Native Bee Boxes

With the arrival of intermittent spring weather, I've been very busy lately.  The outdoor projects have begun in earnest and my hands and forearms are feeling the strain of that work.  Typing doesn't help much.  So excuse the recent lack of posting. 

But here's something I wanted to write about: nest boxes for native bees.  My husband made one of these a few years ago and put it up on our shed.  We've already observed that the sealing walls constructed by mason bees last year have been dismantled, and a new generation of bees is checking out the nest holes for deposits of eggs.  So early in the year!  It seems there's so little in bloom yet for them to feed on, but the warmth has them up and about.  The nest box consists of a block of wood with deeply drilled holes in various sizes.  They serve as shelter for the eggs of several kinds of bee.

We have a huge three-bay garage that came with the house.  Its footprint is larger than the house itself.  It's great for storing all kinds of stuff pulled out of dumpsters and projects in progress, which means it gets packed to the point of becoming unnavigable.  On rainy days I've been working to triage some of the ungodly mess that has piled up in there over the last six months.  I found a short length of 4x4 post and decided to turn it into more nest boxes for native bees.  Small pieces of scrap wood furnished roofs to keep off the worst of the rain.  These will be mounted on the scaffolding for our solar array.  I'm sure they will soon be fully occupied.

Our foray into keeping honey bees last year resulted in unmitigated failure.  Our longest surviving colony didn't make it through the winter.  We're going to try again this year, and we hope that we'll have more success with some hard lessons under our belts.  Seeing the help our efforts provide to native bees offers some consolation. These bees are under the same environmental stresses as honey bees.  The human race cannot afford to lose the free services of pollinator insect species, and bees are preeminent in this work.  As it turns out, some of our native bees are even more effective pollinators than honey bees.  Keeping honey bees requires a significant commitment of time, labor and monetary outlay.  It took me all of two hours to build these two native bee nest boxes at almost no expense whatsoever.  I paid for four screws, a tiny bit of silicone sealer (leftover from energy efficiency improvements for our home) and the electricity to run a power drill.  My work for the native bees ends the moment these bee boxes are mounted. 

I mentioned recently how last year there was a sense of my garden and homestead finally beginning to come together.  If anything, that feeling is increasing this year.  When we bought this house the backyard was a monoculture of open lawn, with a border of conventional, uninspired landscaping.  Now it's stocked with dozens and dozens of perennial plants, and we grow a wide variety of annual vegetables there every year, both of which supply food and habitat for numerous insects, which in turn provide food to birds and other wildlife.  That's biodiversity that simply wasn't there before.  Putting up these boxes for the bees is another effort towards that cause.  It's the inter-species connections on this tiny piece of land that are going to make what we do here sustainable over the long term.  I'm convinced that every additional species I can encourage is a strength for my homestead.  I don't even know exactly what these native bees are doing here.  I'm sure they venture off my property as much as they conduct their business on it.  But they are a knot in the living tapestry I am making of this place.  I want them here.  With some scrap materials and a couple hours of labor it's easy enough for me to make this place attractive to them for decades to come. 

One way of looking at this is as a token gesture of atonement for the environmental damage my actions have caused, and continue to cause; a tiny way to give back to the world that supports me.  Seen another way, it's self interest.  Monocultures are fragile things.  By encouraging as much biodiversity as possible, I get more resilience, healthier soil, lower pest pressures, better pollination of our fruits and vegetables, and less work for me.  That's what I'm talking about when I say things are coming together.

If you're interested in helping populations of native bees, you could build your own bee boxes.  You could even salvage the materials from a dumpster on a construction site, thus diverting useful stuff from a landfill and saving yourself some money.  For guidance on this simple project, check out this fact sheet (pdf) from the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation organization.  On their website you can also find lists (tailored to each region of the US) of beneficial plants to for native bees, including many edible plants.

Honey Bees Update

Now that we're settling down into some properly autumnal weather, with temperatures dipping below freezing overnight, I think it's finally time for an update on the honey bee experiment that began in April.  The short version of the report is: we lost one colony early, and the surviving one is understrength going into the winter.

Izhevsk, our colony of Russian honey bees, looked good all through the spring and into midsummer.  But sometime during late July they ate down just about all the honey they had stored, and have basically been limping along ever since.  They appear to still have a functioning queen.  We've seen her clearly, as she's marked with a blue dot.  No signs of supersedure cells, so the workers apparently think she's healthy and capable of performing her duty as the reproductive organ of the colony.  And yet, we've seen precious little brood since July.  Many experienced beekeepers reported starving colonies this year, apparently due to the exceptionally hot and dry summer here in the east.

There was no question of taking any harvest of honey whatsoever.  We've been feeding them sugar syrup, which I don't like to do.  But there's little doubt they'd long since have died without the help.  They have two full feeders' worth of the syrup at the moment, but if temperatures are cold enough they won't even travel within their own hive to get at the food.  Honey bees have been known to starve to death in the center of a hive, with full frames of honey mere inches away.  Right now the colony is mostly huddled into a single medium box.  That's likely not enough bees to generate sufficient heat to make it through winter.

We added a thick insulation layer of rigid foamboard to three sides of the hive, and black tarpaper to the south-facing side, in an attempt to help them along.  We cut plenty of space around their reduced entrance, so that they still have a front door landing pad. The idea is for the insulation to prevent windchill and the black paper to provide a little solar gain.  But we've also left the bottom completely open except for the built-in screen on the bottom board.  We also added a few spacers to increase airflow from the top cover.  Condensation and moisture in the colony is more of a risk than cold temperatures - at least for a strong, well provisioned colony.  Izhevsk is not strong however.   It seems almost futile to insulate the sides of a hive while leaving so much airflow, but such is the received wisdom.

It's possible the bees may survive this winter, and the milder it is, the better their odds.  I figured this first year of beekeeping would be a major learning experience, and it has been.  Experience is one of those things you get after you need it.  Sadly, the bees paid dearly for our year of learning.  If we lose Izhevsk, we'll certainly try again next year, and I believe, make fewer mistakes.  I put in quite a few perennial plants this year with a view to providing bee forage.  They'll be larger next year, and so provide more nectar to them.  In any case, we're likely to try again with an Italian colony next year.  We're not giving up on beekeeping.

So that's the report - ambiguous but definitely not rosy.  It's unlikely we'll check on them or feed them again unless we happen to get a particularly warm day before spring.  Until then, all we can do is hope the golden ladies make it.

First Frost Warning

We had our first chance at a frost last night.  It came on a day of such autumnal sweetness that we couldn't bear to spend much of it indoors.  We divided the day between attending to frost-prep chores and lazing on the hammock in sheer worship of the glorious weather that will soon be only a memory.

There were things to pick from the garden and an urgency about the harvest that surpassed even that of the summery days of glut.  Eggplants, cherry tomatoes, chili peppers and cuttings of tender herbs came in.  It was a tough call which to incorporate into our dinner.  In the end we opted for the last of the tender sage leaves with a lovely winter luxury pumpkin given to me by one of the farmers at our local market.  She claimed she couldn't sell it because the stem was missing, and added that the seed would breed true because the pumpkin patch was set back from all the other squashes.  "My" farmers just rock.  (And yes, I did buy some of the same pumpkins from her, with stems intact.)  We dined on pumpkin-sage pasta, most welcome on an evening with a nip in the air.

But before that there were bed sheets and row covers to excavate from the shed.  I chose the basil to cover up with the bed sheet, reckoning it the most tender of our herbs.  The sage still looks green, but the older leaves have already started to toughen up, so it lost out.  The peppers and eggplant each got a row cover cloth laid over it, though the plants are so large that we couldn't make the cover reach the earth on both sides.  We did what we could for them and wished them the best.  I rummaged around in the garage until I found the storm windows that fit our two cold frames, and laid them over the frames just as they slipped into shade.

I watched from the hammock as the last sunlight to reach our garden played over our sole remaining colony of honey bees.  The golden ladies were illuminated by the slanting light as they winged homeward from their last foraging flights of the day.  The cats came and threw themselves down under my suspended body.  It was a good feeling to lie on the hammock and look at my homestead.  There are so many things yet to be done here. But I felt I had earned a moment of luxurious idleness on a glorious afternoon.  And I could see the beauty my hands had created all around me.  The lovely honey bee commute ended just as the last sunbeam winked away from our yard.

Then it was time to bring in the potted rosemary, lemon grass, and our lemon and lime trees.  The living room now looks a bit like a nursery.  We'll see whether I have any luck keeping the rosemary alive through the winter this year.  I'm hoping to use it on many loaves of focaccia all through the baking season.

I woke this morning to find the temperature two degrees cooler than predicted, but no frost.  It feels like a lottery win to have dodged this first brush with winter, and if the forecast is remotely accurate, we have at least another five frost-free nights ahead.  The plants we pulled indoors will stay inside till warm weather returns in spring.  I don't fancy moving them again any time soon.

This will probably be the most gorgeous weekend of the whole year.  Two days of clear skies, light breezes, and temperatures in the low 70s.  Autumn is just too short.

State of the Homestead

Time for another jumbled update on various snippets of homestead life.

I've made a not very well informed start on a permaculture guild around our old apple tree.  Actually I started it way back in January by throwing down a bunch of cardboard during a thaw.  Putting the guild in place has taken a lot more material than I had imagined it would, so it's smaller than originally envisioned.  I used all the litter material that the chickens had been on over the winter months, plus a fair amount of compost and mulch.  I put it on the most badly degraded soil under the apple tree, where roof runoff from the back of the garage had stripped the soil bare.  So now the southern quadrant within the drip line of the apple tree is a guild in the making.  So far I've got one black currant bush, two New Jersey tea plants, a lead plant, one self heal, and a few nasturtiums as living mulch.  Our apple tree is still in need of work to thin its canopy.  (It was ignored for a good many years before we bought the property.)  But it got a good pruning this year, so that a little dappled light reaches the guild plants during most of the day.  They get a brief window of full sun in early morning, when the sun is low in the sky.  I don't really feel that I have a handle on how the guild is supposed to work, or whether it will.  But I've made a start, and that's something.  We'll see how it does.  Next year I'll again use the winter deep litter from the hens to expand the guild further away from the tree.  And I'll need another black currant bush to cross pollinate with the one I put in this year.  It's all part of the lawn eradication program.

Our passive solar heating system is crawling oh-so slowly towards functionality.  We should be able to heat with it, I would think, this coming winter.  Also, we should be able to get domestic hot water out of the deal too, eventually.  But here's the really exciting news.  The system requires a heat dump to get rid of unwanted and excessive heat in the warm months of the year.  That heat gets dissipated into the ground.  Yeah: I know you're thinking what I was thinking.  Heat in the ground is what you want in spring and fall.  Under a greenhouse.  The "shoulder months" of the year (April-May and September-October), when we don't really need to heat the house too much, but the sun is still strong, also happen to be months when warm earth and a protective cover could make a huge difference for season extension.  So yes, we're mulling this.  We think we've figured out a good spot to situate the shallowly buried heat dump, where the piping in a double U-loop configuration would be well suited to a modestly sized greenhouse or hoop house (maybe 12'x8').  A greenhouse is probably way beyond our budget at the moment.  But a hoop house we could knock together in a weekend, or two at most.  And it wouldn't cost very much.  Anyway, it's pretty exciting, even if we have to wait for next year to build anything.  Longer tomato season! Perennial rosemary!  Perennial lemon grass!  Parsley that overwinters!  Spinach all winter!  Early peas!  Will keep you posted.

I don't know what to report on the bees.  Both hives are still occupied, and the numbers seem strong.  Foligno looks to be doing great, and the marked queen has been easy to spot every time we've opened the hive.  But they're ignoring the feeder we put in there for them.  Izhevsk is a mystery.  They've built comb inside their frame feeder, which makes feeding them a challenge.  Plus, it gives the bees an easy place to hide.  We haven't seen the queen in a while.  They're building comb just fine, and there's lots of activity, but I haven't a clue what's really going on in there.  Is she in the feeder?  Or is the colony carrying on without a functional queen?  We gave them a frame with a little brood and a lot of honey in it from Foligno, to help them keep their numbers up.  Let's hope it works.  I've been very pleased to see that the honey bees have found the Tuscan kale plants that overwintered in the garden, and they've been all over the blooms as the plants go to seed in this, their second year.  Good to know about the springtime bee bonus with these plants, since I plan to keep saving seed and breed them to suit our location. 

The garlic plants are looking great. It'll be time to harvest them in just a couple months. 

The great perennial herb planting of 2010 is mostly done.  I've put in valerian, self heal, anise hyssop, lavender, spearmint, yarrow, Roman chamomile, echinacea, skullcap, and bee balm.  Now I get to see how they do, and how much they grow and spread.  Also, which ones the bees take to, if any of them get around to blooming this year.  After that, I just need to figure out how to use them medicinally.

My husband cleared and tilled a wide patch of soil that had been hideously landscaped when we bought our home.  It was so awful we just ignored it for the last few years.  We partly cleared it last fall and sowed a cover crop there, then he tilled under the cover crop and added compost this spring.  This is going to be our three sisters area this year, which will help get those pushy, obnoxious squash plants out of the rest of the garden.  The popcorn is already in the ground and starting to poke up.  The Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are soaking, and will go in the ground very soon.  (Other pole bean varieties are going to be planted elsewhere.  It's going to be a big bean year on the homestead, I hope.)  The third sister will be a few sugar pumpkins along with Lady Godiva, an oilseed pumpkin that yields a "naked" (i.e. nearly hull-less) seed.  If successful, the seed crop will be used to feed the chickens in winter, and possibly produce some oil for our own consumption.  The flesh is considered inedible, but I'd bet our vermicompost worms would disagree.

Our hens have been back on grass for a month or so now.  We put them in the three sisters bed for a little while after tilling, but before we were ready to plant.  They became escape artists, digging away the loosened soil so that they could slip under the bottom of their pen.  They enjoyed it so much that we let them get away with it for a few days.  It was nice to see them out and about.  But given the large hawk population, and our zoning codes, we can't make a habit of free-ranging them.

I've gotten interested in the craft of felting with natural dyes, though I don't know very much about it yet.  Sourcing free raw fleece took two emails to two local farmers.  Felting can be done with wool of fairly poor quality, which means you can get material from farmers raising lamb.  Fleeces from meat breeds aren't worth much for spinning, so there's little demand.  But I've already hit a snag.  While I can handle the effort and time to wash, clean of debris, and dye the wool, after that I bang up against the need for proper tools.  The wool has to be carded before felting.  Either it's done by hand with carding combs, which my right wrist could not handle, or I'd need a hand-cranked drum carder, which could get the job done much faster.  Problem is, drum carders run in the neighborhood of $400.  I may still take the free fleeces, see how far I get with cleaning and dying them, and then see what might be possible for carding.  Maybe I'll find someone willing to loan or rent out a drum carder.

Looks like we're going to get our first crops of grapes, elderflowers, and pears this year.  Maybe even a small handful of cherries and blueberries too.  Exciting stuff.  The grapes are wine varieties that my husband chose.  Maybe he'll get motivated by a good crop to do a little fermenting this year.  I'll definitely take all the elder blooms this year, rather than let the plants put too much energy into producing berries.  Besides, I'm dying to try making a syrup or cordial from the flowers.  Our Collette pear tree set a lot of fruit early this spring.  I thinned most of it off.  Then most of what I'd left got knocked off in a strong wind storm.  But now it's putting on a minor second flowering, apparently a habit of the Collette pear.  In any case, the little pears are already looking very tempting, with a lovely red color.  I know I can't count my fruit before it's picked, but I do have my hopes up.

The container plants are mostly looking very good.  Potatoes are up and will soon be ready for hilling.  The hazelberts are growing very well, which is a little surprising.  I'd been told to expect very little topgrowth in the first few years.  They look vigorous enough that it wouldn't surprise me if they tried for a small production of nuts this year.  There's something nasty looking on one of my figs though.  It looks bad, like a blight of some kind.  I've isolated that plant and am trying to figure out what's wrong, and what I might do to help it.

According to my own personal signs and indicators, it's getting very close to time to put in the heat slut tomatoes and basil.  This year it's Speckled Roman (gorgeous paste that resisted blight well last year), Sungold (finally caved and decided to try this hybrid cherry that everyone raves about), Brandywines and Cherokee Purples for beefsteaks.  And my favorite basil: purple ruffles.  This is the first time I've grown tomatoes without the super productive Peacevine cherry tomato in my lineup.  I've decided to just buy starts of eggplant and chili peppers this year.  It was better than making myself crazy with everything else that had to happen this spring.  Maybe I'll try okra again if I can find some starts.  Not a popular garden veg here in zone 6.

In blog news, I've added a Bookshelf page with a bunch of my favorite titles that help me homestead.  Links and mini-reviews there for your perusal.  Check it out, and let me know whether it's useful.

And that's all the news that's fit to print.

It's Getting to be a Real Saga

I updated you a little too soon on the bees.  It's been one thing after the other with my beekeeping debut.  I left the house for a few hours yesterday and returned home to my husband's account of the Russian bees swarming over the garden, dispersing wildly and then all roaring back home twenty minutes later.  I missed it.  We were both mystified, considering how much work the bees were putting into building comb and collecting pollen.  This morning early I opened up Izhevsk to see what I can see.  The short answer was not much.  There was pollen in some cells.  I didn't see the queen or any eggs, but the colony had more gorgeous white comb than the last time I checked and still seemed active and numerous.  I figured I just missed the queen and that any eggs or brood were obscured by the bees thickly covering the comb, which could have been because they were trying to keep brood warm on a chill morning.

I worked in the garden today until early afternoon.  I decided to wind up my outdoor work with a little beehive viewing, just as it was clouding up before a predicted rainstorm.  That's when I saw the cluster of bees on the grass, about 20 feet straight out from the hive.  Sure enough, there was a bee with a white dot on her thorax: the queen.  Rain was now immanent.  I set the lawn chair over the little cluster of bees to keep them dry, then rushed inside to get help from my husband and to jump into my bee suit as fast as ever I could.  We grabbed our bee tool bucket and got the smoker going as quickly as possible.  By the time we got back to the bees, the rain was beginning.

We whiffed a few puffs of smoke at the hive, and at the bees on the ground, as fat rain drops came down.  Then as quickly but as gently as I could, I brushed some of the bees into a plastic planter, rushed over to the hive just as my husband opened it, and dumped the bees in.  I'm pretty sure I got the queen, but not 100%.  And there's a chance I might have injured her as I tried to return her to the hive.  Then there's the likelihood that she was out on the grass overnight with a small group of bees.  Who knows?  I could only try to do my best in a dicey situation.

When the rain let up a short time later, I took a look around the hive and didn't see any clusters of bees, so the queen may well be in the hive.  The rain probably would have been the end of her, or at least tonight's low temperature would have been the end of a group of wet bees.  If our frantic efforts work to restore a functioning queen to her hive, and if the Russians don't swarm out again on the next sunny day (Tomorrow?  Friday?), it'll be a miracle.

I'm having a rough start to this beekeeping thing.  It's going to get easier than this, right?

Bees Update

I got lucky and was able to replace the Italian bees that took off last Thursday.  It's good to be in contact with the local beekeeper's club.  I went to the monthly meeting the same day I discovered my bees had gone and pressed the flesh, did my pitiful but earnest new beekeeper routine, and begged for leads to packages or nucs.  On Saturday I got an email about a beekeeper who had some customers back out of an agreed upon sale of nucs.  They were Italian bees with new queens, and only about an hour away.  We were there Sunday afternoon to pick up our new bees.

Foligno (my Italian hive, nearer one in the picture above) looks a bit different now, since the colony was sold in a medium super with a full complement of comb and some brood.  We kept them in the garage overnight since it was going to be so cold.  We wanted to give the smaller colony a break with keeping their brood warm enough to survive.  It was a snap to "install" them Monday morning and top off their feeder.  They did their orientation flights as soon as it warmed up.  That's what bees do when you move them: they map the world by flying out of the hive and turning to look back at their home, gradually flying farther and farther away as they familiarize themselves with the landscape.  By Monday evening, we saw foragers returning to the hive with their pollen baskets nice and full.

While we were suited up, we checked on Izhevsk, the Russian colony we started this year as well.  They look great, even if they are drawing comb directly inside the frame feeder.  We didn't see the queen, or take out more than one frame, but there is a good deal of comb being drawn and we saw some pollen stored there.  It's a very active colony that looks promising.

I found it interesting that both Izhevsk and (the original) Foligno kicked a bunch of drones out just after the packages were installed.  Drones, the male bees, are total freeloaders.  They contribute nothing whatsoever to their home colony.  A newly installed package of bees has plenty room but no time or energy to spare.  Drones won't even help themselves to food within the hive; they beg food from the (female) workers.  Looks like when push comes to shove, it's the drones that get the boot.  There were many of them dead in front of the hive in the first few days after installation.  I can only speculate, but it seems there's a lesson in there somewhere.

For the record, the trick of painting cinder blocks with used motor oil to keep black ants away doesn't work.  Maybe a full on dunking or soaking would be more effective, but the thin coating of oil we put on the blocks has almost disappeared from the top course.  I think the oil is redistributing itself within the material of the block.  I found a few ants on each of the hives yesterday.  I do think the oil is effective to limit wicking of moisture from the ground though.

Bad News - Good News

The Italian bees have gone.  They were clustering on the bottom of their screened bottom board early yesterday morning when I went to tend the hens, and gone by lunchtime. The queen had made her way out of her cage and they had even started to build some comb.  But there were only a few confused and sad looking bees wandering helplessly around the inside of the hive when I checked on them.  Of course I'm disappointed that they chose to leave.  But I wish them well in the world and hope they make it out there.  I attended the local beekeepers' meeting last night, told my sad tale, and begged for any leads on a replacement package.  The experienced beekeepers found my story very odd, and packages are in very short supply.  I may have to try to catch a swarm if I want two colonies, or settle for just one.

On a more positive note, the Russians are doing great.  They have a significant start on their comb building, and very little burr comb (that's "non-regulation" comb - comb built where a beekeeper doesn't want it).  It looks like Izhevsk will be a strong colony.

Another positive note is that I got a bunch of ramps for transplanting.  The few I put in two years ago are still alive, but their numbers don't seem to have changed at all, so I still don't feel I can harvest any.  I'm going to put these new ramps in several locations and see where they do best.  If I manage to make them happy enough to propagate well, ramps could help bridge the garlic gap, which we're facing right now.  No more fully formed garlic from the garden until late June at the earliest. 

Bees Are in Their Hives, All's Right with the World

We picked up our two packages of bees on Sunday afternoon and got them installed just an hour or two before some light rain fell in the evening.  Sting count: null.  The Italians and the Russians behaved very differently.  The Russians were extremely active at all times, but grouped themselves tightly together in a seething, vibrating mass.  The Italians were initially much calmer.  When they did become more active, their activity looked more purposeful, and they spread themselves out much more.  Who knows what these things portend?

Izhevsk: home of the Russian bees

I've named the Russian hive Izhevsk, and the Italian hive Foligno.  Both are named for places I've visited repeatedly and spent time getting to know.  I was relieved to have both packages safely installed.  Now begins the watching, tending, and learning.

Foligno: the hive of the Italian bees

Each colony was given two pounds of honey, somewhat diluted, in their frame feeders.  I left the pots I mixed the feed in, as well as the feeding cans that came with the packages in an empty deep above the deep with the feeders and frames.  They'll probably need more food soon.  After the installation was done, we sat and watched the hubbub, feeling quite safe in our bee suits.  We saw a few bees at each hive doing the "fanny fanning" thing.  Despite the fact that it's social chaos in a package, with bees from various colonies jumbled together, a few bees took it upon themselves to put their abdomens in the air and waft the homing signal pheromone to the others.  We can only hope the bees from each package have more or less sorted themselves out.  Our apple tree is in mid-bloom at the moment, and today's weather promises fair.  So they should be able to fly out and find some grub right away.

A fat drone bee, perhaps Italian, who came to visit me in the early confusion just after installation.  The stubby "tail" and huge eyes are the giveaways.

Baking Day

I spent Thursday baking.  I'm trying to use up the last of a 50-pound bag of flour that includes the germ of the wheat before spring temperatures help it go rancid.  So I baked up a storm - of flour, that is.  Baking day is messy.  And long.  And exhausting.  It was lights out for me before 9pm last night.  But at least I have plenty of bread to show for it (Acme Bread's fabulous rosemary herb slabs, courtesy of the Artisan Baking cookbook).  There's nothing - nothing - in the world like freshly baked bread.  As another super-special treat that I posted about over at The Simple Green Frugal Co-op, I also made lardy cakes.

Yes, I know, you can't resist the name any more than I could.  Click the picture to see my post over there, which includes the recipe.

In other news, the arrival of our bee packages has been delayed by a week (or possibly two).  This means I can turn my attention to other things for a few days at least.  Such as doing something about the annual garden.  And maybe planting a few seeds.  We're going to go borrow a rototiller from gardening friends tonight or tomorrow.  I swear this is the last year I till that bed!  Also, I pick up three fig trees next Thursday.  So it's time to get their self-watering containers built.  More on that soon.

Happy weekend!

Further Preparations for Honey Bees

It seems like half the bloggers I read regularly are starting bees this year. So I figure there are even more people out there interested in the process of getting ready for the first arrival of our bees. With less than a week to go until our packages arrive, we're hurrying to finish up our preparations.

This weekend we painted cinder blocks with used motor oil. This is almost as gross as it sounds, but there are - allegedly - a couple of good reasons for doing so. We're going to set our beehives on top of these blocks. The oil coating will apparently help minimize the wicking of moisture from the ground up to the wooden boxes of the hive. Also, it's supposed to deter ants from climbing up to the hive in search of honey to rob. A full colony of ants can overwhelm a honey bee colony, and that's one of the many things I'd like to prevent. The other tip I heard about keeping ants and other ground insects out of the hives is to use a water moat around whatever the hive stands on. But that would have to be either a pretty big moat, or four smaller moats for each hive. And besides, I just know that I'd forget to fill it, or a branch would fall in and create a safe passage. So we're trying this. I don't know if it will work for the insects, but it at least seemed plausible for reducing the transfer of ground water. I'll report later on whether it seemed to work.

Also in the interest of preventing rot, I put a couple coats of primer on the bottom of the bottom boards, which will be resting against the cinder block stands. We're using screened bottom boards for improved ventilation, and as a non-toxic partial control for varroa mites. (Any mites that fall off bees in the hive will theoretically fall through the screen and out of the hive, never to return. Apparently they neither fly nor crawl very well.) The other advantage of the screened bottom board is that it gives us a little more leeway in getting the hives level. A solid bottom board catches rain and condensation, which requires the hive to be tilted ever so slightly towards the opening in the bottom board. We don't need to worry about that with a screened bottom board. We'll just do the best we can to make the hive level and leave it at that. Having the frames fairly plumb is important as the bees will do their best to draw perfectly vertical comb, and I'd sure like that comb to be more or less neatly inside the frames.

Yes, we got a little whimsical with the painting. Just wait till you see all the boxes stacked up together.

We also laid a very large sheet of synthetic felt on the ground where the hives will be placed. This was part of the packaging that our passive solar heating system shipped in; so a good instance of re-purposing. The idea is that it's heavy enough and densely matted enough to prevent anything growing up through it. (Of course, old carpeting or new carpet remnants would work just as well.) That means that I don't have to mow or weed in the immediate area of the hives. Less maintenance, and I can keep a respectful distance with the lawn mower, not to mention, a little more lawn eradication. Bees really, really don't like any knocks or direct vibration applied to their hives, so keeping a decent margin that needs no yardwork is a good idea. We situated this in an area where the grass wasn't growing all that well anyway due to being shaded for much of the day. The hives will get early morning sun and very late afternoon sun, but be shaded during the hottest part of the day.

By the way, we had to choose between conflicting recommendations for situating and orienting the hives. Our first instructor recommended morning sun and shade for much of the rest of the day. Summers in our area are usually quite hot. Wax can actually melt in the hive if the temperature gets too high. Plus, bees will expend energy trying to keep the hive cool if it gets too warm. So the hive boxes need to be painted in light colors and all day sun is a risk. But morning warmth gets the bees going early, which can give them a competitive edge with other nectar- and pollen-collecting insects. On the other hand, our last instructor mentioned that colonies situated in full sun seem to have some advantage in fighting off varroa mites. In the end, we found the logic of the first instructor more compelling than yet another factor in the varroa war. But if you're in a cooler climate, it might make sense to put your hives where they'll get sun all day long. As for orientation, everyone seems to agree that the entrance of the hive should face southeast. On the other hand there's also the theory that bees will first follow a path straight out of the hive entrance in search of food. Since I know my property hasn't been treated with any nasty chemicals, I'd like the primary flight path to be over our land. That direction would be almost due west. So that's a decision we're going to have to make pronto.

I spent a few hours carefully nailing the side bars of 120 frames to the top bars of said frames. If you're a beekeeper, you know what the equipment looks like. If not, don't worry about it. Basically, it's just insurance to keep the frames from being ripped apart by me during hive inspection. Bees sometimes glue things together in a hive with propolis, their house-made glue. It's a very strong glue, more than capable of keeping the majority of a frame in the hive while the top bar is pried off. The work was a little tedious, but not as difficult as I had feared.

We still need a little preventative protection from the one honey bee predator common to this area. Skunks will approach bee hives at night, scratch the hive body, and wait for guard bees to emerge to investigate. Then the skunks eat the bees, leaving few if any indications of their visit. Obviously, this drains the lifeblood of the colony. There are a number of options open to the beekeeper to protect the colony from skunks. One is to raise the base of the hive more than 18" above the ground, placing it out of reach of the predator. Top bar hives accomplish this as an element of their design. Another is to use no bottom board on the hive at all, which allows the bees to emerge en masse and confront the skunk in strength. This is feasible for a strong, well established colony. A weak or new colony of bees cannot adequately defend so large an opening in the hive from other insects that would rob out the honey. The last option is to place a nail bed in front of the hive, creating a decidedly unwelcome mat for any nighttime marauder. This is the one we've decided on. It just needs to get done.

We're also still short an entrance reducer for one of the hives. We'll make do by stuffing a piece of cloth in the opening until a wooden one arrives. Entrance reducers are used to narrow the hive opening for small colonies, until their numbers increase so that they can adequately defend their honey stores. Of course, early on, my colonies won't have much to defend so this shouldn't be all that critical.

Last minute preparations will include mixing up a feeding solution for my packages. I'll get this done either the night before they arrive, or first thing in the morning before I go pick them up.

I've got to say that getting ready for the honey bees has been a lot more work than I had anticipated. Partly this is due to the type of hive I chose, the Langstroth. This is by far the most common type of hive in use in the US. A topbar hive might have saved me a good deal of this work. But then, there may be other drawbacks to that style that I'm unaware of. In any case, I'm way, way behind on getting my seeds started this spring. Frankly I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed. I'm playing catch up as best I can, but I'm probably going to succumb and opt to buy some seedlings as well.

Tiny Tip: Painting Beehives Efficiently

Here's a tip I picked up at a beginner beekeeping seminar. It came in handy for me, and so I pass it on to any of you who are starting bees in Langstroth hives, and desirous of saving a little money by painting them yourselves.

Rig up a couple pieces of lumber between a pair of sawhorses.* "Thread" the hive boxes onto the lumber, and you can easily prime and paint all four sides the boxes. Just rotate the boxes around the wooden support as you cover each side. Good air circulation helps the drying too, so that you can work as quickly as possible. I got two coats of primer and two coats of paint done in an afternoon using this method. Most of the painting is now done, though I'm waiting on replacement for some boxes that were damaged in shipping.

Next up on my list of beekeeping tasks is putting starter strips on each frame, then painting them in place with wax, which I hope will make the suggestion to the ladies: "draw your comb here, please." Once again, the Backwards Beekeepers have a tutorial. It explains both the how and why.




When the starter strips are done I need to think about where the hives will be situated, get that area ready, and figure out what the hives will rest on. I will probably need to build stands for them. Will keep you posted.

* I made those saw horses with scrap wood pulled from dumpsters on home construction sites.

Honey Bees Are Coming Soon

My packages of bees are arriving on March 28th! I'm not ready for them, and there's a lot of work to be done before I will be ready, most of which would be a lot easier if the temperature were about 15-20 degrees warmer. They're predicting 8-12 inches of snow in the next 48 hours. We weren't expecting the ladies until sometime in mid-April, so I was sort of counting on getting all the priming and painting done in early April, when we could reasonably expect to see some days in the mid-50s F. I may actually need to fire up the heater in the garage to get this done. I'm not even sure we have kerosene in the tank, as we hardly ever heat the garage. We also need to figure our exactly where on our little property the hives will reside and build some stands to keep them up off the ground. Oh well. At least we have all the equipment we need (I think).

I've been reading books and online articles on beekeeping, speaking with local beekeepers, and attending classes to learn about keeping bees. There's an enormous amount to know. What becomes obvious very quickly once you dip your toe into the world of beekeeping, is that - aside from the myriad hard facts - there's a bewildering range of opinion and practice among beekeepers. It's rather intimidating for a first-time beekeeper to sort through and make decisions. Of course, I come to the table with my own set of beliefs and inclinations - not about beekeeping per se, but about how much chemical/medical intervention I'd like to use to support my colonies. If you've been reading here for any length of time, it's probably no surprise that I plan to follow natural/organic/low-intervention/biodynamic practices with my bees. I know I run the risk of losing my colonies by not routinely dosing them with drugs. That's a risk I'm willing to take.

Thus far, I'm drawn to a hodge-podge of different practices that don't fall into any established beekeeping approach that I know of. Here's a run down of all the decisions I've had to make before my bees even show up.

Hive type: Langstroth. This is the typical hive type of squarish boxes which stack up on top of each other, with movable rectangular frames inside each box. For each colony I have two deeps and two shallow supers. The shallow honey supers will be easier on my back, weighing in at only 35-45 pounds when full of honey. The alternatives just sounded heavier than I wanted to deal with. Back injuries are very common among beekeepers. I'd rather take a pass there.

Foundation type: none, just starter strips. This is probably my most controversial decision as far as established, conventional beekeepers are concerned. Top bar hive beekeepers, on the other hand, take this for granted. My objections to foundation are that it's either far too labor intensive for me, or that it introduces what is likely to be contaminated wax into a new hive. Also, I'm convinced that letting bees draw their own comb, with the cell size they want to draw, is better for the long-term health of the colony. There are obvious down sides. One is that my bees will have to work a lot harder to produce all of their own wax, which takes energy and time. Another is that they may not draw perfectly straight honeycomb, which will make it far more challenging for me to move and remove frames as I work the hive. It will also mean work for me to install the starter strips as opposed to using wax-coated plastic foundation, and this work needs to be done soon.

Feeding: Reluctantly, I plan to feed my bees on arrival, at least until they have a few frames completely drawn out with comb. Package bees arrive with no frames, having been fed only sugar water for sustenance during transport. I have a frame feeder - meaning a feeder which takes the place of one or two frames and sits directly in the hive. I plan to feed them with dilute honey from a local producer who follows organic practices. I know that everyone feeds bees sugar syrup, but it just doesn't feel right to me. I am especially concerned not to feed my bees sugar made from genetically modified sugar beets. (Most white sugar in the US is now made from these GMO beets.) I could, of course, buy cane sugar and avoid the GMO issue, but I will feed them dilute honey at least until I run out of the "clean" honey I have in my pantry. Also, I will add a little chamomile tea and a tiny amount of salt to their feeding syrup, as recommended in the Demeter standards(pdf) followed by biodynamic beekeepers in the EU.

Medication/treatment: Unless something drastic changes my mind, I'm going to fall on the non-toxic, low intervention side of things here. If you're not a beekeeper or aspiring beekeeper, you may not realize just how besieged the honeybee is by various parasites, and bacterial or fungal diseases at the moment. It is an exceptionally challenging time for Apis mellifera. Ultimately, my view is that bees need to develop their own resistance to various pests and regain their health through a cleaner environment and good breeding, rather than having weak colonies propped up through chemical intervention by humans. My opinion is that, in relying on chemical controls, beekeepers are simply breeding parasitic mites and bacteria that are resistant to those treatments, just as we are with E. coli in factory meat farming. To that end, I will try to support my bees by not introducing chemical insults into their hives, by following non-toxic treatments and practices that will aid them in ridding themselves of parasites, and by providing as much nectar and pollen forage, uncontaminated with pesticides or herbicides, on my property as I can manage. I plan to use many of the preventative methods described in Natural Beekeeping, by Ross Conrad, a book I highly recommend to aspiring beekeepers.

Races and queens: I have ordered one package of Italian bees and one of Russian bees. The particular strengths and weaknesses of races of honey bee are a little too detailed to go into in a blog post, but suffice it to say I felt like trying more than one race as a newbie beekeeper. I have chosen to have my queens marked but not clipped. Marking means that my queens will have a dot painted on their backs so as to make it easier for me to find them when I open up the hives. I hesitated over this because I assume the paint itself is a chemical insult. But as a brand new beekeeper I also see the value in being able to find the queen quickly so as to disturb the hive for as short a time as possible each time I open it up. In future I don't plan to have queens marked; there are other ways to ascertain that the queen is present and healthy within the colony, even if I don't become very skilled at finding her quickly. Clipping is the practice of cutting off at least a part of the queen's wing. I find this abhorrent, and much akin to declawing a cat. I would never do it. Clipping prevents the queen from flying, so that she cannot leave the colony with a swarm. This is feasible only because queens that arrive with package bees are already mated, and so don't need to fly to mate. Because my queens will be capable of flying, I may lose part of a colony to swarming. I'm reconciled to that possibility. Swarming is the only way nature has of forming new colonies of honey bees. If my colonies do well enough to swarm, so be it. I will consider it a job well accomplished, since only a very healthy and well established colony will produce a swarm. Not that I won't try to catch that same swarm if I can. But given the choice between wanton injury to a queen and the possibility of losing part of my investment, I'll avoid the unnecessary cruelty.

Honey harvesting: none this year, destruction method thereafter. This is another area in which I will follow an unconventional approach by the lights of most beekeepers. I don't plan to have anything more than a taste of this year's honey. Since my bees will need to draw all of their own comb, and since I will not feed them continuously, I would be surprised if they manage to produce more than the bare minimum of honey they'll need to get through the winter here. Even if they did, I would not harvest more than a spoonful. (I can't deny myself entirely, can I?) Next year, if things go well, I will harvest honey from a shallow super or two, using the destruction method. This sounds bad, but it's a low-tech method that doesn't require me to invest in a centrifugal extractor. To see how destruction harvesting works, check out this video from the Backwards Beekeepers.



I believe that destruction harvesting will work well for me as a backyard beekeeper because it's rather a simple process. I can do it in smaller batches than beekeepers working with extractors prefer to, because the extraction process is quite involved. If I had many colonies scattered across many locations, it might make more sense to get all the harvesting done in one fell swoop by means of the extractor.

I just want to wind up this post with a caution. Keep in mind, when reading this, that I have exactly zero experience in keeping bees at the time of this writing. I'm still very much in the learning stage with bees. What I've outlined above is only the best guesses I've come to after doing as much learning as I can in a short time. I strongly recommend that other beginning beekeepers do their own research and come to their own decisions about how they will keep their bees. I will certainly report on how the beekeeping project goes, and I'd be happy to discuss theory or practice with any other beekeeper, at whatever level of experience. But don't take anything I've said here as authoritative, because I most definitely am not an authority on honey bees.

Food Production in Small Spaces: Honey Bees

I sort of threw down the gauntlet to my readers on the cusp of 2010. I'm curious to see how much food we can produce on our little property, and I invited others to find out and document how much food their backyards and back gardens, or balconies, or whatever, could produce. I'm far from an expert on this topic - maximizing food production in limited spaces. I wish I were, but I'm relatively new myself to serious attempts at feeding myself from my own property.

Still, having nudged people to play along at home, I feel somewhat obligated to offer some ideas to help out. I'm not going to do one monster length post on all the possibilities. I figured I would take the ideas one or two at a time and see if we can get conversations going about each of them. One thing that is much on my mind at the moment is the honey bee, because we're planning to start with them ourselves this year. I know this isn't for everyone, but as livestock go, honey bees are really quite special in a number of ways.

A bee hive takes up very, very little space; less space than you would need to allocate to just about any other livestock. Maybe you could keep a few quail in complete confinement in the same total area as a bee hive. But a hive's footprint on the ground is minuscule; you could put one on an apartment balcony. And if you did that, you wouldn't have to worry about mice, skunks, or bears that more rural beekeepers contend with. Bees also don't compete with humans or other livestock for the same feed. While the cost of equipment is undeniably high when starting up with bees, there are no pangs of conscience when it comes to feeding them. As far as stacking benefits (i.e. what else do they do for you other than produce food?) honey bees obviously help with the pollination of fruits and vegetables in the garden. Frequently overlooked is the soil amendment value of bee manure. Each colony can be expected to deposit 100 pounds (45 kg) of nitrogen-rich manure in a 120 foot (40 m) radius around the hive, each year. Over the years, that adds up to a lot of free organic nitrogen, a critical plant nutrient. Free fertilizer I don't have to shovel!! Bees are also very different from most other livestock in that they do not need daily tending. You can take a vacation away from home (provided you time it right) without getting a sitter for your bees. That's simply not true with most animals. Bees take care of themselves pretty well.

Additionally, there's no need to slaughter your bees in order to harvest. Granted, a great many bees will die natural deaths over the course of the year. But most people can handle a dead insect or several, and a strong colony will take care of most of their own mortuary duties. Some beekeepers will kill an underperforming queen, but this is a choice that other beekeepers will argue against. So if you're not up to the task of dispatching an animal, even a sick or injured one, bees may be the livestock for you.

Now as for the harvest, one can't count on any surplus honey at all the first year, as the colony needs to establish itself and build its strength. But after that, a healthy colony can easily produce twenty pounds of extra honey that you can harvest each year. Some backyard beekeepers see 50 or even 100 pounds of honey per healthy, established hive in good years! (Does it strike any of you as interesting that 100 pounds of honey per hive per year is outstanding, while 100 pounds of manure is a given?)

I can't think of ANY other way of producing as much high-quality food in a given area while still maintaining humane conditions for livestock. Obviously, yield will depend on many variables, as it does with all types of food production. Some studies show that city bees are exposed to fewer pesticides than bees in suburban or agricultural areas. So if you're a city dweller dealing with very limited space for food production, you may want to consider beekeeping. At this time of year you have almost no time left to mull the decision if you want to start this year. But a year of reading and learning about beekeeping is an excellent plan before getting started. In many areas you can find low-cost introductory beekeeping classes through Agricultural Extension offices or local beekeeping associations.

I would only caution an aspiring beekeeper not to underestimate the initial investment costs for equipment. The start up costs for bees are very high compared to some other livestock, as the housing and equipment for bees are so particular. Chickens can be housed in any number of ways and the housing can be made from easily found scrap materials. No equipment is needed for harvesting eggs (beyond a basket if you happen to have a large flock). Unfortunately, with so many diseases prevalent among honey bees, used hive boxes are not a good idea because they can be a vector for disease. Unless you know and absolutely trust the practices of the beekeeper selling such equipment, it's usually a better route to buy or build new hive boxes.

I'll be discussing both honey bees and techniques for producing food in limited spaces quite a bit this year. Stay tuned.