Category Archives: Bees

Bees, Family, Garden, Health

The Quotidian

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Spring                                                            New Beltane Moon

Kate has taken her still healing cellulitis off to Colorado for a weekend with the grandkids.  Gabe’s fourth birthday is tomorrow.  Her arm looks much better than it did on Monday, swelling much less pronounced and the area of red, heated skin has reduced considerably.  It took four doses of IV antibiotics and the follow-up oral meds to get this infection under control.  No fun at all.

(Gabe and Grandpop, January, 2012)

Meanwhile back at the apiary, I’m going to check the bees tomorrow for larvae, need for syrup and pollen patties.  A few garden chores tomorrow, too, notably digging up the potato patch and amending the soil.  I can’t plant potatoes in the main vegetable garden for a couple more years because the beetles found them last fall.  Too many to pick off and drown in soapy water.

Also, I really need to fix the tire on the Celica, get it started and get the tire repaired or buy a new one.  Then, I’m going to give it away one way or another.  Know anyone that needs a car?  I may have a taker, but I’m not sure.  If not, I’ll pass it on to someone for free.  It has 280,000 miles on it, but it runs well.  We’ve decided to go with one car for financial reasons and it’s the one with the most mileage, so it has to go.

Bees
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Spring                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Peaked under the feeding pail just now.  Bees clustered under it.  Where they should be.  Closed it back up.  I’ll check again on Friday to see if they’re queen right.

Bees, Family, Garden, permaculture

The Outdoor Season, Well and Truly Begun

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Spring                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

Kate got a nasty cellulitis on her left arm.  Probably from scratches incurred while vigorously pruning and weeding.  Spring clean up.  It swelled up, got hot and sent her to the urgent care last night, the doctor visiting her own clinic for treatment.  They gave her a couple of jabs of rocephin, prescribed some sulfa and sent her home.

After a restless night, she got up and drove out to the arboretum (today) for a class on fruit tree pruning.  She’s a Viking, moving past the pain, just as she has from the first days of our life together.  I’m no where near as stoic.

Later on today I’ll check on our new colleagues, making sure they’re clustered under the feeder pail, then I’ll leave them alone until next Friday.  Next Friday I’ll go in and check for larvae.  Finding larvae means the queen has gone to work laying eggs and the colonies will be queen right.  After that, it’s the normal hive checks, hive box rotations and following their life as the colony builds up to full strength.

The outdoor season is well and truly underway.  Got 2.5 pounds of potatoes from Seed Savers yesterday.  I’ll supplement them with sprouts from leftover potatoes of last year’s crop and, possibly, a few from Green Barn, up the road a piece near Isanti.  That bed has to be dug and amended.

Also on today’s docket.  Move the large limbs I pruned a month ago onto brush piles, clear out the work Kate did yesterday, clean off the AC and do some weed prevention.  That’s enough for today.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Bee Diary 2012: Hiving the Packages.

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Spring                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”
H.G. Well

Drove out to Stillwater and picked up my California girls.  About 16,000 of them.  Sprayed’em down with sugar water when I got home.  Unloaded a 5 gallon pail of prosweet, a food supplement for this early period when nectar is in short supply, and two gallon pails with holes in the top for feeding (turned upside down).

Later today, around 5 pm, I took the packages, the two gallon pails filled with syrup, a pollen patty and went out into the orchard.  There I took the hive’s copper tops off, then the hive box cover and removed three frames from the center of the hive box.

Rain, a light rain fell.  And Rigel came in through a gate I had forgotten to close and ate the first pollen patty.  In spite of not being a bee.  Sigh.

So, back down to the refrigerator for another pollen patty.

Back up to the orchard and out to the packages.  I pried the syrup containing can out of the package, sprayed the bees again with plenty of sugar water, removed the queen cage and put it in my pocket, then rapped the container sharply on the remaining frames and 7,000 to 8,000 bees fell onto the floor of the hive box.

I spread them around with a bee brush, then took the queen out of my pocket.  First, check that she’s alive.  Yep.  OK.  Pull back the small screen on her cage while placing the cage in the hive box.  Tap it and make sure she falls into the bees.

Replace the three frames, gently.  Not killing the queen is an important part of this whole process.

Put a pollen patty on top of the frames, away from the hole in the hive cover since that’s where the syrup will come into the hive box and put the hive cover back on the box.  At that point invert the white plastic pail over the oblong opening in the hive cover, place a medium sized box over the pale and the copper top over that.

That’s it for the first day.

There were a couple of moments.  A bee crawled up into my glove.  I removed it.  All the time saying, if I’m calm, the bees are calm.  This is sort of true though even now, four years in, I still get an adrenalin pump when the bees hit the mesh on my bee veil.

I didn’t get all the bees out of the packages, most, but not all.  It was those stragglers that took off after me.  They were not a problem.  But, they could have been.

The hives look great in the orchard; they give it a productive, yet homey feel.

 

Bees

Bee Diary: Preparing for the Packages

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Spring                                                  Bee Hiving Moon

Scraped out the old frames from last year, removing propolis and excess comb.  Picked a site in the orchard for our two colonies this year, next to apple and pear trees, dug up a spot and leveled the base, slapped on a bottom board, then a hive box, a cover and our nifty copper covered tops.  Now I’m ready for Saturday and the arrival of the 2012 crew.

I have to drive out to Stillwater to pick them up, two packages of two pounds, Minnesota Hygienics, some pro-sweet syrup and two feeder pails.  Then I’ll spray them down with sugar water and wait until late in the day to hive them.

The queen release for hiving is a quick release where the queen actually enters the hive while you watch.  This is possible because the queen has been with these bees since California and they have become accustomed to each other.  These are all California girls, it just occurred to me.

If the bees are not accustomed to the queen, you have to do a hard release with a piece of hard candy in the hole of her cage.  The time it takes her and the workers to chew through the candy allows them to become comfortable with each other.

Throw in a pollen patty, plop the feeder pail on and away we go.  The fourth season of Artemis Honey will be underway.

Bees, Great Wheel

On Our Land

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Well.  Those bees I saw earlier.  That got me excited about a successful overwintering.  They were scavengers.  Robbing the honey left over.  So, now I will have two hives, as I imagined I would.  Moving them them to the orchard. The bees will be closer to the house.

Also, a rite of spring today.  I walked the fence line, about 2000 feet, looking for trees fallen on the fence (2, but not bad), holes dug under the fence (none) and anything else that compromises our dog security barrier.  Nothing that can’t be fixed with a chain saw.

A cedar split a live, large branch.  It hangs now, a fresh wound in the tree about 8 feet up.  I can’t figure it.  Healthy.  Not really in the path of the winds.  Yet there it is, a finish to half the tree.

Bright green grass, translucent in the near noon sun.  Tiny shoots also bright green carry leaves still bound toward their date with the light.  All round the forest has begun to wake up.

One of our apple trees will blossom this week, two cherries seem ready to burst into bloom, too.  All over our property the land has shaken off the winter, mild though it was, and changed out its somber browns for productive green.

Bees, GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

Bee Protein and Surge Protection

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Spring                                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

Pollen patties came today. (see right) I’ll be out with the bees tomorrow, weather permitting.  They need the pollen patties for protein which they can’t yet find in adequate supply.  That means the season will have well and truly begun.

To add to that sense we had, as we might expect in late April or early May, thunderstorms this morning around 5 am.  They woke the dogs, who began barking, barking, barking.  Well, I had to get up anyway to shut down our complement of electronic devices, so I let the dogs out.

I’ve been shutting down computers and modems and routers for 18 years and have never had a problem.  My suspicion is that this is something I no longer need to do; but, like an old hoss, I always follow the path to the barn.  Even though the barn got pulled down years ago.

When we first moved in, I had the electrician install surge protectors in the main junction box to forestall any lightning caused jump in current from frying our computers.  He thought this was the silliest idea, but I was paying so he did it anyhow.  That’s why I say I think I no longer need to do it.  Those surge protectors are still lit up after all these years.

The route in that’s not protected is the cable from the cable junction box which sits at the northeastern edge of our property line.  If a lightning bolt hit it, that could fry the modem and the routers.  Again, never a problem.

 

Bees

Bee Diary 2012

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Imbolc                                                Woodpecker Moon

To appreciate the irony here we have to go back to last year.  I decided to change bee management practice.  One colony would be held to over winter, not expecting much because of illness related losses the last two winters.  The other two colonies would die out and I would get two new packages of bees in April.

If the parent colony survived, I would divide it per the U’s method and let the parent colony make honey this year and die out with the two new packages.

When I went out today, just a casual check since this is too early for the bees (I thought), I was surprised to see bees flying in and out with vigor from two colonies, the parent and one I’d left to die.  There were also bees flying into the third colony.  Now, I haven’t opened the colonies up so I don’t know what kind of recovery we’re looking at here, but I could have five colonies where I expected two.

Crazy weather.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Politics, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

A Year of No Winter, Now With No Spring?

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Imbolc                                         Woodpecker Moon

OK.  So, there was this place that used to have winter but had it replaced by a season of cloudy skies and what passes for cold in the southern states.  Then, that season ended and summer began.  Minnesota 2011-2012

Not kidding.  It’s 60 degrees here today, March 11th.  And this doesn’t seem to be an aberration, the temps go like this for highs:  59, 65, 70, 67, 68.  And that gets us through Friday.  It may throw the bee season into a conundrum since my package bees don’t arrive until mid-April and the bloom cycle could be accelerated by as much as a month.

This is also a year when I didn’t start any vegetables.  Not a one.  We moved the hydroponics into the garage for storage so we could consolidate the dog crates in one place. I imagine the places I buy plants will have used the same calendar as usual and we could waste a month or so of available warmer weather.  In other words we could have a growing season up to 6 weeks longer than normal.  But we’re not ready for it and won’t be.

The Great Wheel continues to turn, but the holidays may usher in different weather than usual.  Climate change is well under way.  I hope the climate change deniers have a ringside seat in hell to the catastrophe they’ve created.  I know, that sounds extreme, but I mean it.

The deniers will not and never could change the basic science behind global warming, all they could ever do was slow down humanity’s response to it, a slowing down that amounts to a criminal act, a felony against generations yet to be born.  They need to be held responsible for their greedy, stupid, infantile actions.

But they probably won’t be.  They’ll die off before the worst of it hits.  That’s why I hope hell has a special viewing room for these shrunken souls.

Would you like me to tell you what I really believe?

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Health

Time Marches On

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Winter                                  Garden Planning Moon

Kate sent the check off for the bees.  Two two pound packages of Minnesota Hygienics.  They should come around tax filing deadline.  A happier thing to hive bees.

We also decided on the plantings for our garden this season.  I’ll wait a bit on sending out the order.

In other news:  yes, I left the honey I intended to take Roy Wolf on the counter top.  Here. Yes.  I left the rug I intended to take to American Rug Laundry in the garage.  Here.  Yes, I apparently sent a test back to my doctor without my name on it.  And that’s just this week.

Who’s turning 65 soon?

On a different note.  Two fun groups of kids today.  Asian art tours.  One kid said, “I have a wonder.  I wonder whether the Chinese see our living rooms as weird?  Like we see theirs?”  Don’t know about you but I imagine either one would see our living room as weird.

The museum has artificial turf and tropical plants, brightly colored metal outdoor chairs and outdoor umbrellas up in the lobby.  Called a popup park.  One kid asked, “Is this art?”  Geez, how would I know?