Doing an inspection of “Hive 6” I spotted Tatjana, the Russian Queen I got from Dan Conlon. She was laying eggs. Can you spot her? The frayed, light-colored bee below her, off to the left, is a callow bee: just eclosed. The two dark marks on the queen’s back aren’t mites, but pigment markings. Believe …
Author Archives: kaat
SCOBY Hotel
My two kombucha Continuous Brews (one with a spiced Indian chai, the other a more subtle Earl Grey) are growing vigorously, the mothers in them giving birth to more SCOBYs (scobies?). They are starting to fill up the jars. Time for a special hold-over vessel: the SCOBY Hotel. I learned about this from the Big …
IMO I > IMO II
I tried again to capture those Indigenous Micro-Organisms, again in the leaf mulch pile, and again I got mostly yellow, pink, blue and predominantly black. It smelled sweet, though, so I decided to make a batch of IMO II, adding 1:1 brow sugar. This can be kept indefinitely in a …
Fish Amino Acids (FAA) Update
I visited the two buckets of FAA today – they’re nicely tucked away in the cool, dark basement. Amazing how it doesn’t smell awful or even fishy at all, since it’s just fish and sugar, and some apples. The apple smell dominates, along with a sweet fermented smell. The top of one had a lot …
Getting the Hang of Double Nucs
I decided to give the double four-over-four-frame nucs a la Mike Palmer a try and ordered a set from Better Bee. Whether it was their milling or my hammering the boxes together, I don’t know, but the two top boxes don’t fit together well. With some careful placing, they do the job, but they’re not …
Mushroom!
A quick update on Queen Bianca: alas, she is no more, but her daughter, whom I have named Laura, made her appearance and was laying eggs. She looked good enough to kiss! For now, a photo reportage of a find today in our front yard (“down there,” we call it), in a spot twenty feet …
Look at These Two
Seven Hens, Seven Eggs
Oreo’s eggs, deeply orange with homegrown spinach
New Nuc and Queen Introduction
I ordered two mated queens from Anarchy Apiaries which arrived this morning. Another beek in our group needed one for a queenless hive, so I gave one to her. I cleared the weeds out of the “Home Apiary,” made sure the platform is straight and sturdy, and set up a nuc box (“Hive 5”). Then …
KNF: FPJ and OHN, and OHN tea
Ah–ahcronyms! That stands for Korean Natural Farming: Fermented Plant Juice and Oriental Herbal Nutrient. After weeks of prep, FPJ and OHN were ready to “decant” and use and store. FPJ On 5/2 (about a month ago), I went about in my garden in the early morning collecting the meristems of all the most vigorously growing …