Irish Acres Organic Farm and Apiary Agrarian Blog

        It’s been almost four months since our last blog post. As I write this journal entry, I am sitting beside a beautiful lake at the campus of the American University of Iraq - Baghdad, where I have been working for the past year. Between my work in Iraq and the restrictions imposed on everyone around the world by COVID-19, I was not able to visit Irish Acres Apiary for a full year - twelve full months without a single hive inspection, without opening the hives, without any treatments or feeding, nothing. For one full year, our colonies of bees were on their own, left to their devices, without any “beekeeping” help from humans. How did they do?           Well, as it turns out, they did pretty well!            When I left Kentucky for Iraq in early October, 2019, I left behind eight hives, a number that was down from the previous year as I had been in Iraqi Kurdistan for the previous year and was unable to visit the apiary regularly, catch swarms, split hives, and do all the work t

Throughout history, crazy times have come and gone as politics - and almost always, only politics - have made it impossible for many otherwise normal people to live in society. There have been many such periods in human history, from barbarian invasions, to religious persecutions, to the Dark Ages, to the Inquisition, to the Holocaust, and even into our own time with the politics that is consuming American life today. It was not so long ago that liberals and conservatives were found in both the Democratic and Republican parties, pushing both parties toward the middle and making it easy for politicians to work across the aisle and build bipartisan solutions to political problems. Sadly, those days seem to be long gone with the polarization of politics under which we now live, a polarization that splits families, “unfriends” long relationships on Facebook and in real life, and has even reached the point that many people will not even date unless their potential partner passes a litmus te