The He's Not Here Lounge

She's a social worker at an urban elementary school. There's this kid who was really good at a sport. He suddenly started to lose every game. She found out that he was throwing the games in trade for other kids lunches, so he could take them home to feed his family. More than one kid was trading dumb services for lunches for the same reason.

Her solution was to go to 'Whole Foods Market' and have a meeting with them. Now they're giving food to the school so that the school can slyly fill the backpacks of those kids with food to take home a couple of times a week.

My cousin is made of win.

The beehives have been doing well.

Apiopolis has been very active for over a month now. It's so full of bees you can hear it from three yards away, or more. Warm days see congestion at the entrance.

I'd been worried about Florencia over the winter, and it certainly isn't as full. I gave it some old honey to kick it off, about a month ago. They didn't take much, but it did seem to put them in the mood -- they've also got a busy entrance, though this city is not so furiously abuzz with activity as Apiopolis.

I opened Apiopolis's gates wider about ten days ago, but they are so active that they're pushing and shoving at the entrance anyway.

I have been so busy I didn't get to look inside until today.

Florencia overwintered with a medium super (the boxes that make up standard Langstroth hives come in different depths) full of old honey -- they did not have time to make enough winter stores before fall so I gave it to them. They were just one deep box, full of bees. As an established city they should (the way I practice, anyway) have two deep boxes, one for housing and one for winter stores. Since their population was small, they overwintered fine on the medium super of honey. It's nearly empty of honey now. It is full of eggs and brood and only a few small patches of new uncapped, unripe honey. Queen Melissa IV has been busy, and has an excellent laying pattern -- never misses a cell. I found her in the medium super. She obligingly moved down to the deep one below just as I was about to put her there. I put an additional deep on, to be their 'permanent' storage chamber and for extra laying room in summer, and put the egg-filled medium on top. I hope that when the brood mature the bees will clean it up for honey storage. The new deep super doesn't have wax comb in it yet, so they will be busy building wax, an activity that seems to make bees very happy. With any luck the new deep will soon be combed, and the combs filled halfway up with brood with honey on the top. A queen will seldom cross a patch of honey to lay above it, so if everything goes normally the medium will be honey only in two months, and when Melissa IV slows down her laying in late summer they'll fill in rest of the deep with honey for winter.

Apiopolis is a mature city with two deeps, and overwintered with the top one packed with honey. I didn't look too closely at it, but the frame I examined was just right -- the bottom half to two-thirds full of baby bees, honey on the top edge. Apiopolis is a mighty city. I gave them a deep super on the top to store honey for me in. It's also uncombed frames. Their city is so populous and busy that I am almost sure they will fill it. I probably better work out this summer so I can lift it off in the fall -- a deep full of honey will weigh nearly eighty pounds. I didn't see Beatrice I, but I didn't look for her anyway. I know she's there, for they were very calm and tame, and there's brood in plenty.

I was going to open Apiopolis' gates as wide as possible, by taking away the entrance-reducer bar entirely. I decided not to after watching for a bit, though. A few minutes after I'd added the new super the outgoing traffic reduced a great deal -- many workers have decided not to collect nectar, but to build wax. I'll leave the city gates at the medium-open state for a few more weeks, until it starts getting crowded there again. I don't want the city to have to waste bee-power on guards with so much work to be done. I saw a pirate (a hornet) hanging about wondering how to get in with so many Apiopolians at the entrance to object. I killed her, hoping that she's the first to discover the city and that in doing so I'll have delayed the inevitable raiding attempts. Of course this won't really work. Probably every creature for miles around knows about Apiopolis. Hornet pirates won't be desperate enough for sugar to make a serious assault until much later in the summer. Last year Apiopolis defended against them easily, and it's much bigger now anyway.

I meant to walk out to Barbasilva, the bee-tree in the woods. Its queen is clearly a Melissa, but having absconded into the wild she's given up the name. The bees look just like the bees of Florencia, a fairly distinctive strain. The last two times I've walked past it it's been chilly and I've seen no bees flying. A month ago I stuck my stethescope end in the entrance and heard them buzzing and clearly alive. I hope that no disaster has struck them. Seems unlikely, but I must remember to check on a sunny day when bees are wanting to fly.

Starlings have a nest in the wall of my house. The space coresponds to the upper northwest corner of my office. Every time the parent birds bring something for the babies to eat, I hear them squeaking. This is very often. Like every three minutes. Earlier I got to hear the parents squabbling over the nest-building process, as birds always seem to do. "I brought this twig, isn't it great?" "That twig sucks and I am not having it as part of our home." "Why do you always have to be such a control-freak! I am using this twig. I'm gonna put it, hmm, right here." "Screw you! I said no!"

Nuthatches have also nested in that wall, but you can't hear them from inside the house.

House finches under the porch canopy, right over the door.The adult female flies off from this nest when you go outside, so now I am, of course, limiting my in-out movements more than I would otherwise, especially when it's chilly. They don't have squeakers yet.

One small bunny from under the house. It is becoming sort of tame and I nearly stepped on it today. R. laughing at me earlier, when it was more shy, for saying,  "I promise not to kill you," to the silly thing.

So, it was my mom's birthday yesterday. Had her over for dinner, presents. Good time.
 
Before she left I gave her an old pair of jeans with a hole in the seat, for her parrot, Indy. He loves to crawl inside empty pairs of pants if she leaves them around, and will chew on them.

Indy has these ropes strung across her living room that he can climb around on. Turns the room into a great big birdy play-gym during the time she's home and can watch him. It's cool, she's got no carpet anyway so you just mop every day. She strung the pants up with the rope through one leg. Indy is awfully pleased to have his very own pair of pants, and rubs them and strokes them with his beak, tugs on them to adjust their position on the rope, and has carefully chewed the label off. Now he's working on removing the pocket liners. He hangs out inside and peeks out through the hole in the seat.

I came over, he comes out and fluffs up, spreads his wings and looks fierce. "Get away from my pants! I will defend these pants from all comers!" Okay, I hear ya, bird-man, and I am so not going to touch your pants. But, being sweet on my mom, he croons at her, tries to coax her, "You're cute, come inside my pants..."'

I really regret that I didn't bring the camera. And am amused that the destined-for-ragbag pants have created so much more fun and laughter than the stuff I paid for.

The great thing about Angie Zapata's murder is that the newspapers are actually calling it murder. Fan-fucking-tastic, a transgendered woman is murdered and it's murder in the headlines. Not, you know, just a 'killing' or a 'death.' Seriously, chuck 'transgender AND murder' or 'transsexual AND murder' into LexisNexis and you get squat. Make it 'killing'  or 'death,'  well, there are plenty of those. It's funny how a person can be beaten to death or shot and still the media just can't quite call it 'murder,' when it was obviously not done by mistake. 

Oh Angie. Pretty girl, I'm so damn sorry that you getting to be murdered like a human being instead of just killed is a triumph for us.

Of course, now the great debate is, was it really a hate-crime. This Andrade finds out that pretty young Angie has a penis, beats her with a fire extinguisher, later notices she's not dead and goes and beats her some more, then goes around the jail saying, "All gay things must die," and people have the gall to say it's not a hate-crime, and not even first-degree murder since he was, you know, justifiably enraged at being 'duped' about her genitals?

I wonder if there's a 'mood' icon thing where my little fox is vomiting blood? No. Damn it.

He was for the D&D game. A peach pie. The crust is whole wheat, the image stuck on just with water. His eye and the tip of his tail are cut from raisins. I painted him with cherry juice so he'd brown darker than the rest of the crust. I hoped that the vents, all cut on the bottom half, would leak enough golden peach-juice to look like he was sleeping on a pile of treasure, but I didn't put quite enough peaches in. These things seldom work out, though my first strategic-vents pie, a cherry pie with an armoured orc on a rampage and the vents cut to give the spurting blood effect, that one turned out fantastic.



Close up:



I've got to remember to take the pictures in natural light, next pie.

It's Hector, prince of Troy. The latest additon to our household. He's named for the mostly naked Eric Bana in that lame Troy movie featuring Brad Pitt's nipples. Rock has a thing about Eric Bana. Hector has a ten gallon all to himself and is happy and bubble-nesting, though he's only been home a few days. Maybe we'll add some otos later.

The camera didn't do justice to Hector's reds, brilliant wine on his fins and salmon on his nape, but it captured the electric blue/purple okay.

I just bought a CSA share in a local farm. I've paid already. Now every week for their growing season, they'll bring me a box of organic vegetables. I don't get to pick what, it's my share of the harvest so if they grow a lot of one thing, I'll get a lot of it, and if something else doesn't grow well this year, I won't get it. I have a list of what they usually grow and about when it's harvested. Lots of different stuff, and I like all of it but the cabbage. But Rock and I will be giving a third of our share to my mom, and she loves cabbage. Folks who had shares last year said it turned out to be a very good deal compared to supermarket prices, and more food than they could eat, but it's possible that the farm will have a bad year and it'll be expensive.

I'm happy about it. I get locally grown organic produce, and the farm gets a stable source of income in thick and thin, so it won't be lost so easily.

Here's a site to help you find CSA farms in the US.

http://www.localharvest.org/csa/
 

My cat, Foetus, is soul-bonded with a small, shiny black lizard. It has a flat, squarish tail. Foetus is extremely happy with her lizard, but it doesn't seem to care for me or Rock much, and we don't particularly like it.

However, because of her amazing soul-bond with the lizard, Foetus can go for hikes like a dog, both her and the black lizard running along beside us. We take them out in the fields around the house and Foetus is having a grand time. The lizard is, of course, emotionally inscrutable.

The lizard falls into a bottomless pit lined with white PVC pipe, about ten inches in diameter. This is out in the middle of the prairie for no discernable purpose. I suspect the lizard of falling into it on purpose. Foetus is very upset, but we cannot reach the lizard, or even see it. We try to tell her how sorry we are that the lizard is lost, but she does not listen and instead leaps gracefully down into the hole and dissapears. I am in paroxisms of grief because Foetus is gone, never to return.

The next thing I know, we are at a party, wearing matching tuxedos, and we must explain to everyone just how this happened.

Psychiatric medications are liable to make your dreams more vivid. Mine were always rather vivid, but they're sillier. Last night's was a good one.

I am wandering through Manitou Springs, Colorado, where I used to live. All the hills and staircases are distorted and steeper. All the angles are wrong. I want to find out what business or organization has moved in to the old Base Camp for the Arts space. I find myself lying in bed, but my bed is affixed to the wall of the building, above the back deck which overhangs a stream. There are several other people in bed with me, all fully clothed. I don't know any of them in my waking life, but I know them in the dream. They are young hippy types, the sort of people I knew when I lived in Manitou. Sawdust and bark mulch are blowing out of a large hole in a tree on the other side of the stream, and getting in the bed, making it gritty and getting in my eyes. We decide to wait for the wind to change, but eventually I get bored of this and leave.

Reentering the building, I find it is transformed to the Manitou Spa building, also distorted inside with all the angles wrong. It's rather crowded, and I want to leave. I'm carefully navigating my way along a distorted, too-steep, weirdly bending staircase. As I attempt to pass by, a woman stops me.

"I know you pay fourteen hundred and eighty-five dollars a year to wear that t-shirt," she says.

"No," I reply, "I paid around fifteen bucks for this t-shirt, and can wear it whenever I want."

I don't usually wear t-shirts in public, but I am in the dream. It is the 'Miskatonic University, Home the Fighting Cephalopods' t-shirt that I used to have. When my pet rat, Tannhauser, died about four or five years ago, we buried him wrapped up in the rags that were left of it.

"You pay fourteen hundred and eighty-five dollars a year to wear that t-shirt," the woman insists with calm certainty.

Consider, for a moment, that junk-mail that includes a reply envelope with 'Postage Not Necessary if Mailed in the United States' printed in a little square where the stamp ought to go. The company that is annoying you by sending trash through the mail has not pre-paid for that envelope to be returned to them. Rather, it is billed to them when you put it back through the post. They also must pay a person to open it and process the contents while the outgoing junk-mail is stuffed by machine.

The thing to do is to stuff the entire junk-mail package, including the torn-open envelope it was all sent to you in, back into that business-reply-mail envelope and pop it back into the mailbox. You may wish to jot a note somewhere on the mess, requesting that they recycle it for you as your bin is full from the junk mail they sent earlier in the week. Do not neglect to add any magnetic business cards or calendars you have collected for this purpose, and any lead fishing weights that you have hammered flat as part of your anger-management program.

I guess it's the greedy season. Everybody's feeling the crush of their own overspending. This must account for the fact that in the past two days I, in spite of the fact that I'm on leave and am hardly seeing anybody at all, have repeatedly overheard people saying, "I don't see why I should pay for other people's health care."

Well, my milk-fed friend, I can think of a half-dozen reasons in fifteen seconds, starting with cholera.

Since you don't want to pay for their health care I'm sure you don't want to pay for their shelter and sanitation either, and pretty soon we'll get people using the 'flying toilet' here in the good old U.S. of A. Oh wait, we've already got that. The flying toilet, in case you hadn't heard, is when somebody shits in a plastic bag and swings it 'round her head and lets go, and lets the uh, chips fall where they may.

A little later, flies walk on that spatter and then land on your hot-dog during the St. Patrick's day parade and if that person who's health care you see no reason to pay for was sick you might get a nice case of cholera or typhoid or SARS or hepatitis or that cool ascarid worm that can migrate to your nervous system and make you go blind or kill you, or... Well, I could go on. Maybe your darling daughter steps in it and then climbs the ladder on the playground slide and every kid who plays there gets a little on her hands climbing up afterwards. It's the little things that count, you know.

And pretty soon you're paying a massive sum to live in a gated community with private playgrounds and no flying toilets, and you've got to send darling daughter to an expensive private school because the public ones and the cheaper private ones are all full of sick kids with their dirty unwashed hands and their coughing and sneezing and your kid will come home with tuburculosis and then some if you don't. And when she grows up you want her to get a job and her own apartment and learn the value of a dollar just like you did, but it turns out you'll have to pay her rent because her nice little waitressing job doesn't make her enough for a good apartment and you sure as hell don't want her living in one of those cheap ones where those lazy poor people whose health care you don't want to pay for are spreading that bacterial meningitis around.

Dear little puppy, living in a third world country is not like visiting one. Your dollars aren't worth hundreds of pesos when its your own third world nation you're living in. They're worth the same as everybody else's. When the American middle class is gone, you won't be one of the rich.

The reason to pay for other people's health care, Mr. Enlightened Self-Interest, is that it's dirt cheap compared to paying for only your own.

Hell, even if we weren't starting to see all these nifty third world diseases in our country, you'd still save money with a national health plan like the one proposed at www.pnhp.org/. Look at the numbers. You want to pay double just to avoid carrying anybody else?

Speaking of public health and third world conditions, my local Humane Society just got its already too-low budget cut by almost two thirds. You don't want to pay for all those unimportant doggies and kitties? Just wait 'til you're living in a community with a bunch of homeless friendly neighborhood dogs and cats running around, playing with your kids and begging for food and petting and spreading leptospirosis and worms and bloody rabies around.

Get it? The health of the people and animals in your community and your health are the same thing. Wise up and pony up and save your greed for the gathering around that sparkly tree of yours.

There's a fine late summer nectar flow.

Florencia has a nice steady but small stream of foragers going in and out. They've also got ants going in and out, to my displeasure. I should have given them an entrance-reducer to start with. I did so now, but the returning foragers seemed so disturbed and confused by the change in gate-configuration that I took it out again. And picked up the forager who was walking around outside in a disheartened fashion and set her on the landing-board. She walked right in, this time easily recognising the hive as her own. I will put the entrance reducer on in the night so everyone will notice it as they go out and not be so tragically baffled at it when they return. Those leaving simply gave it a once-over look and went about their business, but those returning hovered, stared, started to go in, stopped, hovered, stared, went partway in, came out, hovered, stared, tried to go under the hive instead of in it, and became a little crowd of confused creatures as more arrived from the field to go about this all-too-lengthy process.

Apiopolis has decided that the season for reproducing is over, and that drones are therefore garbage. They are not so firm about this decision that they've started killing drones, though. The hilarious result of this lack of conviction is the sight of workers dragging drones outside, dropping them onto the inevitable midden-heap that develops in front of a hive, and leaving them, only to have the perfectly healthy drones hop up and fly back inside.

Had my peek inside the hives, two days later than planned because houseguests and rain kept showing up.

Beatrice I is accepted within Apiopolis, and I saw her walking about within her magic circle of attendants, being treated with the appropriate dignity. There is no question, she is their queen. Long May She Live and Lay. Everything has quieted down in there, there is significantly less activity at the entrance these past few days, probably because there's a lot of brood to be looked after.

Melissa IV is within Florencia, in her own magic circle, busily laying eggs. In one case sloppily laying two in one chamber, a behavior that I hope does not become a troublesome habit. Most of the colonists who went with her have dissapeared, but the frames of eggs and newly hatched larvae now contain pupa, capped with wax. They'll emerge as fuzzy young workers in a few days. Florencians have eaten a great deal of the honey I gave them and I will probably offer them some sugar syrup tomorrow, as they have very few foragers. I am a little concerned that this new city is so weak, but I'm not greatly worried, as there is plenty of time for it to grow before autumn, and I'm not beyond hoping they'll have a good force of foragers before the late-summer bloom of wild sunflowers. If not, well, bolstering them with sugar syrup for the winter is no big deal.

I need to repaint hive-bodies and replace the peeling parts of both cities with freshly painted ones before fall. I must also remember to buy two new entrance-reducer boards, as Florencia never had one and the one that went on Apiopolis is just about broken. At the same time I must order the cheap plastic jars I like to use to ship honey, and a new spigot 'honey-gate' thingie for my bottling-tank, as I've broken the one that came with it.

I went to release Beatrice I from the queen cage this afternoon. She had been in Apiopolis eighty hours.

The citizens of Apiopolis have chewed through the cork that kept Beatrice I's cage closed, freeing her. I did not look for her or for evidence that she is alive, because bees often appear to actually consider their queen somehow responsible for the well-being of their city and may 'blame' a new queen for a disturbance and kill her. I must wait another week or more and then look for eggs, larvae or Beatrice herself.

It is odd to me that they would have chewed through the cork. Usually when one buys a queen in a cage, the 'door' to the cage is plugged with candy, and the intent is for the bees to eat it away and release the queen in a few days in this manner. If it had been a candy plug, I would be satisfied that the bees had accepted Beatrice I, but I wonder if "Free Our Trapped Queen!" is a strong enough motivation to gnaw through cork or if "Kill the Usurper!" is what it would take to drive them to it. On another occassion when I tried to requeen with a caged queen, they (a different hive, and a different subspecies of bees, an ill-tempered one at that) killed her in the cage and then ignored the cage -- corpse, candy and all.

It seems clear to me that they did not kill her in the cage, because the chewed-open hole is wide enough for her to walk out head first but probably bees could not have pulled a queen-sized body out, their method being to grab rubbish at a random spot and just pull in the right direction, try repeatedly and then mummify in propolis any unwanted object that cannot be removed in this way. (Remind me to make a movie of dozens of people trying to move a ratty old couch by grabbing it wherever they can grip and dragging it to the doorway, where it will of course become jammed, and then deciding that since it cannot be removed, the only option is to cover it with nice clean new wallpaper.)

There was obviously some politicing going on, since yesterday afternoon I found a number of dead and dying bees outside of Apiopolis, and they were young and fuzzy. Old bees at the end of their lives get a threadbare look to them. These ones must have been rebels, though who they were supporting I can only guess.  I didn't find a queen body there. Of course, I could have missed it or it could have simply blown away, but I doubt it.  Apiopolis is in a sheltered spot and I must rake up its garbage from time to time.

I'm guessing that all is well. They are busy, and very indifferent to my manipulations. They appeared not to notice me opening the hive at all. In fact, they're tamer than ever before. Which is a good sign that Beatrice I is accepted. Queenless hives are pissy. Also, Beatrice I's home hive acted like that, and when one requeens often the entire hive will immediately take on the 'personality' of the new queen's hive-of-origin.

Some of you are aware of my ongoing drama concerning Apiopolis, my beehive.

I had decided that Apiopolis needed a sister city, which is always a good idea in beekeeping, but I have hesitated to do it because with my hand-crank honey extractor extracting honey is hard work, and I did not want to produce too much to process. Last fall, however, I found a stationary bicycle next to somebody's garbage can, half-inched it, and had a welder friend modify the extractor to be pedal-powered. This sped up the extracting process enormously, and made it much less exhausting. Though it did remove the formerly amusing quality of getting covered in a thin layer of honey and sweat while extracting and then inviting my partner to lick it off.

Apiopolis did very well this spring, building up its population enormously in a month. But, when I went to check inside and consider if it was ready to make a split, I found no eggs and no queen. I did, however, have two queen-cells, one a supercedure cell and one a swarm cell. In my clumsiness, I damaged the swarm cell. Swarm cells hang off the bottom of the the frame of comb and are easily squished. It was not damaged badly, but I feared for the health of the queen pupa within.

So I waited. When I checked again, the queen cells were both open and empty, but I found no queen and no eggs. I figured I had lost the young queens. Queens fly once, to mate, and at that time are vulnerable to predation, and birds like to hang about on the trees near Apiopolis to catch the workers as they go in and out.

I sought a new queen to purchase, and found one from a local beekeeper, to my pleasure. When I consulted with him he advised me to wait another week, in case I had a virgin queen inside, not yet laying and hard to see because they get their size after mating and run around on the frames very quickly when virgins. They also say, "Zweep! Zweep!" rather loudly, and while I wasn't sure if I'd heard that or a Stellar's Jay's call, I was pleased to take his advice, and I had forgotten that a young queen does not begin to lay only four days after emerging from her cell, but eight or ten.

Alas, a week later, I still saw no queen and no eggs. I set about obtaining the queen for purchase, and was delayed three days because the seller is quite a busy man, running around town removing unwanted feral bees from people's attics and yards. When I went to get my new queen, yesterday, he had just returned home with five buckets of bees obtained in this fashion, in one day. It was seven thirty by then, and I barely had enough light to install the new queen in her cage inside. 

I suited up, because three days earlier the hive had shown signs of getting 'hot' -- they become angry when they have no queen. But they were quite mellow when I opened the hive. I recalled that I had not destroyed the empty queen-cells when I last looked, and decided to remove them now, lest my new queen lay in them and the hive swarm. I pulled out a frame and stood gazing dreamily at it for a moment and saw that it was full of eggs, and some had hatched to larvae.

By the look of their development, a series of odd circumstances must have occurred -- the last time I'd looked in in the hive, three days before, was the same day that the young queen had begun laying.

It was too dark to see well enough to go queen-hunting, so I reassembled the hive and left. The new queen, which I have named Beatrice I, spent the night in the bedroom, in her little cage with her serving-maids. She made small clicking noises, like the sound of a stuck eyelid popping open, but audible across the room and quite soothing. I did not know about this noise.

This morning I went out and opened Apiopolis. I found her native queen on the first frame I looked at. She is Melissa IV. I have had Apiopolis for about seven years, and it swarms every other year. At that time I know I have a new queen so I give her the name of her mother and a number. I put Melissa IV, the frame of comb she was on, and all the bees and eggs that were with her into another hive-body. I added more frames with lots of bees on them, and some frames of honey, and put the lid on the new city. I will call this hive Florencia.

While I was working I set Beatrice I and her serving-maids, in their cage, on top of some of the frames of Apiopolis. Bees gathered around the cage, covering it, but they seemed keen to look at her and lick her through the screen. I only saw one buzzing her wings and pointing her tail towards the inside of the cage, as if suggesting regicide. Nobody appeared to listen to her. I have high hopes that Beatrice I will be accepted as the new queen of Apiopolis, but the great numbers of bees balling on the cage is a sinister sign -- they suffocate small foes in this way. But they did not behave angrily, and Beatrice was not squeaking in distress. I will check again in a few days and am busily hoping that I will find them calmly attending her. Hope hope hope. If so, I'll release her from her cage and then be hoping again, this time that I will find a nice pattern of new eggs the following week.

This afternoon, some five hours later, things look nice. I didn't open the hives, but the citizens of Apiopolis are hard at work, going in and out with full pollen-bags and no doubt nectar, and they do not sound displeased. Florencia is quiet, of course -- every field bee that left the city to forage will have returned to Apiopolis. I did pop the lid to assure myself that it still contained plenty of bees. It does. Florencia has decided that there is no need for reproduction now and are busily murdering the drones and hauling their corpses out.

If Beatrice I is not accepted, I will simply reunite the cities again and then split them like I'd planned, so I am happy, no longer fearing I will lose the hive. Even so, hope hope hope, as Beatrice cost $24 and when I went to collect her I saw the inside of the queen-rearing colony that had her, and was very impressed with their gentle, calm temperament and beauty. I want that genetics and hope that future cross-breeds will produce bees with the extra-fuzzy brightly golden appearance of the Apiopolians, and be even gentler. They are already the nicest bees I've ever had. Also, all the Melissas but Melissa I are offspring of an incestuous mating between a queen and her own brothers, while Beatrice I is a golden Italian cross-bred with fit drones from any number of colonies in the supplier's bee-yard, including tough ferals, and since queens mate with multiple drones the amount of genetic variation she might add could be considerable.   
 

Alas, my submission to McSweeney's list of lists (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/) has been rejected. The humiliation.

My list:

The Convenience Foods of Doctor Moreau

Beef Wellington Pop Tarts
Instant Microwavable Cuppa Jugged Hare
Oysters Rockerfeller High-Energy Meal Replacer Bars
Stilton Whiz
Crispy Puffs de Foie Gras
Lobster Bisque in a Biskit