(not so) Urban Hennery

It’s amazing what 6 weeks, dental work and 100 pounds will do for a horse. We crossed our fingers when we bought Whiskey (for a very nice price) and hoped that he would turn out to be a great first horse for Mike. When we brought him home he was a bit skinny, a bit homely and a little neglected in the tooth and foot department.

A visit to the vet for worming and tooth floating, a lot of fresh grass plus some grain and orchard grass hay, and plenty of room to run and play, and he’s become the beauty we hoped for. If you didn’t know he was the same horse, I’m not sure you’d recognize him.

We love them both and now that we’re all settling in we’re having a blast. Evening rides, afternoon rides, early morning rides. If we can squeeze it in, we load up and head down the road to one trail or another. Now if only we could find maps for all of them…

Tags: horses

Now this is the kind of thing we like to find sitting on our porch when we get home.

Cherries, fresh from the neighbors’ trees. Waiting for us to dig in and enjoy. And an offer of more! Now we just have to decide what to do with them (aside from eating them by the handful…).

Tags: cherries

Today my car broke down pulling out of the office parking lot on the way to Beez Neez. You’d think that would be the bad news of my day, but it turned out to be a very good thing. Instead of running out to Snohomish to pick up a bottom board and lid and then home to work on a report I’m writing, I ended up getting help to push my car back to the side of the road. Then I worked on the report while Mike came up and removed the broken belt so that it was drivable (yay for Toyota engineering). I followed him home in his work truck, planning to immediately run back down to get the supplies in our truck.

Before I drove south, I walked out to the hives to swap the Old Sol and original hives to strengthen the weaker Old Sol hive.

Just after I’d done so and given the swarm hive it’s own stand (in the center), I noticed two swarm clusters on the same tree as yesterday. NO WAY!

What now? I headed inside and called Jim at Beez Neez to get his recommendation. Luckily he was willing to loan us some equipment to get the swarms secure until we can start recombining hives. I dropped them both into separate Western boxes with 5 frames each using cardboard for temporary bottoms and covers.

As I got back to the house, Mike let me know that the contractor working at the neighbor’s house had stopped to say that there was another swarm on the apple tree over there. Again, NO WAY!

I called Jim again and he volunteered to loan me an old used Western and frames until we got everything under control and since I hadn’t driven down there for anything yet, I said “Thanks!” and headed out to get the swarm out of the tree.

apple tree swarm photos courtesy of Mike

After the apple tree swarm was in its beer box combo, I drove down to Snohomish and picked up the equipment we needed to give them all homes. It’s a good thing I hadn’t made it there earlier or I never would have made it back again to get the rest of what we needed tonight. First time I’ve ever been glad to have car trouble.

When I got back I discovered that one of the two swarms from the cedar had disappeared out of their box. I think that, really, the two on the cedar were one swarm and that they all moved over to the other box (maybe that’s where the queen was). But if not, may they live well and prosper where ever they ended up.

I added a bottom board and lid to the remaining cedar swarm that was already in a Western box. I also added in the other 5 frames for them. Then I retrieved my beer box swarm from the neighbor’s yard and installed it in the empty Western left by the missing swarm.

So today’s daily hive count? FIVE! From left to right: Old Sol hive, first swarm, cedar swarm (in back), apple tree swarm and original hive. Whew!

Hopefully the original hive is done swarming. Jim said that moving it, and in effect moving all the bees that were foraging this afternoon to the Old Sol hive, should reduce the population and maybe keep it from happening again as more queens emerge. If not, we’ve got two extra Westerns with some ugly smelly comb (just the way they like it) in the barn to put them into.

And I cannot say enough positive things about Jim at Beez Neez. If you’re in the Seattle area and you’re interested in beekeeping or in need of equipment, you really should give him your business. He didn’t have to make our hive’s issues his emergency tonight, but he did, and that is a wonderful thing.

Tags: bzzz, farm life, swarm

About 3.5 weeks out from our swarm (we think) we knew we didn’t have a queen in our hive, and while the girls were raising masses of queen cells there was a lot of uncertainty about what was really going on. So after some debate, a lot of conflicting advice and a queen bee in my pantry for 48 hours, Jessi and I split our hive in half Friday night.

We basically pulled out 10 deep frames with no queen cells and as many bees as we could get, after carefully checking for a virgin queen, and created a new hive into which we placed the cage with our new Old Sol queen. We bought a new screened bottom board and a migratory lid and crossed our fingers. The Old Sol hive is on the right in the photo above.

The old hive was still full of bees and with a shortage of deep brood boxes, we left the unused honey super on just in case.

Tonight I went out to check to see that the queen had been released (she had) and on my way to the hives spotted this.

A second swarm from our original hive, I think. It was about the size of a large melon, if you stretched it out. Resting on a cedar sapling about 12″ off the ground, it was only about 25′ from the hives. Not really what I needed to find tonight.

I headed back to the house, thinking hard about what I was going to put them in. We’re pretty much out of boxes / frames for the moment. Not to mention that we don’t have another bottom board or lid. What a hot fucking mess.

In the end, I used our bee escape board, upside down with electrical tape over the exits, as a bottom board. I secured it to a Western box with more electrical tape and put 3 frames inside to give the bees somewhere to go. I stole the inner cover off our original hive to use as a temporary lid.

With my veil on I headed over to see what the swarm would do. In the end, it was pretty anticlimactic. I simply used my Felco’s to snip away all the bits of branch I could and then positioned the box underneath them. I cut the branch completely off and gently lowered them into the box.

After a few minutes I shook as many off the branch as I could, added 2 more frames for a total of 5, and put the temporary lid on. I set the branch on top so that the remaining bees could find their way inside.

I left the box for an hour so that any stragglers that had taken flight could find their way inside. Then I moved the new “hive” and put it on top of the other new hive. I closed the top entrance of the Old Sol hive, they’re not using it anyway right now, and the swarm hive has no bottom entrance at all. I think they’ll be okay for a day while we figure it out. The temp cover has a hole in top, but it’s not supposed to rain tonight, although I think I’m going to dash out in the dark and put something over it just in case…

The likely plan is to combine the swarm with the Old Sol hive as it’s definitely the weaker one. The only hard part about that is that we’ll have to find the queen in with the swarm and kill her to insure that we get to keep our expensive queen. The other option is to swap the original and Old Sol hives tomorrow when the girls are out foraging. That should put some more bees in the Old Sol hive. Then we just have to figure out what to do with the swarm. Neither Jessi nor I really wants a third hive, although at this point I could be persuaded to give it a try. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Tags: bzzz, farm life, swarm

We’re really “in the peas” now around here. The shelling peas are going gangbusters, as are the snow and snap peas. Tonight I filled half of a 5 gallon bucket with an assortment. And there were likely more out there, but we got distracted hunting for strawberries instead.

I love peas. I really really love peas. We had the first cooked shelling peas tonight steamed with a bit of farmstead butter and salt. Mmmmm.

How are your peas doing?

Tags: harvest, peas, veg

A few weeks ago I alluded to a new potato growing method around here. I promised a post to Anita and then failed to follow through (story of my life right now!). So I thought tonight was as good a night as any.

Last year we planted potatoes in rows and then hilled them in the traditional way. We hauled a lot of compost up from the pile to make it work, and really didn’t hill as well as we should have because it was A LOT of work to hill 100 row feet of potatoes that way.

This year I’m all about finding ways to make the garden less work because, really, I’d rather be horseback riding with Mike than weeding or hilling potatoes. So, with a stroke of inspiration, I decided to dig holes to plant the seed potatoes in. Of course, it turns out that this is a widely know and used idea, but whatever, I thought of it with no help

Essentially I dug a 12″ deep hole and put a seed potato at the bottom of it and then covered it with about 2″ of dirt. Once the potatoes sprouted and came up 6-9″ I filled in the hole and then started hilling the potatoes with the soil I had dug out. With minimal effort I managed to hill all the potatoes up about 8″ last night. So much easier than last year’s method.

The pictures are of the Desiree row. They’re off to the strongest start, but the rest are close behind. Now I just need to solve my “weedy path” issue. I’ve got an idea there that I’ve started implementing, hopefully it will work as well as this one!

Tags: planting, potatoes, veg

On Thursday night Jessi and I headed out to the hive to check in and see how they were doing with the honey super we’d added 2.5 weeks before. We were assuming they were ready for another and were all set to admire any and all honey they’d already made us.

Unfortunately when we opened the hive we discovered that they’d built out none of the frames in the honey super and there were only a few bees hanging out in there. Hmmm.

After pulling off the honey super we got into the top box and found a fair amount of capped brood, newly laid eggs and larva, but not in the volume we should have found. We had a lot more empty comb, that had previously had brood on it, than we should have.

So we dug deeper, pulling that brood box and investigating the bottom box. In it there was virtually no brood, only dark empty comb and bees, but not enough bees. Not good. Then we found masses of queen cells hanging from 4 of the frames in that box - Aha!

Turns out that our hive swarmed either right before or just after we added the honey super. How might we have missed it? Well, we’re new at this you see. And the day we added the honey super it was really warm and the middle of the day when most of the worker bees would have been out foraging. Plus, with the hive in the pasture I can’t see it from the house - so unless I happened to wander out to say hello to them at exactly the right moment, I’d miss it.

So now what? Well, in theory a new queen hatched before the old one up and left with two-thirds of our hive. And the signs seem good that that actually is the case - we’ve got new eggs and larva and some capped brood and all of them would have been created after the swarm. But to be sure Jerry and I will go back into the hive on Monday night and look for our new queen.

Should be a bit like finding Waldo considering that this one won’t be marked with a white dot on her head. Plus she’ll be smaller as she’s very young. If we can’t find her, we’re supposed to verify that the queen cells on the bottom frames do not have live brood in them and that they’re being dismantled by the bees.

If we don’t have live larva and we can’t find the queen, or our queen hasn’t been properly mated, there’s a chance we’ll have to buy a new one. Before we take that step we plan to photograph every frame just in case - that way we can try to spot her on the computer screen if we can’t find her during the hive check.

I have to say that Jim at Beez Neez has been invaluable this spring. Answering all of our questions and assuring me that missing a swarm doesn’t mean that we’re bad beekeepers. As he says, it’s a fine line we walk when we keep bees. You want them to be happy and thrive so you get honey. But not too happy or too thriving or they’ll decide to leave before you know it…

The pictures are from Thursday night’s hive check. As you can see, all is not lost even though we may not get any honey for ourselves this year since the blackberries are blooming now and our hive is in the process of rebuilding itself, not storing honey. The learning curve for beekeeping is turning out to be steeper than we thought.

Tags: bzzz, farm life, honey