Portrait of Oliver Saks, Photo by Joost van den Broek
Below is Oliver Sacks’s last message to his readers of the New York Times. The message is titled: My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Cancer.
“I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.”
The New York Times, February 19, 2015. Dr. Oliver Sacks died on August 30, 2015.
At the Best Bees Company Urban Beekeeping Laboratory and Bee Sanctuary (UBL) that I direct, my associates and I focus on what enhances the health of honey bees. We are presently assessing DNA values of honey to measure queen health, the presence or absence of the unicellular parasite Nosema ceranae, and the diversity of the flowers on which the bees gather pollen. Together or alone, queen health, Nosema ceranae, and floral diversity incline a hive to thrive or fail. Because Nosema ceranae now constitutes an acute challenge to numerous colonies, we have been testing an all-natural anti-fungal treatment on honeybees and, accordingly, we are testing mated queens for the presence or absence of Nosema ceranae.
Observation Hives
This summer we have also been testing how honeybees communicate. We are studying their waggle dances in observation hives (honey comb enclosed in glass) by video recording their behavior under varying experimental treatments (see pictures attached). How intensely and frequently they waggle dance varies under different conditions.
And we’re expanding. We’re about to undertake significant research within the city limits of Boston. The Urban Bee Laboratory has purchased five vacant lots from the City of Boston to turn into productive urban farms and apiaries.
Maybe best of all, MassArt students are contributing to our work. Two MassArt students, Greg Maslin and Ethan Drory, will be working on art+science projects on the farms this fall. Greg is now learning beekeeping, honey harvesting, and hive box building. He’s fabricating twenty-seven cube container displays to make visible to visitors how various specifies interact. Ethan is constructing an aquaponics (fish and plants symbiotic) system.
Next on my wish list? A greenhouse here at MassArt to serve both as a productive farm and a ‘living laboratory” where students and faculty could behold, up close, how living things live by sustaining each other.
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Photo: Gerst July 16, 2017
Writes Professor Robert Gerst: The robins had built a nest in spring. They produced just two pale blue eggs that never hatched. Then they assembled a whole row of nests. They abandoned each…until this one last nest they tucked under the eaves. One mother here and three juveniles, all juveniles screaming, top of their bird lungs, “Me! Me! Me!”
Photos: Gary Parzych. Music: Ludwig van Beethoven, 6th Symphony (“The Pastoral”). Video: Gerst.
Gary Parzych (2019) writes:
I am doing an amazing stone carving internship in Vermont. And I have found an unexpected connection to wetlands….about which I learned in Wetlands Science & Policy.
The three quarries that are on our property were first excavated in the early 1800’s and are near the base of a large hill. Until 1970, quarry operators pumped the quarries to keep the marble dry and the workers safe. Pumping massive amounts of water out of the quarries and down the hill, the operators created a huge marsh in what was a valley/ dry flat land. Now the downhill site has saturated soils and marsh vegetation. It is clearly a wetland! Super interesting side effect of marble quarrying.
Dog drawings by Monica Souza, Tomomi Yoshida, Sam Elwood, and Nicholas Leonce. Excerpts from texts by Sam Elwood and Finn Duffy. Song is “Old Blue.” Singer is Dave Van Ronk. Video by Gerst.
Writes Professor Norrie Epstein:
The dog is a product of intelligent design, only the intelligence is human rather than divine. Today’s breeds are cultural artifacts, products of aesthetic choices. For a final project, students designed their own ideal dog breed. There was one caveat: it had be grounded in reality. Thus, no flying or talking dogs!
The robins had built six nests beneath the eaves before they built the nest that satisfied them and then they had fussed for days. We had given up all hope–it was cold and damp and dismal–until this morning, when something hatched and they flew away, taking all save these eggs in two nests. Robert Gerst
Spring 2017 “Energy in the 21st Century” contemplated a universe few of us ever consider–Mass Art-the-energy-consumer. Who knew that 3D Glass consumes more energy than any other major? Who knew that the hot shop uses more energy per occupied square foot than any building in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?
