Can it bee?

We worked on the cabin last weekend but it wasn’t all work. Emily and I took a stroll around the place a little too. It was so nice out that we couldn’t resist. It was sort of like we were on a bus tour for retired folks (Emily does have a significant birthday coming up this summer), stopping at various places along our tour route.

Bees flying near the beehive

Anyhow, the first place we stopped was over at the bee yard. We are registered with the Department of Agriculture so we are honest to goodness farmers…bee farmers! Most Januaries, the bees remain inside the hives and cluster together (and sort of vibrate) to keep warm. Honeybees do not hibernate. They are cold-blooded of course, so they slow down if they get too cold, but if the hive is healthy, they remain relatively warm inside the hive and do just fine.

Bees flying near the beehive

The best color for a beehive? The color of cheap paint!

So, this January has been super warm as Januaries go so the bees were out when we visited the bee yard! Here is another interesting fact about bees…barring nosema (bee dysentery), bees will not poop inside the hive. So, winter can be a mighty long prospect if there are not nice days here and there. Nice days for a bee basically means above 43-45 degrees so they can leave the hive to…uh…catch up on some reading if you know what I mean.

Movie of bees flying near hive

Click above for a video of the bees flying. If that version won’t play on your machine, try this link

This year, the bees are feeling good! They can poop pretty regularly, they have a chance to break up their cluster now and then to move inside the hive for food, and they give me something to watch! So, my friends, please enjoy my January bees with me for a bit. They are always delightful and especially so in the wintertime!

6 Comments

warren, January 24th 2012 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Bees, Nature

Some perspective on showers

Is it January?  It was beautiful today.  The building fates have been with us indeed.  We finally made it back to the property today and made some more progress on  the deluxe shed…I mean deer stand…I mean the cabin.  The weather man assured us it was supposed to be sunny and 60 so we headed out early…way before it was either sunny or 60.  It still wasn’t January cold but I could have stayed in bed pretty easily.  Anyhow, we drove out in the woods and there were icicles on the trees and everywhere else too.  We had planned to install soffit and fascia on the sides of the cabin because the wind runs right up under the eaves and gives me the heebie geebies…like it could rip the roof right off and send it down over the hill.  I haven’t hugged a ladder so many times as I have this winter as we work in the wind.  It is always windy on top of our ridge but I think winter wind is the wildest.

Installing soffit and fascia on our small cabin

Installing soffit and fascia on our small cabin

Installing soffit and fascia on our small cabin

So we pulled up and saw all sorts of icicles starting to melt and drip right down the fascia board where we had planned to work.  Time to change plans.  I guess it worked out better because dripping water running down my back would be high on the crap-I-don’t-want-to-do list.  We cut a several pieces of soffit at a time but I could only work with two pieces at a time up on the ladder.  So, every two pieces I had to climb up and down the ladder.  That makes for a slow and tiring day.

Installing soffit and fascia on our small cabin Installing soffit and fascia on our small cabin

Emily and I decided to take a short walk in the woods since we were just so doggone efficient at getting work done.  It sounded like it was raining with all of the ice melting off of the trees.  It was so cool.  The only sounds we could hear were from the forest.  I love being out there because it always seems to amaze me.  At least as many water drops ran down my back as would have if we had worked on the soffit and fascia on the side of the house.  I didn’t mind the water in the woods though.  Perspective is sort of funny, isn’t it?

 

 

See all of the progress on the cabin

5 Comments

warren, January 23rd 2012 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Cabin, Land, Nature

On the way to the outhouse

So, we are building our cabin, right?  The land is completely raw so there are absolutely no amenities, if you catch my drift.  So, we work hard about every weekend from morning until dark.  We drink fluids and nature does with fluids what nature is supposed to do with fluids.  Yeah, we have to pee sometimes when we go out to the property.

Last week and this week are deer hunting season in WV.  I promise this is related.  So, let’s pretend that one of the females who may or may not be my wife, drank some fluids during deer season on a piece of raw land out in the woods in WV.  As nature takes its course, such a person may feel a little fearful of being mistaken for a deer….a white tailed deer in that exposed condition, while dealing with…uh…natural things.   The obvious solution to such a dilemma is to announce one’s presence in the woods like so: “I am not a deer.  I am not a deer.  I am not a deer”.  So far, there has been no mistake and we have had done very well with this method.

Mushrooms on a log Mushrooms on a log

Now let’s say that a guy who may or may not be me also had fluids while working on a piece of raw land out in the country in WV.  Now for a guy, the world is pretty much a fair target.  Oh yes, it is all about the challenge of a good target.  Anyhow, with the world as a man’s urinal, the concern over being confused as a deer is less pressing.  Instead, a man is able to take in the sights in Nature’s lavatory.

Mushrooms on a log Mushrooms on a log

It seems very late for mushrooms, but the whole point of this story is to lead up to how a guy who may or may not be me, found a really cool log that had the most exquisite collection of mushrooms growing on it.  I like to touch mushrooms.  Is that weird?  These mushrooms were silky and really fleshy and difficult to stop touching.  That’s weird I know, but I think it is fascinating that there are things in the woods that keep the place cleaned up but still look so delicate and soft.  I mean, they were chewing up a log for goodness sakes!  I have been making far too much contact with wood as I build this cabin and my head is suffering greatly from how hard wood is.  These beautiful mushrooms eat the same wood for breakfast!

Even in the most basic of times in the woods, I am continually amazed at the power and beauty that is around me all of the time.  I like to pay attention to these things, even on the way to the outhouse.

7 Comments

warren, November 30th 2011 | Tags:
Posted in Cabin, Land, Nature, Thoughts, WV

Solved: The Case of the mystery prints

Awhile back, I mentioned that we discovered some large hoof prints in our field and we couldn’t figure out for sure what they were.  People have animals in our area but all of them are well fenced.  I had suspicions that we had a cow on the loose but there was no evidence beyond the prints.  If you know much about cows, you know that they leave evidence.

The mystery footprint

We went up to the property both Saturday and Sunday this weekend.  On Saturday, we found the evidence.  Only one marker turned up so I figured we had a single wild cow on the loose that was roaming the wilderness looking for greener grass to eat, living the life of a free bovine.

Ahem...ladies...

On Sunday morning, we pulled up and noticed a small herd of cows.  So much for the single renegade cow.  It was a herd that was on the loose!  I figure one got loose a few weeks ago and tasted the sweet grass over our way and finally, on Sunday, convinced all of her girlfriends to bust out and enjoy a wild day away from the field…on another field.  Anyhow, the group of them left many markers so I am certain that this was the first day they had all come.

The girls...

Tails in the air means big fun is about to erupt!

We drove up slowly thinking that the girls would spook but they were calm standing under our cabin-to-be.  Isaac wasn’t too interested in petting them but he was interested in figuring out how to claim them for his own.  He said, “why don’t we just build a fence around them?  Possession means everything, right?”  I suppose we could have rustled some cattle but I don’t think it would have lasted long.  Their owner came riding by on a 4-wheeler and tried to herd them home.  Having no luck, she ran back home for a bucket of feed and the ladies traded their freedom for the elusive pail-of-promises.

Until next time...

I am sure they will always remember fondly that day they all made a break for it and lived the life of care-free cows, not a care in the world, the wind on their udders and sun on their hairy backs.  Ah, yes, those were the days!

8 Comments

warren, October 24th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Cabin, Land, Nature, WV

We were framed

We only got a chance to work on the cabin on Windday…I mean Sunday.  We framed a lot of the walls when my family was here last weekend so we started putting them in place this weekend.  Our plan was to attach the OSB sheeting and then set up the walls already covered.  We sized the walls so we could lift them with OSB already in place.  The wind, however, said differently.  We started to set up the first wall and nearly flew off the back of the platform.  I don’t know what the wind-speed was officially, but it was ridiculous-miles-per-hour by my reading.

So, Plan B…We decided to set up the walls sans OSB just so we can say we made progress.  There is a fair chance we will regret that later when we have to go back and hang the OSB, but doggone it, we have walls up!  Emily’s granddad came up to help us.  He’s been around the sun 86 times but you would never know it.  He was a huge help in getting these walls in place and we couldn’t have done it without him!

Poppaw...86 years old and we couldn't have gotten the walls up without him!

You may notice that these walls look a little different than most walls.  Good eye!  We are roughly following the Advanced Framing Technique.  What that means for us is that we are building with 2×6 boards rather than 2x4s.  We are also building on 24 inch centers (the space between boards) rather than the more typical 16 inch centers.  You can read the details on the link, but we are excited about the potential savings in materials costs and the potential for improved energy efficiency.  That and we like the weird looks people give us.  It sort of flies in the face of traditional house framing which makes it all the more appealing.

 

Building a wall…and the view out the front door!

 

Abigail surveying the scene…that’s as far as we got!

So, anyhow, we got the hardest walls set and plan to work more this weekend on getting the remaining walls up.  We will need to get the OSB started too.  I figure we will set up some elaborate pulley system to get the wood in place so we can start on the roof.  If we get wind again this weekend, I am going sailing.  Let’s see, I will need to get that old washtub and some sheets…what else do I need to build a sailboat?

 

See all of the progress on the cabin

4 Comments

warren, October 20th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Cabin, Family, Land, Nature, WV

Solar Powered Electric Fence

Part of moving the bees to our place in the country is so they can be out of town and away from people.  Of course, getting away from people means getting them closer to good old mother nature herself.  For anyone who has read Winnie the Pooh, you know that bears like honey when they get a rumbly in their tummies.

Bears don't read very well...

Not much will really stop a hungry bear, but the official recommendation is to enclose all “country bees” in an electric fence.  When a bear attacks a hive, the bees always come out in great number to ward off the attack.  Bear fur is typically too thick to present a problem.  The only sensitive place on a bear is apparently their nose/mouth area.  While my electric fence is a little more “juiced” than a bee sting, most folks agree that a bear has to learn about the fence with their mouth or nose.  I’ll talk more about that another time, but it makes sense that an electric fence properly set up should deter all the Poohs out there.

So, you may be wondering how solar power can deliver enough juice to make a bear even notice it was there.  It turns out that the people who make electric fence controllers make a version that runs on DC (i.e. deep cycle batteries, not house current which is AC).  The controller I bought is designed to power up to 25 miles of fence.  All told, I have maybe 1000 feet of wire strung on a few poles, so the charger will deliver a good shot when it fires.  I won’t bore you with the calculations about the capacity of the battery but it is roughly the size of a car battery just for perspective (a car’s starter battery would not work here though…this application needs a long continuous  draw on the battery rather than the quick hit when you start a car)

The battery, fence controller, and charge controller

The instructions show that the fence will run for 2 weeks on a fully charged battery of the proper specs but I do not want to have to worry about whether the battery is still charged if I don’t make it out there for a few weeks.  Instead, I bought a solar panel and a charge controller to keep the battery full.

See? It's pointed south

I pointed my solar panel south and angled it to the optimal angle to get direct sun.  Output wires from the panel go into the charge controller which regulates the power going into the battery.  The charge controller makes sure the power is the proper voltage and that the battery does not get over or under charged. The charge controller also has a “load” connection so I connected the fence controller to that connection and we’re off and running!  All of the charging/controlling/shocky-shocky stuff is inside a beehive surrounded by my other beehives as a sort of a theft deterrent.

Oh, by the way, without thinking I tried to use a regular household switch at the gate to turn the power on and off.  Of course, the fence controller pushes somewhere around 10,000 volts which didn’t even slow down for the switch rated for household current of 110 volts.  If you want a switch, make sure you get one rated properly…same with any wire you may need to use (I only used fencing wire which handles the charge nicely)

So, I hope some of that makes sense.  So far it is alive and well.  Let me know if you want more details…

7 Comments

warren, September 12th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Awesome, Bees, Land, Nature, Technology

Change of address

Etched in my back…er mind…is a picture of a bad interaction with the bees last year.  It was shortly after that episode that I decided that if I was to continue to have bees, they had to be away from people.  We bought property out in the country early this Spring and one of its main purposes was to be a bee yard.  After this weekend of labor, I am happy to report that the majority of the bees have been relocated to the new bee yard and seem to be doing quite well.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  As you might have guessed, it was anything but.  Of course, any test of one’s mettle always makes for a good story if nothing else.  To ease the move, I decided we would mostly enclose the bees with screen and other stuff the night before.  To enclose the bees the morning of the move would only stir them up and make the process miserable.  Each hive got the screen treatment except for a small access ares for the bees to come and go.  The plan was to screen that final access point, throw the bees in a truck and go.

My father-in-law and I started before sunrise to carry the bees from his back hillside to the truck.  So, we grabbed ahold of 150 or so pounds of bees+hive+honey and prepared to stumble down the hill, guided solely by the sweet glow of the…yeah, it was dark.  We tried to carry a heavy bunch of bees down a hillside in the dark.  FAIL.  Oh don’t get me wrong, gravity works and we got the bees down the hill and into the truck but it wasn’t fun.  Luckily, the first one took us so long that it was daylight before we got to the next ones and they all went pretty smoothly.

 

We finished the electric fence of doom a week or so ago so hopefully any bears, raccoons, or bee-lovin’ dinosaurs will find that my bees are not on the menu.  I still have 4 more hives to move but it was such a relief to get the first batch moved to their new address in the country!

8 Comments

warren, September 7th 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Bees, Land, Nature, WV

Solar wax melter

In a comment yesterday, Ed mentioned reclaiming wax after the harvest is done.  For lots of people, honey is what they think of when they think of beekeeping.  There are tons of other things that beekeepers can harvest or use from the beehive though.  Wax is a big item on that list.  In one of yesterday’s pictures, you can see that wax capping that covers mature honey in the honeycomb.  When I extract the honey, I have to remove those cappings with a knife to allow the honey to be removed from the comb.  Some folks might be tempted to throw all of that wax away, but those wax cappings add up quickly.

When we process honey, we uncap the honeycomb on the frames, place it in the extractor, run the extracted honey through a kitchen strainer to remove cappings and pour it into a bottle.  That is the extent of our processing.  Besides making a more pleasant looking honey, we run it through the strainer to harvest the wax cappings in particular.  So, I collect the wax cappings from when I use the knife to uncap the comb as well as the little bits of cappings that come out in extraction and let them drain (as both are covered in/full of honey still).  The bees are given access afterwards and they complete the bulk of the clean-up for me.

After the bees have their time, the cappings get thrown into my solar wax melter.  It’s basically a black wooden box with a baking pan and a bread pan inside, covered by a sheet of plexiglas.  The box rests at an incline so it faces the sun properly.  The baking pan has 3-4 small holes drilled in one edge at the bottom of the incline, and the bread pan sits under those holes.  As the sun passes through the plexiglas,  it heats everything inside like crazy, just like any greenhouse would.

The honey begins to melt and runs down through the small holes into the bread pan.  Any bee parts or other detritus are too big to flow through the holes.  Honey sometimes flows with the wax but the melted wax floats on the honey very nicely.  After everything cools, the wax hardens and comes out very clean.  I pull the wax out, feed any honey to the bees and marvel at how awesome the wax looks.  And let me tell you, the smell is incredible!

So, once the honey is cleaned (and yes, truthfully, it sometimes takes a few runs), it can be used for anything where wax is needed.  Usually, people make candles but folks also use it in soap, for quilting and woodworking (as a lubricant) and for handlebar moustaches!  Honey is a major crop from the bees, but wax is also significant and just plain cool.  And what better wax to process honey than with the help of the same sun that allowed the bees to make it in the first place!

 

6 Comments

warren, August 25th 2011 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Bees, Nature

Thank you berry much

We have been busy as cats in a sandbox and it seems that we haven’t had time to do anything, much less anything interesting.  Every now and then, though, we get a chance to take a few minutes to do something simple.  Since it’s July (holy cow!  It’s July?!), something simple means berry picking for us.

 

We have an excellent raspberry patch at the house so I can stumble out in my pjs and grab a handful of berries.  Our patch makes many more than a handful though so we pick and freeze berries every day.  Our raspberry patch is pretty interesting.  Of course there are berries, but the new feral kittens hide out in there too (anyone want a kitten?  Energetic.  Free to a good home).   I have seen all manner of bugs and spiders also.  Honestly, our raspberry patch is a biology lesson (in a good way) waiting to happen!  I love picking berries just to see what will pop out next!

Black raspberries...not the same as blackberries

By the way, did you know you can spread berries out in a single layer on a plate, freeze them, and then put them in freezer bags.  The individual berries remain intact so you don’t end up with a berry blob.

Blackberries!

Anyhow, raspberries are easy for us.  It’s the blackberries that are painful.  I think they have to be that way for folks to appreciate their awesomeness and I am willing to let Emily make the sacrifice.  We all pick them actually.  By “we”, I mean Emily and I pick them.  The kids always seem to wander off into the woods at our secret blackberry location to “look for more berries”.  Uh huh.

Sweet reward! Blackberry pie!

So, blackberries are especially good right now and I love blackberry pies more than any other pie (except maybe Emily’s strawberry pies).  I have an excellent wife who not only helps pick the berries, but also makes me pies!  Thanks you berry much!  You are my favorite wife, Emily!

6 Comments

warren, July 13th 2011 | Tags: ,
Posted in Food, Nature

Coopers Rock

A few weekends ago, we went on a little getaway vacation to Coopers Rock State Park in Bruceton Mills, WV.  I was mainly excited for the cabin in which we were staying and the hot tub it advertised on the back deck.  Never did I imagine how cool the park would be.  More about that later.

So, we got to the cabin after navigating the Grand Canyon road back to the place.  The cabin itself was nice and did in fact have a hot tub.  The kids jumped right in as Emily and I unpacked and prepared for supper.  I am not sure why, but the power went out and we were without water or AC.  When you are not prepared, both are pretty important.  Anyhow, several hours later, it came back on and all was well…even the well.  We could shower and do dishes, etc.

On Saturday morning, we gorged on cheap powdered sugar donuts and Doritos then headed to Coopers Rock (it seems like there should be an apostrophe in there but there isn’t).  Little did we know, but there was a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the park.  The place was teeming with things to do as all sorts of groups offered nature talks, projects,  and hikes.

The kids built cool birdhouses and painted rocks.  We played on the play ground (where I tried my best to dislocate my shoulder).  We saw rescued birds of prey from the West Virginia Raptor Rescue Center and even got to touch a red tailed hawk who was very friendly.  It turns out, she was essentially raised in captivity so was not bothered by people.  The other rescued hawk and owl were not so friendly.  Still, they were awesome!

I think the best part of the park though, was walking the trails under the rocks.  We explored some and saw great rock formations.  The kids and I walked into a cave/tunnel and went all “Dora the Explorer”.  Abigail fell in the dirt and got muddy.  It was perfect and cool and a great time to be together as a family.

If you ever pass through the northern part of WV, stop in at Coopers Rock.  Its views are breathtaking and there is all sorts of fun to be had there.  It turns out that the hot tub was very popular, but it paled in comparison (for me at least) to the beauty of our state, just as it is!

7 Comments

warren, June 22nd 2011 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature, WV
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