>with so much work out in the garden, i have been horrible at writing in any form. there are lots of things to catch up on, and most of those require some visual aids. it is slightly more than i have energy for to start uploading photos, so i will just write briefly about a topic where visual aids would be less appreciated — bugs.
yesterday, i was looking for something for baki and i ended up climbing up to our loft bed to see if it was up there. as i sat there, i noticed a tiny white spider lowering itself by my head. i looked more closely and found that there were about half a dozen of them descending from the ceiling. i caught them by their threads and dropped them off the side of the bed (and later found them in my open cookbook, and on the shelf below). last night as ali and i were lying in bed, i looked up and saw a few spiders, so sat up for a closer look. there were no less than thirty spiders on the ceiling! i guess this is when baby spiders hatch, because although we have always had a good number of them in the house, this is a real population explosion. i guess it will simmer down, though. this afternoon, i saw a black spider on the window. there were a bunch of little white spiders up there too, and i wondered if the black spider was looking after them. then i noticed that the black spider was eating something. upon closer examination, i discovered that the black spider was eating one of the baby white spiders.
the other news of the hour is that tick season has started. i got my first one of the year on the back of my hand, ali got his first on his leg, and baki got his on the back of his neck. tick checks are a daily routine again.
but the biggest best news of all in the bug department is that we have bees! ali and our neighbor, the elderly yet spry omer amca (uncle omer), had been talking about going to see a bee man in town. omer amca is a man of action, so their talk quickly turned to plans, and two days ago he and ali set off in the afternoon. ali did not come back unti well after dark — they had had to wait for the bees to go back into their hives so they could be shut in and transported — with two white boxes full of bees! the boxes are, in effect, hives (the real name is “supers” ), and we will need to buy more of them by may, because the bees are going to multiply! it is so exciting to have them. ali and i put them under a tree, and then opened the doors to the hives and ran! they did not emerge as an angry swarm to find and kill us, though, just peeked out. baki and i have spent some time watching them buzzing in and out of their hives, and drinking water from a pail we put out with some wood floating in it so they can perch on it. we are, i think, pretty energized by the bees!