.

 

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I don’t know why I became a beekeeper.

Maybe because of the dire environmental and agricultural implications if they continue to be decimated by insidious unknown forces.  As Albert Einstein is reported to have quipped, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”  (Okay, he probably didn’t say that, but it’s a good quote.)

Maybe because there is something fascinating about them: their ability to construct Lilliputian cities of perfect geometry, their industry, and their capacity to communicate with each other and form a collective intelligence that is almost unsettling – they are “only” bugs after all!  For such a specialized organism to have slowly evolved through the eons of time by the impartial process of natural selection truly boggles the mind.

Maybe because of all the free honey.  Yep, that’s why.

2015 looks like it will be a good honey harvest.  That is, if the bees don’t  succumb to the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, pesticides, mites, or just plain swarm and fly away.  Also, there is predation from flycatchers, beecatchers, wild turkeys, and skunks.  Yes, skunks.  At least we don’t have bears.

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

– William Butler Yeats