Paint Sticks and Lost Turtles

It was wet and rainy earlier in the summer, and the bee hives were moist. The little girls were spending a lot of time outside their hives, on the outer walls, drying out. A friend called for advice, remarking that she'd read that if the roofs of the hives were lifted a bit there would be better ventilation.
"They recommended putting paint sticks on the top of the hive and setting the roof down on top of that. I'm going to buy some tomorrow. What do you think?"
I think a stick would be fine, a few odd pieces of wood or anything else you had laying around. But there aren't things laying around for a lot of people. They find themselves in the quite sorry ass state of affairs of having only prefabricated crap laying around, in which case, paint sticks would be fine. Don't use them to stir paint. Buy them special as scrap wood.
The idea of paint sticks as a metaphor as objects of a particular dimension that can be used to improvise to reach a certain goal is lost, and paint sticks become the focal point.
This only bothers me because of a classified ad I saw in the Mountain Express, our local liberal free weekly. A kind citizen had placed the following ad: Box turtle found in West Asheville. Call if you've lost a box turtle.
They don't exist in the wild, it seems. If there's a box turtle, it must've broken out of someone's terrarium. We can do as we wish to ourselves, and only have ourselves to blame. When we suburbanize the insects and the reptiles, we've gone too far.