Busy bees

 

A few weeks ago we did a check up on the bees.  They seemed quite active to me, maybe a little different than usual. It's hard to say how you can recognize bee behavior, especially when I don't stick my head in to see what they're up to all that often.

 

But somehow, things seemed a big different.  We had two boxes on at that point. I'm so bad with all this bee terminology, I don't even know what they're called (which I'm sure would be really helpful). In any case, there were two boxes, and a third on that top that had some bee food. That was to help them get through our super cool spring and the beginning of summer. 

 

Jeremy took that box off and then we started looking into the top box with frames. Holy cow. The bees had been REALLY busy! Each of the individual frames of honey/way/etc probably weighed 4-5 pounds a piece! It was intense!

 

Anyway, we swapped some things around and then put on a third box. This is good news for us and the bees. Last year our bees never got far enough along for a third box. Jeremy is going to check them again this weekend and see if it's time to put a super on. (I do know that word! Uh... not exactly sure what that means. I DID take a long class about all this and read a lot, but I've forgotten!)

 

A few days after adding the third box, the bees were doing this: 

 

I'm hoping they were just partying. A beekeeper friend says it's possible this was robber bees stealing our honey! But we're not sure yet if anything has gone wrong. They're not doing this anymore and there continues to be bees coming and going from the hive. So we'll see!

Remodel!

Remodel our house!? Finally finish the bathroom; the gaping hole in the floor!? Finally finish the front hall, the railing, repair the plaster? Do the big giant kitchen remodel!?!?

No.

No, we are remodeling the chicken coop. You heard me. The chicken coop.  Our needs must wait, the chickens come first around here.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true, but a chicken coop remodel is much more affordable/manageable at this point in time. I've been pretty excited about this remodel for at least a year, maybe two. At least since our two dozen birds got big and their house wasn't big enough. The annex was meant to fix this, but it hasn't been convenient to use, so took on a temporary status. You know: 'permanent temporary.'

Just as a reminder, here is what we've got now:




(The annex to the right.)

Jeremy has been dreading this project for as long as I've been excited about it (of course).  But I finally talked him into breaking it down into small manageable steps that take no more than a couple hours each.  We're going to attack the coop one wall at a time, one piece at a time, and hopefully finish it by mid-September!

The first step was to replace the old Dutch door. Having your human door swing into the coop is bad. A big no-no. Take it from us: don't do it!  We never would have done it that way, but the whole coop was designed for a completely different location where the door couldn't swing out. Of course then we moved to a new house and it didn't matter - but the coop was already done! So we've been dealing with this stupid door ever since. One problem is that the chickens kick piles of straw and stuff up around the door until you can't open it anymore. Luckily the top opens independently so you can open that and use a shovel to try to dig out the door. Another problem is that when you go in you have to open the door wide enough to get in and get past the door, which often leads to sneaky little chickens escaping! Also, when you're trying to remove anything from the coop - the food bin, a bucket of poopy straw for the compost, a sick chicken - it's hard to hold onto that thing and get the door open at the same time, without letting half a dozen chickens escape at the same time!

We dug a regular house door out of the garage and cut it down. The glass was broken out at some point so we screwed on an old storm window. A couple coats of paint was all this baby needed.



So - door now opens out. And isn't it a fabulous door!?



Next up: the east wall.

Spring!

I guess it's technically spring since summer doesn't start till June 21st, though I'm sure most of us consider summer to start on June 1st.  But... I'm also used to spring meaning a lot of flowers and things growing. This year winter lasted till May and everything is slow getting started.

I'm very disappointed that my entire garlic crop seems to have failed. A dozen or more shoots were up a month or so ago... and then they just sort of died and disappeared.  I've heard others had this problem, so I assume it's the weather and not just me.

In any case, I've been seeing flowers blooming all over the place though ours have been slow.  Two of our phlox varieties are blooming and the Bleeding Heart.

My first Siberian Iris bloomed just this morning:




It's hard to tell the size... and still sort of hard even with my hand in the picture.  But these are smaller than regular Iris.


They grow in a large clump that looks sort of like grass and dozens of these beauties bloom at the same time.  They're one of my favorite flowers in the yard.



In other garden news, what happens when you let your chive plants go to seed?


Baby chives!! Lots of baby chives. I saw these yesterday and thought for a moment it was grass - but there was something about it... I picked off a piece to chew and they were chives.  There are a dozen or more in this spot and a few in other areas.  They each consist of two or three little chive blades and, did I mention, they're tiny?




They are to the left and front of one of our main chive plants here, near the stepping stone. See them? Like I said, they're tiny!


This is very exciting though for our plans of turning the terrace into a perennial herb garden.  Chives are taking over this spot for sure!

Also recently I planted out the top of the terrace with a variety of thyme.  There is also some parsley and nasturtium up there. Unfortunately parsley is an annual here.  And frankly, I've never seen nasturtium re-seed itself.  (I guess it would help if Jeremy would stop eating the flowers before they can go to seed!)

Nesting

I was just sitting down to a quiet lunch and heard a funny sound.  It was sort of a scratching, crunching... hard to identify sound. But clearly not natural. I though maybe we had mice gnawing on something in the living room. I moved out through the house slowly, stopping every few feet to make sure I was still hearing the sound and figure out what direction to go in.

I got through the living room and realized the sound was coming from outside, but close, maybe on the front porch.  I looked out the window, saw nothing.  I went to the door. The sound was loudest there.  I peeked out the door and saw:

I opened the door and scared him off so I could take a look at the damage:

This old door used to have some sort of extra lock which we took out some years back. Jeremy filled the hole in with some foam stuff. It has stood the test of time...until now.  I went to get some tape and the bird came back and kept digging!  He'd be pretty surprised once he broke through the foam to find not just a nice nesting spot, but a whole house at his disposal. Just what we need.  I shooed him off again and taped over the hole. I suspect he can get in through tape too so we'll have to keep an eye on this.  I have been wanting to put up some bird houses - maybe now is the time!  And it also adds a bit more urgency to getting our new doors installed.

Yes, we have brand new, beautiful doors all painted and ready to install (you can tell by the photo that we obviously are way past due for an upgrade!).   Jeremy doesn't have the time because of mushroom stuff so we're getting a local contractor/builder to do it.  They have to squeeze us in so they'll be giving us a couple days notice and then the doors can go in. We haven't heard anything yet, but I hope we can get them installed before the birds get through and move in!

Embarrassing (aka: I Told You So!)

Those of you who remember our "freezer challenge" from a couple years ago may not be surprised by this. Our freezers are still jam packed full of stuff and we have pretty much lost touch with what's hiding in there.

I think I've mentioned this before, but Jeremy has a thing with a fully stocked larder. He doesn't feel safe, or like we have a real home, if there isn't food spilling out of every crevice in the house. He didn't grow up poor or starving or anything, so I don't know where this comes from. But he really does feel giddy when we have lots of food around.

I've been saying for some time that we should do an inventory of the chest freezer out in the garage. Winter (or at least Minnesota's freezing spring weather) is a great time to do it since it's practically the same temperature in the freezer as it is outside.  Taking everything out and cataloging it is not an easy one person job.  I've been suggesting we schedule this for weeks, or many months, but I don't think Jeremy was convinced. He thought he knew what was in the freezer.

Uh-huh.  (That's a little foreshadowing for ya!)

Jeremy had some meal idea yesterday and he kept remembering that we were hung up because we didn't have chicken broth. Grr. He'd have to make some.  He said he was going to go out to the freezer and look for...something. Chicken parts, or something, I can't recall now. I innocently suggested that maybe I should go with him, with a pad of paper, and maybe now would be a good time to just take a quick little inventory...  Jeremy hesitated for a moment, and then gave in.

We trooped out to the freezer, set up a few temporary tables to hold things, and started emptying it out. Holy cow.  It's stunning how much stuff is out there! Jeremy, with a bit of shame, admitted I was right and this was a good idea. Why? Well, for one thing we found at least FIVE containers of chicken broth!! =)

What else was in there?

• lots of bacon
• a few packages of pork soup bones
• bags and bags and bags of mushrooms and mushroom stems (the stems are for stock)
• package of ham
• bee pollen and sugar for the bees
• loads of bread: sandwich bread, hot dog buns, rolls, fancy breads, bread flours
• beef brisket (when the heck did we get that!?)
• two packages of cream corn (Jeremy had just said that day we should make sure to preserve corn this year since we didn't have any now. Uh-huh.)
• 4 pie crusts
• tons and tons of blueberries, raspberries, cherries, strawberries
• edamame
• butter
• chicken innards and chicken feet and packages of chicken necks and backs, probably a dozen altogether (for the stock)
• zucchini
• roasted sweet pepper juice. yes, juice. What are we doing with this??
• banana
• pesto (Jeremy was really excited about this)
• 3 whole chickens! (Jeremy almost bought another the other day...didn't realize we had some in the freezer still.)
• rhubarb
• cranberries
• asparagus
• loads of squash
• dried currants
• roasted tomatoes
• spinach
• pears
• basil
• coffee beans
• salsa
• grated beets
• shelled peas (from 2008!! I think these are ones we grew ourselves. yikes)
• peaches
• plums
• green beans
• left over whey from when we were making cheese ages ago.

It's kind of embarrassing listing all these riches.  I see a lot of fruit ice cream in our future, blueberry muffins, chicken stock, banana bread, zucchini bread...  

Later on relaxing in the kitchen I said to Jeremy, "You know what we should go through next?"  With a gleam in his eye, he replied, "The canned food!"  No.  "The other freezer."  

He wasn't excited about that, so who knows when we'll get to that one. It's much smaller, but we do use it all the time and it's a disaster.  I think a person would have to have their freezer stocked entirely with frozen meals - in boxes - for a freezer to be organized well. It's hard when everything is in plastic bags. 

Working the bees

The bees arrived in a buzzing little box in mid-April (while I was off traveling in Kenya!).  So Jeremy took care of installing them in their new home and there are no pictures of any of that. You'll have to wait for those details because we do have more bees arriving next month. More about that later.

Here they are happy (? - I hope!) in their new home.



Coming and going.


It's not a good idea to disturb the bees too much so we really tried not to. In June Jeremy opened up the hive to make sure things were going well. I know - it's kind of silly that he wears a bee veil but has bare arms! I guess he'd rather get stung on his arm or hand and not his face.




Looking for the queen.




These guys have been busy! Yep, busy bees! =)


Oops, put this board in upside down! You can see how they're building comb all over in any place where there is space. Sue Hubbell talks about the "bee space" which is the ideal distance apart between combs. I think if there is too much space they may find it drafty so they fill it in. We're still working on finding the right spacing for our bees.



Jeremy checked the bees other times too, though it mostly looked the same as that time in June. We had a general idea of how much honey the bees should be making and when we should add more supers. But they were slow for some reason and it was some time before Jeremy felt they needed another super. I think they only got that third box on before fall came. Jeremy went out to check on them for the last time in about October and discovered they had all died.

Here you can see the comb, with honey, and dead bees in the comb.






We don't really know why they died. We've talked with a number of beekeepers and think we've narrowed it down. We're pretty sure it wasn't disease. That's good - one of the bee diseases is so bad the only solution is to burn the whole hive (there is no disagreement about that!). It's possible the queen died for some reason and the bees hadn't been prepared with a new queen. They are pretty dependent on that queen. She makes more bees, so if she dies, the bees slowly die out with no new bees to take their place.

The other possibility is that they starved. The first picture seems to show that: bees crammed into the comb eating the honey. I think we had some cool evenings and it's possible they were too cold to move over 3 inches to find more food. That does happen I guess.

But maybe it's a combination of those two - or neither of them. We don't know. We did learn some interesting things in the process though. First, we had a beekeeper extract the honey for us (she's a professional and has a machine and everything!). She said we had a lot of "wet honey." The bees bring in nectar and store it in the comb; the nectar has a high water content. Throughout the summer they fan their wings to dehydrate it, thereby creating the honey we all know and love. Our bees hadn't had time to dehydrate the nectar all the way so our honey had a high water content. It still tastes fine, the problem is it will go bad faster. We gave some little jars away to family and warned them not to admire the jar for too long - eat it right away! We put the rest in a bucket, secured cheesecloth over it, and set it in front of the heater vent. After a couple months it seemed to be the right consistency. I hope our future bees will do this job themselves!

The second thing I learned was about flowers and nectar. I wondered if our bees just hadn't found enough nectar and that's why they were so slow and then died. But we have tons of flowers in our yard, blooming a lot of the summer! I talked to a beekeeper about this and she said it's possible since there was such a drought last year that there wasn't much nectar in the flowers. I've prided myself on some native and drought-resistant plants - they still bloom and look pretty even when we haven't had much rain. But it turns out they aren't making much nectar and that's what the bees need. So this year I'm going to be better at watering the flowers - and I'm going to mulch better to keep all that moisture in.

In the end I think we got about a gallon or so of honey. Not bad for our first year!
That's all we've got left now; we'd better slow down and make it last! Our new bees are set to arrive at the beginning of April. I'll try not to take a whole year to let you know how that goes!

Oh, for those of you who are wondering, I haven't been stung at all (and I've gotten every bit as close to the bees as Jeremy). Jeremy got stung once I think. As long as you don't bother or harass them, they are very peaceful and content to go about their business.

Bees...the beginning

I can tell I fell of the blogging bandwagon in a big way when we started a whole new urban homesteading project and I never blogged about it! I know I mentioned it once or twice (and some of you have been patiently waiting for an update - you've told me!).  It's amazing that some of these photos are from more than a year ago now.  Without further preface and delay: getting into bees!

To start with, we took a day-long beekeeping course, asked tons of questions of everyone we knew who ever had anything to do with bees, and we got some books. The number one thing we learned (which has been backed up by other beekeepers since): PERSONAL PREFERENCE!  That is, you'll hear a dozen or more different ways to do any single task with bees (how to feed, care for, medicate, etc) and it's really up to personal preference. Actually, the way Sue Hubbell explains it in A Book of Bees, this is because climate and bee habitat vary from area to area and something that works in one place may not work in another. So really you have to get to know your own bees and your own bee habitat. Don't worry, I get the feeling they'll teach you.

Jeremy was really the instigator of this project.  He begged family for gifts of all the beekeeping stuff we'd need, and over the space of about a year he got it!  Last Christmas he got boxes of bee frames to put together.  Yep, DIY!  And there is a lot of little fussy stuff to do when putting these things together.

First he built all the boxes.


He drilled some holes in the fronts to allow for bees to come and go and for extra ventilation. We got little corks to fit in these holes so we could block them up when needed.


Then he primed and painted all of them. Painting is important because the hives sit outside, of course, and the paint will help keep the wood from rotting away.


Then Jeremy built all of the frames. I think these were the most nit-picky of all.


After they're put together you slide the wax foundations in each one, then secure them.





And then start loading them up in the boxes.





Here's all our bee stuff ready to go: bee hive all painted and full of frames, with the base thing down there at the bottom; the smoker; a bee veil; and a hive tool.

This was all done by the beginning of March and our bees were set to come in mid-April. But I was gone when they got here!