0022

I linger in bed, listening to the morning chirrup! of a nearby robin. I face two tasks today, neither of which is attractive, because in both cases I possess great ignorance of what I need to do.

The bees win. After breakfast, I drive the short distance to see Tom, the local bee expert. He tells me it's kinda late in the season to be starting, but not too late. He sells me a frame with a nuke of well established bees, and, back home, I set the colony up south of the garage, in an untilled area of the garden. Manage to do it with only one sting, and that was at Tom's place. They are soon busily at work, cleaning and fixing up their new home, and making pollen and nectar runs off into the woods. They are oblivious to my presence as I stand there watching, fascinated by their industry and organization.

I see now that my ignorance is not the barrier that I had imagined. These little creatures just know what to do, whether I do or not. I learned from Tom that the queen doesn't rule or control the other bees. A honey bee colony has no leader. Rather, the worker bees take collective responsibility over the running of the hive, with the queen being merely an egg producer. I think of Star Trek, and the Borg.

After lunch, I face the second chore. I stand for awhile staring at my broken pump, not in fascination, but consternation. How will I jack this thing up to get at the cylinder that Willie spoke of? And what will I do then?

I unbolt the pump from the flange at its base. Bending at the knees and hooking my arm under the spigot, I give a mighty heave. Did it move? Hard to say. Perhaps a fraction of an inch, for a fraction of a second. Clearly, there's some serious weight here, and I'll need leverage.

With my small flat bar I can get separation between the base and flange. Then a larger bar makes the gap wide enough to slip a bar in sideways, and I can jack against the bar with a bottle jack. Then get a 2 x 4 in there to jack against, blocking on one side and jacking on the other, until, after about 3 hours, the pump is blocked up about 8 inches above the flange. I suppose that round galvanized thing is the cylinder, extending up into the housing and down into the casing. How far down it goes, I cannot see.

I guess that the next step is to see if I can loosen the cylinder, and try to get the cast iron housing off. That's got to be most of the weight, I suppose. My instincts tell me that is a task to be begun at the start of a fresh day. I pack wads of plastic between the cylinder and casing to prevent bugs and debris from falling down the well.

Before going inside for supper, I'm drawn back to the bee colony. The hum of productive activity, the incessant departures and arrivals on the landing area, the remarkable division of labor, are balm to my human spirit. Keep doing what you're doing, little bees; it's what you were designed to do. I wish that I were as well equipped and capable.