• Tag Archives woodenware

  • Bee-Keeping, The Third Year

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                         Full Autumn Moon

    Our revels now have ended.  The very last of the year’s harvest, four-foot long decorative squash and birdhouse style gourds, Kate brought in yesterday. 

    The bees are done for the year.  Two colonies will die over the winter and the third, with luck, will survive.  Even if it does, this is my last  year for overwintering colonies.  The part-time, small quantity operation we have here doesn’t justify the extra work of mite treatments, concern over various ailments only caught by colonies that survive from one year to the next and the inhibited production of the colony developing as a parent colony.

    Artemis Hives now has two honey harvests under its belt in this, the third year of bee-keeping here.  Kate and I have developed a work flow.  She takes care of wooden ware, uncapping frames and bottling while I put foundations into the frames, manage the colonies, remove the honey supers and bring them to the house and insert them in the extractor.

    Three hives, or even two, will make honey enough for us and our friends.  The process is more straightforward after three seasons, now heading into the fourth.  The bees have become part of our life here, like the perennials, the vegetables, the orchard and the dogs before them.

    We also have the beginning of a label collection with 2010 and 2011 labels designed and produced by Woolly Mammoth Mark Odegard.


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  • Bee Diary: May 16, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                     Waxing Planting Moon

    The bee project here has two active workers, a woodenware maker and a bee keeper.  Kate has put together 7 honey supers and 70 frames plus four, and counting, hive 05-15-10_bees_woodenware1colony31boxes and 26 frames.  Without her patient and careful craftswomanship, the hives would not exist.  I’m just no good at the fine, repetitive tasks involved in woodworking, but she is.  She brings an artisan’s hand to her work.  As a result we have beautiful hives.

    A possible identity for our hives has begun to take shape.  Artemis is one of the many bee goddesses, but she is a familiar name, at least to some, so Artemis Honey is a strong possible name.  A common offering to Artemis was honeycakes, so we might be:  Artemis Honey, The Honeycake Honey.  When we start getting enough honey to exceed our use, including gifts, then we’ll start selling at farmer’s markets.  We’ll need a name, a label, a brand.  We’ll include a  honeycake recipe with every container sold and Kate has agreed to bake up some honeycakes to use as samples at our stands.  Let us know what you think.

    Checked the crops today and harvested parsnips.  One resisted leaving its happy home in the raised bed.  It came out well over a foot long.  Smelling the tiny roots off the parsnip just after pulling, amazing.  A sweet, earthy, pure scent.  Wish I could bottle it.

    When I left the MIA on Friday, I noticed on my walk back to the car, a migration of caterpillars.  I believe they were swallowtail butterflies in there can’t fly yet stage.  All of them, scores if not hundreds, chose northeast as their route across the warm concrete sidewalks that run between the Children’s Theater and the MCAD campus.  At first I just noticed their numbers, then I saw their common journey.

    Where I wondered, did they begin?  So, I followed them back, moving against the small, humping crowd until I found a crabapple tree along an MCAD sidewalk.  Looking up I noticed caterpillars soon to head north by northeast eating their way out to the end of small branches, then, as the branch bent under their weight, falling to the grass.  Why they decided on their direction, I have no idea.


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