Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Croci
Monthly Archives: April 2012
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.
A Short, Short Story
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
First, you take a blank page.
Throw marks at it, enough to light a fire under it.
Bring to a simmer.
Stir violently. Then chase it with cars and a motorcycle.
Throw in a vampire or an alien.
Cook for 45 minutes.
Turn off the heat and let it set.
Stuff Done
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
AC cleaned out. Limbs moved and put into brushpiles. Weed prevention completed.
Muscles a little achy, but feelin’ good. Bees this afternoon. Then a Latin day tomorrow.
Working outdoors at this pace at 65, a blessing. I’m ready to go longer.
With Kate’s sprucing up, the onions, leeks, shallots and garlic growing, asparagus popping up, rhubarb going strong, daffodils in bloom plus a few croci, bees buzzing about the cherry and apple and pear blossoms, the vitality of our home bursts out from every square inch.
The Outdoor Season, Well and Truly Begun
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.
Bee Diary 2012: Hiving the Packages.
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.
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Which reminds me, when health policy reformer Cong. Claude Pepper (D-FL) died, he went to heaven and asked God whether health reform would ever be successful in the U.S. To which God replied with good news and bad news. “The good news is, yes it will. The bad news is, not in my lifetime.” (from Dave Durenberger’s Commentary.)
Good Fortuna
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Sheepshead. Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fortune and fate, had her hand on my shoulder tonight. Even when I had not so good hands, I got good results. Amazing.
Sold my second jar of honey tonight, too. Still feels weird, selling the honey. The bees make it; I just support them.
Cool tonight, but not cold.
Bee Diary: Preparing for the Packages
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.
A Serious Man
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Saw A Serious Man tonight. Coen brothers. Might not have quite the resonance if you are either A) not a minnesotan or B) not a Jew, but if you are both or if your wife is Jewish and many of your friends are, too, and you live in Minnesota, this is a must see movie.
So many in-jokes. “Ron Meshbesher? Is he expensive?” “Well, he’s not cheap.” A past conductor of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Hugh Wolf’s son, Aaron, plays a major role as a stoner Bar Mitzvah boy and a neighborhood in Bloomington became the perfect 1967 setting for poor schlub Larry Gropnik’s modest 60’s home.
A black comedy, this movie moves with great pacing through a short period in Larry’s life where he’s up for tenure, his wife declares her affection for another man, his son listens to the Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew School, his brother hangs around like an unresolved note, his neighbor is a bigot who comes home in one scene with a dead buck lashed to the top of his station wagon and two rabbi’s give him hilariously bad advice.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth it.