Oh Yeah . . . Now I Remember

Tags

backyard chickens, Beekeeping, bees, French Breakfast radishes, gardening

I’m not feeling so bored or depressed about not having a toddler/baby in the house anymore.  In fact, I’m starting to remember how much I enjoyed my life pre-children.  It was pretty good.  Sleep as much as I want.  Read a book all day if I want (hell, just read a book without constant interruptions every couple of sentences).  Long walks with the dogs (not so long anymore; senior dogs can’t go very far these days).  Pole dancing.  Gardening.  Theatre.  Writing.  Biking.  Taking forty-five minutes to drink my coffee and read on a Saturday morning.  Wandering through the Farmers’ Market with no time constraints or threats of public tantrums.  

Children are great, but life without children is also great.  

Garden update:

Radishes and asparugus are going strong. I’ve been eating a huge amount of French Breakfast radishes.  I’ve waited all winter for these radishes, and they are just as wonderful as I remember them.  I eat the radishes, and the chooks eat the greens – they love radish greens so much that they start jumping up trying to snag them as soon as I open the coop door.  

  

Rhubarb is ready to be harvested.  I still have a bag of frozen rhubarb in the deep freeze from last summer, so I think I’ll make a batch of rhubarb slushies this weekend, and harvest some fresh stuff for preserving (once strawberries are ready to go in July).  

  

Planted tomatoes, cucumbers, and herbs in pots (since we ran out of room in the gardens). We actually got a bit of frost last Thursday evening, and it killed a couple of our tomatoes, and made the cucumbers really droopy.  The cucumbers perked up, but the tomatoes didn’t recover.  Have to grab some more seedlings this week.  

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Hardneck garlic, softneck garlic, onions, and peas are looking really good.   

 

And the hives are all hopping.  There are starting to store honey already!

  

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Garden Diary, Bees, and Chickens

Tags

backyard chickens, bees, Chicken coop, gardening, planting, splitting hives

May long weekend!  Time to plant the rest of the garden (plus garden number two).

In our yard, we planted:

• Radishes
• Pumpkins (Sugar Pie)
• Butternut Squash
• Spaghetti Squash
• Golden Summer Squash
• More pumpkins (Jack B Little)
• Tomatoes (bought seedlings; planted some in pots)
• Cucumbers (in pots)
• Peppers (bought seedlings; not in garden yet)
• Melons (bought seedlings; not in garden yet)

In Garden Number Two, we planted:

• Carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Paris Market)
• Beets (Chiggio, Golden, Cylindra)
• Sunflowers
• Onions

Will split the hives.  It was a bit scary, but they were so full, the bees would’ve swarmed anyway.

I finally – FINALLY – cleaned the coop.  Even though Ginger had already laid her egg today, she insisted on breaking in the fresh straw in her nesting box.

On another note, I’ve now napped three days in a row.  I feel as though I’m catching up on six months of sleep deprivation.

This Weekend on the Homestead

Tags

Beekeeping, gardening, planting

Forgot to post on Friday.  

I worked full-time last week between my regular, part-time job and my acting job (not to mention raising a child, wrangling the chickens, chasing the dogs, cooking the meals, and cleaning the house – my homemaking job).  I was workshopping a new play by my friend Ken about the foster care system.  It’s going to have a public reading on Saturday, May 16th as part of Spring Festival this year.   (If you’re in Saskatoon, the reading is free, so join us!  Details at saskplaywrights.ca)  So of course I was practically brain dead come Friday evening.  I’m not sure I could’ve written a coherant sentence if I tried.  

Anyway.

Saturday morning, we went to the Farmers’ Market – the outside vendors have returned!  Hurrah!  

Saturday afternoon, we went to the Sask Eco Living Expo, and (gasp!) I got to set foot in an ACTUAL TINY HOUSE.  I didn’t know it was going to be there, and when I spotted it, I got light headed and a bit giddy.  It was so very, very beautiful.  I think what I appreciate most about tiny houses is their simple efficiency and lack of clutter.  On a scale of one to ten, one being “Never Going to Happen” and ten being “It’s Happening as We Speak,” I’m currently sitting solidly at eight, as in “I Have Already Started Sketching Plans for My Tiny House.”

Will’s “bee friend,” Chris, came over in the afternoon, and they cracked the hives to have a look at the ladies.  Those two hives are hopping.  I predict a really good honey flow this summer.  

 

Chris recently added ducks to his backyard chicken flock, and brought us half a dozen duck eggs.  I’m  dying to have a look at his backyard ducks.  Foster todller and I had scrambled duck egg sandwiches for lunch the next day – they had a lovely, dark orange yoke, and a softer, chewier texture than chicken eggs.  Delicious.   

 

On Sunday, we did some grown-up chores, like plan meals for the week and grocery shopping.  Then when Foster baby went down for her nap, Will took bee boxes over to our friends Melanie and Dan’s house.  Melanie built the hive boxes, and Will has ordered a package of bees to arrive next week.  Melanie is going to let Will put the hive in her backyard, and she help with the honey harvest.  

  

Sunday afternoon we attended a birthday party for our friends Matt and Kari’s four-year old son.  Foster toddler had a blast, and is now obssessed with a toy whistle that came in the treat bag.  

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on here yet, but Will is trying dry cure salami.  He has it hanging in the smoker, aand smokes it about an hour a day.  It’s looking really good.  I think he may give it a go in about a week.  I’ll let him try it first – I’m still a bit suspect..

  

We also did some more planting this weekend, so I’ll end this post with a Garden Diary entry.  We planted onions (white onions, yellow onions, Spanish onions, and multiplier onions) over in Al’s yard (our friend’s rental property), and potatoes (Marilyn fingerlings, Blue Russian, Red Russian and Caribe – I feel as though I’m forgetting another variety we planted as well  – AC Ptarmigan, perhaps?) in our yard.  We still have five pounds of Yukon Gold to plant . . . somewhere.  And peas!  We planted two types of peas:  sugar snap and a hybrid bush varietal..  

  

Pretty good weekend on the old urban homestead.  

That’s a Wrap!

The lady bees are still busy kicking the drones out of the hive.  We thought they had removed them all on that first day, but apparently it’s a bit of a longer process.  They even removed a drone larvae the other day – creepy white translucent half-grown bee – ewwww.

Even though they are still foraging a bit, and feeding a bit, it’s time to wrap the hive for winter.  Will and I made an insulating wrap from heavy black plastic and leftover insulation (thank you Alan!)  You basically tuck the insulation in the plastic and then fuse the plastic together using an iron and wax paper.  We wrapped the hive up after the bees had settled down for the night (we tried to do it earlier, but boy were they agitated).  The top of the hive also gets insulated, but we’re still feeding them for the winter, so it’ll have to wait until that’s done.

Here’s hoping they make it through their first winter with us (fingers crossed!)

Beeswax Tealights (for cheap!)

Tags

backyard hive, beeswax, Candle making, tealights

We finally put our beeswax to good use.
I wanted to make tealights, but supplies for candle making are kinda expensive, and I’m kinda cheap, so I decided to put it off for awhile. That is until Will bumped into a friend whose sister has a honey bee operation, and she sometimes make candles. She told us her secret: the dollar store.

Buy a bunch of cheap tealights from the dollar store and pop the wax out! Because they drill through the wax and slide it over the wick, you can pop the wax out and use the container and the wick. It’s brilliant. We got sixteen tealights for $1, whereas the supplies I priced out at the craft store cost about $1 per tealight.

We melted the beeswax in a double boiler on the stove, and then strained it through cheesecloth to get it nice and clean. Note: dedicate a container and strainer just for wax because both will be ruined by the end of this process. Then I poured the wax into the tealight container (rather messily), and we let them sit and harden. And that’s it! So very easy.
I have to admit that at first I felt wasteful throwing away the wax, but it’s paraffin wax, which is made from petroleum and some information out there suggests that it might be toxic. It’s a cheap by product. I saved it anyway. I’ll use it to wax my window tracks or something.

I am so pleased with how the tealights turned out, and quite surprised by the amount we were able to make. We made 32 tealights from the wax we collected. Here’s hoping for more next year!

The Drones are Gone

Tags

Bee, drones, honey, Insects, Mating, Queen bee, Worker bee

The ladies are getting ready for winter, and it’s a bad time to be a boy bee.

You see, the drones, AKA the boys, are big and dozy and need to be fed, but are tolerated during mating season just in case a virgin queen needs to go on a mating flight.  But once the weather turns a bit cooler and mating season comes to a close, the lady bees, AKA the workers, kick them out of the hive.  We were lucky enough to witness it on Saturday.

The lady bees are brutal.  There was no way those drones were getting back in the hive.  They sure did try, though.  But the workers were ruthless, and they were fighting off wasps, too!

Poor drones.  They didn’t stand a chance.

Related articles

• Video: A Drone Mates With a Queen Bee in Glorious Slow-Motion (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)

 

The Last of the Honey and Our First Mite Test

Tags

backyard beehive, Bee, Beekeeper, honey, Mite, Oxalic acid, Powdered sugar

Last Monday, we harvested the last of the honey. Not much there. The honey flow has ended for the year.

We also did our first ever mite test. It was a bit scary. We decided to go with a no-kill method because a) we don’t want to kill our bees; and b) we are unable to identify our Queen bee yet. We can tell the difference between the drones and the workers, but the Queen still eludes us. There was a (very small) chance the Queen could be in the sample of bees we took to test for mites, so no-kill method was a must.

Will knocked a frame of bees into a bowl, and I scooped up half a cup and put them in a jar with a couple tablespoons of icing sugar. Then we shook the jar ’til they were all coated, and let it sit in the shade for a minute. Apparently, the icing sugar acts like little marbles under the feet of the mites and will knock them off the bees. Then you shake the jar and the icing sugar falls off the bees onto a plate, and you wet it down.

We found one mite. Ugly little thing. This means we’ll have to treat for mites this fall.  We’ll be using an organic method of dribbling oxalic acid between the frames.  Oxalic acid is wood bleach, and in the right concentration, it doesn’t hurt the bees, but does a number on the mites.

After, we released the ghost bees from the jar back into the hive, and the others started cleaning them off. It was pretty cool.

We saved the uncapped honey, put in in a mason jar, and fed it back to the bees for the winter.  Since it’s our first colony and our first winter, we want to make sure they have lots of honey to make it to spring.  If you lift that mason jar, you’ll find tons of bees sucking honey from the holes in the lid.  The wasps are desperate to get into that jar.  I hope they die off soon.

We also did the first of four dustings of OxyTetra-A for foulbrood. The bee club said that there’s been a number of cases of foulbrood this fall, so the treatment is a must. Once again, you mix the antibiotic with icing sugar and use a floor sifter to dust the ends of the frames. Bees love icing sugar.

We have seriously enjoyed having our bees this summer. Will’s already researching how to split our colony next spring, so that we can have more hives to look after. They are amazing little creatures.  Future apiarists, perhaps?

Related articles

• How many mites might make menace? (therasapaul.wordpress.com)
• Inspection, Mite Check (sanabeja.wordpress.com)
• How can I improve Varroa resistance? (simplebees.wordpress.com)
• From Beesearch to Bee Church Pt. 1 (yearofthescout.wordpress.com)

 

Beeswax

Tags

backyard hive, beeswax, Candle making

I’ve got beeswax! After a few different tries, we figured out a good method to separate the wax from the honey. Put the wax in a pot with water and heat it up ’til it melts. Use a thermometer to watch that the temperature doesn’t go over 75 degrees. Beeswax doesn’t boil, it simply ignites when it gets too hot! Once the wax is all melted and mixed in with the water, remove the pot from the heat, and let it cool. The wax will float to the top and harden. Then you can dump the water, rinse off any remaining honey from the wax, and you have clean wax.

Next adventure: candle making!

This Weekend on the Homestead

Tags

bees, Beet, beet greens, canning, honey, swiss chard, urban farm

It was so good to be home this weekend.  As much as I didn’t want vanlife to end, it was great to be home a few days early and have some garden fun.

We came back to a lush, beautiful garden (thank you, Melanie!) Check out the pumpkins.  The bigger green ones are Sugar Pie, which I’ll use for jack o’lanterns and then baking.  The smaller ones are Jack be Little, which are just cute and for decoration.  And the purple/green beans were still good, so we harvested them all, and then pulled the plants to make room for the rapidly growing squash vines.  Note to self:  Don’t plant squash in the middle of the garden next year.

As I mentioned on Friday, we cracked the hive to find lots and lots of beautiful honey.  Melanie (our house sitter/summer house guest) helped Will take the frames out of the honey supers.

Then we scraped and crushed and strained and poured the clear honey into mason jars.  It was a pretty fantastic time.  In the end, we got 28 pounds of honey.  And that’s only the first harvest.  Yippee!

We picked the last of the sour cherries from the school yard across the street.  I broke down and bought a cherry pitter.  It was bloody expensive so I expect it to last at least 100 years.  Once we got that puppy going though, it took longer to pull the stems off the cherries than to pit them.  Love that stupid thing.  I canned four pints of sour cherry preserves, and I’ve still got 28 litres in the freezer downstairs (thank you, Mom!)

Finally, on Sunday, we did a quick little harvest for supper.  The beets are lovely, and Will steamed up a huge bunch of Swiss Chard and beet greens for me.  I love them when they’re just wilted, tossed with olive oil and salt, and then drizzled with balsamic vinegar.  So good.

We maybe sorta decided on the trip to start our our own urban farm (eek!)  We’re in the research phase at the moment (anyone familiar with SPIN farming?)  We’re thinking of the name Urbana Farms – opinions? thoughts? ideas? awesome name or weird name?  Help us out with the market research.  Leave a comment below!

 

Welcome Back, and We’ve Got Honey!

Tags

Beekeeping, Food, honey, Honey extractor

We’re back home!  It was an awesome trip, but it was so nice to arrive home.

Our house sitter is amazing – the yard looks fantastic, the dogs and chickens are alive, the garden is thriving, and the house is sparkling clean.  I want a house sitter every time I go on vacation.

It took all of half an hour to unpack the Westie, and since we didn’t have to do any cleaning (thank you, Melanie!), we decided to check on the bees, and  . . . there’s honey!

Will took out one frame so that we could test our homemade honey extractor.

The honey is clean, and pure, and heavenly.  I’m so excited to harvest the rest of the honey this weekend.  And get my hands dirty in the garden.  And walk the dogs.  And clean up the chickens.  Domesticity is bliss.  (Sometimes.  Other times, van life is bliss).

Have a fantastic weekend!

Related articles

• Our Beautiful Golden Honey Harvest & It’s Sweet Delicious Fragrance (lilsuburbanhomestead.com)
• wash like an egyptian (oatsngoats.wordpress.com)