The winged machine swung around to address the runway -- another perfect landing.    Like so many airplanes, the bees take off and land via a clear plexiglass tunnel en route to the hive.  Standing outside the Orangerie, one could hear the buzz directly overhead, as the bees took their proper place at the fruit and harvest expo in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Buzzing around Paris at this time of year, there is lots to see.  Chinese photos are being shown on the fence outside the gardens, and oversize sculptures are in the Tuileries.  Tonight is a "Blanche Nuit" or "white night" when many activities are open until Sunday morning.

A course in bee handling, or apiculture, is offered at the Park.  Often you can see the white-suited net-covered students, armed with little smokers, approaching the hives.   The hives themselves are a honey-colored wood, stacked up under little copper roofs, around a fountain.  Bees need water.

We visited the Veronese exposition at the Senate museum on Friday night.  Veronese painted life size portraits, along with many mythological scenes.  Daphne's soft skin gives way to branches for hands, as her metamorphoses is recorded on the canvas. A knight stands boldly in a painted architectural niche, his armor gleaming.  The show is a good way to become reacquainted with the "classic", something we rarely seek out in a bigger museum.

The European honeybee is indigenous to France, and was transported to America from England by the Virginia colonists nearly 400 years ago.  Now the worldwide European honeybee population is endangered by a mite, which attacks the bees and their larva.  Because bees are not carnivores, they do not destroy the mites.  It is up to man to put anti-mite strips in the hives.

There are over 600 varieties of apples and pears raised in the Luxembourg gardens.  A smattering of specimens were represented in the hall, which  smelled of apples, a little liquor-y.  At this time of year, each piece of fruit on the tree is enclosed in a fine cotton sack to foil the starlings.  We bought a loaf of gingerbread made with honey, to support the pollinators.

My own morning glories have taken to blooming, at the eleventh hour of summer.  Impatiens have sprung up from last years pot.  A lackluster summer has given way to a fertile fall.

We bought a new mobile phone this week, and have spent hours trying to retrieve email from the machine.  We have mastered dialing, which I'd formerly thought of as obvious.  On the sidewalk outside our apartment building a computer monitor lay this morning broken to bits -- ravaged for parts, or was it hurled from the window?

At the "bio" market I find a pile of picturesque, imperfect apples.  I buy them solely for their artistic merit.

On the way to London on the Eurostar, we pass "pea-patches" full of pumpkins and squash.  Apple orchards with bright red fruit dot the countryside, interspersed with cows and sheep.  It is a bit of a disappointment to pull into Waterloo station, but we make up for it with some good Chinese food.

Laurie (painting and text) and Blair PESSEMIER
Harvest, acrylic on wood, 7 x 12 inches