Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
🐝 Beekeeping!
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events. Like, a lot of them.
🚙 Adventures just beyond Austin
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS. Some of us meet outside IRL together. We host monthly events. Two for your radar:
1. SUNDAY, APRIL 26: Athena and two(!) owlets are reigning over the Wildflower Center. We’re going to say hello. This will be open to the community + family-friendly. Bring a buddy, and embrace your birding destiny. Grab a spot.
TUESDAY, MAY 12: Peacocks, ponds, visiting the 2009 Small Tree of the Year.
This is a collaboration with ATX Art Club, an excellent, laid-back art club in town. Bring a chair or blanket. Grab the sketchbook + charcoal pencil add on if you’re coming empty-handed. Grab a spot.
To get first dibs on event tickets and join our tighter circle, join here.
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
Sometimes a dream coming true looks like driving down the interstate with thousands of bees in your enclosed vehicle.
Today we’re navigating the slippery slope into a beekeeping hobby.
First, the smallest toe into the water about bees:
Pollinators make plants possible. Without them transferring pollen from flower to flower, fruit doesn’t happen, seeds don’t scatter, ecosystems don’t hold.
Honeybees are a particularly efficient delivery mechanism for this work. They practice floral constancy—on a single foraging trip, a honeybee often visits only one plant species, which means the pollen she’s carrying actually lands somewhere useful. There’s no cross-contaminating the tomatoes with the salvia. Girlfriend’s on a mission, and she knocks it out of the park. Fruit yield increases several times over in the presence of hives.
Native bees exist, and do serious, important work. Native bees are mostly solitary, and that lone wolf mentality puts them on a much less scalable playing field.
Throwback to this native bee visiting my first anemone
Enter: European Honeybees. Honeybees punch above their weight as pollinators because they communicate. Think: waggle dance. It’s a show-and-tell of the direction, distance, and quality of a food source, and the ship rises with the tide here.
Honeybees also store—honey, honeycomb, beeswax are byproducts of a colony prepping for a future it can’t see yet.
Two facts that got into jaw-drop territory for me:
Honeybees have 3-mile radius range for their food supply, so special shout out to my neighborhood pals for your native landscaping efforts
Bees see ultraviolet light. Flowers have UV patterns called nectar guides that act as an illuminated runway pointing straight to the good stuff. This fascinates me.
Why would you keep bees?
They’re cool AF
I mean, have you seen them?
There’s a 50% hive failure rate. Which means there’s a 50% hive success rate. What a challenge to be responsible for a living system that’s an underlying force for the local ecosystem.
Honey. Honeycomb. Beeswax. What backyard potential for teacher gifts and book club grazing boards to escalate.
The origin story
A one-off conversation with a neighbor several years ago flagged that there was a beekeeper in the neighborhood, and I remember thinking: you can do that?
Turns out, yes.
I traded him some eggs for information. Learned that swarm capturing is a thing. Got his eyes on my backyard to consider whether hens and bees could cohabitate in the corner I’d been eyeing. Mid convo, I noticed my gate was ajar, my hen in the greenbelt, and so a very paddle cactus-laden poultry rescue mission. By the time Penny was safely underarm, bees were officially in my 2-5 year plan.
Penny, age 8
Survival instincts: blissfully underdeveloped
The prep work was its own rescue mission—confirming I’d remain in the house through divorce, admiring the fence construction for my aviary/apiary, leaping on secondhand beekeeping supplies through Facebook marketplace, becoming aware of and ripping out invasive privet and ivy monocultures in my yard, considering and installing plants to support and lengthen nectar seasons, having conversations with neighbors about future bee buddies + known honeybee allergies, encouraging my kids to be calm and curious with bee buzz bys, booking the agro-tourism class. Lingering with my son at the Austin Nature and Science Center field trip, playing how to identify the queen. Why to identify the queen. What to do if you do identity the queen.
Then: learning where and how and what to order bees. Discovering that 5-frame nucs are a thing. That nuc mean nucleus colony. That they are miniature, established hives that include brood frames with eggs and larvae and capped brood, frames of honey and pollen, a mated laying queen, and worker bees. That “deeps” is a term. That there are thousands of bees in a nuc. That a healthy, productive queen can lay 1500 eggs PER DAY. That she does this all after one mating flight, where she stockpiles sperm to dole out for years.
And now:
the reality of this responsibility and honor
how to transfer beginner-level knowledge from theory into concrete action
how crucial it is to have patient, proactive, curious help along the way
to spend Monday evening at the Senior Activity Center to deepen my beekeeping knowledge
The night before
It’s a big thing, to have a goal come true. Sleep hinged on a Santa-is-coming type excitement and an exam time dread—would I ever be able to hammock peacefully again, or would the bees drive me away? Am I making my backyard kid-unfriendly? Were my neighbors really cool with this, or just being polite? Am I really capable of learning this hands-on thing, finding resources, knowing when I don’t know, handling the grief if this hive does collapse?
Also: why do 50% of bee colonies in Texas collapse?
And then, underneath all of that: what if things go well? What if you can build the life you desire, step by step, learning along the way?
The pickup
First, for all of my discipline, it entirely disappeared in the farm gift shop. Did I need mealy blue sage and Texas sage and The Beekeeper’s Bible and a couple of spare deeps? Very much so.
Did I need the surreal vision of a woman in a bee suit smoking my hive, carrying the nuc to my trunk, the visceral awareness of spending half an hour in an enclosed vehicle? Also yes.
Smoke to subdue
And so, with sputtering gray clouds, a low, steady thrum of bees and the growing contingent in the back window. One curious worker perching on the dashboard for the duration.
Hello, little friend!
Installation
Suited up and through a smoker learning curve, I quickly discovered there’s an inherent incompatibility between a bee suit and a Diet Coke.
I wondered if I’d be afraid of the bees.
I was not.
What I was: in awe. Acutely aware of my very emerging literacy of bees, but immediately soothed by their collaborative purpose—so certain of their roles, so amenable to being gently brushed aside for finger-gripping frames, transported from carrier to brood box. To see how incredibly many bees were diligently working on the frames. To be so very careful not to pinch a small body with my oversized leather fingers.
And soon after seeing their little faces, a need to go to another plant nursery, to crouch to observe the buzz around the skullcap, the penta, the salvia. To look differently at the diversity of my landscape, to triangulate with the sun, to create a space with the best possible outcomes.
To want something and to work incrementally toward it.
To have it arrive and be even more than I’d hoped.
My daughter, naming the bees.
Half a dozen down. Several thousand to go.
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ April 17: Founder Pickleball—this is for you, early stage tech founders
🗓️ April 17: Stewards of the Austin Wild Night: Dress code: Texas cocktail casual
🗓️ April 18 : Austin Ruck Club: Rucks available to borrow. BYObones to strengthen
🗓️ April 18: Pop-Up Picnic + silent auction
🗓️ April 18: Cars, Coffee, & Croissants: Porsche, with a side of Lake Austin waterfowl
🗓️ April 18: Marvels of Migration: Learn about these long distance athletes and their choice of breeding grounds
🗓️ April 18: Clean Lady Bird Lake: Keep Austin Beautiful Day: take to a kayak to scoop some trash
🗓️ April 19: Travis Audubon’s Birdathon: Great use case for binoculars
🗓️ April 19 Walk and Talk, rooting in connection and curiosity
🗓️ April 19 Tree Folks Friends and Family Picnic with Ask-an-Arborist, bug safari, and a dunk tank.
🗓️ April 19: Texas Mushroom Conference: Yes, there’s a costume contest.
🗓️ April 20: Pitch & Run: for 4.2 miles of opportunity to support your founder/investor buddies
🗓️ April 20: Plant Swap & Hotdog Social: Austin Pond Society does not mince words here
🗓️ April 21: Tuesday Twilights: Music + wildflowers + Athena the Owl
🗓️ April 22: Put out the Welcome Mat for Backyard Birds: Don’t chase, attract.
🗓️ April 22: Earth Day @ Zilker Botanical Garden, with seed balls and microgreen activities in the lineup
🗓️ April 22 : Astronomy Club: Physics, Math, and Astronomy Building
🗓️ April 25, 26: Austin Blues Festival
🗓️ April 26: Group Gawking: Athena + Owlets I’m hosting this! Step one: look at owls in various stages of maturity Step two: 1-mile stroll with high odds of flora talk
🗓️ May 2: Basic Blacksmithing Intro: Live out your fantasy fiction dreams in real time, advance registration required
🗓️ May 12: Charcoal in the Garden- I’m co-hosting this with my pal Lara from ATX Art Club + the resident peacocks. Zero artistic talent required.
JUST OUTSIDE OF AUSTIN
🚙 April 17: Adult Night Hike at Cibolo
🚙 April 18: Intro to Archery
🚙 April 18: Spring Star Party at Enchanted Rock
🚙 April 18: Hiking to the Stars: A hike to the falls + night sky + UV flashlights
🚙 April 18: Geology of McKinney Falls: indoor education for your outside enjoyment
🚙 April 18: Ancient Dart Throwing: could you hang with your ancestors in a Mammoth hunt?
🚙 April 18: Golden-cheeked Warblers: Native Texan Songbirds These birds are a BIG DEAL in the Central Texas birding world
🚙 April 18: Fishing with a Ranger: Loaner rods on standby
🚙 April 23: Dairy Days: Butter. Cheese. Milking a fake cow. This is what OOO is made for.
🚙 April 24 UV Night Walk if you needed another excuse to visit Dripping Springs
PSA
CRITTER CORNER
Friday night chicken coop mucking.
This is not a chicken.
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you lean into the hobby that’s been circling the hoop.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 Are you looking for a community of people in the startup ecosystem who go outside together? I’ve got you.
🪵 Are you sitting on a misogi-esque story? Spill.
🪵 Do you need to commission a writer? I’m happy to discuss projects that might make me cry in public/funnel my experiential/existential dread into essays like this one.
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
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