Mite Count and Camera Trouble

Exactly three days after installing the sticky board underneath the hive, I pulled it out. Fascinating what’s all on that sticky board: dropped pollen, nectar, honey and propolis, dirt and dust, little insects and… varroa mites.

Yes, there were mites, tiny fat disks a dark reddish brown, all of them stuck to the board and some of them still alive, little legs squirming. Too bad, suckers!

Using our magnifying glass I counted and Amie kept score. Thirty of them. I was alarmed. Maybe I had even thought my bees wouldn’t have mites, even though I knew that all bees in most parts of the world have mites.

But my bee books told me that the threshold – the point at which you need to consider treatment – is a “mite fall” (the amount of mites that fall onto the sticky board as the bees grooms themselves) of 40-50 a day. What a relief!

I’ll do another mite count in the middle of Summer, when the mite population is at its highest. In the meantime I didn’t put the sliding board back in, so now the hive is open at the bottom except for the screen. We are getting some more hot and humid weather and the bees will welcome the extra ventilation.

The bad news is that my camera seems to be on the fritz. Everything works  but it will no longer focus – a severe handicap. Maybe I pressed some button that I don’t know about. I wish I could take a picture of the sticky  board for you, and of my kale substitute for sauerkraut (so yummy and much easier to grow than cabbage), and of Amie’s latest drawings. I am so dependent on my camera, not in the least for blogging inspiration…

Honey Bee Stinging Bumble Bee

Bees coming in on the landing board

The hive was getting very crowded, with 8 frames entirely built out, so today I added the second brood box. The colony should build out 10 new frames much faster than they did the previous 9 ones, because there are many more bees now, and the colony is growing every day.

I also replaced the full bottom board with a screened one, which will improve ventilation over the next couple of months. This bottom board has an added feature. It has a slot for a board that slides in through the rear of the hive (handy, because I won’t have to disturb the bees). On that board I put a sticky board to trap all the mites that fall off the bees. If you have a full bottom board, mites can just crawl back up again. If you have a screened bottom board, they fall onto the ground and can’t make it back, but you also can’t count them.  I will return in 3 days to see how many have fallen onto the sticky board, and I’ll be able to do an assessment of the mite population in my hive.

I wanted to build this bottom board myself, but with DH away for a conference I couldn’t figure out which of our vast array of power tools to use (and how), and the colony couldn’t wait until he gets back. So over the weekend Amie and I drove to a beekeepers supply warehouse, where I stuck strictly to my shopping list, and I bought this thing.  I wish now I hadn’t forgotten to photograph its ins and outs, so I could reproduce it…

In order to put this new bottom board on, I had to lift the first, filled brood box and put it aside, and I was surprised at its weight. Inspections will get harder from now on. Imagine moving and inspecting two brood boxes, three honey supers…

One of the neatest thing with this hive manipulation was the honey bee – bumblebee fight. Just as I arrived, a big fat bumble was approaching the hive – they try to get in and rob the nectar and honey. A guard bee was warning it off. I grabbed my camera and took some pictures. Not the best – it was cloudy – but it gives an impression of the situation:

Warning stance?

The honey bee gets her stinger into the bumblebee!

The bumble bee managed to get the writhing bee off her, then beat a retreat. The bee of course perished right there. What a saga!

Amie is Still an Artist

It’s been a while since I wrote about Amie’s art. This has become a garden (and beekeeping) blog, no doubt about it.  But while the blog has changed, in one respect Amie has not: she is still an artist.

Ever since a boy at her preschool claimed that she is not, she has been working hard at her art. She draws at least an hour a day, longer more often, depending what else the day has to offer. She goes nowhere without her field bag, bulging with paper and an array of pencils or markers. She is never happier than when I buy her a 20-pack of legal writing pads.

A couple of days ago, when we were drawing together, she was telling me that you have to practice long and hard. You have to be 90 to be an artist, it takes that long! I said few people live to be 90, really. Okay, she said, 70, no, 71 . That was as much as she wanted to compromise. I think it keeps her safe from expectations, her own especially. She gets quite upset when someone insists she already is an artist. She insists that she is really a “half artist”, not a “full” one.

Her art-making these days is more independent. Once in a while I sit with her to draw and then she’ll copy some things of mine that she finds interesting. Mostly she draws on her own. She doesn’t have a special place yet, and draws anywhere and everywhere: on the bus, in the car, in restaurants, at playdates, at the dining room table, at her desk, on the floor, on the bed… Sometimes she’ll come and sit next to me and quietly work away, or keep up a running comment. Other times she is happy quite by herself in the room.

These days she concentrates on patterns of shape and color. She loves to repeat and arrange random objects on a page. These are blankies and hats:

These objects are sometimes named, like “blankies” and “hats”, or they are simply “designs” or “decorations”. The strip and the two blocks in the drawing at the top are “pieces of candy” thrown up into the air for the bird to eat, but in the drawing below, they’re just “decorations”.

She likes to schematize objects too, oftentimes things that she feels are necessary in most pictures and that she has drawn often before, like the  grass in the drawing of Rabbit and Roo and the sky and the sun in the drawing of the playset (ladder, slide, swing):

She likes order on the page. Nothing touches, things are separated. In the drawing of Rabbit and Roo, they are holding hands. The drawing below, on the left, is of a dragon climbing a wall. And of the drawing of the  fishes she actually said: “See, these [the yellow dots] are separations.”

There are elaborate stories. Most of the drawings you see here are from a book she is making about a bird called Yellowfinch and his family – who are actually sparrows.  Here are two more drawings from the Yellowfinch series:

This schematizing, separating impulse is a new development, and the drawings you see above are all no more than a week old. The following drawing – my favorite – of a giant with a tiny head and belly button, which she made a month ago, already shows these inclinations:

Here is Amie about how she is an artist:

Garden Photos on a Gloomy Day

Bees bearding the hive? Or just lots of traffic. Here’s a little video. Most of the noise is generated by the bees:

Garlic scapes ready to pick – I’m waiting for a hot afternoon

These are ready as well, but I’m holding out for red peppers  (these are the overwintered pepper plants)

Something pretty in the side bed, don’t know what

The comfrey patch: all the transplanted roots and shoots made it

This was the best surprise in one of the potted cauliflowers. It was not there two days ago, and now it is. I’ll have to wrap it up as soon as it stops raining. The cauliflowers in the beds are bolting, I’m afraid.

Fun with the Hive

I wrote last time about my concern that my colony is behind. At my last inspection they still hadn’t drawn out (built wax comb onto) enough frames to warrant the second brood box. Still, my inspection indicated that the queen would soon run out of immediately available space to lay eggs. In the summer a good queen can lay 1500-2000 eggs a day!

So yesterday I went in to move one of the empty outside frames in couple of spots in.

When bees build comb and then fill it up with brood lives in two boxes, they will always use it for brood {UPDATE: this turns out not to be true: the bees can clean out honey and use the cell for brood}. As the new bee emerges from her cocoon, her pupal lining stays behind and is not cleaned out – neither are waste and bits of pollen and propolis. Over the years, brood comb, then, gets darker, even black. Since the chance of disease rises and the cells become smaller with each new shedding of a cocoon, brood comb needs replacing every four or so years (though it depends). Comb filled with honey will always use be honeycomb {UPDATE: nope}, which is lighter in color, because each cell always gets cleaned out totally when the bees go into their honey stores.

The brood nest (adult bees, eggs, larvae and pupae) forms a sphere in the middle of the hive. When you add a second box on top, the bees will gradually move the nest up. By winter, the nest will be in the top box. In spring you reverse the boxes, so the nest is in the bottom box again. And so forth.

My brood (B) nest, confined as yet to one single box, was honey-bound: it was enclosed on both sides with honeycomb (H), and not large enough.

One of the solutions is to put the second  brood box on top: no less than ten empty frames. But it is desirably that the bees draw out all the frames in both boxes. This means the beekeeper often needs to move frames around. I moved the empty first frame into the third slot, in between two frames of brood, so the bees will draw it out and fill it with brood.

This is what I love about beekeeping (or what I have experienced of it so far). It is like a good game: rule driven, with a challenging array of variations. You observe patterns, deduce what is going on, and manipulate to get the best outcome. But the game is much bigger than that. All that the bees do, all that the weather brings, all that the flowers offer and all the interference from other animals and beekeepers, etc., it is all rule-driven: it has causes, reasons. Most of these are natural.  And nature is vast. We, beekeepers, have very limited insight in them. So the game is new every time. Keeps you on your toes.

Stung!

Honey comb is white, brood comb is yellow

I’ve had my bees for 5 weeks, and I’ve done 8 inspections, and yesterday I did a big one. I pulled out frame by frame, looked at each side for several minutes, spotting patterns, looking for mites and queen cups, just standing in awe of all those hardworking, generous creatures going about their business even as I was ripping their home apart. I checked for other insects or mouse droppings in the hive, and removed dead bees, leaves and burr comb. I topped off the sugar syrup in the feeder and checked the Apiguard mite treatment (still needs a couple of days). The queen looked fine, though at some moment the bees were on top of her, 2 to 3 layers deep. I thought: is this balling? But she got out from under them.

A friend who started his hive on the same day, with a package from the same  dealer, has had his second brood box on for a week now. This means that his bees drew out (built out wax comb) across 7 to 8 entire frames. He also noticed a marked explosion of the population.

All the signs in my hive have been good: there are good brood/honey/pollen patterns, many frames of brood in all stages (even eggs, so the Apiguard didn’t stop my Queen from laying) and many frames with honey. The picture below shows several ages of bees (a callow is a newly emerged bee: they have more fur), as well as the queen laying an egg in a cell:

Several ages of bees

Still, my bees have still to draw out 1 1/2 frames to warrant the second box. I also found two (I think) queen cups under construction (they’re easy to spot as they face down), which may indicate that the colony is not happy with its queen and is preparing to raise a new one.

Queen cup?

I’m getting a little worried, because they’ll have to draw out 7-8 frames in the second box as well before I can put on a honey super. The honey flow is supposed to be going on right now, so we’re behind. I don’t care if we don’t have honey this year, but I want all the frames drawn out so the next generation doesn’t have to, and the honey supers filled with enough honey so that colony is ready to survive the winter.

Drawing out comb

Well, in any case, this inspection lasted about 40 minutes. It was a great day: not too hot, though at the end the bees did start fanning inside the hive, getting up a wonderful buzzing sound that signaled that it was time to close up.

One last look

And I got stung for the first time. I don’t want anyone to blame think badly of my super docile bees, so I want to stress that it was totally my own stupid fault. I had scraped off some burr comb with what I thought was a dead bee stuck to it.  Back in the kitchen I picked it up to throw it in the trash and yowzah! Right in my index finger top (left hand, but that’s little comfort since I’m ambidextrous).

The bee and her stinger

I had forgotten how much it hurt. It took me three tried to scraped off the stinger (with my fingernail) and I marveled at the pumping action of that little venom sack. Then I sucked on it and spat out whatever venom. Then I scoured the internet for remedies. I tried calomine (nope), ice (nope) and onion, which really helped against the pain. So I walked around all day rubbing onion between my thumb and finger. I put the event on my facebook and have recevied several alternative remedies, which I will try next time.  We’re exactly 24 hours into the sting and my finger is still swollen, but at least I can type.

Peas

Every day now we have this ritual, Amie and I. We go out to the pea bed. She spots the fattest pods and I pick them – she can’t reach these ones but will be able to pick the next bed that will become ripe. Then we come in with our bounty, sit down at the table, and snack. She loves to break open the pods and go “one for you, one for me”.

My garden is paradise

Mycelium!

I checked the mushroom bed and just under surface there is this:

Mycelium, hopefully the King Stropharia that I sowed in it. There’s a chance it isn’t, of course. The pile of leftover woodchips, which I did not inoculate, looks exactly the same! Time will tell.

Herb Spiral

Our herb spiral was a long time in the making. It just kept getting shoved down the list of things to do. But the herb seedlings were languishing in their pots, so I put my foot down and we did it in two days.

We decided to build the wall with bricks from top to bottom (1) because we have so many clay bricks left from our old patio. (2) We’re also  planning to build the base of our earth oven with these bricks, so there will be a visual continuity in our backyard.  And (3) we like neither the look, nor the instability, of just placing a ring of stones around and on top of a mound of soil.

So our spiral involved a lot of lugging of bricks and of a surprising amount of soil, but all in all it only took about 12 man-hours to complete it. And it was good fun: what a great shape to work with!

  • Build it

First you lay out the spiral on the ground with one layer of bricks. The spiral can go in either direction, but I guess clockwise with the sun makes most sense (even though ours goes counterclockwise). Count on the inner column reaching at least 3 feet high. You can make it as high as 4 feet, then the slope will be steeper. But keep in mind that the plants will also grow, some over a foot tall.

Make the whole thing not more than 5 feet wide, so you can easily reach the center without having to lean or step anywhere on the spiral. Walk around it to make sure that you can reach all parts for easy harvesting. Bear in mind plantings around the spiral, and plot stepping stones or narrow paths.

Then start building up the inner column. There’s no need to cement, but make sure the individual bricks don’t wobble. Also, don’t pay attention to the grade yet, just concentrate on the inner column.

When you’ve reached about 2 feet, fill it up with soil. Don’t put your best soil at the bottom. We used the small soil pebbles that we sifted out of our loam for the garden beds: great way to get rid of some junk. Some advise putting gravel or stones at the bottom for better drainage, but we figured this would create a barrier between the “bed” and the land with its nutrients and beneficial soil organisms.

  • Learn from our mistakes

Then curse, because you realize you’ve forgotten to put in the sprinkler (if you’re using one). Break the wall open and dig out the soil where you want the sprinkler system to go. Select from your large store of pvc pipes two pieces about 4 feet long for the horizontal part and one a little over however high you make your spiral for the vertical part, and any broken elbow connector from the trash. Through this assembly thread a short piece of hose (the box stores sell cheap “remnants” 15 feet long). Make sure to get the ends (connectors) right. Bury the system in the soil underneath the spiral.

Put the whole thing back together again and forgive your oversight: it is the cost of your enthusiasm. And that you put the hose in the wrong way, blame that on the hot sun beating down on your brain and the sweat pouring into your eyes. And in any case, they have adapters for that.

As you fill the inner column with soil, fill in the outer path as well, so the brick wall is pressed by the soil on both sides. Carefully tamp down the soil on both sides at the same time, adding to the stability. Once the first layer is done, add the last foot to the inner column.

Now grade the slope by adding bricks to the wall and filling the winding path with soil. Use a hammer to gently tap the bricks here and there, moving them if they’re sticking out to much or have been displaced. This way also try to make the wall lean slightly inwards, for better stability.

As you can see, a lot of the column will be visible when you’re done. So be sure that you like the look of your building materials. By the time the plantings have reached maturity, it should be lush with green, but some of the bricks will still be visible.

  • Zone it

The whole point of the spiral is to create a variety of microclimates out of many combinations of  wet/dry, cool/warm, sun/shade. This allows for a greater variety of herbs to be planted together, each in their favorite niche. The most important microclimate zones on the spiral are:

(1) The top, where the water begins but where it won’t hang around for very long. It is also always in full sun. So this is the driest part of the spiral.

(2) The slope, where the water runs, can also be dry, but you can adjust the level of water retention by creating small  cups and trenches around you plants so the water can pool. The side of the spiral that is facing North will get the most shade once the plants have grown. (In the beginning, when it’s just seedlings, or seeds, there’s isn’t much shade on a 3 foot high spiral.)

(3) The base, Part I. I divided the base into two parts. Part I is the end of the sloping path, where the runoff water will collect. Thus it is the wettest part. I augmented this aspect by creating a barrier that will keep the moisture in. I buried some bricks right under the surface of the soil.

Then I covered them up so the visual of the spiral isn’t ruined. I also created a low retaining wall all around that area.

(4) The base, Part II. The part of the base against the clay brick wall is a real hot spot, at the moment. It faces South in our case, and the bricks soak up the sun, warming the soil behind them and radiating heat onto the soil in front of them.

(5) The gaps and cracks between the bricks.

  • Plant it

Now, to match the plants to the zones. Planting the herbs on the spiral first, top to bottom gives you a good idea of how reachable they will be come harvest time, so place your stepping stones strategically. So down the spiral they go:

The drought/heat/sun-loving herbs are: rosemary, thyme, then oregano, sage, , marjoram. You’re already well down the slope. Add chamomile, parsley, cilantro, etc.

In zone (3) put chives, and all the mints (contain the entire bottom area if you’re afraid they’ll take over your spiral). If it gets really wet down there (depends on the soil, the steepness of the slope and the orientation) you can put watercress.

In zone (4), I will put heat-loving basil – which IMHO would be out of place on the spiral because it is an annual and will yearly leave a gap, and because it can grow too tall.

In (5) the cracks, I put pennyroyal, which is a small mint that is not too invasive. It likes it wet, so I’m not sure if this is the best place for them.  So far they’re doing pretty well. We’ll see.

I can’t judge the plantings yet, as they’re all still seedlings. I’ll update as I learn more from my observations as the plants settle in and grow.

  • Conclusion

To me, a herb spiral is the emblem of permaculture design.

(1) It allows more plantings in the same space by cleverly stretching the surface into the third dimension.

(2) It allows for a greater variety of herbs to planted together, each in their favorite niche.

(3) It conserves water: runoff is used over and over again as it goes down the path.

(4) It is aesthetically pleasing, a marvel to the eye, and a story piece  too.

If you have a partner who needs convincing that this is a serious undertaking, I recommend you slip this schematic into their email. The herb spiral was originally conceived by Bill Mollison and was most recently popularized by Toby Hemenway, in his Gaia’s Garden.

(Mostly) All in Pictures Today

Unwanted things:

(1)

(2)

Things hung to dry:

(3)

Things newly trellised:

(4)

(5)

Flowering things:

(6)

(7)

(8)

Things bursting:

(9)

(10)

Take the quiz:

(1) oak seedling (2) caterpillar on cherry tree (3) kale seed pods (4) favas (5) tomatoes in hoop house (6) can’t remember, sowed it under the bird feeder, bachelor’s button cornflower? lupine! (Thanks Barb!) (7) overwintered vetch (8) strawberry (9) peas (10) tomatoes