new world

Did it. Am here. This is what I have found so far........

First, the climate. Asking a native or transplanted Kiwi about the climate is futile. It's all so relative. So, I observe the citrus trees bearing fruit and determine that no, it doesn't get cold here. And after a beautiful balmy day of being outside working in the sunshine, I am told it was hot, perhaps 90 F the natives guess. Pfft. Not exactly. So, when they go on and on about the heat, I suppose it must be hot for those accustomed to paradise.

Next, the scenery.

I spent the past few days beekeeping on the east cape.....which is a very desolate, wind swept and breath-taking part of the world. Hours of driving windy mountain switchbacks and coastal road and it's all wild, unspoiled land. At least I have the wild part in common with this place.

Random fences and pastured animals together with bee hives are the human touches.

Some lovely Kiwis I met yesterday told me that Robin Williams (did I know of him, they asked) was interviewed on tv and said that god made the planet, got done and then thought to create a theme park, and so made New Zealand. Yup. About right.

It's as if Hawaii and Colorado had a party and invited coastal Oregon and Cali and Virginia and Tennessee and they got liquored up and had an orgy in the living room. New Zealand would be the magical love child.

About the beekeeping....the people we are wwoofing for here are a scottish osteopath and a british shiatsu therapist. The beekeeping operation is a new venture, about 5 years old and is mainly being run by a former british wwoofer about my age who never kept bees before this. He's been with them about a year.

There have been many wwoofers with their hands in these hives, none of them with much, if any experience. Upon opening the hives, I can tell that. Boys in the hives. It's a typical situation, but my opinion still stands that it should mostly be women in the hives with some strong men about to lift things. I know, it sounds sexist, and there are some men who get it.

These bees are women. And Italian women at that. One only needs to see how they treat their brothers and lovers to know what it takes to make them happy. They let their brothers push them around all summer, doing no work at all, coming and going as they please. But come fall, these tolerant girls become vicious and drag the boys out on the front lawn to die. Alone.

And that is gentle compared to how the virgin queen rips her lovers' phallus's right out of their bodies in mid-air with an audible POP and flies on as they plunge to the earth to die. Alone.

With women like that, it's best to engage in a little foreplay. Offer a little smoke, move slowly, sing a love song, compliment them on their beauty.

The Scot told me these bees were fierce and mean. But, when I met them myself, I found them sweet as honey. You see? Boys in the bee yard.

Inside the hives it was quite a mess. There were medium depth frames in deep boxes resulting in the bees having to make a complete mess of burr comb filled with honey and drone brood. Sometimes there were spaces with no frame at all, of course the bees filled it. Feeders had been left in with fermenting syrup and rotting bees and plant material. I found myself astonished and disheartened. Here are these bees on the most valuable honey plants in the world (manuka)and they are being managed by inexperienced young wwoofers. Tragic.

There were too many queenless hives and no plan to requeen them but to give them a frame of egg and let them try to raise their own. In my experience, that is a very regrettable plan generally leading to a collapsed hive. If they were my hives, I'd be chopping heads.

The views at the bee yards was a saving grace.

To get to these yards, we drove on a road which is really a river bed that floods every winter and has to be re made every spring. It's a road only in name as four wheel drive is a must.

Wild horses roam with their foals and there is no place to point the camera that is anything but jaw dropping.

I saw my first southern hemisphere starry sky. They looked so foreign and so close. It's stranger than I thought to gaze up and see constellations I don't recognize.

At last, let me say that immigrating may be a complex task.

Beekeepers are on the short-term and long-term skills shortage list on the NZ government website. However, it is apparently impossible to get a beekeeping job that will lead to residency as they require a college degree for an apiarist. And a degree in apiary is something that does not exist in the US. So, this government is like the others, which is to say, a general clusterfuck.

I'm optimistic, though. The degree is apparently available in correspondence courses. Ha!! Isn't that hilarious? Correspondence beekeeping. What a concept.