if you kill a bee in germany there's a 5,000 euro fine

07 Aug, 2024

July was less restful than I had hoped. I finished up all of my study-abroad classes midway through the month, as well as my language class, but the one course I'm taking at a proper German university - on the algorithms and techniques behind image generation with AI - is still not done. My last assignment is a 30,000-to-50,000-character (15-25 page, I think) paper on clustering and quantization – techniques in machine learning. Very technical. I have to go deep into the weeds. It's so not fun, my brain does not want to sit there and learn about "Linde-Buzo-Gray Algorithm" and other ways to "pick the best scalar quantizer for the best performance." I guess when I get to something I finally understand, it's not so bad anymore. I've come a long way learning what the other stuff I've written about in this paper is. It's just so grueling staring at some 600-page textbook compiled by some guys somewhere and trying to understand what it is they're saying, staring blankly at the words, and then googling to try to find something that's at least written in a way I can understand.

Learning about machine learning is so exhausting. Today I hit the 20,000 character mark, finally, and just collapsed in bed for an hour because my brain was simply so tired. It's taken me since July 20 to make this much progress on the paper so far - none of my courses at the American college I go to have had me write an introductory textbook chapter for a technical topic, and having to write this much is just like augggh. Auuuuugh!

I suppose I'll post it to this blog when I'm done. Maybe some data scientist or machine learning engineer out there will actually want to read this thing, considering that I'm making a real attempt to make this understandable and almost everything I've found on these subjects has been not-understandable. Who knows.

Yesterday we harvested the honey in beekeeping. 102 pounds! 51.77 kg for you metric people out there. I am very proud of us - the Imkerverein, being German, is way better organized than the tiny beekeeping club at my university in the US. We harvested maybe two pounds of honey total, did all our operations in a shared dorm kitchen using pots and pans on the stove, and poured it through a tea strainer into the tiny 1-ounce jars. In contrast, our Imkerverein here has an industrial honey extractor which uses centrifugal force to extract the honey from the comb, and we wore labcoats, hairnets and plastic gloves. In preparation for the harvest, "cleaning the Honigraum" (honey room) turned out to mean getting down on our knees and scraping off every clump of wax with a scraper - although at least we earned a "ihr wart gestern fleißig" (you guys worked really hard yesterday) from a German who had missed it. He said the honey room had never been so clean.

The highlight was getting to use a Refraktometer to investigate the honey's water content. 15% is ideal - too high and the honey will ferment. I felt so professional and serious in my lab coat and gloves, testing (überprüfend) the honey and cleaning the tools between each frame for accuracy. After the whole process (six hours of manual labor - pretty exhausting) we went to a restaurant and then to a bar. In true German fashion, the bar, which was in a residential neighborhood, had "quiet hours" 10pm to 7am, so when the clock struck 10 the waitress came out and shushed everyone. I couldn't tell if the bar was still technically open after 10 (what is "quiet hours" for outdoor seating at a bar even supposed to mean anyway) but we were all pretty tired so we went home. A full day of beekeeping adventures, spent entirely in German.

Germans are much more hardcore than Americans - in their expectations for the length of college students' papers (for this same class, I also gave a 30-minute presentation about the same topic, and took Q&A), in their level of organization (to be fair, that's expected), even in the way they exercise. Whenever I've gone hiking, I've gotten to a point where I'm exhausted and struggle to go farther, and I see a young German mom with her 3-year-old happily trotting along as though the terrain isn't hard at all. "Does your son like mountains?" "Oh yes, he's been to several already!" They even bring their dogs with them up mountains. Absolutely crazy.

I am on my way to joining them however. A few weeks ago I went on a hike with a Bavarian friend of mine, and we walked for 8.5 hours - 11 miles total. It was over flat ground, but it still made me completely exhausted the next day (especially because we had spoken 98% German the entire time.)

The other unbelievably German thing that I learned at that bar was, if you kill a wasp in Germany there's a 5,000 euro fine. Yes, five thousand euros. And depending on what kind of wasp it is, if it's one of the ones that's especially protected, it's a 50,000 euro fine. They are very, very serious about protecting pollinators and other endangered species. I learned this when a wasp started buzzing around our food - really glad the Germans told me that before I swatted it in full view of everyone, but I absolutely thought they were pranking me.

I'm glad the Germans have such strong and stringent protections for the environment, even if it is really annoying. Apparently you aren't allowed to even remove wasp nests from your property yourself, you have to hire an expert to do it for you. Bees, bumblebees (Hummel), butterflies (Schmetterlinge), hornets (!) and some types of beetles are also protected. (Mosquitoes are free for the swatting.) I do like that bees are given a special status. They deserve to be protected. I suppose you can look at it as, even if it does hurt, this is our duty to give back to mother nature. To protect all of her children, even the ones we don't like.

beekeeping

Step 1: take the frames with honey without disturbing the hive. Leave enough for the bees to feed their young with throughout the winter. (Picture posted here with permission since it was ganz anonym -- fully anonymous.) We brush remaining bees off the frames with a bee brush. (Unfortunately, two bees snuck in anyway. I captured them in a special box and let them go outside.)

capped-honeycomb