Ready for the girls!

Paula and I set up the bee yard last night for three new packages of bees arriving Monday. We faced pouring rain and some wind. You can see how dry the land is, nothing blooming yet. This is the earliest we have ever packaged bees before by about two full weeks. Ordinarily I would be worried but we have frames with honey to put right in the brood nest and all of our frames are completely combed out. The girls will have plenty to work with for the first two weeks without ever leaving if this god awful weather continues. Tonight I am going to mix us some syrup, just for good measure but the bees will surely take the honey before they need to resort to the syrup. I pulled some pollen patties out of the freezer and we have everything else set to go for our Monday arrivals.

We did have one disappointment during our bee year visit last night. Our favorite Indian haunt is closed. We have a tradition of having a few Indian dinners after our bee yard visits throughout the summer. Lucky for us that in Northfield there is another Indian spot so we can just relocate.

Keep your fingers crossed for some nice spring weather on Monday. I know that is asking a lot these days but we sure could use a 50 degree day without wind and a little sunshine. Just for an hour, please!

Ready, Set Go

Yesterday was the first day of spring and it was minus 12 degrees when I woke up. I am fed up with this winter, fed up I tell you. March has been colder than January and we keeping getting more snow. Ordinarily I might not care so much but our bees are getting delivered three weeks earlier than usual this year. A deliberate decision no less.

You see every single year we have missed the apricot tree blooms and the apple blossoms. Between that and having so much comb we decided to get a serious jump start and hopefully hit the fruit trees blooming. Our land owner is so very generous, the least we can do is maximize the pollinating services! However I am a little worried about this cold spell we can't seem to shake. The bees really really really like it above 40. At least they will be going into hives with completely combed out frames with lots of pollen and even some honey so they don't have to forage right away if it is too cold.

We have been working our butts off getting everything in order. The back room in our condo has been a make shift work room for over a month now. Every single box has been scrapped, repaired and painted. Today we assembled all four hives, stacking the hive stands, screened bottom boards, brood boxes, inner covers and telescoping covers. This might seem like an easy job but trust me, it isn't. Our equipment is a mix match of different sizes and configurations. It took about three hours to get it all right, hall some excess equipment down to the basement and organize our bee yard tool boxes.

Can I just say I love to organize! So very satisfying in the end. I just love looking at those four newly painted and neatly staked hives, just waiting!

Sometime over the first weekend of April we will organize the frames for the first boxes, another daunting task. We will transport all the equipment to the bee yard,  get it all set up and in place, ready for the bees. If all works out as planned the post office will call bright and early on Monday April 8th, long before they actually open and beg us to come pick up three packages of bees, each containing 3 pounds of bees. Don't ask me how they weigh 3 pounds of bees, I have no idea. Our forth package won't come until the end of April. It will be interesting to track the growth and production of the late arrival.

In the mean time we are ready for another season, set to go!

Cleaning The Bee Yard

I knew we had a mess on our hands especially when another foot of snow fell last week burying our equipment deeper in the snow. When we went down to the bee yard two weeks ago to see how the girls were doing it was too much to face. Two hives standing with three boxes each,  three or more hive stands and a pile of equipment thrown behind the hives which was now frozen solid in place. None of it would budge. We agreed, we needed to come back another time with a shovel and more energy.

I was sort of dreading the task but it would give Paula and I time in the car to visit, catch up and hatch a plan for managing the equipment, especially the frames. I get completely overwhelmed just thinking about the frames.

We trudged through a foot of snow from the car to the bee yard, probably a good long city block, sinking into the snow. Each hive needed to be dismantled and all of it carried back to the car.

You can see the piles of dead bees, so very sad. We got as many of them out of the equipment as possible and left them to the land. If either of us were gardeners we would have taken them home for fertilizer.  It took a fair amount of work on Paula's part to shovel and pry the equipment out of the frozen ground but she did it, all of it. A few pieces of equipment are broken but they can be repaired.Once we got to the bottom of each box we discovered our fury little friends had returned and had taken up house,  nesting under the bottom board of each hive. Several mice darted out of the each nest, clearly disrupted by our work. Unfortunately we discovered a very recent casualty, most likely our doing.

Poor little guy, at least his nest mates made it out safely. We carried all of the boxes, full of frames with comb, honey and dead bees up to Paula's vehicle and loaded everything up. I must admit, 6 months ago this would have been an enormous physical undertaking for me but even Paula noticed how easily I lifted and carried the boxes through the snow and up to the car. 

Once we got home we moved everything to the porch while we organized the all ready over crowded workroom, making room for everything.

I remain overwhelmed but grateful to have this part of the job behind us. Paula is coming back on Thursday where we will spend the day tackling the rest of the equipment, scraping, cleaning, repairing and painting everything. After that we will simply have to face the chaos of the frames. I am trying to stay calm and focused, knowing it will all get done by April 4 which is my deadline for having every thing back in place in the bee yard to welcome four new packages of bees.

Patrick's Pollinators

Meet the newest member of The Flight of The Turquoise Apairy! After four years we are retiring Crazy Comb who always lived up to her name. In the spirit of better karma and less crazy comb we hope the girls in Patrick's Pollinator live up to their name as well and pollinate the dickens out of our land owner's apricot trees, apple trees and expansive vegetable garden.

My friend Patrick is an adventuresome spirit full of compassion. Hopefully his spirit of adventure and love will rub off on these girls. Like myself Patrick is a Tibetan activist. The guy loves honey and is always encouraging the efforts behind The Flight of The Turquoise Bee Apiary. Most importantly though I am hoping Patrick's Buddhist influence will infiltrate this colony and give the girls a mild tempered spirit.

As always, hive  namesakes will hopefully enjoy a bountiful harvest come September.

Procrastination, Propolis and One Overwhelmed Beekeeper!

I am just kicking myself for the mess I have on my hands. It is my own fault and now, I am completely overwhelmed with the task at hand. I can't imagine what on earth I was thinking last fall when I junked up the basement with all our bee equipment straight from the bee yard. You can only see about a third of my mess in the picture. Boxes covered in propolis strewn about, nothing organized. Large Tupperwares filled with stinky sticky frames all combed out but scattered with unhatched brood. It is nothing short of a disaster.

I am not a procrastinator. My nature is anything but. I never stall. I am a get done now kind of gal. I make lists, I organize and I get stuff done. I never do this kind of thing! It is so unlike me. Right now, I am not even sure where to start. To make matters worse we left equipment in the bee yard.When we went down to check on the bees last week I was a little dumb founded to find the bee yard the way we left it. Behind the two dead out hives we had thrown bottom boards, hive stands and hive boxes. We would have pulled that stuff when we were there last week but it was snow covered and frozen in place and we couldn't pry it loose. We are expecting another foot of snow today so who knows when we will be able to get that equipment home for restoration.   We also have stuff in Paula's garage. All of this makes it very difficult to inventory, organize and clean.

I finally faced it all this morning and started hauling the hive boxes up to the work room to begin the daunting task of scraping, cleaning, repairing and painting.

I am trying to tackle one hive at a time which is hard since not everything is in the same place. Today I pulled Colleen's Royal Ruckus upstairs and spent the morning scraping Propolis off every nook and cranny.  Propolis may have its purpose and it may have great medicinal properties but frankly the dark sticky resinous stuff that the bees seal everything with is a bitch to clean up! I probably shouldn't be so callus in my dismissal of Propolis and take more care in actually harvesting it but right now I have four hives that need to be scrapped clean, repaired, and painted before April 6th.

Do the math, each hive has a screened bottom board, a hive stand, three brood boxes and three honey supers. That is 6 boxes plus 2 hive stand parts times four. That is 24 boxes and 8 hive stand parts that need to be restored people.  That isn't counting the frame work. Each box holds 8 to 10 frames. Did I mention I am overwhelmed?

Once I scrapped all the Propolis off  I vacuumed each box and cleaned them with a wet rag. Then started painting. I hope to get the bottom board, the hive stand and all three brood boxes painted with two coats of paint by the end of the day.

Once they are dry and labeled I will  stack them neatly in the corner of the room until I make my way through all four hives. Eventually I will need to tackle the supers and the frames. Right now I need to prioritize so that we have hive bodies ready for the four new packages of bees. The supers can wait.  If I can finish a hive a day I might make my deadline. Our bees are coming three weeks earlier than last year so the heat is on to get this done!

I got started painting this morning and didn't notice that the door to the work room was open. You can imagine how interesting this work is to a pair of kittens. Ziva Jane worked her way around the room and the activity like a little lady but not Tashi Losar he managed to get a wide swath of white paint on his beautiful dark coat.

In all honesty this pales to rest of the organizing and preparing that needs to take place before the bees arrive in early April. I have bee suits that are sorely in need of repair, feeders to clean, syrup to make and our record keeping logs to get organized. Like I said, OVERWHELMED!

I sure wish I had done a better job cleaning and storing last fall which would make all of this feel far more manageable right now. The good news, it is work I like doing and it is fairly physical which is all good. I couldn't be happier smelling the wax and tackling all that Propolis, knowing the girls will be here soon.

Mass Casualties Two Dead-outs

I always get antsy in February about the girls. Did they make it? How many colonies will I be managing this spring? If they died, how did it happen, did they freeze or starve? What could I have done differently. So much is at stake. In my head I have created this idea that the mark of a real legitimate beekeeper is one who can overwinter her colonies.

Now I am smart enough to know that there factors way beyond my control that determine if the girls will make it or not but emotionally I am tied to the idea that if the they survive I have accomplished something big.

The Buddhist in me takes the responsibility of beekeeping seriously. I care deeply about the well being of my bees and while I am painstakingly mindful and deliberate about my actions in the bee yard there are occasional casualties and sometimes even deliberate actions that result in a necessary loss. I try and minimize those losses and go about my beekeeping in a manner that reflects compassion and care.

Last year we overwintered two colonies of bees. We were giddy last January when we found one colony thriving. We had not left much honey for them, nor had we taken much. We didn't have much to work with but we wanted to try. Of course there were three more months to go when we found those girls last January. We ordered sugar boards to hold them over through February and March and we started feeding them in April. When we went back a few weeks later we discovered the second colony had survived, we just hadn't gone deep enough in the boxes to find the cluster. Through a combination of good karma and good beekeeping they all made it.

Mr. Abbott's Little Bee came out of one those overwintered colonies last summer, genetically related to the ill tempered Turquoise Bee. The bees came from the Turquoise Bee but they got a new queen and an opportunity to sever their lineage. But you might remember the queen mayhem that ensued. Two queens running amok for over a month and then the new queen disappeared leaving the colony with a new queen the bees had raised from original Turquoise Bee brood and thus poor genetic fate. They struggled all summer, never produced a lick of honey and it wasn't until September that the population started to mount. It was hard to convince ourselves to attempt an overwintering plan for them but we did. We moved a few frames of honey from other hives into the colony, put them to bed and hopped for the best.

Then there was Katrina's Drone Den, a strong group of girls who had produced well over the summer. Her sister colony Colleen's Royal Ruckus had absconded late in the fall, probably infested with mites. We could have checked the mite load in Drone Den but it wouldn't have swayed us, we needed to try and overwinter them. We left them with a full box of honey, probably not enough but more that we had left in our previously overwintered colonies. We could do the same thing as the year before and order sugar boards if need be.

Paula and I went down to check on the bees today. We should have gone in January but it was too cold to open the hives. Even today was too cold but if there was any chance they were alive we needed to know and get food stores on the hives.

I just love going into the bee yard no matter what time of year. It is a place of solace and calm for me. We worked our way through the snow with our shitkicker boots, veils and hive tools. It was cold, we had to move quickly.  We started with Katrina's Drone Den. Nothing in the first or second box but we'd learned our lesson last January,  and  worked our way to the bottom box.  I was  hopeful at first, no dead bees piled up outside the hive. Right way though we found large clumps of dead bees on frames right next to large patches of honey. In fact it seemed like the top box was just as we left it, full of honey. Clearly the bees had frozen, unable to move to the honey on the frame. It was as though the cluster had busted up in a frantic moment and they were spread all over just frozen in place. Sad really, knowing they couldn't move to get to the honey. A total dead-out.

Mr. Abbott was a slightly different story.  You can see in the picture a large pile of bees outside the hive and dead bees scattered all about just outside the hive, tell tale signs of a dead-out. Since there wasn't much honey in that hive its hard to know what happened. They may have starved, they may have frozen, not enough clues to make a deduction.

Two total dead-outs and two sad beekeepers.  What can I say, grim day for us. We have three new packages coming and I am going to try and find a forth package between now and April. In the mean time we have a heck of a clean up job facing us. Last fall I piled all of our equipment in my basement storage locker without cleaning any of it. I knew I would regret that come spring and I sure do. It will take days to clean the boxes, repaint some of them and get organized for the April 6th arrivals. We also have to clean up the dead-outs which is never easy. Such is the business of beekeeping. I am going to re frame all of this and look forward to a fresh start! All new colonies, and more than likely we will be starting each of them on frames that have been completely combed out which will give every colony a kick start. We minimize our swarm risk and hopefully maximize our honey production. So chin up,  all is good at The Flight of The Turquoise Bee Apiary!

More Is Better

I can't help myself. I am wired for more of everything.  What ever it is, I want more. Right now the object of my affection is weight loss, lots of it. I want more of it and I want it faster. I know better, really I do but that doesn't help the chemistry of my constitution.

Occasionally I go to the gym twice in a day, because more is better.  When I have  a little coffee melt down  before doing my weight lifting routine or on Friday when I swim in the morning I go twice.  I am stymied by the number of people who are at LAF at all times of the day. Generally I am there very early in the morning or right after work. Stopping by in the middle of the day is out of character for me. Still, there are volumes of people there not matter when I go.

I have been at this for 52 days. Yes I am counting the days, just like my first days of being sober.  I have lost 14 pounds. Tina says my body shape looks different. I think she is just being nice. That being said I do feel better. I have more energy. I didn't actually need more energy, god knows I have a plethora of energy but it is true, I feel more energetic. I walk with more enthusiasm, I move more easily. I can get up off the floor more easily. I can do 90 squats without batting an eye, 30 of them holding 20 pounds of weight. When I heard that squatting would help me out in the bee yard, picking up heavy boxes full of honey I started doing them earnestly and with enthusiasm. I can't lunge to save my soul nor can I do a push up, pull up or sit up. But I am stronger and that is good.

I have a constitution for also not feeling deprived, lucky me. Exercise is only one aspect of cleaning up the sabbatical mess. I am eating differently and not cooking elaborate exciting meals. We aren't eating out as much. Dinners usually involve some protein, a vegetable and a salad. I am limiting my carbs, mostly saving them for "good".  Eating pizza on New Years Eve, a little creme brulee last night after a theater fiasco or planning a fun birthday dinner keeps me going. Oh and I have not had a potato chip in 53 days. The key for me is coming up with food that really appeals to me, that is savory and will fool me into thinking I am eating something special.

So a few nights ago I created a side dish to go along with a roasted chicken. A savory kale dish with onions and mushrooms and a scant amount of brown rice not only tasted fabulous but was very attractive and company worthy if you like that kind of thing! I made more today adding the left over scraps from the roasted chicken and packed it up for my weekend work lunches.

Spicy Kale with Onions and Mushrooms

8 ounces of thickly sliced mushrooms

1 large white onion thickly sliced

2 cloves of minced garlic

scant teaspoon of olive oil

1 large bunch of kale, de-veined and chopped

1 /8 cup white wine, more if needed

1 can RoTel, original or mild

salt, pepper and red pepper flakes to taste

1 cup cooked brown rice, or any grain you like (optional)

Heat a large non stick skillet. Once hot add the olive oil to lightly cover the bottom of the pan. Add the onions and garlic and saute on medium heat for about 3 minutes, until slightly soft. Add the mushrooms, continue to saute a few more minutes. Add salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. Add the copped kale, tossing it in the pan to mix with the onions and mushrooms. Add the RoTel and simmer until the wine reduces. About 5 minutes. Add the rice to absorb excess liquid and continue to simmer until heated through.