Month: September 2019

The Child Files

Kids say, well, whatever pops into their blessedly sweet heads

By Susan S. Kelly

Whenever “the world is too much with us,” as William Wordsworth so prettily put it, or current events and crises and confusion threaten to crumple me, I first read Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” taped to my computer monitor. Then I pull up YouTube, and Hugh Grant’s voiceover opening lines of Love, Actually. “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport . . .”

Then, naturally, I head for my Child Files.

Next to my Miscellaneous File (because where else do you stash something like “Mules and mushrooms have no gender,” and “New wallpaper smells like Band-Aids”?), my Child File is the thickest. Sure, I dutifully listed all minutiae in their baby albums — first word, first tooth, first haircut — but the Child File contains far more pertinent information. It’s a kind of record, repository, evidence of, the skills my children came by, created, and/or appropriated for survival as adults. Darwin’s theories had nothing on my three kiddoes (and what you told me about yours).

On avoidance: When I lecture my oldest, he clips a pen to his leg hair.

On socialization: “If you miss lunch, you miss everything,” my daughter complained if I scheduled her doctor’s appointment late morning. She also whined if the carpool came too early, thus denying her another op for elementary school drama. In addition, the all-day sulk because she’d forgotten it was a dress-down day and she’d worn dress code to school.

On negotiation/the art of the deal: My son receives a $10 gift certificate at Harris Teeter for a tip, and then tries to sell it to me for $9. Why nine and not 10? I ask. “I’m trying to sweeten the deal,” he says.

My 16-year-old is cleaning out his collection of . . . liquor bottles. His 8-year-old sister wants the cool Absolut vodka bottle, for which he makes her pay him $2 and smell his feet. The amazing aspect to this sibling transaction is that it takes place without my ever being aware. No one pleads; no one fights. Both think they got a good deal. Later, my daughter shows me the newly acquired bottle with pride, and tells me how she came to possess it. With no trace of humiliation.

On growing up: My son and his post-college roommates bickering in a Costco aisle, then resorting to rock-paper-scissors to determine what they’ll buy. As far as I can tell, rock-paper-scissors informed 90% of his decisions at that age.

Other son eating pancake batter because it was the only thing he could afford at that age.

Daughter asking, “How do you know when you’re grown up?” Oldest child immediately answers, “When no one writes your name in your clothes anymore.”

Nephew who composed an outline before he wrote the thank-you note to his girlfriend’s mother.

On higher education: My son’s announcement that his teacher told the class that every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the Gilligan’s Island theme song.

Other son’s announcement that he has dropped Statistics 11 for the History of Rock ’n’ Roll.

Son’s wholly serious question the night before second grade begins: “Mom, do I have to take math this year?”

Nephew’s entire essay content on What I Like About People: I like their houses and toys and that’s about it.

On ownership rights: The handwritten note left in the dried-up, sugar-stiffened, flake-crusted Krispy Kreme box containing a lone doughnut: DO NOT EAT THIS IT IS MINE.

On illness: “I blew my nose so hard that air came out of my eyes,” my son informed me.

On coping with ennui, from my daughter: “When I get bored, I either like to organize things or try on clothes.”

From my son, who is tired of me reading all the time: “Watch. I can predict what Mom is reading right now, I’m psychic. She’s reading ‘the.’”

Same son, leaning over lawn mower and breathing in the gasoline fumes: “Watch, Mom. I’m getting dumber.”

The 9-year-old daughter and her friend are playing a game called Make Me Laugh, which involves putting on some music and dancing. How nice, I think; how cute. When I come downstairs, the Make Me Laugh laughter abruptly ceases. Slow dawning of humiliation: The pair are dancing and laughing to my music, finding it all just too, too hilarious.

Older, non-eyeglass-wearing brother to younger brother, who’s finally, gleefully, getting contact lenses: “The first thing the doctor does when they measure you for contacts is give you a shot in your eyeball.”

(Actually, that entry might go hand-in-hand with the sibling argument it interrupted, wherein the two combatants were arguing over who had peed last and therefore had to go back upstairs and flush the toilet.)

Bless the child, then, unwitting antidote for adult existential angst. OH

Susan S. Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and a proud grandmother.

Revved Up

Artist Jan Lukens heads up an exhibit for Revolution Mill’s revitalized gallery

By Billy Ingram

Can three guys in their 60s revolutionize the local art scene? Discover for yourself on October 11th at Revolution Mill’s newly christened Gallery 1250 (1250 Revolution Mill Drive.)

I had first seen the spectacular 2,800-square-foot, glass-enclosed open space three years ago, when it was designated a satellite exhibition space for UNCG’s Weatherspoon Art Museum.

But like every good intention, the vision never came to fruition beyond its initial splash: Raleigh Street artist James Marshall’s floor-to-ceiling mural in variegated shades of green.

From his studio across the hall from the unrealized gallery, artist Jan Lukens grew increasingly frustrated

“I complained,” Lukens says. But he also banged out a business plan, which Revolution Mill’s general manager, Nick Piornack, liked. “It’s yours,” he said

But what to do for the inaugural installation? “Since I’ve never been a gallery director before,” Lukens says, “I thought I’d get my feet wet by being in the show so I invited two close friends to join me for a show called Triple Vision.”

The Greensboro native hopped from advertising illustration to full-time painting in 1992, making a name for himself with majestically realistic portraits of thoroughbreds and Olympic jumpers. “A lot of people think that’s all I do because that’s all they ever see from me. So I’ve only got one horse painting in this show.”

His fellow exhibitors are Roy Nydorf, recently retired head of the art department at Guilford College with an M.F.A. from Yale, and Michael Northuis, who has an M.F.A. in painting from UNCG and was a visiting lecturer there and at Guilford College for years. Some may remember GreenHill’s respective of Nydorf’s work in 2012.

While Lukens’ animal portraits are realistic, Nydorf’s and Northuis’ multimedia creations might best be described as highly imaginative figurative paintings, rich with art historical references and social comment. “My intention for Gallery 1250,” Lukens explains, “is to show large-format art, in an alternative exhibition space, by the best artists in the area and beyond, focusing on painting, photography and sculpture.”

And how does he find setting down his paintbrush long enough to take the, uh, reins of Gallery 1250? “I still do commissioned work but when I do work for myself, I get to make all the decisions and that’s so much fun.”

— Billy Ingram

 

Photograph by Billy Ingram

The Third Person Project

In search of Wilmington’s buried and forgotten past

By Wiley Cash   •   Photographs by Mallory Cash

 

As his 2011 essay collection Pulphead makes clear, John Jeremiah Sullivan possesses the inestimable skill of sifting through American popular culture to separate the bright, shiny things from the timeless ones. The seemingly divergent essays in the collection ricochet between a hilarious yet stirring portrait of the Tea Party movement circa 2009, a deep dive into the origin myths surrounding Guns N’ Roses’ frontman Axl Rose, and meditations on loneliness, identity, and what is perhaps the most American trait of all: our Protean ability to recast ourselves in different renditions throughout our lifetimes. With this in mind, Wilmington, a city that is always revising and reinventing itself, is the perfect place for John Jeremiah Sullivan to live and work.

On Labor Day, John and I spent a few hours on his back porch, and, over a couple of appropriately named Long Weekend IPAs from Kinston’s Mother Earth Brewing, we discussed Wilmington’s frustrating history of not only shedding the past, but also burying it. Of course our conversation began with the most violent and shameful event in the city’s history: the race massacre of 1898, which is, to this day, the only successful coup d’état in American history, and something the city largely ignored for over a century. As John puts it, here in Wilmington “our identity is based on something we can’t talk about.” But John has joined a legacy of writers and thinkers who are willing to research and talk about 1898. From these various investigations and discussions has sprung the Third Person Project, a group of citizens, scholars, students and researchers who are dedicated to scouring the past to uncover Wilmington’s missing and buried moments.

I ask John how the Third Person Project got started. He takes a moment to consider the question, and I imagine his mind cycling back through reams of microfiche and dusty pages of reference books and telephone directories that had been left hidden in basements and tucked away on bookshelves across the city.

“It grew out of the projects that make it up,” he finally says, the first of those projects being The Daily Record project, in which a group of scholars and local eighth-graders searched for editions of The Daily Record, an African-American newspaper that was thought lost to time after white marauders destroyed the printing press in 1898. The group found seven copies of the newspaper, and they scanned them and published them on their website.

“The experience of finding those newspapers and studying them gave us a sense of how thick the wood is here, how much there is to drill,” John says. “Wilmington has an unusual amount of lost history.”

Nowhere is this lost history more apparent than in Wilmington’s African- American life and culture. Take jazz musician Percy Heath, for example. Born in Wilmington in 1923, Heath was a bassist who played alongside icons like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, and was a member of the iconic Modern Jazz Quartet. While it is popularly believed that Heath grew up in Philadelphia, John informs me that Heath did not permanently leave Wilmington behind after the move north. He would return to Wilmington throughout his young life, a fact either glossed over or altogether absent from jazz history.

“Percy Heath played in the marching band at Williston,” John says, his voice edging toward an exasperated laugh. “And he was the class president! Every rock you turn over in Wilmington has a story like that.”

Another story is that of Charles W. Chesnutt, an author who was born in Cleveland and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and who, by the turn of the 20th century, was the most celebrated African-American writer in the country. His seminal work, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), is probably the best-known fictional portrayal of 1898, even though its portrait of white terrorism effectively ended Chesnutt’s career.

Because Chesnutt spent his adult life in Cleveland, scholars have long wondered why he chose to fictionalize the events of 1898, especially because doing so exposed him to critical peril. It has been assumed that Chesnutt’s childhood in Fayetteville and his ties in eastern North Carolina are what made the events of 1898 so important to him, but John has found a more direct connection: Chesnutt’s uncle was a man named Dallas Chesnutt, who left Fayetteville and settled in Wilmington in 1876. Dallas Chesnutt forged a career as a postal worker, but he also had a second career as a printer. What did he print? It turns out he was the printer of The Daily Record, the newspaper the white mob set out to destroy by burning Dallas Chesnutt’s printing press in 1898. John argues that Charles Chesnutt’s interest in Wilmington’s coup d’état was not simply historical, cultural or political; it was deeply personal.

John points out that the 1898 race massacre was not the beginning of Wilmington’s attempt to unwind the positive changes brought about by Reconstruction. He recently discovered that the Confederate memorial statue in Wilmington’s Oakdale Cemetery is one of the very first, if not the first, Confederate statues in America, erected only a few years after the end of the Civil War.

Considering the milestones in Wilmington’s racial history — the erecting of what could be the nation’s first Confederate monument, the 1898 race massacre, the battles over integration, and the Wilmington Ten — John argues, “If it’s possible to be the anti-conscience of the South, Wilmington is, but we can reverse the polarity of that.” He smiles and looks into his backyard, the weight of what he has just said seeming to settle over him, the clouds that presage Hurricane Dorian not yet on the horizon.

“But that may be the thing I love most about Wilmington,” he says. “People who live here now can take a hand in it. I have a funny feeling that what happens in Wilmington — when it comes to the political destiny of the South and this country’s struggle with racial equality — somehow it matters what we do here.”  OH

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His latest novel, The Last Ballad, is available wherever books are sold.

Both are easily gone in a puff

 

By Jim Dodson

On a cool and misty autumn afternoon not long ago, I found myself taking up a secret pleasure I’d abandoned years ago.

While doing book research for the day in Staunton, Virginia, the lovely Shenandoah Valley town just off the Great Wagon Road that brought thousands of Scots-Irish to the American South, I turned up my coat’s collar and took a stroll though downtown in search of a cup of tea and a bookshop before hitting the road for home.

On the corner, I spotted an old-fashioned tobacco shop.

Its window display featured a selection of gorgeous, hand-carved pipes with names such as Mastro Geppetto and Savinelli Estate.

Beyond them, two gents sat in comfortable wing chairs, smoking pipes and having a quiet rainy day conversation.

On a lark, I stepped inside.

If Marcel Proust’s main character in Swann’s Way associated the taste of a simple madeleine with childhood, my version might well be a whiff of pipe smoke.

The scent of aromatic pipe smoke, you see, has a similar effect on me, conjuring up nice family memories and not a little amusement at my own youthful vanity.

Walter Dodson, my paternal grandfather, a cabinetmaker whose name I bear, smoked a Dr. Grabow pipe, the inexpensive brand once manufactured in the pretty Carolina mountain town of Sparta. Walter was a man of few words but a rural polymath who could make anything with his hands. He taught me to fish and how to cut a straight line with a handsaw.

Some of my fondest memories of him are of fishing together in a Florida bayou or watching my grandfather work in his carpenter’s shop, his Grabow pipe clenched in his teeth, fragrant smoke drifting all around us. Walter was the age I am today — mid 60s — but looked positively ancient to me, and a bit like an old Indian chief. In fact, family lore holds that his mother was a woman of Native American heritage.

I was 10 or 12 years old at the time of these encounters, a bookish kid under the influence of adventure tales in which wise forest wizards and noble Indian chiefs smoked pipes. So it all seemed perfectly natural and wildly romantic to me.

I never worked up the courage to ask my grandfather if I could try a puff of his Grabow pipe, and he never offered.

Ironically, about this same time, heeding the new surgeon general’s warnings about the health hazards of smoking, both my parents ditched their cigarettes, hoping my older brother and I wouldn’t take up the habit.

They needn’t have worried.

Following the prescribed formula for pulling an “all-nighter” for a geology exam my freshman year at college, like an idiot I drank an entire pot of black coffee and smoked half a pack of Camels, my first cigarettes ever. Somewhere around midnight, after throwing up and peeing myself silly, I fell asleep and managed to miss my 8 a.m. exam.

I’ve never touched another cigarette.

That same autumn, however, I drove home on a beautiful October afternoon to surprise my father at his office, hoping we might slip out for nine holes of golf before dark.

I found him sitting in his office reading Markings, a spiritual classic by Dag Hammarskjöld, the Scandinavian diplomat who’d served as the secretary-general of the United Nations.

He was also smoking a handsome wooden pipe.

“Oh no! You’ve discovered my secret pleasure,” he said with a sheepish grin.

Given my recent unhappy run-in with cigarettes, not to mention his own abandoned habit, I was surprised to see him smoking anything.

He explained that pipes were different from cigarettes. For one thing, you didn’t inhale pipe smoke into your lungs but allowed it to circulate in the air around you, “pleasing both the nose and the soul” — one reason, he reckoned, so many writers, poets and philosophers chose to smoke a pipe. 

“It was either Charles Darwin or James Barrie who said a pipe stimulates noble thoughts” he said.

“Maybe it was either Santa Claus or Hugh Hefner,” I suggested. “They smoke pipes, too.”

I learned that he’d bought his first pipe in London during the Blitz and brought the habit home with him. “I thought it made me look like an intellectual,” he added with a chuckle. “Truth is, it reminded me of home. Your granddad smoked a pipe. It was pure comfort, a pacifier with smoke and memory.”

I wondered how frequently he smoked his pipes. There were three on his desk. Two looked new, one looked very old.

“Not very often.  A dozen times a year, tops. It’s not a habit — more a simple pleasure.”

He laughed, handing me his oldest-looking pipe. It had a cracked stem.

“This one belonged to your grandfather. You can have it, if you wish.”

“Can I smoke it?”

“Better try this one instead. Fits the hand nicely. Not much bite.”

It was a handsome thing, burled briarwood, a simple Italian affair with an elegant long stem. He showed me how to pack and light it and watched me puff away, reminding me not to inhale.

“So what do you think, college boy?” He asked.

I liked it.

He smiled. “We won’t tell your mother.”

That Christmas, though, he gave me a copy of Markings and a gorgeous handmade-Italian pipe that looked like it had been carved from a knot
of mahogany.

I loved my new pipe even if my new college girlfriend didn’t.

She was a fellow English lit major, a self-described Marxist who had expensive tastes in footwear. She laughed out loud when she saw me pull out my fancy new Italian pipe and fire it up at a party where the guests were smoking a different kind of pipe and something that smelled like burning shag carpet.

“My God,” she hooted. “You look like an idiot! Next thing you’ll be wearing a corduroy jacket with elbow patches and calling yourself a Republican.” Had I been quicker on my feet, I might have told her that Che Guevara and her personal hero Virginia Woolf both smoked pipes, and that William Wordsworth carried his favorite pipe with him during his famous Lake District rambles. I could just picture the bard sitting on the crumbling wall at Tintern Abbey, dreaming of his lost Lucy as he sent perfect smoke rings into the still summer air. 

We broke up a short time later — irreconcilable differences over politics and pipes — at which point I went straight out and bought a second-hand corduroy jacket with elbow patches, hoping I might look like John le Carré on the back cover of his latest espionage thriller.

By the time I was a married father living in a forest of birch and beech trees near the coast of Maine, I owned several handmade pipes, which I typically only smoked when summer vanished and the weather turned.

Our kids, however, always loved watching me smoke my pipe, probably because I could blow smoke rings prettier than either Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf the wizard.

Which may explain why, on that recent misty afternoon in western Virginia, realizing it had been many years since I even held a pipe in my hand, I impulsively bought a cheap Missouri Meerschaum pipe and an ounce of mild tobacco and had a fine time making smoke rings as I hoofed around town.

Back home, I went searching for a box in the basement that contained items from my office desk in Maine and found a few of my favorite pipes from those days, but not my grandfather’s Grabow or even the handsome Italian number my father gave me once upon a time.

They may be waiting somewhere in an unopened box, like artifacts from a carpenter’s workshop or a spy novelist’s corduroy jacket.

Or maybe they simply vanished, like smoke and memory.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Long Live, Libra! And Scorpio, too

By Astrid Stellanova

In the mists of ancient time before pumpkin spice lattes, Star Children, we only had golden pumpkins, autumn leaves, marigolds and Halloween to keep us happy in October. 

Ruled by Venus, those born in early October are balanced Libras, but the later October born, with powerful Pluto as their ruler, are passionate Scorpios. 

Long before old Astrid, we had Dr. Spock to tell us how special October babies are.  Strong, long-lived — more months of sunshine means more vitamin D for these babies. Strong minds and even stronger opinions. More presidents — John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, to name a few — are born in October than in any other month. If they can’t rule over you, they’ll entertain you, like Simon Cowell, Julie Andrews, John Lennon, Katy Perry  and Cardi B.

 

Libra (September 23–October 22)

There’s original you, and then there’s new you. There’s no shame in your game because that resilience makes you ever stronger. Sugar, you’ve had more comebacks than Sonny Bono after he split with Cher. Sonny bought a restaurant, added a whole new verse to “Bang Bang,” (for one of Cher’s later solo albums) and took up skiing. Wait — on second thought, don’t pull a Sonny. Don’t go to the big boy slope. Stay on the bunny slope and wear a helmet.

Scorpio (October 23–November 21

Think about Sesame Street: One of these things doesn’t belong here. What might that be? Can you see the ways that you have wandered off into the weeds when you were looking for the ball? Eyes back on the ball, Darlin’. There ain’t nothing worth risking what you’re risking.

Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)

If you don’t make a change, the one you’ve been stalling on, you will know it.  Here’s how: Regret will start stinking up the place like a bag of stale pork rinds.  Cha-cha-change will make you feel like a whole new person, even a real grownup.

Capricorn (December 22–January 19)

Oh, what a flap dang doodle you got into. Is your legal advisor R. Kelly’s? Yes, you’ve won before, but this time you don’t want to test the limits. Throw it in reverse; rethink your situation. Lordamercy, you could use a better braking and thinking system.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18)

Listen, Ringmaster. This ain’t your monkey, and it sure ain’t your circus, Bud. Try not to dominate when you know the plan is not yours to control. The temptation to take charge of all the circus rings is one of your biggest urges, but, uh, no.

Pisces (February 19–March 20)

Oh, Lordy. This drama you’re starring in is about as fun as taking a bubble bath with a hair dryer. You’ll get lots of reaction, but none that a normal person would want to experience. Something about this reeks of wrong place, wrong door.

Aries (March 21–April 19)

In recent weeks, there’s been a surreal story line involving you and your closest friends. If it keeps up, you’ll have to fish your eyeballs out of the soup bowl. You know so much it is about to bust you wide open. But do your best to contain it, Baby.

Taurus (April 20–May 20)

Here’s what my Mama used to tell me at times like this: Keep things high and tight.  And if at all possible, dry. Yes, the creek is rising and you really didn’t plan on buying a duck boat. Sugar, if you see this as adventure, it really will be a giggle.

Gemini (May 21–June 20)

Your nearest and dearest think they’re Rat Pack Royalty. If anything, you should be the front person swinging the mic. Stop traveling with rats if you don’t want to be mistaken for their entourage, Sugar Bean.  It’s not your destiny to be a groupie.

Cancer (June 21–July 22)

An ounce of pretense is worth a pound of manure. That’s what you know in your heart of hearts, yet you allow one pretentious somebody to cause you a whole poopie storm of trouble. Windex won’t clean everything but at least it can clean your glasses and let you see things more clearly.

Leo (July 23–August 22)

You may be slick, but even you can’t slide on barbed wire. Take the opportunity to say no thank you to what looked like a great escape opportunity from what must feel like your personal Alcatraz. If you don’t, you might wind up getting important pieces of you rearranged. 

Virgo (August 23–September 22)

If you stir in that hot mess, are you willing to lick the spoon? No, I didn’t think so, Darlin’.  You were a fine instigator of a situation that tickled you silly, but now the fun is over. Try to make amends with a friend that didn’t find it funny.

For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.   OH

The Secret Lives of Beekeepers

Once they catch “bee fever,” sweet fulfillment is theirs

 

By Cynthia Adams

 

Ah, hive sweet hive! Nobody runs a tighter ship, nor a more orderly home, than a hive of bees.

Bees are terrific housekeepers. Fiends for organization and hygiene, too. They even take out the trash (which may include the corpses of redundant queens or drones after killing them off).

Hives are a famous symbol of mathematical symmetry and order.  Beekeepers cannot say enough about this.

But I digress.

Beekeeping is not easy. Easy is not the real reason people are drawn to the singular work, either.

Greensboro beekeeper Robert Jacobs stood demonstrating a glass-encased beehive at Bee Friendly to Pollinators Day at the N.C. Cooperative Extension Center on Burlington Road. Children seemed completely fascinated.

He patiently introduced all comers into the secret world of beekeepers, explaining what drew him there.

“I am a retired attorney,” says Jacobs, who only recently hung up his law license. It is safe to call beekeeping his passion. He teaches beekeeping for the Guilford County Beekeepers Association. Jacobs has been intrigued by bees since he can remember.

He grew up in Greensboro when he said the “town was quite different.” Through his reminiscence, Greensboro was a storied place where kids didn’t suffer from a nature deficit disorder — which is an actual thing for kids deprived of nature.

No siree. Jacobs was experiencing nature firsthand, playing and exulting in the natural world. He chose the Walt Whitman way versus the Walt Disney way.

 “Even as a kid, friends and all, would look for hornets’ nests,” Jacobs recalls fondly. “A friend at the back, had a fence and one of his neighbors had bees. We would sit and watch the honeybees.”

In 2007, Jacobs took the beginner beekeeping course offered at the Guilford Center. He began buying local honey from a Guilford beekeeper.

Then he got his own bees.  By the way, most of them come from Georgia, arriving by mail.

Let us bee mindful. The ancients immortalized the embattled Apis mellifera, otherwise known as the honeybee, on coins, crests and jewelry.

Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein and Winnie the Pooh were big fans. Bonaparte’s crest was embellished with a bee. Einstein predicted disaster if the bee were lost. Pooh’s very first story pondered the “wrong sort of bees.”

We massage beeswax onto our nail cuticles and buff it onto our furniture. Slip an elegant beeswax candle onto the table. Slather honey onto our morning toast.

Bees pollinate more than one third of all food sold, including more than 100 crops in the United States.

Singly responsible for billions of dollars in American food production, the honeybee’s industriousness is worth over $20 billion annually. They transfer the pollen from the anthers of a flower to the stigma of the same or different flower.  The process must occur during a fixed period known as “receptivity.” Seedless watermelon flowers, for example, are receptive for only one day.

While bees once showed up as a matter of course, desperate farmers now resort to renting bees for pollination. They truck in colonies to pollinate flowering trees, vineyards and crops lacking sufficient indigenous bees.

In the United States, 80 percent of the wild honeybees have been lost. The reasons include colony collapse disorder, mites, insecticides and fungicides.

Fortunately, there are beekeepers at work, battling to save the honeybee. .

“The more beekeeping I did, the less practicing law I did,” admits Jacobs. “My clients knew if the front door was closed, a swarm was on. I call-forwarded my office phone to my cell as I was winding down the practice.”

Sure, he found the law interesting, Jacobs says. But there was something about beekeeping that was endlessly fascinating.

“I’ve seen in bee publications in the late 1800s, an affliction referred to as ‘bee fever.’ That’s what I’ve got.”

Bee fever is real. Something frets him, Jacob says, but now it isn’t a pending trial or court date for a client. What concerns him is his clean windshield.

“When was the last time you drove your car out of the city and had to clean your windshield from insects?” he asks. “Over the last several years, I haven’t had to do that.”

Jacobs is a reader, but if you ask the title of his favorite book there is no hesitation:  A Practical Treatise on the Hive and the Honey Bee by Lorenzo Langstroth, who “realized the significance of bee space” and developed the concept of movable frames that are so common today. There is a considerable body of literature concerning bee behavior. Jacob knows only too well and has been working his way through it as fast as possible.

“You can never know everything,” Jacob sighs. “And I am constantly making adjustments in what I’m doing and trying to figure out what the bees will do. The late Dr. Ambrose at N.C. State said something like, ‘If we think one thing, and the bees think something else, they are right.’”  He adds wryly, “Bees may do things this way because this is what bees do . . . or, the opposite”

Not everybody is cut out to be a beekeeper, Jacobs mentions.  You will know within a couple of years, he inserts.

Minta Phillips, a retired radiologist, keeps hives on her Julian farm.

“What interests me about beekeeping is that I love the bees, and it comes from so many influences.” Like Jacobs, she harks back to her childhood, when her maternal grandmother and mother “didn’t want to squish a bug.” They imparted a sense of connection with the natural world, and a reverence.

She was never instilled with a fear of insects or bees.

“There was a misunderstanding in remote times about bees,” she reflects, “And an interest to steal their honey. So ancient coins bore the sign of the bee, as things important to early man.

“If we focus on what’s really challenging pollinators now,” she continues, “it’s often taught at the Guilford County Beekeeping Association that the No.1 detriment is the beekeeper! We can kill them out of misinformation.”

What led her to keep hives?

“My parents were at end of life. And a social worker, Camille, at Well-Spring [Retirement Community], was a beekeeper. I found it interesting to talk with her.  She told me about the January beginner’s event [for beginning beekeepers].”

Phillips took the beginner’s course to satisfy her intellectual curiosity. She also made friends. “Beekeepers in Guilford county are a varied type of people.”

Phillips ordered two packages of bees as starter hives and became a new beekeeper.  A starter hive costs roughly $200.

“They weigh out a package of three pounds of bees — containing 15,000-20,000 bees.  And a queen in a separate chamber.”

She describes the particulars; how the bees gather pollen and make “bee bread which is packed inside the comb.” The queen is in the center, laying eggs. The worker bees feed the eggs and cap the “cells.” The outside of the frame is capped honey. She also mentions the queen’s pheromones, having a pleasant scent she likens to lemongrass.

Her mentor is fellow beekeeper Curt Bower. She also relies heavily upon Charles Black, a retired electrician who grew up on a dairy farm in Guilford County.

“He has a reverence for bees. Charles is just amazing.  Again, he’s not afraid, loves bees and marvels at this little creature,” she says.

“I’m more interested in the bees than honey,” Phillips admits. “In my fifth year, I have not extracted honey.  I’ve kept it for the bees.” Like others, she experienced colony collapse from bee mites.

She looks forward to the development of a genetically “hygienic bee” that can resist mite infestation, which has decimated so many hives.

Phillips is also an artist who earned a degree in art at Yale before attending medical school at Harvard.  She has painted bee-related pieces shown in art shows.  One show benefitted the Friends School.

“The symmetry of the cells is a biologic efficient, an evolved (form of) wisdom.”

Raising bees requires constant vigilance, but she finds that spring is really fraught with concerns.

There is the persistent worry of a swarm. “In the spring, I reorder frames. If they are going to swarm, the beekeeper can lose half their bees.”  Her goal is to “fool the bees and make them think they have more space so they won’t swarm.”

Even so, it has happened. But in April, she added a colony after putting up a bee box with a tiny wooden hive and a “lure treated with bees wax and essential oil.”

Phillips plants wildflowers and pollinator friendly plants on her bucolic farm and is on an alert list when nearby farmers spray chemicals.

She worries about drenching “rain bombs” which can wash out bees and kill them.  In late winter, she lost two hives to early warmth that reverted to severe cold.

Overall, there is only a 50 percent survival rate. Last year alone, bee keepers lost 40 percent of their colonies, according to a survery from the Bee Informed Partnership

Two years ago, Phillips noticed an ad in the American Bee Journal for the American Congress for beekeepers in Cuba. She made the trip, visiting bee yards and watching oxen-drawn carts.  However disadvantaged, the Cubans united with their global visitors in saving the honeybee.

“We looked at the survival of bees and how to do it” she says. “For example, the propolis, an antimicrobial made from the resin in pine is used to caulk everything in the hive. Vets and human medics looked at propolis as an antimicrobial salve.”

Since Cuba, Phillips has attended the N.C. Bee Conference and meeting in Hendersonville last year to hear Cornell’s beekeeper Tom Sealy.

She worries about the vicissitudes of climate change.  “That’s kind of the plight of the honeybee.”

Phillips adds sadly, “Maybe they’re the canary in the coal mine.”  OH

Cynthia Adams reported on colony collapse disorder a decade ago.  She has the distinction of having a bee fly into her mouth and sting her tongue while eating outdoors. Despite that, she values bees and beekeepers. According to the USDA, “a honey bee colony is worth 100 times more to the community than to the beekeeper—meaning the value they deliver extends well beyond their actual price.”

The Guilford County Beekeepers Association meets on the second Tuesday of each month in the barn kitchen meeting room at 3309 Burlington Road. Contact Rob Jacobs at (336) 740-1703 or robertjjacobs@aol.com for information. The course cost for beginner beekeeping is $25 for individuals or $35 per family, which includes membership in the Guilford Beekeepers Association.