Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Kate handed me a note with the honey harvest for this year:
Peanut butter jars (large): 7.5 x 3 lbs each for 22.5#
Pint jars: 17 x 1 lb 17.5#
1/2 pint 37 X 11 0z. 32#
1/4 pint 13 jars @ 5 oz. 4#
total 75.5#
This is not a large harvest as honey harvests go, but it more than meets our needs and offers us many opportunities to make gifts and to barter.
Kate’s the precise type, which is a good thing in a physician.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
The new honey labels are on all the jars. And we still have a few more jars to fill. This is a lot of honey, much more than we need, perhaps even more than we can give away. A season’s work worth the effort.
The honey buckets have been cleaned, as has the extractor and the uncapping bins, the hot knife and the sink. We have another gallon or so of honey left, not in jars.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
The honey harvest has moved to the bottling stage. Kate has dozens of jars filled already, quarter pint, half pint, pint and quart (peanut butter jars). We’ll give them out as gifts, tips for good service, for barter.
I’d say our harvest this year was twice what it was last year, an amount that seems to make sense, so I think two colonies is plenty.
Mark Odegard’s label, utilizing art work from a friend of his in Duluth, is snazzy. It features a northern Artemis, bow pulled with geese flying above her. I’m going to Duluth this week or next to deliver payment for the art work. Honey.
Kate’s quick treatment of my multiple stings: cold shower, benadryl and prednisone minimized the post-sting trauma. I have no psychological aversion to the bees; they were just doing their bee thing, so bee-keeping will continue as part of our gardening, orchard, apiary set-up here.
The honey harvest has this strange phenomena associated with it, one I imagine farmers feel when they harvest crops in the fall. All the work, hiving the packages, feeding them, putting pollen in, adding hive boxes and doing reversals, putting on a queen excluder and slapping on the honey supers all lead to this one day, removing the honey supers, extracting the honey and bottling it. All that work and a very quick finish. Very satisfying, but a little strange in the brevity of the final, sought after act, the penultimate purpose of all of it.
The ultimate purpose, of course, is honey consumption.
Almost done with the bee work for the year. I’m reading to lay down my smoker and hive tool and to pick up the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Ovid will get more time now.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Yesterday during the honey harvest (before the swarm) activity shifted among pulling frames from honey supers, delivering them for uncapping (Kate), getting them set in the extractor 
and going downstairs to work on Mark’s Saudi visa. Shifting from the concrete tasks of honey to the abstract and electronic tasks associated with the visa application caused some mental whiplash.
We had a few setup problems. In fastening the extractor to the deck (again) we positioned the rack so we had to work with it in the rear, clumsy but not impossible. After we got it in place, we loaded it up with fresh frames full of honey.
Turned it on. Nothing moved except the electric motor. Neither Kate nor I are what I would call mechanical geniuses so we dithered with it, trying this and that, until we discovered it needed the top snugged against one side to allow the motor to mate with the rod connected to the centrifuge. After that the extraction moved along as planned.
Not sure on the total yet but we have at least double last year’s harvest, maybe more. Now, though, we have to bottle it and get its moisture content checked. Anything with a moisture content below 19.6 (if I recall correctly) is grade A honey and will keep forever though it may crystallize. Just warm it up and it will become liquid again.
Honey with too much moisture will start to ferment. This may be ok with you.
The harvest took from around 10 am until 3:45 or so. It was at that point that I decided to test my bee’s perimeter defense with my head.
Lughnasa Waxing Harvest Moon
Tomorrow the season’s honey harvest. Kate and I will haul out the extractor, fasten it to the deck and begin uncapping our honey.
The process goes like this. Each colony with surplus honey, 2 & 3, has at least two full honey 
supers and a third with some honey. The bees have to be removed from the super, then the super covered with a bee tight lid.
The super goes in a wheel barrow and gets trundled to the deck. Kate will uncap the frames by sliding a hot knife over the capped cells. This is a sticky process, one that had several uninvited guests last year, but we’re taking steps to keep the bees away from the extraction.
In the first place we’ll only have one extractor load of frames at a time (6). That means there will not be frames sitting free, inviting bees. If we can, we will do the uncapping inside, further removing a source of attraction.
At any rate bees away from their queen are not defensive, so even if they do show up they’re not inclined to sting unless harmed.
Tomorrow’s work completes a journey begun two weeks late, at the very end of April and the beginning of May with three, three pound boxes of bees.
(6 frames go in the slots. The motor turns the frames and centrifugal force extracts the honey)
Colony 1, which will over winter, has no surplus honey, and I have yet to determine if it has adequate stores. That will come in the days after the extraction.
If my estimates are correct, we’re going to have a large harvest (for Artemis Hives).
Lughnasa Waning Honey Extraction Moon
Checked the honey supers this morning. On the two package colonies that I do not intend to overwinter, we have approximately four full honey supers. That is, we have for harvest the 
amount of honey they would have needed for the winter, close to 200 pounds. Figure that 40 pounds is not recoverable due to drips, stuck on honey comb even after extraction then that should leave around 16o pounds to harvest.
If we chose to sell it at, say $7 a pound, that would create around a $1,ooo in sales after keeping some back for own use and gifts. After the bee packages at $60 each and amortizing the honey extractor, supers and hive boxes, syrup, hive tools, smoker, pollen, queen excluders, honey jars, top and bottom boards and telescoping covers, we’d still be in the red for the first three years. Don’t know what we’ll do with it this year, probably give away a lot again. It’s good for barter and gifts for sure.
Artemis Hives has produced honey two years in a row now, an artisanal honey created by bees aided by the beekeeper, me, and the bee equipment and harvest partner, Kate.
Looking at the gardening year in total we will have a good, not great honey harvest, a good potato harvest, leeks, beets, chard, beans and possibly a decent tomato crop. Kate has good success with her zucchinis and the decorative gourds have bloomed but produced no fruit yet. The gardening and beekeeping year will wind down in September, just in time for us to finish our cruise preparations. Caring for gardens and bees requires a lot of face time with the plants and hives, visits to nurseries, attendance at Hobby Bee Keeper meetings, not to mention all the work of harvesting and putting food by.
I’m at the point in the year when my enthusiasm has run out a while ago and the only thing that keeps me active now is the need to finish, to harvest. When it’s done, it’s over for the year.
Mid-Summer New Honey Extraction Moon
Kate and I bought a new vehicle yesterday, a Toyota Rav-4. Well, we picked out the things we wanted, left a deposit and now wait for the finding. This may not be big news in most families, but the last time we bought a new vehicle was 1999 and before that it was 1994. Until Wednesday we still had both of them. The Tundra, the 1999 purchase, fell thanks to an oil-pressure hose providing cooling to the transmission. It blew, taking with it other essential fluids, the engine and the transmission. Bad luck. The Celica motors on, at its next oil change it will hit 275,000 miles. Toyota’s last and that’s what I want, have always wanted, in a car.
Our life has coasted back to a familiar routine from the intense clay week followed by the intense family week. Both were good, positive experiences, but there are reasons these events last short periods of time and the calmer times last longer.
Got a note from Mary, safely back in Singapore, who observed that international travel was easier than intra-US. She had a variety of air-related mishaps in her two weeks plus of traveling the US by plane.
Kate and I need to spend time in our gardens, two weeks away from them at this time of year leaves weeds as happy as the plants we want 
there. Also, the tomatoes have begun to ripen, peas have played out for now, though I’ll probably plant a fall crop, the beets have begun to fatten up (second planting), carrots, too. Chard and spinach look good and they, too, need replanting for fall harvest.
August will find us once again with the honey extractor set up, frames to uncap and jars to fill. Mark Odegard has begun work on the 2011 version of the Artemis Honey label. His first efforts looked good to me, but he’s a skilled professional and keeps adjusting, trying new things. We’ll try this year to uninvite the bees to the extracting party. They become a big bother, not appreciating the heist of their summer’s work. Who can blame them? Though, I should add, they put up a surplus well beyond what their winter survival requires. That’s why bee-keeping works in the first place.
Mid-Summer Waning Honey Flow Moon
The six new honey supers did not prove necessary since I’m still two supers ahead of each colony, but it does look like colonies 2 & 3 have already stored a lot of honey, especially in the two supers that went on in place of the third hive box. In colony 1, the colony I will overwinter, they seem to still be at work filling up that third hive box which will constitute their honey supply for the winter. In 2 & 3 we will harvest the honey from the two super equivalents to that third full hive box.
Looked at the garlic, which I’ve been harvesting as its leaves brown. When two leaves are brown, I pull them and I have about half the crop out now. It looks like the best garlic crop I’ve ever had. Nice fat heads. I’ll save a couple to plant next year, continuing this garlic’s acclimatization to our soil and weather.
We’re harvesting more frequently overall this year, getting beans, peas and lettuce before they over grow. This part of the July is the hump part of the growing season. From this point forward it’s either harvesting or making sure plants stay healthy until they are ready to harvest. The bees are in mid-honey flow, storing and working like, well, like bees.
Artemis gardens and hives is having a good year.
Mid-Summer Waning Honey Flow Moon
Out to the bees in just a few minutes to slap on two more honey supers each, the six I finished varnishing yesterday while Mark put foundations in the frames. This will find six honey supers on colonies 2 & 3, while colony 1, the parent colony for next year’s only divide, will have four. Not sure if I’ll need more than these. I’m having to do this in the early morning, not the best time, but the only time I’ve got today.
At 9:15 Kate and I take off in separate cars for the Northern Clay Center. Our clay intensive starts this week, 10:00 to 4:30. I hope to learn how to make Japanese style tea cups and salad sized plates. Like tai chi working clay puts a premium on hand-eye co-ordination and sense of touch as well overall design skills.
A good while ago my spiritual journey had gone stale in the reading, meditation, contemplative modes I knew best. The next stage of my spiritual practice became gardening, working with the rhythm of flowers, soil, spades and trowels.
That practice went on for many years when Kate and I decided to add vegetables and the orchard with permaculture principles in mind. That added a good deal of oomph to the tactile spirituality, deciding to keep bees put animal husbandry into the mix. At this point my spirituality has become more and more attuned to the rhythms of growing seasons, plants and bees, all within the context of the Celtic Great Wheel.
With tai chi and clay my spiritual practice comes closer in again, my hands, my feet, my hips, my arms. Both clay and tai chi are paths on this nature focused ancientrail, though for me they are quite a bit harder. But that’s the push I need to grow.
After our first day at Northern Clay, I have my Woolly meeting tonight at Highpoint Print co-operative where we will make prints. One more step down the ancientrail of the mind/body link.
Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon
So. Attended a political meeting in the morning, came home, took a long nap, got up and put Helmsman varnish on the honey supers, six, then went up and watched some TV after a conversation with Mark and Kate.
Today had one weird announcement. This statue of Marilyn Monroe in Chicago. Only time will tell if it is really in as bad a taste as it seems to be. Not sure quite what to think of it. Guess I’d have to see it in person. No, I would have to see it in person.
What’s good. It’s a famous image, made bigger than lifesize in a believable way. It’s either saucy or sexist, or both. It puts the whole 1950’s/1960’s era right there, in the midst of 21st century Chicago. It’s pop art, I suppose. It is a joyous image, a woman apparently secure in her sexuality and having fun. It is a heroine sized sculpture, a monumental tip of the hat to Marilyn, a complex figure for 1960’s era boys and girls.
What’s bad. It invites the pictures I’ve already seen posted of men standing between her legs and looking up. Of course, that’s on the men, yes, but still. It draws us into a stereotypical display of woman as object, as object of desire, of silly non-chalance as an antidote for prurience. (which, come to think of it, maybe it is.) It plays to our cult of the celebrity. (or, does it play with our cult of celebrity?)
If you’ve seen it, I’m interested in what you thought.