I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced.

Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds.

For a long, long time, nearly 40 years, I never had any bees. I can't think why.

Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.

Nothing gives a person more confidence... than to be zipped snugly inside a bee suit.

My crickets found me.

I started collecting crickets to study them. Now I expect they will be my companions for many years to come.

Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.

Fiddling with the genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we had become human. We are the fiddlingest animal the world has ever seen.

I am an early riser.