Full Moon

It's a full moon tonight. You all know what that means - the moon will look like a big pale circle in the sky. Did you also know it means the moon will rise at around the same time as sunset, and the moon will set around the same size as sunrise? This is because the moon is full when it is directly opposite the sky from the sun, so they can't both be in the sky at the same time.

So if the moon is full tonight, what will it look like in one week's time?

a. It will be totally dark
b. It will be totally full
c. It will be a crescent like the letter "C"
d. It will be a half circle like the letter "C"
e. It will be a crescent like the letter "D"
f. It will be a half circle like the letter "D"

The answer is c. if you live in the northern hemisphere. If you live in the southern hemisphere the answer is f.

The moon completes a full cycle (new moon, waxing moon, full moon, waning moon, new moon again) in about 29 1/2 days, which is close enough to four weeks as a rule of thumb we can say it completes a quarter of its cycle in one week. This month encompasses a whole cycle quite handily, so the calendar I have reproduced above shows how the moon looks as it waxes and wanes. The thing I want you to remember is whether a "C" shape means the moon is waxing (getting bigger) or waning (getting smaller).

Northern Hemisphere
If you live in the northern hemisphere, the moon goes from dark, to a "D", to an "O", to a "C", then dark again. So the way to remember it is "Doctor Moon" - "D O C". Got that?

Southern Hemisphere
If you live in the southern hemisphere, the moon goes from dark, to a "C", to an "O", to a "D", then dark again. The way to remember it is "the moon if a fish" - "C O D". OK?

I find it oddly depressing that very few people seem to know this, but the majority of people can name Jennifer Aniston's husband.

Review: Why the World is Full of Useless Things

In Alan Moore's From Hell (a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper) there is a chilling sequence where the Ripper hallucinates after the murder of Mary Kelly. He is transported to the present day where he is amazed by the wonders that science and technology has given us, but even more amazed by our own responses to living in a time of miracles. He says

Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?

The same idea is expressed in Why the World is Full of Useless Things by Steve McKevitt, but his book is much funnier than Moore's. The premise of the book is that McKevitt wonders why the 21st century has not delivered the personal jet-packs, affordable space travel and clones of Raquel Welch that he looked forwards to when he was 10. Instead we have QVC, ready meals, Jade Goody and reality TV.

It's a funny book, it's an easy read, but it's not one of those quirky but ultimately pointless stocking fillers you sometimes get (they would be a good example of the sort of useless stuff McKevitt writes about). He really tries to analyse why our world is full of this tat. You'll have to read the book yourself to find out his answer. It's subtle and not easily amenable to summing-up as a neat one-liner. But you'll get a clue if I tell you that the book is divided into four sections: Hubris (thinking we know more than we do and we're more talented than we really are), Ignorance (and why being ignorant makes you vulnerable to being sold useless things), Mind Control (in other words, marketing) and Everything Now! (our ever-shortening attention spans and demand for constant entertainment).

I found it thought-provoking. I've read plenty of books that repeat stuff I already knew about why we should combat consumerism - because it's leading to over consumption, climate change, peak oil, soil erosion and so on. But McKevitt says we should combat it because it's just no fun. As he says in his 300-word summary of the book:

The world is full of useless things because we've made it that way. It's not a bad world, but if only we demonstrated the tiniest amount of collective ambition it could be a whole lot better. The first step is to demand more from ourselves and refuse to settle for facsimile lifestyles that are available in magnolia, beige or vanilla.

By the way, he also includes a 300-word summary of the book created by Microsoft Word Auto-Summarizer. Reading that was one of the laugh-out-loud moments.

July Challenge

We're well into July now so this is just a quick challenge that won't even apply to everybody. But if, like me, you have a shower unit over your bath (rather than in a separate shower cubicle, or even no shower at all) then I challenge you to put the plug in next time you take a shower.

You'll end up standing in a few inches of water but never mind, I only want you to do it once. The reason is to see how much less water you use in a shower than in a bath. Unless you take very long showers, you won't use nearly as much water as if you filled the tub for a hot bath.

Most people know that showers use less water than baths. But I think it's really helpful to see with your own eyes just how much difference there is. Direct personal experience is a lot more likely to make you want to change your behaviour than any efficiency campaign or general good intentions.

Once you've finished taking your shower, consider what you're going to do with the water. Will you just pull out the plug and let it go down the drain? Or can you reuse some of it, perhaps to water plants? If it's still quite warm you could mix a little soap powder into it and drop some laundry in there. I wash my duvets in the bath once or twice a year because they're too big to go in the machine. It's better to reuse bath or shower water for a job like that than to fill up the bath just for a duvet. Or if you are clever at plumbing, could you somehow divert the water into your washing machine, or an irrigation system for your garden, or even your own reed bed?

But that's not the main focus of the challenge. The challenge is just to put the plug in and see how much water you save by taking a shower rather than a bath. Don't forget to vote in the poll in the right-hand sidebar when you've done it.

Broad Bloody Beans

Don't ever mention broad bloody beans to me again. I spent the weekend lifting plants, stripping 40lbs (18kg) of bean pods from them, carrying them home, shelling them, blanching them, draining them, popping them one by one out of their skins, then freezing them in handy portions. I reckon I spent about six hours doing it in total, and I had help from Ed and the kids at most stages.

Anyone know any good broad bean recipes?

A Day at the Apiary

The weather brightened up so I did go to the apiary yesterday afternoon with my bee guru, Arnie. We had a few tasks to do and they were all fun.

First we transferred a swarm Arnie had collected from a nucleus box into a proper hive and fed them. A nucleus box is a small temporary beehive. Arnie collected the swarm in Bollington, but we don't know whose bees they were. The queen was marked with a blue spot which means she is four years old. That's pretty old for a queen. Beekeepers paint coloured dots on queens' backs to make them easier to find in the hive and also show how old they are by the colour.

Next we transferred my bees into a WBC hive. Finally! I've had them for more than a year and they were always supposed to be in my own WBC hive but they have remained in a borrowed National hive instead. Now I can clean up the National hives and return them to the person I borrowed them from. The colony is doing really well. The bees are strong in numbers and they have loads of honey stores, despite it being another poor season. Arnie says he has been feeding his bees because their stores are so low.

I saw my queen! I have never seen her in the year I've had her. I've just had to rely on the presence of eggs to reassure me she was still there. But I spotted her before Arnie did. She's huge! I don't know how I missed her before. She's unmarked, so I want to get in touch with Ally from Ducking for Apples and ask her if she knows when the queen was hatched. The we can mark her with the prope colour, and also have some idea how much longer she's got in her. Arnie wants me to ask Ally about the breed of the bees. He thinks they might be Welsh blacks. Ally sold me the bees in the first place, but she has just had a family bereavement and I don't want to intrude.

Even more exciting than seeing the queen is taking some honey. A WBC hive is slightly smaller than a National hive, so I took home two frames of capped honey and we all had honey on toast as an after-school snack. It was delicious. No trace of mouse pee this time.

The final exciting thing came as a big surprise. The landowner had told me there were three beehives somewhere else on his land, left behind by the chap who had this apiary before me. Arnie and I went to investigate, thinking we'd just be taking away some empty equipment to clean up and reuse. But when we got there we saw bees flying around. Two of the hives were empty (though infested with wax moths, and one of them housed a wasps' nest, now vacant), but the third clearly housed a colony. I hastily replaced my veil and gloves, but Arnie had left his gloves behind thinking we wouldn't need them. We began to disassemble the hive to inspect the colony anyway - some beekeepers work bare-handed as a matter of course. But these bees were unused to being handled and were quick to use their stings, so we left them for another day.

We're going back in a week and we'll check the swarm colony, check my bees and take more honey, and inspect the surprise colony. I want to divide my bees some time this season so I end the season with two strong colonies going into the winter.

I understand something now I didn't fully understand before. It's not about honey. Frankly, beekeeping is a complicated, labour intensive and expensive way to get honey. If you're just after honey, you're far better off buying it in the shops. The real reason to be a beekeeper is simply because it's a heck of a lot of fun.

Painting Beehives

I spent most of yesterday cleaning up a WBC beehive. I scraped any wax or other crud off it, expelled a few spiders, and sterilised all the parts with a blowlamp (that's my favourite). Then I sanded and painted all the exterior bits with ordinary white gloss paint (after filling with wood-filler where necessary). I got some frames with foundation wax I had already assembled. Then I was ready to go.

But today it is cold, miserable and raining. Not at all the right kind of weather for beekeeping tasks. If I opened a hive today the brood (the maggoty baby bees) would get cold and die. Also the bees would be cross and would try to take it out on me. The hive parts are all damp and that's really bad for bees. So nothing doing until the weather brightens up.

Freecycle Challenge Results

98 people voted in the Bean Sprouts Freecycle challenge. The voting was as follows:

• I've joined Freecycle! 10 votes (10%)
• I was already a member of Freecycle! 84 votes (84%)
• I don't want to join Freecycle! 4 votes (4%)
• I'm a Freecycle moderator! 1 vote (1%)

Wow! Voters were overwhelmingly already members of Freecycle, and a number of people commented to say they were instrumental in setting up their local groups. Ten people voted to say they had joined Freecycle in response to the challenge. And we'll never whether any others joined because of the challenge, but chose not to vote. As ever I'm amazed by your response to these polls. A new challenge for July will be appearing shortly.