Wrapping up my visit to the Yerba Buena Farm

It has been an incredibly challenging, stimulating, and inspiring experience here for me. First of all, I am immensely grateful for the space, time and energy that this family has given me. They have provided an unbelievably welcoming environment for me and I am so impressed and inspired by their generosity and sincere devotion to teaching people about their life and the things they do to sustain and enrich their experience on earth. They have taught me to listen directly to my body. I have never been able to take clear moments throughout the day to sit with myself and think about how i'm feeling and be my own caretaker. In no way do they discourage seeing a doctor when you've broken a bone or have some other severe injury or pain that you cannot help yourself with in the moment. Although I think it is so valuable to learn how to take care of yourself in little ways that add up to preventing the bigger problems from occurring. I am completely spoiled here with amazing and fresh food, healing energy, and healing materials such as oils and tea that I know make my body so much happier. This trip has been a really crucial step for me in mental and physical health. I love being outdoors but I know that simply going for a walk everyday is not enough medicine and not enough for my brain to be aware of. I need to be constantly aware of what is entering my body and what is fueling me and what feels right and what doesn't. When we open up a hive and look inside at whats going on and how successful and healthy it is, we have to look and think very deeply about every little detail. Nothing can be missed. If you look through a hive and miss one frame, there could be a mite infestation on some of those larvae that we eventually spread and destroy the colony. When we are thinking about our health we have to think about every factor that could be helping or hurting us. Even living in Vermont, a state with supposedly clean air and resources. We now face a huge issue with contaminated water that is now going into our systems every day. There is also a huge problem with skin cancer in Vermont because people spend all winter inside and then finally go out in the sun in the summer when their bodies aren't used to it. There are so many miniscule factors that go into our health that we rarely think about or even do anything about. We also forget that the health of ourselves directly correlates with the health of the Environment. If there are high pollution rates in your area, or if there aren't a lot of trees and thriving wildlife around where you live then that means you are missing out on all of these natural resources that make your body happy and healthy. If you don't see any birds eating the berries on a tree, that means they are poisonous to yourself as well. If you don't see a lot of happy animals and plants in an area, that means there is something wrong and you are suffering from it. I want to use what I have learned on this trip to show people that we cannot be healthy if our surroundings aren’t. Taking care of yourself is 100% worth your while and we need to stop thinking that there are so many things like work and money that come before our health.

Photography was a really important tool for me on this trip because it allowed me to capture my thoughts and feelings instantly. There are words and feelings that go with every picture I took and even if they aren't physically there to other people, they will always be there for me and I strongly believe that if I have real passion and feelings in my photography, that they will come out and be felt by my viewers.

Bees

So far I've learned a lot about choices of beekeeping and the benefits and downfalls of each of them. Here Agape and Kwao have about 70 hives, 5 or so are langstroth hives. Their reason for top bar hives is economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. First of all, making your own top bar hive is far less expensive than buying parts to build a langstroth hive. Second, langstroth hives are much more aggressive which to me is a clear indicator that it is a less natural formation for them and many langstroth beekeepers use pesticides which harm your bees and poison your products. Agape and Kwao use only french thyme and guinea hen to fight of pests. Langstroth hives also have to be handled much more when you have to pick up entire boxes (10 frames at a time) full of bees, which can be up to 100 pounds if it is full of honey. As opposed to picking up one frame at a time when working with top bars which weigh up to 10 pounds when full of honey. This makes top bar hive beekeeping much more accessible and easily introduced to people who never thought they could do bee keeping. I went into the hives one of my first days here with very little introduction and I was so surprised at how much I learned so quickly and how I was completely capable of holding a frame full of capped brood and coated in bees. People have chosen langstroth hives because of the honey production. The bees produce more honey because the frames require a foundation that is a thin piece of bees wax printed with only worker cells on it, no drones. This means that the bees continue to only build worker cells and the workers make honey and protect the hive, while the drones only live to mate with the queen. That is why langstroth's are used in more of a production system and for people who only want the honey. Many beekeepers with langstroth hives are also convinced that drones are not necessary for the hive and a successful honey flow. Drones don't make honey so therefor they are considered useless. It has been proven however that not letting your bees produce drones does not help your colony in the long run. If you want cost efficient, healthy and happy bees however, and you're also interested in rendering the wax, then top bar is the way to go.