Strands of Genius: Food Disgust, Learning From Rejections, Art of the Home

Plus: beeeeeeees (for real this time!)

Apr 25, 2023

WORKING ON | finishing talks for a client summit in Palm Springs

LOOKING AHEAD

April 11-26 | Beersheba Springs, TN
April 26-28 | Palm Springs, CA
April 28-May 5 | Los Angeles, CA
May 5- June 9 | Seattle, WA

:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::

We wrapped up our time in Beersheba Springs yesterday, and it felt a bit sad to leave. We arrived to empty trees, and left to leaves of green (and pollen just about everywhere.) And in that time, we caught up with friends, and with each other, enjoying company and conversations and cooking!

The next two weeks are transitional for us, as we join clients for a summit in Palm Springs and catch up with friends in Los Angeles before we head to Seattle, where we’ll be for a full month.

This week, we’re especially thankful for:

Jason & Niki, mimosas, tacos, Oskar, green shakshuka, red shakshuka, Ali & Chris, pulled pork, collard greens, mac & cheese, Karin & Gordon, Steve, Tina, Howell, all our Beersheba fam, Armfield Avenue walks, Stone Door hikes, wild flowers, mountain laurels, honeybee relocations and educations & YOU.

:: THE LINKS ::

FOOD DISGUST

I’m always fascinated to hear the weirdest things people have eaten, or the food where they draw their line. I joke that I have poor hygiene standards, but my stomach of steel has served me well over the years. Faris has a bit more of a sensitive stomach and so he’s typically a little more cautious than me. Still, we’re both pretty adventurous, and not too easily disgusted by food. Christina Hartmann and Michael Siegrist at the Technical University of Zurich found that people’s disgust concerning food can be broken into eight distinct weighted areas, and it proves to be excellent conversation fodder. (Idr Labs)

LEARNING FROM REJECTIONS

Running your own business, you deal with plenty of rejections. Some come with a sigh of relief, but others are sad. But as Dr Dreisoerner writes, rejections hurt because they’re often attached to a hope. But, rejections build resilience and — They’re not all bad. While this list list specifically about dealing with job rejection, the learnings apply to quite a few types of workplace-based-rejections. (Indeed & Psychology Today)

THE ART OF HOME IN TIMES OF ISOLATION

Because she says it far more beautifully than we could Julie Schneider writes, “In the wake of COVID-19’s house-bound isolation, art materials and motifs derived from the home seem charged with new meaning and a searching sense of reinvention.” She continues, “During a grinding era of hardship after hardship, pandemic and “tripledemic” and endemic, the pull of everyday domestic objects seems to keep popping up in sculptural forms in museum and gallery shows with even pre-pandemic pieces shining in a different light and new works appearing as handmade harbingers of something, dare I say, hopeful. By reimagining the commonplace in delightfully weird and witty ways, pandemic creativity feels like an invitation to seek beauty and possibility, even in the humble, imperfect, and seemingly ordinary.” (Hyperallergic)

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:: BEEEEEEEEES! ::

We arrived back to my family’s mountain house, Wholemeal, after spending a weekend in Chattanooga to my cousins wrapping up their time at the house. My cousin Katie mentioned that there were quite a few bees outside, and that we’d probably better deal with it. It turned out the we was me ;)

I called pest control companies the next day, only to discover we were out of range, or the project sounded too difficult once they got the videos. It took a full 5 days for me to finally find someone, and this was after learning that we were likely dealing with honeybees, a protected species that pest companies aren’t licensed to help with anyway. Extermination was out, relocation was in. And thankfully, Phil Harr a University of Georgia graduate working for the University of Tennessee’s agricultural extension program was willing to help.

I was over the moon excited to learn that we were dealing with honeybees, y’all. I’ve been hooked on Mr & Mrs Bee Rescue on Instagram, so I had an idea about what to expect: We’d smoke the bees, open up the area, find the queen, put her in a box, and then all the bees would follow. The problem was, I didn’t have any of the equipment or expertise. But as soon as we had Phil on board, I asked him if there was any chance he could bring an extra bee suit so I could *bee* a part of the day. (The bee jokes were flowing all week long, because obviously.) Thankfully, he was happy to oblige, and let me join him on the adventure.

The day started bright and early, with Phil setting up his ladder on a sloping hill and trying to get a read on the exact location of the bees, since we could only see where they were flying in, but not where they had built the ‘comb. (That’s short for honeycomb, and refers to those hexagonal cells that are joined together by bees. It’s where they store their eggs, larvae, pollen and honey.) I’m not going to lie - the ladder situation made me a little nervous, but Phil seemed like he knew what he was doing, and like he wanted to continue living, so I trusted that he felt safe enough. Unfortunately, the location of the bees was less than ideal. According to the heat sensor, those freeloaders had made their home in a decorative wall. The wall was outside of the second floor guest rooms, but because of the way the house was built, it was three stories from the ground, and free floating, unattached to the rest of the house itself. “This is how you get bees,” Phil tells me, repeatedly about decorative walls.

He eventually decided that the ladder setup was not conducive to the bee relocation, and his ingenious solution was to back up his truck, and try to level out his ladder as much as possible. His ingenuity impressed me almost as much as his fearlessness. Here was his second setup

(Side note: I truly thought he was about to climb up from the back of the truck, but he pointed out that would be stupid when he could just go out from the window. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks, ha.)

Once he was satisfied with his setup, he put on his bee suit, and then went to work with a crow bar to remove the boards… and we got our first glimpse of the hive in all its beauty!

(See all of that stuff *below* the comb? It looks a dirty white underneath the black tarp, below the comb. That’s debris. It turns out bees make a whole lot of debris and that yes micro plastics are hurting them too, but more generally you can tell the health of a hive through the debris. In the debris, he also found two acorns and mice dropping, meaning that at some point we had squirrels and mice up there too. )

Before Phil could start removing the comb, he first had to vacuum a bunch of bees. When I asked why we weren’t smoking the bees, he said, “Rosie. Look at this house. It’s wood from the ‘70s and I’m on a ladder. I’m not about to take my chances with catching this house on fire,” which made a lot of sense.

He had created his own bee vacuum, essentially a shop vac with a mesh bag at one end to collect the bees. He’d scoot out onto the ladder, backwards, and then I’d pass the hose through the window, and he’d suck suck suck. Then, we put the bags of bees in a bucket and safely carried them through the house and outside. I say WE because remember, Phil hooked your girl up with her own bee suit!

Here I am living my best life, a badass with a bag of bees.

Once we had the bags of bees outside, we’d dump them out and look for the queen. It was thrilling. Incredibly exhilarating. It’s like riding a roller coaster — You know you’re safe, but it still feels dangerous. I had 30 bees on my face mask at one point and it’s really difficult to calm yourself enough to stop swatting at them. On top of the fear factor of seeing the bees right in front of your face and all over your clothes, the buzzing was ridiculously loud!

Head on over to my Instagram highlights and for a look into how the whole thing went down.

At this point, Phil told me we were dealing with Italian honeybees. Apparently there are a number of different races, and we were thankful we got the Italians because they were bred to be docile, and the queen has a red abdomen — unlike the German honeybees which have been bred to be aggressive. Yikes. Good old fashioned stereotypes woven into the lives of bees too, I guess!

Still, despite our best efforts, we were unable to find the Queen. Phil told me that he finds the queen ~80% of the time, but that our situation was especially challenging — it wasn’t just the location of the hive itself, but the way in which he had to get to it, the transporting of the bees, etc — it gave us a lot of time to lose the queen!

After enough of the honeybees were sucked off the comb, Phil made his way back up the ladder and then began cutting off the comb. Inside the comb, we saw pollen packs, which are stored and then eaten by bees for protein. Also in the the comb were puffed up cells, called brood cells, which are darker and help the bees develop and then hatch. And then, of course, there’s also honey.

I thought only honeybees made honey, but it turns out most bees create honey or nectar of some kind — this is their carbohydrate! Honeybees, however, produce a surplus of honey, hence why we’re so familiar with them. There was a small amount of honey in the comb, which Phil cracked open for me to see, but as soon as he did that, the bees came swarming back to eat up all the honey. By the time we had made it upstairs and back down again, the honey had been completely consumed! Had we dealt with this problem in June or July, we may have had more honey — but we also might have had a much bigger (and definitely stickier) problem on our hands.

I got to see a bunch of drones hatch, and it turns out that drones are all men, they can’t sting you, and basically the only thing they do is consume resources and have sex. They can help themselves to nectar/honey, but they can’t make it. Even drones that survive the mating journey are quickly ejected from their nests when they return, because they’ve already done their job. If you ask me, it sounds like the drones have the best job, ha! (That said, they can only mate 7-10 times within a mating flight, and they die pretty quickly after mating, which is less ideal.) Their boxy shape gives them away, and I scared all the friends who were staying with us by carrying a drone bee inside on my hand.

After the comb was cut, Phil used rubber bands to attach it to a tray. And then he put several trays in one box. Phil told me that it usually only takes a few days for the bees to remove the rubber bands entirely, and to connect the comb to the tray on their own. We would pour the bees into the lid of the box to look for the queen, and then dump the bees on top of the trays, where they would shimmy down into the comb. The vent at the bottom of the box meant that any bees outside the box could (and did!) quickly make their way into their temporary home together. It was 72F outside, which was pretty cold for the bees, and we lost at least a couple hundred throughout the process.

All in all, Phil was around for 13 hours, y’all. It was INTENSE. It was EXCITING. It was THRILLING! It had me thinking “maybe I’m in the wrong industry?!” because I was on a high for at least a week afterwards, and honestly can’t stop thinking about the honeybees. Phil told me I was a 10/10 when it came to being an assistant, and that I could help him out any time. He even told me I was the best assistant he ever had, but then he followed that up with “You’re the only person who actually followed through on assisting.” I told him that he really didn’t have to add that last part on, and we both giggled.

(For those wondering, yes, I did get stung, but I got stung early on and it made me realize that actually it’s totally fine to get stung, and it really didn’t hurt that badly. Phil got stung 3 times, which he said wasn’t too bad. His record is more than 30 times on one bee relocation.)

I checked in with Phil today to see how the bees were doing and he said “they’ve been very active.” “Busy little bees?” I responded, cheekily. He indulged me with a laugh and told me he’d keep me updated, but that he was still letting them get settled.

I know I’m biased, but the video content over on Instagram is pretty fantastic. And if you have any questions about honeybees… I’m basically an expert now ;)

Head on over to my Instagram highlights and for a look into how the whole thing went down.

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

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Strands of Genius