Fox Haven Journal

Beau August 22nd, 2010

Oh my… home again! It was a nice journey around the upper midwest, and after the Iowa State Fair we made our way to Missouri, stopping over one night near Mark Twain Lake to clean things up a bit. It wasn’t all fun on the way home… I picked something up at the fair and spent a few nights with a fever and cough.

I’m getting there but it really knocked me out for a few days. Salmonella anyone? Who knows… I had several eggs at the fair, and a couple of egg breakfasts in Wisconsin and Iowa. It wasn’t a fun way to finish the trip, but hey that’s the price you pay for having fun, huh?  Home again and school starts this week for the boy.

That last night at the fair was really nice, and we rode the Skyride up the hill to the campground.  

On the way home the boy learned how to play dominoes.  He found an old dominoe set at an antique shop at the fair for a reasonable price… nice little wooden pieces.   After playing a game or two he would build things that didn’t stay up very well while driving along.

The chickens must have known we would be home… they gave us five presents for the first time with that many eggs. I was really hungry this morning and had four poached eggs on toast! Of course they were half-size eggs anyway :)

We have one or two chickens that don’t know where to lay their eggs… well, maybe they do, but one likes to put an egg in the corner of the coop. I found four eggs in the nest boxes this morning however, so maybe they’ll adapt.    They’re a cute bunch, and race out to see you whenver you come near the coop and run.  Of course they’re motivated by food… they go crazy for scratch mixings of corn and other seeds.

Hello Chickens!  We’re Home!!!

It was very dry while we were gone and all the grass was going to seed and nearly two feet tall. Weeds everywhere… I can’t believe how much things grow up in such a short time. We missed our Concord grape harvest! They were just ripening when we left and I thought our timing would work out… but the dry weather wilted the vines and all the grapes dropped off.

While cutting the grass I nearly ran over a little turtle scooting through the field. He was heading toward the pond a good hundred yards away. I believe it’s a Western Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta belli).

Colorful little fellow, and he kept paddling in the air as we looked at him. I took him for a free ride to the pond, and let him go… he swam quickly for the depths.

A quick check of the bees and they’re working away like crazy. There goldenrod is blooming! I watched dozens of bees at one hive bringing bright packs of pollen into the entrance. Three of the four hives appears to be doing well, but I may need to order a new queen for the other.

It’s good to see the bees doing well.  Still not a lot of honey this year, but their populations have increased dramatically.

The garden is surely winding down… the squash bugs got most of the pumpkin and squash vines, and cucumbers too.  But the corn is still growing taller and the carrots are growing bigger.  The tomatoes, not so much… between wilt and hornworms they’ve had a pretty tough summer.  But we probably took more than 30 pounds of tomatoes from the garden this year so we can’t complain. The elderberries have half dropped their fruit as well, so we hope to run around and cut some berry clusters before they’re gone.  Soon it will be time for jelly!

We may have some cooler weather ahead and I need to make the rounds and catch up on all the writings in the blogosphere.    

Sometimes I think of my grandmother on my father’s side.   I last saw her in 1999 when she was in a nursing home and when I asked how she was, she laughed and said “I’m here…” and then, “Time waits for no man…”    She passed away a few months later.   Somehow I’ve been thinking about life in the context of time lately… but (with luck and a little time!) those thoughts will await another day.   Stay well…

Here’s someone who really loves little Brownie the chicken!

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Beau July 29th, 2010

Where has July gone already!?    I’m thankful our garden and other activities are coming along nicely, and I hope our harvest keeps on coming.  Or at least progressing… like my weekly battle with squash bugs and tomato wilt (I’m losing!).  

I will say our tomatoes have produced their largest harvest this summer as compared to others, but the plants look so ragged and are really struggling.   Such is life in an organic garden in the midwest.  So much still to learn… but we’ve had enough tomatoes to make a good bit of salsa and more coming for sauce.

Each year I want to plant more and more… you can never have enough tomatoes! 

And what is the deal with pickles anyway?  Why do we like canning them?   You can buy a huge jar of pickles at the store for a few bucks.  Or you can take time to plant cucumbers, weed the garden, grow and pick them,  buy the jars and ingredients, and then take time to can your own…   Granted their is some raw satisfaction in doing it yourself. 

These are the home-canned variety with dill mix and garden grown dill and other ingredients inside… like garlic and jalapeno peppers. Then processed for 20-30 minutes in boiling water to keep for long-term storage. 

They are very different from the fermented pickles I made last year… those were pretty tasty and I still have a few in the fridge that are still really good.  But it was hard to achieve consistent, firm pickles when I fermented them naturally.  

Mostly I love a good cucumber and tomato salad in summer for dinner… so I think pickles just come from trying to figure out what to do with all the extra cucumbers!   I guess it’s fun trying different recipes too… what’s yours?!

I did come up with a natural concoction to help combat tomato wilt/fungus and for discouraging squash bugs and other critters. Here’s my recipe: In a plastic bottle sprayer, combine 1 cup of milk, 1/4 cup hot/spicy sesame oil, 1 tablespoon tea tree oil soap or shampoo, 1/2 teaspoon dishwashing soap, and the rest with water… shake well and spray away!

It seems to work pretty well, although I found if you put the milk and oil in a blender first with a few drops of dishwasing soap it mixes a lot better. When I spray it the bugs skedaddle away quickly. It may or may not kill them, and is probably just a temporary protectant.  But hey, it doesn’t cost much!  Do you have a special mix or recipe that works?

The carrots are doing pretty well this year, but we came out a few days ago to find a dozen or more caterpillars happily munching away on the leaf tops.   These look like the caterpillar larva of the Black Swallowtail Butterfly.   

There’s no free lunch in this garden, so out they went!    Well okay, there are lots of free lunches…  I’m just trying to get the crowd to leave!   But I threw the caterpillars up into the grass and weeds at the fenceline, so maybe they’ll still become butterflies.  

I did find a really neat plant this month.   Kind of funny too because I was the one who planted it.   A fellow beekeeper gave me a small mint plant a couple of years go, supposedly as an aid to natural beekeeping.   I’m all for that, even though I didn’t know what it was, and planted it at the base of an oak tree near my hives…  this year it finally flowered.   This is a Pycnanthemum species of some kind… try saying that five times really fast!  I love the white bracts that look like leaves at the top of the plant, with a little crown of flowers.

How did I find out what it was?   Well, I was enjoying the beautiful sights at Edifice Rex a couple of weeks ago, and Annie shared some photos including a plant called Mountain Mint…   I had never heard of it and thought it was neat.   Lo and behold when this one bloomed I realized it was the same plant!  Pretty neat way to find out something new- thanks Annie!   I’m not sure which species of Pycnanthemum it is, but it looks like albescens…

I’ve also found that a particluar species of wasp really loves these little flowers.   The Double-Banded Scoliid wasp (Scolia bicincta) has covered this plant over the past week, with as many as 18 wasps on the tiny flower heads.   I’ve also seen some tiny flies and other insects, but no other bees, moths or butterflies.   It’s fascinating to see how the wasps really love the nectar from these tiny flowers.   These are commonly known as digger wasps.  They burrow into the ground and parasitize grubs and other insects.  I’ve never seen this species except on this plant.

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The bees are doing well and still building up their hive populations. About a month ago I took five frames from a really strong hive, and placed them in a small “nuc” hive.  Here’s a picture of that little nuc hive sitting on top of an empty full-size hive at right in this picture.

The little old boat with flowers is our “Burt Dow Boat”… do you remember the story? I wrote about it here a few years ago.   I love to fill it with petunias each year, and planted a wispy river birch behind it…

Anyway, I checked on that small nuc hive yesterday and it was doing so well that I put those bees right into that full-size hive that it was sitting on!  I was excited because the nuc was a “walk-away split” and the bees raised their own queen.   When I opened it up they had two full frames of brood and newly capped larvae… cool beans!    It looks like they’re in the shade, but the hive gets full sun from the middle of the day until sunset.

I wondered a little about moving their entrance lower from that little nuc to the bigger hive… if you move a bee hive any appreciable distance, the bees don’t know where to find it.   Supposedly if you need to, you either move them 6 inches a day, or two miles away!   Moving a good distance away is  fine, as long as you wait until all the bees get home in the evening, and then close them up.   But I only moved my bees down a couple of feet, and they quickly figured out how to get into their new home.

Now that I placed them into a new hive, they have five empty frames to draw out with wax, so I mixed up 10 pounds of cane sugar as a syrup, and put that in a hive-top feeder for them.  They won’t draw wax unless their is a good bloom and nectar-flow going on, or if you feed them to stimulate production of wax and additional bees.

With luck that hive population will increase over the next few months and be strong enough to carry right through winter.  I’m thankful they’re doing well and keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll have four hives next spring.

Our other visitors lately include a couple of Great Blue Herons who visit the pond a few times each week.   I don’t begrudge them a meal or two, but they never tire of an easy catch at the expense of our little fish.    When I see them I usually clap my hands or try to sneak up on them…   then they “Croawwwk!” loudly and fly away.

July is coming to an end.  It has been a really warm and humid month, but we also enjoyed a good bit of rain.    Hard to believe how fast summer is going by, but we’re not quite to midsummer’s eve yet!   I do love the evenings though, and the other night was a pretty one…  

I hope your summer is going well too. What are you thankful for today?  See you next time!   :)

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Beau July 20th, 2010

A few days ago the chickens were hanging out in the shade with temperatures in the coop over 100 degrees.   And then rain, sweet rain.   And then more rain.    Two days ago I began to write, “a passing storm and raging winds, and then a gentle breeze, drizzle and clouds.  Just what the garden needs, and a respite from the heat…”

I saw this early before dawn… it was quiet and a beautiful orange light was all around.   I just had to walk further.

Then I saw this, slowly building to the southwest…

The clouds billowed upward and outward, forming a classic thunderstorm, with the rumble of thunder in the distance.

Soon it became this… 

The barn swallows have another nest full of three more fledglings, and a dry perch to watch the rain pour over the gutters.  Methinks there’s a clog somewhere down the line… I cleaned the gutters out not long ago, yet heavy rain pours over. 

So yesterday it was another huge storm of wind, rain and hail, and then today more heavy rain!  The clouds are nice in terms of cooling things off, but we’ve had quite enough water for the time being thank you very much.

I remember years ago being surprised to realize that a lot of folks have not experienced heavy thunderstorms before.   Of course that’s what I’ve always remembered about Missouri summers.    Brief storms  with thunder, lightning, showers and blessedly cooling weather.   Then back to the humid and hot. 

With a little cooler daytime temperatures we  seized the opportunity to catch up on weeding and pruning.

This was a shrub rose gone wild that I’ve been meaning to cut out for weeks.  It had several more branches just like this one,  spreading out more than twenty feet in all directions!   It’ll come back unless I put something on the stump to kill it.  And the flowers?  Inconspicuous little white things.  I’m not sure where this rose came from, but it doesn’t have a place here anymore. 

The young boy is really a great help around the place.   Now I understand why farmers of old had such big families…

Later the boy enjoyed a break with his Shiba.  Although that little dog likes to think he owns everything around here…  he’s a funny little guy, and a good watch dog.  He lets us know when anything out of the ordinary happens or someone comes down the gravel drive.  They are cute together…

Here’s a picture of the shiba when he was a puppy…    A few years ago I described how he adopted us from a little Japanese pet store in 2002.   We call him Kuma, which is short for Kuma no nuigurumi  or Teddy Bear in Japanese.  

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This week it was also time to check on the bees.  I’ve got just three hives and a small nuc (nucleus hive) going. Earlier in the spring I had a hive with a drone-laying queen, and she eventually disappeared. Before the hive was queenless too long I solved that problem with the help of another local beekeeper.

We combined that hive with a nuc and a new queen, using a screened divider between them for a week. That gave the failing hive time to become acquainted with the new queen and other bees, and then after removing the screened divider, the hive became one, joining forces to work together.   Since that time they’ve steadily increased their population and look great now.

Alas I have another hive with a failing queen. This hive started out strong, but then simply languished. I have found no disease or other external problems, but the queen is simply not laying enough eggs to keep the population strong.   I will probably order a new queen to replace her soon, and allow the bees to strengthen the hive before winter.

With all the beekeeping challenges this is not a year for gathering much honey.  That’s okay because I’m really trying to build them up going into winter.  But that middle hive is very strong and may yield a small super of honey, so we’ll see.   Here’s a picture of bees fanning at the top opening on the inner cover.  

One reason they fan their wings is as a signal for other bees, blowing scent pheromones from a hive entrance or other location so their hive mates know where to go.  But they also fan to cool and circulate the air through the hive on hot days .  Most importantly, the bees will fan to increase the evaporative cooling effects within the hive to remove moisture from the nectar/honey stored within.  

After the bees gather nectar from flowers, it is carried in their honey stomach back to the hive, then often passed to another worker bee to process and store within the hive.  During this process the nectar is converted to various sugars by enzymatic action and deposited into the waxy cells within the hive.  But it is very runny and full of moisture at this point… not even close to being honey yet.   Beekeepers call honey which is too runny green.   It doesn’t really become honey until the moisture level is lowered to about 17%-18%.   Then the bees put a waxy cap on the cell and the honey is stored until needed as food.

Because the bees have lowered the water content of the honey, it is very hygroscopic, meaning it can absorb water moisture from the air.   Good quality honey has a very low water content which is one of the reasons it can be stored almost indefinitely without spoiling.    If you’ve ever had honey ferment at home, it’s either because the container wasn’t sealed tightly over time and it absorbed a lot of moisture, or it was too green or allowed to sit open before it was purchased and fermented later.  Of course you could always make mead or use it for baking!  Runny honey just needs to be used a little more quickly. 

Everything else is coming along too.  We took around 15 pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers out of the garden this morning.  I think pickles are in our future… and tomato sauce!     Seems like the tomatoes are ripening all at once, and I need them to keep going.

Last week I found this lucky titmouse enjoying a feast on a ripened sunflower.

We planted more squash, and some beets in the garden- hoping they mature in time for a good harvest.  It was the perfect time too with all the rain.    I also planted collard greens which supposedly improve in taste after the first frost.   I don’t know about that, but I enjoy them when cooked and mixed with seasoning.  Does anybody have good ideas for how to use collard greens in the kitchen?    Those are going to be a hard sell around here… :)

The sun is back out this afternoon… 96 degrees and hot! Hard to motivate anyone to do anything, even myself it seems. One small step…

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Beau June 9th, 2010

With the rain and warmer weather, this year has been good for the bees so far.  My hives are really increasing their bee populations now, all except for one.   When I installed the package of bees for the hive I remembered thinking there were a lot of drones (males) in there. I wasn’t too concerned however because I was installing a new queen right along with them. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it’s now pretty apparent that I have a “drone laying queen.”

I thought at first I had laying workers, where there’s no queen and some of the workers began laying many infertile eggs. But you can tell that pretty clearly from multiple eggs in each cell, which I don’t have. And I have a good-looking queen in there, laying single eggs. Just not fertile ones!

What does that really mean? Simply that the queen bee in this hive is not laying enough fertile eggs that can develop into female worker bees.  She is laying some fertile eggs, but not enough. How does that happen?   Well she could be older or running out of eggs, or if the queen wasn’t fertilized properly on her mating flights. Perhaps it was too rainy or whatever, and then even though she lays eggs and looks strong, many or all of those eggs are infertile and may simply develop into drones (male bees).   Take a look at this picture (click for full-size detail):

Brood Pattern of Drone Laying Queen

It’s not as healthy a brood pattern as you would like to see.   A nice brood pattern is much tighter, and more uniform.  In the picture above there are mostly scattered brood cells, all over the frame.   And see the puffier ones that bulge outwards? Those are the drone cells because drones are bigger bees.  Look at that big drone halfway down and to the left, and compare his size to the workers. This weak pattern existed on several frames in this hive and the queen was just wandering around all over the place.    I think she’s laying both fertile and infertile eggs because there are worker bee cells and larvae in addition to all the drone cells.

Yesterday as I stood at the hive entrance I counted nearly 50% drones entering and leaving the hive right along with the workers. That’s pretty bad… too many drones simply eat all the nectar and honey stores, and don’t contribute anything.  Well they do contribute something… they say it takes at least 12 drones to mate with a queen bee for proper fertilization, so they’re necessary. Just not all the time! Yes, snicker, snicker. But that’s why in Autumn we see the drones being dragged out of the hive because they don’t need to overwinter and eat all the stores inside. The queen bee can always produce more drones when needed.

Obviously for a normal, strong hive you need countless thousands of female workers, or the hive won’t survive (or make any honey!).   Right now my drone-laying queen hive is slowly losing ground, kind of like running in place on a backwards moving treadmill without growing the worker population.

Here’s a frame from one of the strong hives.  See the much tighter pattern of brood?  Just what I like seeing, especially with the honey stores at the outside upper and lower edge of the frame.  The queen in this hive is awesome, and their population has exploded recently.

So how do I fix the problem hive?  Out with the old queen and in with a new one!  Ah, but not as simple as it sounds and there’s many ways to go about it.  I was thinking about shaking out some drone heavy frames and providing a few frames of open brood from a strong hive… with the right pheromones and fertilized brood they should be able raise a new queen.    Should. Or perhaps the hive would raise a new queen themselves, but that might not happen for a long time, or at all before the hive dies out.

A friend suggested starting a new hive or nucleus (smaller) hive with a new queen. After a couple weeks, take the old hive and literally shake out all the bees on the ground a little distance away… workers, drones, queen, everything. Then I install the new queen/nuc frames into the original hive/location, and put a queen excluder on the bottom. Voila! New hive, and all the workers from the old one will come back and join the new one.   But all those lazy honey-eating drones will be stuck outside, along with the old queen.

Sounds like a plan to me… but what do you think? How would you approach it? Isn’t beekeeping fun!

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Beau April 20th, 2010

The last few days have fostered a hale and hearty outlook for getting things accomplished. That’s what happens when you bring home a bunch of critters to take care of.    Yesterday was a big day at Fox Haven though…  I put three packages of bees into their new homes!  After losing two hives over the winter, it just wasn’t the same around here without them.   I love going to the post office to get the bees.  I call ahead to let them know they’ll be arriving, but the postal workers are sooo thankful when you show up!

 You always want to inspect the bees and make sure they did okay in transit.  There’s a can of sugar water hanging in the middle, and the bees cluster around it to feed.   They’re also in a cluster so they can keep warm if it’s cool outside.  I was pleased to see there were few losses of bees enroute, and my packages all looked in great shape.   This is what is called a “3 pound package” of bees, because it literally holds about three pounds of them.  Most of the bee farms are pretty good about filling the package with extra bees in case of losses, but it’s estimated that there’s 10,000 to 12,000 bees in each package.   Sounds like a lot, but by mid-summer a strong hive should have 50,000 to 60,000 bees or more!

Getting the bees into the hive is quite simple:  You carefully take out the queen cage, and then the can of syrup that kept the bees fed while in transit.   Then quite literally you shake and dump the bees into the hive!  I wear my bee suit and veil for protection… but the bees are not aggressive typically when you are introducing them to the hive.  That and the fact that I have misted them with sugar water a bit calms them down…   as I empty the bees onto the frames, they eagerly climb all around the new hive.  Quite a few fly around and begin orienting themselves to the new hive location. 

As I take the packages apart, I pull out the queen cage and inspect it to make sure the queen is alive.   I keep my hive tool laid across the little opening where the queen cage was so the bees don’t start pouring out.  A closer look showed all my queens to be vigorous, running around the little space inside the cage.  The black shape you see inside the cage below is the queen’s abdomen.  I use russian hybrid queens, and they are much darker than the traditional italian bee queens.

The bees on the cage feed and attend to her, although since this is a new package- these bees and the queen were just put together for the first time prior to shipping a few days ago.  While in transit they are becoming familiar with her scent, and when I place the queen cage between the frames in the hive and close it up, they will continue to become used to the queen.  Eventually they will chew out the gooey white candy substance (to the left in the picture above) that blocks her escape from the cage, and let her out.  If all goes well, she should be laying eggs within the hive in a matter of days.   

I’ll come back in a few days to check and make sure… I just don’t want to disturb them while they settle in.   If for some reason I cannot find or see the queen, or some proof that she’s alive and well (like eggs in the cells), then I’ll probably order a new queen or two through the mail.  It’s a pretty cool process.

It was a perfect day here though- not too hot or cool, and very little wind.  The bees were up and flying around in no time!   I haven’t been alone this month in welcoming bees back home again.   Warren has a neat post with a video link showing how he installed a package into one of his hives last week, and Kim writes about their journey to a country bee farm to pick up a new package of bees to take home as well.  

Once you’ve had bees, it seems disquieting to be without them.   They are so full of energy and do wonders for the local garden and flowering plants and shrubs.  I really enjoy having them around.   I also found out last year that some of my family have a history of beekeeping going back over a hundred years.  I like continuing that tradition.   

It was nice to walk out early this morning, and watch the sun rise and shine on the hives.    This may be a “split year” here at Fox Haven where I divide these hives as the season progresses.  The good news is I may be able to double my bee population.  The bad news is I’ll have to wait until next year to get any honey from them.  Patience, patience…  The journey continues!

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Speaking of critters- I feel like I’m part of that nursery rhyme, except instead of five little ducks it’s,  “Ten Little Chickies Went Out One Day…”   They are chirping, eating, mess-making, running around little dudes!  Or dudettes…  For the first week I was up a couple times at night to check their brooder temperature and give them food and water.  Now they’re doing so well I tuck them in at night and they’re all bright-eyed and almost bushy-tailed in the morning waiting for breakfast.

“Okay… what did ‘ya bring me!?”

Inquisitive little things…  but at meal time they were very flighty and would nearly panick and run everywhere until just a couple days ago.    Now they seem to be getting used to the routine of “The Hand” entering their cage and changing the food and water.   They will even eat out of our hands, and a couple of them are so tame they jump on your arm right away.    The boy loves to take the barred rock pullets out and play with them- they are really calm.

I don’t have names for the eight girls and two roosters yet…  and you can’t really tell a lot of them apart aside from the white and black ones.   But their feathers are really coming in, and they are growing so big.  They’re only three weeks old! 

 No… I don’t have the coop built yet.  Or started…    Here they’re gathered around the feeder quite pleased with me.

So this week it’s time to get busy.  Or busier!   And the garden is really growing too, I’ve got take some more pictures…  Have  a good week!

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Beau March 5th, 2010

Another beautiful week, and hopefully everyone back east is getting a little warmer weather too.   A strange few weeks this has been for me… but I can hear again! Hence the cheery title for this one. Somehow I came down with an ear infection in mid-February.  It was one of those “hurts a little” things that became a huge pain in less than a day.  Long story short, it ruptured my eardrum and clogged up the ear for weeks.    Finally this week I can hear much better, the ear is clearing up and most of all… that incessant RINGING is finally going away!   

I never gave much thought to tinitis, or how ringing in the ears could be so distracting, but wow!  It’s almost like that emergency broadcast tone on the radio, playing constantly in one side of your head.   I’ve always protected my hearing, and the thought of having to live all the time with a tone like that constantly would be quite debilitating.  I feel for anyone who suffers from that.   

The Doc said it’s usually from nerve damage from long-term loud noises and there’s not much they can do about it.  People must learn to deal with it over time. The solution?  Just like everything else…   Preventative health care!  Wear ear plugs and such when you use loud machinery, and watch the loud music!  Kids especially these days can really mess up their hearing by playing their music too loud all the time with those ear phones and mp3 players.   I’ve always said that when I’m 80 years old I still want to hear the birds singing in the forest and the the kids telling me stories. Think I’m still on track…

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Aside from that I was bummed this week when I faced the fact that my two hives of bees didn’t make it through winter.   I knew something was wrong last month when I should have seen activity on some warmish days.  I had checked on them in December and they seemed okay.  I took a peek in January and I could tell they were weak… it just didn’t look like a strong population in any hive.   

Last September and October were so cool and wet that the bees barely had a chance to gather food.   I fed them like crazy as long as I could, and even wrapped and insulated the hives, but it was simply not enough.    I remember seeing quite a few of the larvae that died in late September being pushed out of the hive.  That indicated they were not able to increase their population fast enough due to lack of food or some other reason.   So finally I went and took apart the hives a couple days ago.

This might look like live bees gathered around the queen or something, but instead it’s a picture of the last stand the bees made for food at some point.  These are all dead…  and aside from a few hundred dead bees on the bottom board, these were all that were left inside one of the hives.    I never noticed a swarm in late summer, but some may have left the hive early.   And there was never any noticeable disease or mites present.   I really think it was just lack of food and the time to build up their population to keep a strong, viable cluster through winter.   Lesson learned for me… start feeding earlier and don’t count on late summer and early fall to help them build up.  

So it’s like starting over…  and a strange feeling.  I didn’t realize how I had become so used to their activity around the place.  I really miss them. Another local beekeeper lost 15 of 25 hives or so for similar reasons, especially the poor autumn weather.   But on a positive note, I should be filling three hives with bees in a little over a month.  With a little luck and a good warm flowering season, they should ramp up and be fairly strong this year.   My education continues… but never fear! We’ll persevere! Okay my title’s a little corny :)

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On the insect theme, I found a strange pupal shell on the bottom of one of the hives.  I’d love to have seen what emerged from this one… any ideas? Maybe our favorite entomologist can help :)

Other than that, I need to write a little more often. Thanks for coming around now and then to say hello. I’m not going anywhere even if I do slow down at times, and somehow I think this will continue to be a really interesting year for all of us… in a good way. Stay well!

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P.S. Jessica Watson rounded the Cape of Good Hope (Africa) over a week ago and is now continuing from the west across the Indian Ocean east towards Australia. She’s made great progress, yet still has a few months of sailing to go. If you like appetizers, she’s got a “tinned and dried version of nachos” that doesn’t look too bad for being nearly five months at sea!

• Beekeeping , Wildlife, Insects and Pets
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Beau January 14th, 2010

My goodness the days are flying by.  The snow on the pond was beautiful yesterday with the shadows of the trees. And there were many animal tracks near the pond’s edge, with a few tracks heading out across the ice. The mysteries of the night…

Yesterday we enjoyed almost fifty degree weather finally, and the snow has almost finished melting. Gave me a chance to catch up on splitting wood, running a few engines and chasing the mice out of the barn.  These are the remaining oak and hickory rounds from trees cut up in summer.  They don’t look like it, but the wood should be fairly dry and will provide enough heat to get us through winter.  I didn’t expect to use so much so quickly this season.

That subzero weather last week really did a number on a few things, not the least of which is my 16 year old truck. Seems the clutch fluid must have moisture in it because the clutch froze in place and I couldn’t drive it. Maybe ice on the cables… anyway I’ll top it off today and since we’ll see 40+ F degree weather again I’m hoping it works normally.   One morning we awoke to a beautiful scene of ice crystals on the trees and shrubs.  I love how the light shimmers through the branches.

I am worried about the bees however… I didn’t see them flying around yesterday which I would have expected. Usually after an extended cold period they will be out and about briefly with temperatures above 40 degrees F.   It wasn’t warm that long yesterday however, so maybe they’re still clustered up?   I won’t open the hive unless it’s warm for a few days in a row, and we’ve still got freezing night temps.  From now through March is the difficult time of year for the bees when they really depend on stored honey.  When it’s super cold they go through those stores faster… and you can’t really feed them until it warms up a little. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Driving home at dusk the other day, the sunlight glowed beneath the clouds.

Our wintery landscape seems so far from the events taking place around the world, such as earthquakes and unrest.  Wish I could do more to help from so far away.  In a couple years when the boy is older I may be able to… for now our thoughts, prayers and donations can help in some way. 

Did you know you can use the American Red Cross’ TEXT2HELP program to donate from your cellphone here in the U.S.?   For specific Haiti-related donations, you can text HAITI to the number 90999 and it will donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with earthquake relief efforts.


Update: There’s many other organizations to help with Haiti disaster assistance, and other charitable efforts of course. Here’s a few more links to share:
• The International Committee of the Red Cross
• International Medical Corps
• Catholic Relief Services
• Save the Children
• Direct Relief International
• World Food Programme
• World Vision
• International Relief Teams
• Yéle Haiti
• Operation USA
• CARE
• World Concern
• UNICEF USA
• Mercy Corps
• Operation Blessing International
• Shelterbox
• Americares
• Operation USA
• Doctors Without Borders
• Medical Teams International
• The Salvation Army
• American Red Cross

• Beekeeping , Landscapes , Seasons
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