We’re in the honey!

After the first unsuccessful attempt at harvesting honey this year, we decided to give it another go last weekend.  I had removed about half of the honey from the hives the weekend prior (before things went south).  I suited up again this Saturday to finish removing the honey on the remaining hives…not one single sting while I was removing the rest.  Not one!  That’s the way it is supposed to work!  I am not sure I would recommend it, but if one has normal freakin’ bees and works slowly and deliberately, one could almost work the bees buck naked.

Anyhow, I pulled the rest of the honey and we extracted on Sunday (with the help of my family!)  I nearly fainted as Isaac and Abigail both actually helped with the process.  Typically they swoop in and swipe bits of honey, then retreat to unknown locations planning their next attack.  But this weekend, they actually stuck it out for an hour or so!

Some years we get different colors of honey.  Different nectar sources produce different colors of honey.  This year, all of the honey was the same color.  That doesn’t mean that all of the honey came from a single type of flower…just that all the types of flowers they worked happened to make the same color of honey.

We have converted our honey frames over to plastic Honey SuperCell frames which I cut to size to fit in the shorter honey boxes.  There are many advantages to these type of honey frames but one thing that is both good and bad is that the bees don’t draw out the honeycomb too thick.  Really, they don’t draw it out beyond the depth of the plastic that is already drawn.  That’s good in that I don’t destroy any honey getting the frames out, but bad in that it means it’s harder to cut the cappings off.  Rather than using a knife to remove the top caps of the honey comb, we had to try something new this year – a capping scratcher.  That’s basically a fork with long thin tines that we drag over the sealed honey cells to break open the honeycomb so it can be extracted.   (All that may be confusing…basically, I can’t use a knife any more to open the honey cells…now I need to use a fork)

We spent about 4 hours on Sunday and extracted about 193 pounds of honey this year.  I am pretty satisfied with that especially considering I destroyed 25-40 pounds of honey in one of the hives I had to kill.  It’s exhausting work but we really enjoy the family time too (right family?  right?)  Like so much at this time of year (i.e. the garden), I love the build-up and the harvest but even more-so, I love its completion!

10 Comments

warren, September 1st 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Bees, Family, Nature

Stuff…you know…things…

I was looking over a bunch of pictures of stuff we’ve done/seen/enjoyed lately and I thought it might be fun to show the stuff…you know…the things…

Of course, the other day, I posted our score of grapes which we were planning to turn into jelly…real grape jelly.  We got that done.  Usually Emily and I work pretty hard together on that sort of stuff but for some reason, she did all the grape jelly this time.  She is a jelly-making fool!  I am just a plain old fool.  I was busy watching The Colony, a new show on the Discovery channel (cable is evil but that is a heck of a show…if you are into post-apocalyptic stuff)  while she did all the work.  Yeah…still paying for that.

Let’s see, we have seen lots of butterflies and moths around the house lately.  I don’t know why, but whenever I see turtles or butterflies, I like to make sure they are ok.  I stop and help turtles across the road and I always offer a frown when a butterfly gets tangled up with the car (yeah, I know…it’s not much but what can I say?)  Anyhow, we have had a good crop of butterflies around…and dang they are cool!  I am not sure I had ever seen a luna moth before but it was really cool…so beautiful!

Yeah, I guess snails fall into the same category as turtles too…snails are super cool to watch.  I love to see their antennae disappear into their bodies and I am always amazed at how they can stretch.  They’re a little chewy primitive I guess…like turtles.  I am just amazed at all the stuff that just seems to be everywhere if I look!

9 Comments

warren, August 27th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Nature, Thoughts

Purple fingers

It seems like this time of year finds our fingers all sorts of different colors. It really just depends on what we’re picking at the time. Last night was no different really. A co-worker of Emily’s has a bunch of grapes growing at her house. She has picked a ton and canned/preserved them every way she knows how. That’s where we come in. The grapes are still plentiful so she gave us a bunch of them…and there are more to pick so we are hoping to be able to go and harvest a bunch more. It’s hard to beat real concord grapes I think!

this is just a portion!

We cleaned them last night and are making grape jelly with the ones we have now. Do you remember when you were a kid and even the store bought grape jelly had flavor? I have tried some recently and it seems like the grape jelly is completely without flavor. I guess it’s like everything – homemade is really hard to beat. But gee whiz, the store stuff isn’t even fit for slug bait!

Anyhow, does anyone else gather grapes? What do you do with them? I remember my Mom and Grandma canning grape juice but they always left whole grapes in the jars. It freaked me out because I could have sworn they canned eyeballs!  Oh, and don’t get me started on when they canned whole tomatoes…eeek!  Anyone make raisins or juice or wine? I’ve nibbled on wild grapes but does anyone do anything more specific with them?  I’d love to know what options I may have!

8 Comments

warren, August 25th 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Canning, Food, Nature, WV

Stingy stingy

This weekend was supposed to be the weekend I harvested honey from my hives.  I started as I always do by donning my suit listening to Johnny Cash. So I open each hive and check how things look through the small hole in the inner cover.  If all is well, I usually remove each frame, one at a time,  and shake the bees from it before I walk it over to Emily who waits inside the door to receive the frames.  I finished the hives at my house and headed to the next location.  It seemed pretty normal.  We started the same way and got one hive done.  I opened the second hive and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Bees are never thrilled with honey harvest day, but it has always been manageable…until this weekend.  I opened the outer lid on the second hive and it erupted with bees.  I thought it was odd but decided to press onward.  I got a number of honey frames out before the bees really came out.  Most times when I get in a hive, I only smell honey and the normal smell of happy little bees.  There are two main scents that bees release when things are about to go badly for the beekeeper.  The first warning one gets is a strong banana smell.  I know it sounds weird but if you smell bananas when you get in a hive, the bees are upset.  Sometimes you can continue, sometimes it’s best not to try.  The second smell is more ominous.  I can only describe it as the smell of a junior high locker room – it’s a strong b.o. smell.  When one smells that in a beehive, it is time to get away and fast.  I never did smell the banana smell but I definitely got the locker room smell but by then, it was too late.

Anyhow, once the attack started, I knew I wasn’t going to get any more honey off so that wasn’t an issue.  In all seriousness, staying conscious was more my goal.  At various points, I couldn’t hear anything but buzzing.  I also couldn’t see out of my veil as it was black with bees.  I started smashing bees as best I could so I could see to get a hose.  My father-in-law (who had a suit on thankfully) was able to get a garden hose to where I could pick it up.  I sprayed water in the air such that it felt like rain.  The bees thinned some which helped.  I continued to spray which settled things down to a manageable level.  Emily mixed up a few 5-gallon buckets of soapy water for me to pour into the hives.  You see, soapy water is the safest way to kill bees and it works fast.  I dumped 15-20 gallons of soapy water over each of the two bad hives to kill them.

Once both hives were essentially dead (some bees were still in the field…I poured more soapy water on them after dark to ensure no bees were left), I headed into the house to see the damage.  This picture of my back was the worst but my shoulders and front weren’t much better.  I wish I had taken a picture of my suit.  It had thousands of stingers in it as well.  Emily started to count the stings on my back but stopped counting at 200.  I fully expected to need my epi-pen (which I had thankfully) or at least head to the hospital but my reaction never got much worse than what is in the picture.  I took 2 benadryl and slept the rest of the day Saturday and most of the day Sunday.

I know I am pretty lucky that this didn’t end with a sad story.  It’s a good warning to anyone working with bees (or anyone who happens upon bees).  Honey bees are typically defensive only when provoked and are somewhat predictable…but not always.  I have never seen a hive react like this one did. When bees are unpredictable, they can be dangerous or even deadly.  These hives are no longer a threat.  I just thank my lucky stars that nobody was hurt…

Ok, so all this stinging stuff made me think this stuff…

Well, Sting of course…singing his coolest song ever!

And Ali – I wish I had been able to dance a little more and sting a little less…

19 Comments

warren, August 23rd 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Bees, Nature

What is this?

We have a compost pile in our back yard.  We throw all sorts of stuff in there, but I always know what it is when it goes in.  This year we had volunteer tomatoes, catnip and a mystery squash come up.  I have absolutely no idea what kind of squash this is but I know we have never thrown anything like that in the pile.  We have thrown pumpkin and zucchini and cushaw and yellow squash parts into the pile but none of those particularly look like this fruit.

For a bit, I considered the possibility that someone was playing a compost pile prank…but who on Earth would do that?  Too bad I don’t have any composting friends though…could be interesting.

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand…does anyone have any idea what this is?  Maybe a mutation of some hybrid pumpkin or something?  Ginny chomped on one, but quickly left it alone (and you know, my dumb dog eats poop so that ‘s saying something!)

We have found other weird stuff in the course of gardening…

9 Comments

warren, August 13th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Food, Garden, Nature

Wax harvesting

Honeybees are amazing…first of all, there are 60,000 or so females living together under one roof.  That could be the end of the story really…but I’ll go on.  Every bit of every day is about being busy.  They warm the hive or cool the hive.  They gather nectar or raise newly hatched bees.  Sometimes they die protecting the hives from…well…me.  I think one of the most interesting things they do, however, is make wax.

(click each of the pics – you will see more detail in the expanded view)

Bees mainly produce wax during the early bit of their lives…in particular, from days 10-16.  They eat honey which is necessary for the wax glands to produce.  It takes 6-10 pounds of honey to make one pound of wax.  Small flakes of wax protrude from the underside of the bee’s abdomen when the glands are in production.  The bees pull the flakes and chew them so they can be molded into whatever shape they need.

The cool part is that bees can also recycle wax!  Bees are the ultimate green community!  I had some extra honeycomb that I pulled from a hive that I had been working on earlier.  I always leave the bits of wax out for a period after I remove it so the bees can have a go at it.  This most recent batch has been particularly tasty I guess because bees have been all over it for 2 weeks snatching bits of old wax.  They bite chunks of the wax off of the old honey comb and chew it until it can be shoved into their pollen baskets to be carried back to the hive.

I have often seen bees work with wax I leave out for them, but I have never seen them work so long and hard on a single “pull” of wax.  It really is sort of inspiring how they use what they have and make do.  I think there is a lesson there for everyone…

8 Comments

warren, July 19th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Bees, Nature

To the river gods

Last weekend we went canoeing with the kids and Emily’s aunt and uncle.  The Little Coal river is near where we all live so it is convenient and really, a pretty great river for canoeing.  Like most of the East, we have been hot and dry for quite awhile so I had pretty low expectations about the quality of the water on the trip.  I grew up in NW PA near the beginning of the Allegheny river.  It is pretty shallow and slow there so I have plenty of experience in carrying a canoe through shallow water.  I didn’t really want to carry a canoe full of my offspring over rocks and downed trees.

We threw our canoes in (actually, the kayak started down the river without us) and headed out.  The water was perfect!  My shallow-water-eyes were just flat out wrong.  There were spots that weren’t deep but in every case, there was a ton of room to navigate the river anywhere we wanted!  The last time we went on this river, the water was raging.  We absolutely could not  get out of the boats (and truth be told, probably shouldn’t have even been in the boats) and our trip down the river was speedy.  This time, we got to really enjoy the river!

There were a few “rapids” that we got to ride.  I wasn’t sure whether the kids would enjoy it but they laughed and Isaac yelled, “Caribou!” at the top of his lungs (yeah, it’s a 4th/5th grade boy thing I think).  We stopped at the end of several of the rapids and walked back up to ride down in the rapids sans boat.  Holy mackerel that was fun!  I had to hold on to the kids the first few times because they were wary, but in no time, they were itching to go on their own…we just had to catch them at the bottom!

At one point, we saw a few cassette tapes in the water.  I suspect that someones house or camp was flooded at some point as no one would just dump old Motley Crue cassettes.  Anyhow, the kids saw them and asked what they were…that’s right, my kids had no idea what a cassette tape was or why people would use them instead of cds or dvds.  That was a bit shocking to me but we had a great conversation about how life was when I was a kid (and that wasn’t super long ago…I can’t imagine if they had the conversation with my 96 year old Grandpa!)  I enjoyed telling them about sleeping in the back of the station wagon on trips and how our legs would burn and stick to the plastic seats…how we didn’t have A/C in the house  or cars and no cell phones or video games.  Abigail asked me, “How did you make it through?”  HA!  And our lives were still pretty easy compared to people before us!

Anyhow, it didn’t take long for Diva…I mean Abigail…to get tired.  She propped back in the kayak and toured the rest of the river “princess style”.  We ate lunch on the river and laughed and had a great time not worrying about a thing.  Our only donation to the river gods was one pair of old sunglasses.  They were easily satisfied with our sacrifice.  I think the river was just what we needed…and I can’t wait to go again!

Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 Video 4

You may need to download Quicktime viewer if these videos don’t work for you…

13 Comments

warren, July 9th 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Adventure, Family, Fun, Nature, Thoughts, WV

It’s purple…and huge!

So…ahem…the blackberries are in full glory right now and we found a newish place to pick and this year’s berries are as big as I have ever seen (including those pretend ones you can get at the grocery store).  We have picked several “messes” of berries and I have enjoyed 2 blackberry pies that my delightful wife has prepared.  She made some good ones 2 years ago, but this year, the berries are purple and huge and AWESOME!

Of course, we live in West-by-God-Virginia where mountain goat commandos go to train.  Our new location is significantly more hilly than previous years so picking in our new secret spot has been interesting and a little prickly.  I have to wear soccer cleats so I don’t slide down the hill through the briers.  I really wish I was more successful at that.  Anyhow, because of the danger (yes, the hills are steep enough that it is dangerous), the kids are not picking this year.  They mostly run around and look for new spots for me to scale.  I think they have grown up a good bunch though.  They still fight like mountain goat commandos and mountain lions, but not while we are working on berries…and that’s worth a big hee-haw from me!

so much for focus...

Aside from the hills being interesting, our new spot is farther into the woods and we have been assaulted by a few ticks this year.  Ticks suck.  I think I hate ticks and roaches more than about anything…not sure why because bugs in general don’t offend me, but I am personally offended when I see either of my nemeses.  Alas, I shall push on in pursuit of the berry.  The blackberry pie calls to me…I must heed its call!

Time to go picking...

10 Comments

warren, July 7th 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Food, Nature, WV

2010 – the year of the bee

I know the Chinese have long been in charge of managing the years and their animal counterparts.  This year for instance, the Chinese calendar claims it is the year of the tiger.  I see it slightly different here in West-by-God-Virginia though.  This has been the year of the honeybee!

These bees are headed inside the house

On Tuesday evening of this week, I got a call from a couple in South Hills who had a swarm of bees on their window.  I checked it out and it seemed that the swarm had decided to take up residence inside the soffit of their house.  That swarm is still in progress.  We’re waiting to see if they are truly headed in or if they were just running from me as I tried to catch them.

Last night I got home a little before 8.  There was a message about another swarm in Dunbar (a nearby town).   My father-in-law came with me as we loaded up the van and headed out.  The homeowner and her daughter and grandson noticed the swarm in a tree that they had planted for Mother’s day this year.  The usual way to get a swarm off of a branch is to cut the branch and lower it gently into a hive.  Of course, this tree was small and important to them so we went with Plan B (cue the scary music and crazy eyes).  I always carry a cardboard box so I had my father-in-law (who was fully suited up) hold the box while I gave the tree a good shake.  Most of the bees were jolted into the box which we then dumped into the nearby hive.

Home-owner's Grandson L.

The swarm itself was really easy to catch so that part was done pretty quickly.  My favorite part of swarm catching is not really getting the actual bees into the hive though.  The home-owner’s grandson had a lot of questions and was very curious about bees and beeswax and whether they would hurt him, and how they made honey, etc.  Answering questions and talking to people who are curious about bees is my favorite part of catching swarms…and Grandson L.  really made my day.  I chatted with him for 15 (?) minutes after the bees were captured.

All-in-all, it has been a great bee week and a good bee summer…this is definitely the year of the bee!

More swarms…

7 Comments

warren, July 2nd 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Bees, Nature

Bullseye!

The kids first started archery about a year ago.  Since then, Isaac has participated in “Archery in the Schools” and the state tournament.  Abigail’s school doesn’t have that program yet but she loves to shoot when she can.  Back when we started this deal, I thought it would be a good family-together thing to do.  We didn’t really have the equipment or a range to make all that happen (I figure the city frowns on shooting a compound bow in the back yard).

Fast forward a bit…Isaac and Abigail both received bows as presents from their grandparents.  Last weekend Emily and the kids surprised me with an early father’s day present…my own bow!  And it’s camo!  The day they gave it to me, I decided we needed to make the “family shooting thing” happen (I wonder what sort of weird google searches will bring people to this page now!)

On Sunday we headed to Kanawha State Forest with Emily’s parents to be devoured by the mosquitoes try our luck at target shooting.  We started off a bit rough (and that was before we even started shooting), but once we got into the groove, we had a great time!  Isaac was able to do some “shooting while moving” exercises during which he shot a good bullseye from 15-20 yards.  Abigail did great also.  She is finally strong enough to draw the bow such that every single arrow she shot stuck!

Granddad and I had fun…that’s all I’ll say about that.  We didn’t have to comb the hillside which was covered in poison ivy and some sort of ridiculous scratchy plant which would make a nun cuss, too many times searching for arrows.  We did donate one arrow to the archery gods but we gained someone else’s previous sacrifice so it was a wash, arrow-wise!

Anyhow, it was a great time and we have a date to go back out this weekend to shoot some more!  I think we may have hit the nail on the head for a good family hobby!

7 Comments

warren, June 10th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Adventure, Family, Nature, WV
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