Just Enough To Be Dangerous Pt 2

....so after all that, the next day I get a phone call from the Redneck telling me I have idiot bees. Ok. Fine. In the realm of expected reactions out of said manfriend. Plus the cell reception was kind of crappy as he was driving back from somewhere and the phone was cutting in and out and I didn't push the WHY the bees were idiots issue.

Was not expecting to come home to this:

Just to prove how big of a point I am trying to make, note the lack of caption on the photo. Ahem.

When installing your package of bees, you're supposed to, AND I QUOTE: "spray them down, bump the bees back, open the box up, and shake them in".

Got it? Good.

We talked about it in class extensively, and watched videos in class as well. Of people doing this. They showed us how to do it at field day (although I was not one of the few who tried it there....). And then in preparation for doing it myself, I watched more youtube videos of people doing it. Guys and gals with no protective gear whatsoever transferring happy bees into their new happy home happily and probably then turning off the camera and going home whilst singing tralalala through the woods.

So. I sprayed mine down, bumped them back, opened up the end instead of the top where the can is because with the newfangled containers we got that did not match ANY of the videos of bee shaking I watched (but I'll get back to THAT in a minute) you can do that, shook them in and good golly holy hell where there a lot of fucking bees flying around. The acorn, who had been taping up until about this point when the battery on my phone died because I was TOTALLY prepared, started backing away slowly at this point. I can only imagine what thoughts were going through his head as he watched a million gajillion angry bees swarm around my body. I had been told (and told, and told....) that a few bees would be left in the package and that you just leaned it up against the hive body and that they would want to go in after their sisters and would within 24 hours or so. OK. No biggie. Got it. It seemed like a rather large amount of bees that hadn't made it in the hive, but surely that was OK....

Did package #2, although with this one said 'fuck it' and decided to open the middle top of the box where the can of syrup is inserted like they did in ALL the videos I watched (albeit of the older packages, but still). Spray, bump, shake, boom, all in. Lean package up against side for stragglers. Except not nearly as many stragglers on this one. Hrrrm. Went back and checked #1.... only to find a good half of the bees still in the box. Fuck. Figuring I had royally screwed this hive up and probably didn't have enough survivors anyway, I decided I had nothing to lose by opening that hive back up again and spraying, bumping, and shaking the bees into the box again in hopes of getting them all in.

Whew. Mission accomplished. Ish. I think. I've never done this before.

Being a total genius and *not* wanting to burn down the 40 acres of woods and new house we're building, I set the still-lit smoker down on a cinder black a good 15ft or so from the hives and went down and went to bed excited that I finally had bees. SQUEEEE!

Until the Redneck called me at work the next day.

Came home to find all those bees all over the smoker. I figured it was no big deal. I had to feed the bees anyway (um. yeah. because I only had enough sugar for about a quart total of syrup when I really needed close to a gallon....), so sprayed down the outside of the smoker and bumped and shook them back into the box. Yes! Success! Wait. Is that a bee coming out of the spout? Oh! And another! Ok. A few must have gotten inside. No biggie. I still have sugar syrup in my spray bottle, I'll just spray them down and open up the can and bump and shake those into the box, too.

Except when I opened the lid, a million gajillion bees came pouring out of the can of the smoker like a horror movie of some sort. They just kept coming out!!

Loooong story short, it took gasoline and taking the bellows off the back to get all the bees out. Yup. It sucked.

Carnage

Still. More. Bees.

My smoker's all cool and vintage and shit. Got it from a very awesome local farmer who kept bees 30 years ago....

Old staples...

...new staples!!

Back in action.

So lesson learned. Spray, bump, and shake with confidence.

Or - follow the video of the maker of the new-fangled package we got and set them in the box and let them crawl out on their own.

Or something. But definitely no leaving lit smokers 15ft away from bees looking for a home and a refuge due to an idiot beekeeper not knowing how to bump and shake them properly!

Just Enough To Be Dangerous Pt 1

Because once you've taken a 10-week course, had 2 field days (or a field day and a hive removal at one of the instructor's houses), passed a written and a practical test and trolled all the facebook Beekeeping forums that'll have you, you obviously know tons jack shit.

I think at one point my facebook status read something along the lines of 'I hope passing a certification test in beekeeping is more helpful than High School French was in France'. Totes magotes. I know *just* enough to be dangerous.

I was SO EXCITED to get my bees. Finally the day I had been waiting for had arrived! Weeks of anticipation on top of 4 years of wanting to had finally come down to one day in which I would go to work at 6am (where we were down a person) on 2 hours of sleep, dip out at 9:20, get my bees, drive them home, go back to work by 10:30, stay until 5pm, go home, feed childs and manchild and the menagerie, and then! Oh! And then! INSTALL MY BEES.

Oddly enough all of *that* part went off without a hitch. Seriously surprised the shit out of me that it did. I left my bees under (what will be) our back porch so they could stay cool and wait for dusk.

Adorable! This is what 6lbs of bees comes in!

Wait. Hold up.

A few days BEFORE the arrival of my bees, because I've totally reinvented myself this year into a planner/organizer extraordinaire, I actually set up the hives outside where they're going to be. The phone call that day to the Redneck went something along the lines of "...oh. yeah. I set up the hives.......Where did I set them up?......You remember where we talked about them going? Where I showed you?.....Yeah, I didn't put them there." Thankfully he is amazeballs awesome and this is a typical conversation for us.

So I actually had them all set and ready to go for bee arrival day.

If my life were an old book, this plate would read "where we find that the Element, indeed, acts as a farm truck"

SO MUCH HELP hauling heavy-ass cinder blocks and commercial pallets. Sidenote: that was the pallet the cinder blocks for our house foundation got delivered on, so pretty damn sturdy methinks.

Because CUTENESS! And ready for BEES!

There's a lot of equipment involved in setting up your bees. And I'm not even talking frames and supers and whatnot.  Syrup to feed them, syrup to spray them (so they can't fly AND so they're distracted while you're shaking them around in a box they've been cooped up in during transport for 2 days....), protective gear, rubber bands (!), the list goes on and on.....

Checking the equipment.

But I had help.

Bee buddies!

First thing you do is check the queen cage to make sure she's alive and kicking.

The queen in her cage with her attendants

Yay for 10 year-old videographers.

Then you get her situated on the frame. She'll stay like this for a few days while she and the other bees chew through the candy plug that's keeping her prisoner. Then she'll get to the business of laying eggs as soon as she can. The hope is that by the time she gets out (3 or so days) the hive has accepted her as their queen and they have drawn enough comb for her to have somewhere to lay said gazillion bajillion eggs. The game here is to boost the population enough that they store a LOT of food for the winter and so that they still have an OK population to start out with next spring.

Queen cage installed onto frame. Note the super professional rubber bands. Next up: install the rest of the bees!

The Acorn's fancy shmancy shot

Needless to say at this point I kinda screwed some shit up that took another day to fix. But that is another story for another blog post.

Spring!

So excited to see spring springing. I was talking to my dad on the phone the other day, and as I was gushing on and on about the first leaves popping out on the apple trees I bought and planted, he responded with a "what did you expect to happen?". So he's not the most outwardly sentimental of folks, but dammit if nature doesn't surprise the shit out of me every year when it does EXACTLY what it's supposed to. I don't feel like I emerge from single digit temps as enthusiastically as my plants do - I seem to have to spend some time licking my wounds and reminding myself that it's a whole 9 or 10 months until I have to go through that again. Our plants, with their lack of dwelling on the past, just burst forth and make the most of the turning tides of weather. Gosh darn it I gotta take a hint.

But I'm trying. I almost finished hemming in our meadow garden this year, although putting in 3 rows is more than enough (so says my back) for now. My trapezoidal gate is awaiting chicken wire and then it's done. The onion starts are ready to go in the ground, and I've got rabbit-poopy hay to go between the rows and mulch/fertilize. My starts up in flats are ready to be joined by more starts of the warm-weather variety. Holy hell it's gonna be a busy growing season!

Handsome dog amongst the flowers

Embarrassed to say I'm not sure what this sweet little white flower is. Damn you eastern flora!!

Three rows. 3!! About 10 more to go...

Not everyone has a trapezoidal garden gate. BOOM. Lucky girl, this one.

Red maple.

Bradford pear.

Vinca.

Daffodils + vinca = Spring!

Onions!!

Preparing for Bees....

I am so so so very excited to be getting bees this year. And so so so very excited to cross #2 on my list off for the year.

I mentioned that I had like a 1 in 4 chance of getting a cost share - AND I DID!! Whoopee!!! The list of things they give you is long so I won't list it here.... suffice it to say that I really just need protective gear, a smoker, and a bee brush. And so many people have come out of the woodwork to give me old equipment they found or no longer use, or whathaveyou. Which means I have to find a bee brush and some leg bags and possibly an old white shirt.... and then I'm good. Everything else has been supplied through the Farm Bureau's cost share, or friends. AMAZING. Thank you thank you thank you!!

I don't know yet who my mentor will be, but I know a lot of the members that live near me, so very excited. A bunch of really cool people.

OOOH. And one of the women working in the county planning and inspections office put this little map together that shows all the locations of beekeepers in the county with a one mile radius around them, emulating the bees' range. SO COOL. I grew up in a household with maps in the bathroom, and now that I am going to have 2 GINORMOUS bathrooms, I ordered a 38 x 48 copy.

Starting on hive bodies!

Finished hive bodies!

SO. MANY. EYELETS.

25 done. 15 to go....

Couldn't resist getting started on these. Such a yummy yummy smell.

Inching Closer

As I mentioned before, I have a great desire this year to produce something. Don't get me wrong, we're producing shit. Babies and houses and whatnot. But I have this grand desire to produce something smaller and more intimate.

I had a baby. Maybe 'intimate' is not the best choice of words. You mama's reading this know what I mean.

But having a baby, building a house, juggling a young family.... these are big big things. Big things that take up all your focus if not time and energy (and resources). And I feel like they're floating on an infrastructure that's quite shaky, frankly. If you could strip them away (which you can't, thankfully), there would be nothing left. And that's kind of starting to feel empty to me.

So it's time for me to come "out of the baby funk" (thanks for the perspective, mom!) and get to building that foundation. The house won't be under construction forever. The baby (OK, toddler) won't be a baby forever. The family won't be young forever...

So three things I'm looking to produce this year. Like I said before, if we pull ONE off, I'm a fucking winner.

#1 - THE GARDEN
We're bringing it back. Yes yes. It's time. I planned it (I used a planner! What!), I ordered half of the seeds, I found the seed starter light set up thingy I got from a generous soul, I bought seed starter trays, I bought seed starting mix, I am patiently awaiting time to start 'em (just around the corner). I got everything all figured out, and then in a casual sort of way the Redneck threw out that we should use the meadow instead of my raised beds... Time to re-plan! Which I did. Which of course just made the project bigger, because if I'm going to plant in the meadow, then OBVIOUSLY this opens the beds up to being herb beds.... snowballing already, this one. And I've barely even begun.

Thankfully the rainwater tanks are still in good condition and I was already planning on putting a soaker hose in the blueberries this year, just in case. The Rabbiteye blueberries have a tendency to ripen late and right when the rain stops, so hoping this way every single last berry gets a chance to ripen instead of shriveling up into nothingness....

#2 - BEES
Everybody I know personally has listened to me squee! every Tuesday night for the past two weeks (so twice...but it feels like there was a LOT of squeeing...). Dude. I'm in a beekeeping class. And effing LOVING it. (Because I was born an eighty-year old peasant woman) I am the one in the middle of the county extension auditorium surrounded by people in varying stages of boredom fucking wide eyed and so excited I'm about to pee. And then coming home and verbal vomit gushing/regurgitating it all back to the Redneck who very patiently pretends to listen to it all when he so just wants to get back to his video games now that the toddler has FINALLY gone to sleep.... and he threatened to stop letting me go if I thanked him for taking care of the kids every Tuesday night (on top of already having them every Monday night) just ONE MORE TIME.

I can't help it. I have been trying to take this class for the past 3 years. I finally just sent the check in and figured I'd figure out logistics later. And so I'm doing it. I have a 1-in-4 chance of getting a Farm Bureau sponsored pair of beehives and bee packages and I've got my fingers crossed I'll be a lucky recipient. Because there's a lot of equipment involved and that shit is pricey! And they give you bees, too. And one of the requirements of the cost share is that you agree to take a mentor. Ahem. GIVE ME A MENTOR, YO!

I'm really, really excited about this one.

...and #3 - BUNNIES

We need to supplement protein. Our chickens give us a lot of eggs, 'tis true. But we need to start supplementing meat. It's time. And chickens take forever and a day to get big enough to eat. IF they go broody and raise hatchlings. Because let's face it, with everything else going on, I'm not getting on the incubator bandwagon. That is too mush trouble. So with my far-fetched dream (it's good to have goals!) of a fiber farm in mind, I'm eying some Angoras. French Angoras, specifically. I'm hoping to be kicking myself that my table loom is at my mom's and wouldn't fit in the last car load out this time next year. Oooh - raised bed garden with herbs morphing into dye garden? Fuck yeah! I already ordered the indigo seeds. Not even kidding.

Maybe it's the company of some truly inspiring women recently and getting to spy into their farming endeavors (here and here - and one of the spouses is in my beekeeping class! Small world!), maybe I'm coming full circle, maybe I'm in fantasy land... but I am a strong believer in if you say it out loud, it's true. So I'm saying my shit out loud. I would love to make these three things a reality this year. I'm anxious as hell to get started.

Beehives! - Part One

OK. So I have been not so secretly working on making some beehives. My mother has wanted to keep bees for a very very long time. I did, too, but the conventional beehive that I kept coming across just seemed time/equipment/money consuming. I kept thinking about, of all things, Friar Tuck from Robin Hood and couldn’t see him traveling around the English countryside with boxes and frames precariously perched upon his drunken rotund backside.

So. After some further research I found out about Top Bar beehives. They are what people use in developing countries, and are enjoying a renaissance of sorts amongst backyard beekeepers.

I love the idea that this method is not necessarily honey-centric – it basically lets the bees do their own thing in their own time, and this enables healthier hives. Healthier, happier, bees. This seems like a good thing, no?

The other upshot of this is that I am not in this for the honey. If anything, I prefer to get more wax than honey. And wouldn’t you know it! Since the bees aren’t constricted to a frame that you introduce to the hive, they have to build all the walls of their cells, which means more wax. So. Yay for me!

I think I was convinced to actually try to build a hive when I came across a post on Little House in the Suburbs. I love this blog, and I appreciate the sense of humor that they approach it with.

Armed with this plan, I set out to build my own.

Cutting the sides and ends out of raggedy yet new (yay!) plywood. And yes, that's the saw I used to do this whole project. Why? Because it's small, cute, does the job, and that way I didn't have to haul out/set up more tools.

Cut top bars - enough for one hive. The way the plywood worked out, it was more efficient to make two hives at a time. So. Yes. I cut 50 of those.

Follower boards being glued to the top bars. Nope. I don't have clamps big enough, so they just had to be pressed by their own weight.

Concerned with said glueage and lack of clampage, I decided to pop some nails in there, too. Just for my piece of mind.

You have to give bees a bit of incentive for them to latch on and build comb where you want them to. Some people put grooves down the length of the top bars, quarter round and things like that - they add some sort of texture and cover said texture with beeswax to coax them into wanting to make that unused piece of wood their home. I am too broke to be buying 60' or soof quarter round, so I decided to staple extra thick bamboo skewers I happened to have to the undersides and I will cover those with beeswax. I cut off the points with tin snips first.

Attached bamboo skewer - ready for wax!

Really it should be made out of proper wood – and by proper wood I mean wood planks. I am, as you very well know at this point, unemployed and broke as hell so I made it out of exterior grade plywood and furring strips. Which means that when I lay the top bars down on top of the hive, there will more likely be gaps due to curvature of the wood. This is really not something I could avoid. I picked out the straightest ones I could find, but for the price and quality – there’s gonna be some curveage.

Right now the ‘beehive’ is in the shed waiting for me to get off my butt and get wood for the legs so I can assemble the thing. Stay tuned!