This morning's observations:
I was awake but reading in bed when a thunderous double boom rattled the house. Last time I heard such a noise, some doomed fool took a lit cigarette into an empty tank up at the natural gas refinery, 4 or 5 miles away, thus ushering himself and three others into the next world. No sirens followed this boom, so I'm hopeful that's not what happened this time.
I poked my head outside just to see if I could hear or see anything further, but heard nothing but crickets--literally. The natural noises soon resumed, though, and I carried my coffee out to the chair for my morning commune with nature (it's getting addictive).
Two ruby throated hummingbirds, a pair!
Cardinals galore
Red-bellied woodpecker
Off in the field, a turkey gobbler.
Beedicca is bustling today, very curious about me in the chair, and the new waterer I set up, and the relocated hummingbird feeder. I moved the feeder a bit away from the hive to see what would happen. The bees found it quickly, but seem a little less possessive, so the hummers were able to get some nice deep drinks.
Watching the light change as it comes through the leaves, hearing the myriad bird calls, the crickets, the hens singing their egg song; watching Binky turn his vigilant orange eyes to the treetops, calling out a cautionary"Scree!" when he spots a hawk (prompting all nearby hens to bolt into the underbrush and lie flat--they're survivors, these girls)...it's enough to make your soul dissolve into bliss.
Which brings me to a thought I've been having: chickens and bees have a lot in common. Both have partnered with humans for thousands of years, and we've all reaped both great rewards and terrible affliction from the association. Think, a snug coop and daily food in exchange for fresh eggs--benefit! and then think of a factory farm prison: the poor short-lived, tortured, genetically crippled birds ending up in fast food fryers--an arrangement that does enormous harm and no one good. Likewise with bees, who have long thrived in partnership with humans, exchanging a snug home, protection, and care for their surplus honey, wax, and medicinal royal jelly, but who are now, because of human activity, on the edge of catastrophic collapse--and they just might take us with them.
In my mind it all comes down to scale. Once the scale goes beyond the personal, that is to say, what one household can well and truly care for, things get screwed up. I'm sure I don't need to rant about factory farms to either of the two people who read my blog (*wink*), so instead I'm going to wax poetic about why I love living with chickens, and now, bees.
First of all, both bees and chickens pretty much know what to do with themselves. We build them an house, fend off possums and raccoons--enlisting the help of yet another species, the dog--and make sure they have food when they need it; and then we turn them loose. They know what to do and where they live, and they reside with us of their own volition (or not, as in the case of Darkle, who moved in with my neighbor when we had some young roosters around. She couldn't be having with that, at her age). The flock--or pride, as I like to call them--ranges as far as 2 or 3 acres away, although when there's a person around, they are more likely to stay close to home (people frequently toss food).
Second, they feed us. They forage forest, pasture, and swamp, eating things we never would: bugs, frogs, lizard tails, dead moles, cow flops, rotting fruit...) and every day (almost), deliver us a perfect, delicious package of nutrition, the egg. It's magic.
Bees are much the same. We set them up in a nice house, support them when they need it, and they comb the forest, gathering tiny pollen grains and infinitesimal mouthfuls of nectar, and bring it all back home to make honey, quarts and gallons of sweet, lovely honey. Both bees and chickens are kind enough to make more than they need, and we humans get the honor of collecting the surplus. And it is an honor, is it not? A symbiotic exchange of trust and sustenance?

If you forget it's an honor and start thinking of it as your due...down that road lies all the bad decisions that lead to factory farms, with all their brutish cruelty and devastating pollution, and large scale apiculture: carting your bees all over hell and gone to pollinate crops, exhausting your hives by taking too much honey, then destroying them at the end of the season because it's too expensive to feed them all winter.
Instead of breeding chickens and bees to be smart, tough survivors, we've bred them into idiotic food machines: to paraphrase the Gunslinger, we've forgotten the face of our Mother. Even if you live in a city, even if you only have an apartment, even if you work too much, even if you don't have any money: you can live sweetly with the natural world and the creatures, like chickens and bees, who have come so far with us.
Third, even if they didn't feed us, they are fascinating to watch. A pride of chickens is an intricate social structure, with factions, generations, alliances, and territories; they're chatty, and have a pretty big vocabulary. I understand a few words of chicken: 'here's something good to eat'; 'get out of my face'; 'that's not your egg'; 'I just laid the biggest egg'; 'she just laid the biggest egg'; 'are you going to feed me?' 'where are you?' 'snake!' 'hawk!' 'owl!' and 'unidentified disturbing thing!' I haven't lived with the bees so long, so I'm just getting to know them, but already I can tell there's a lot to learn. Like, are some bees in charge of pollen, and some assigned to nectar, or do they glean one particular plant at a time?
Enough for now. Time for an omelet.