Category Archives: Bees and beekeeping

Bees and beekeeping

What the season holds

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My apologies, dear readers, for the unplanned hiatus. Those of you who are aware of my chronic aspiration-induced pneumonia issues will be happy to know that the latest round of grue was not pneumonia. It was, however, a gigantic sinus infection so bad that it made me want to chop my head off. I wound up in the ER last week for fluids, since I spent one day with everything coming out one end and the next with dry heaves virtually all day (that was the day of the ER visit). Why sinus? Probably coughed something up in there that didn’t come out. Thankfully, that’s over, my head is intact, and I’m back to the things I need to do. Well, almost there. The strength is coming back slowly. I also lost four pounds over the course of two days, so I’m working on that, too, although the food intake is just making me nauseated all the time – an incredibly unpleasant sensation. Pain you can usually work through or around. Nausea is just different. For me, anyhow.

On to better things!

I got my new packages of bees Friday a week ago. Unfortunately, my camera battery croaked after my sister and I were already out there, and since I was in the end throes of the crap I had, there was no way I was going to go get the other one. So, no video of the installs this year. I did take video of several days after that, though, and I’ll be editing those – time to really learn Adobe Premiere instead of screwing around, I guess – to put up on the Lazy Dogs Ranch channel on YouTube.

We had some challenges with the package installs. The shipper is no longer putting a feed can in the package, but just throwing some marshmallows in. The bees don’t seem to really care one way or the other about sugar products, so I understand this is an effective, cheap method of dealing with the feed can issues. However, when pouring the bees into the hives, the marshmallows also go in, which means reaching in and fishing them all out (ditto for pine needles, etc., that win up in them). That was annoying.

We also had big issues with drifting. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it means when bees drift from their own hive to another one that is close to it. Usually, this sort of thing happens if you’re making splits and don’t move the split hive a bit away from the original. For the package installs, since the bees weren’t really imprinted on their caged queens yet, it meant some hives wound up with a ton of bees in them, while some wound up with half or less of their package. I worked on this the Saturday after the install, moving frames and just taking handfuls of bees from one hive to another. It seems to have worked out all right.

One package obviously had a queen in it, though: the bees killed the caged queen and swarmed away before I even got into the yard on Saturday. So I had an empty box and a dead queen.

They were insured, so the shipper is going to send me a replacement. I’ve also asked for a package without a queen, to bulk up the hive that suffered the most drift.

Meanwhile in the beeyard, the monster hive #8 is still performing well. After the last split I did, it had three deeps and one super on.

I peeked in, and they were ready for another super.

I grabbed another super and popped it on to give them some room. I’m going to have to do a deep inspection at some point.

For now, though, I’m letting them do their thing.

That’s all for now, as I need to deal with the nausea here. Until next time, peeps: be well.

Bees and beekeeping, Homestead, Honey

Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full

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There are times when I go out to the beeyard just to watch the activity at the hives. The girls zipping in and out, guards on the landing boards (along with drones, hanging out, drinking honey and talking up the girls), the occasional midair collision that harms no one, the (at times) clumsy landings and then crawling over other bees….it’s all a day in the life in the yard. The bees I see foraging today will be dead by next month, having worked themselves to death, and will be replaced by newly graduated foragers, heading out into the world to find its bounty and return it to the hive for the benefit of all. Have I mentioned I’m a writer?

I captured this with the new camera (a Canon Powershot SX730 HS as my pocket camera to replace my Fuji FinePix, which is good, but very old). I stuck it on a tripod in front of the mega hive (#8) while I went and had a look at the second split from that hive (#11). It’s very relaxing – so much so that the other night I almost fell asleep watching it. I should keep that in mind the next time the insomnia is really bad. (Of course, it could also be because I was sick, on meds, and had been doing some things outside that absolutely had to be done when I should have been resting. Who knows?)

Bees and beekeeping

Framing for the new bees

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No, I’m not framing up walls so they can move in to the house here. I’m building frames for the hives that need to go to the beeyard so they’ll be ready when the new bees arrive on Wednesday. I’ve been sick most of the week, which scuttled my plans to be building frames during that time and making sure the new setups were ready to go. Such is life, though.

I also did some cleanup of bee gear, which was rather unpleasant in some cases, as I’d let frames hang out in hive bodies on the driveway until I could get to them. And I never got to them, which is how this saga happens. Both wax moths and small hive beetles love it when you do this, because it allows them to go in, undisturbed by bees, and create messes in the unprotected frames.

You can’t really see it in this image, but when you open a hive and get hit with a sickly-sweet, rotting sugar kind of smell, you’ll know there have been wax moths and small hive beetles in the box. Then you pull out a frame.

This is web and cocoons of wax moths. They like the dark comb where brood have been, and will invade it if the hive is not strong enough to fight them off or – as in this case – the hive bodies are just sitting around outside, empty.

This is a closeup of some of the crap: some webbing and dead cocoons. The larvae will eat into the wood of the frames and the hive bodies. The moths will happily go right into the carveouts the larvae have done and lay more right in them. It’s a nasty business cleaning up damaged gear and sometimes just not worth it.

Some of the frames in the hive bodies had honey in them – good honey, not honey rendered worthless and useless by small hive beetles and THEIR larvae. The bees will find the good stuff, go to the frames, chew open the capped honey, and start transferring it back to their home hive. The bad honey that has (or had) small hive beetle infestations they will not take. We also do not take it: it goes in the trash.

All those open cells that make sort of a rainbow above the bottom middle have been painstakingly chewed open by the other bees in the yard, and their content transferred just as painstakingly back to their home hives. Here’s a closeup of how ragged it looks afterward.

The edges are jagged and you can see some of the cappings inside the cells. normally, were this just a frame of honey that for whatever reason we wanted them to take – in this case, we wanted the beeswax from this rainbow area, because it was lighter in color and that is what we want for our beeswax melting – we would wait for the girls to do their thing, then put the frame into a hive. The bees would then clean this up, taking out the debris and repairing the outer edges. This frame, though, had hive beetle-contaminated honey on the other side and was trashed. On this side, I scraped the wax off into the bucket where we hold our wax that is to be melted so it can be turned into whatever it will ultimately be (lip balm, candles, and so on).

I wound up making about 60 frames today, and between that and what I’d already done pre-sickness, we are now ready to give the newbees their spaces. I have a video of some of that process on my youtube channel, and I’ll put it here in a post tomorrow.  There are videos dating back to a few years ago, before chronic pneumonia and hospitals became my besties.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

Bees and beekeeping, Food, Gardening, Homestead, Weather, Working it out, Writing

Welcome to spring, Florida style

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Finally.

We’ve had a bit of unsettled weather here at the ranch – Mother Nature has been a tad ambivalent about letting our “winter” go. Overall, it was a mild winter, with only a handful of overnight freezes, and if I ever get a greenhouse up, even those won’t matter. How mild was it, overall? So mild that these guys were all over the place at the end of December.

He and his pals vanished to wherever it is they hide out during cold weather a short bit later, as January brought with it not just a freeze, but sleet/freezing rain at a time it is normally dry here.

While that didn’t last long, it surely did make for some fine pictures: icy pines above, my iced over pear tree below.

Usually, I start the flats in the barn under the lights just after the first of the year. I’ve found, though, that the seedlings tended to get a bit leggy even with the lights right over them, and they were definitely getting rootbound before I’d be able to plant them out after two months in. The transplant date was also kind of iffy: do we go with our “official” last frost date for this area, which is around my birthday in March? Take a chance as I did several years ago and kick the seedlings out of the barn in early March, hoping there will be no surprises? Or do I change the entire thing?

Of course, it’s the latter: I started the flats in February this year, and just started putting out the seedlings over the past week and a half. I also waited to direct sow the other crops until April. That gut instinct turned out to be the right one: we had ourselves some random overnights right near freezing at the end of March, and some coolish temps in early April that would not have been all that great for germination of the directly sowed items beyond the shelling peas (and even half of those croaked because a few days later it was 87F before returning to milder temps).

Speaking of germination: for the first time ever here at the ranch, we have had 100% germination of all the tomatoes and peppers. It is astonishing: 274 tomato plants, and  227 peppers. I also have assorted brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) and those appear to be at 100%, but let’s face it, the stars of the gardens are tomatoes and peppers, by far. This is also about the time of year I usually decide to tilt at my personal windmill and try corn (again), but I’ve decided to let that be this year and not deal with it.

Meanwhile, the blueberries, which I’d basically ignored and which I had not cut back, as “they” say should be done, are coming along nicely. I noticed the first blooms at the end of February, and at the end of March, even through some weird, drastically changing temps, it had started forming berries,

And now, we’re here in April. Lots of tomatoes and peppers in the rows, the directly sown zucchini and squash plants are nice and big, and they are now beginning to flower and form fruit, going from this

To this

In just five days.

Things are looking up at the ranch.

One other programming note: I was doing pretty well a couple of months ago, writing up something every day. Then life intruded at some point and once again, I did not see it through. This time, however, I am: I will post something, every day. It may just be a picture of something and a few words. It may be a recap of what’s going on in the gardens or with the bees. It may be about tech. Or it may just be ruminations on things. Whatever the case may be, the discipline to do this will help feed the discipline of writing every day on the novel side of my world, which has also suffered from my neglect.

No more.  I don’t need anyone’s approval, I don’t need to care what people may think, I don’t need to worry about failure – this is one of my worst fears – and I don’t need to worry about anything else in this world beyond calming my mind, focusing on the story I’m telling, and then tell it: write it straight through, without going back to edit until the work is complete. I hope my handful of readers, whoever you may be, will be watching my journey through all this, but even if you aren’t, I still have an audience of me, and sometimes that is (and has to be) what carries me through.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

 

 

Bees and beekeeping, Food, Gardening, Weather

Spring?

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Possibly. Who can say, Florida being what it is? That image is from yesterday, as I got caught up in other things before I was able to come back and finish the post. BUT: the forecast now is the same as it was on the 8th when I took that screenshot. It will be around 80F during the days, and around or slightly above 50F in the evenings.

Mother Nature can decide at some point to hammer down on us with more winter days, and she may still get around to that. For now, I’m cautiously optimistic to the point that I weeded out both the carrots/beets/radishes/kale row and the peas/cukes row in order to sow a few varieties of carrots, radishes, and shelling peas. If we get a hit of freezing weather, and sprouting stuff is killed, seed for these things is cheap. I can just throw some more seed into the rows.

Having said that, there are still carrots from last year in the row. I found today that something has been nibbling at the leafy carrot tops. Usually, that equals a bunny – and I have found rabbit nests in the asparagus and carrot rows before. That means another item for the todo list: do a walkaround of the fence, as there’s a gap somewhere that needs to be closed.

Things I did not get completed? Lots. many things. I’m not going to have one of those conversations with myself about why things didn’t get done and how I’m a slacker and bad person, though. Instead, I’m just going to recognize it for what it is: illnesses threw a wrench into the grand plan, and there’s little I can do about that.

I did get the hive equipment out of the barn, as the barn bees didn’t make it. I also cleared the last of the honey off the floor in there, and tested my grow lights. The fixtures I use have two lights. On some of those fixtures, one of the sides will not work, for whatever reason. That’s a bit of a bummer, as I like to spread light out across the entirety of the tables. Instead, I’ll use those at the sides, and let the dead portion of those fixtures be on the outside of the table.

Speaking of bees, with the warmer weather comes the rampup of queens laying and the possibility of swarming. I’m going to inspect hive #8 to make sure they have plenty of room to expand without being overcrowded. When spring officially arrives, I’ll be splitting that hive at least once, and possibly twice. That’s the plan, anyhow: keep this queen’s genes in as many hives as I can.

Time to wrap this up and get back to the various work I need to do.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

 

 

Bees and beekeeping, Cancer, Life in general, Weather

Cowpie bingo

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There is such a thing. Anyone who lives near or has lived in ranching country knows what that is. For the rest of you: divide a pasture field into a grid. Number the resulting squares, and then have people put money down on a square they think the cattle you let into that pasture will take a dump. The winner gets something as a prize, but the event is generally a fundraiser kind of deal.

Winter in Florida is a lot like cowpie bingo. Every so often, Mother Nature drops by to take a dump on us, just to remind us that while we may be tropical most of the year – and sometimes even all of the year, in some cases – she can and will come down for a short stay, even given her very busy schedule.

We’ve already had six days in a row with freezing overnight temps, with one in the 20s. Then things went back to a rather Florida-like “winter”. Tonight and tomorrow, however, actual winter is back for a two day show, roping us in with the misery it’s creating up north.

Tonight, just before I geared up and went out to turn on a couple of the far taps around 10PM, it was 32F. Two hours later, and it’s dropped to 28F.

The wind has also picked up, as the blue line at the bottom shows. It’s cold. Very cold. And a terrific reminder why I will never live in the northern reaches of the country again. Had enough of that in my childhood, and I’m not anxious for more. We, unlike people in the great north who have to spend a quarter of the year at least playing host to winter, will get right back to our version of it.

In other news….see below the fold, as there’s a pic that may make some people a tad squeamish. If you don’t like blood, don’t go there.

Continue reading Cowpie bingo →

Bees and beekeeping, Food, Life in general

When life gives you fish (oil)

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So Thursday was a pretty crappy day.

As my small but deluded devoted readers know, I put a hive with a very, very small population of bees in the barn to protect them from the freeze. I had found the queen (yay!) and they seemed happy enough. The past few days have been in the mid-70s, and when I checked on them on Thursday, I found it had gotten too hot in the barn with the heater running: one of the frames had its wax melted, and there was honey and wax all over the floor.

So, I had to clean that, scooping up the honey and wax with a bench scraper, and then washing up the mess. And…the bees were not in the hive box. They were clustered up again the window. I got them down, but did not find the queen. As the queen had one wing clipped, she certainly would not be flying anywhere. She was not in the box, not on the window, and I couldn’t find her amongst the bees that had finally reached their last shift and died.

I was taking a break from the cleanup to get something to eat, and had a coughing fit – a hard one – and my throat started to close. I wrapped one of those cold towels that you put in cold water and then snap to get excess out around my neck and tried to stay calm through the wheezing. It finally eased, and was fine the rest of the evening, although it made me a bit hoarse.

To top off my craptacular day, I was going to do a formula feed through the tube, and when I flushed the tube with water before starting the formula, I felt wetness on my abdomen where the tube goes in, and then on my hands. I wondered if I’d just not put the syringe fully into the tube, but nope: the tube itself had split open at the abdomen side. It’s been in place for eleven months, so it wasn’t terribly surprising, but it was (and is) annoying. When I coughed, a little squirt of belly juice would erupt from one of the holes the blowout had caused. I needed something to hold things together before Tuesday, when I’ll go to the hospital and the doc will replace the thing. I took a small binder clip (the black ones with the wings), clipped it to the tube at my abdomen just before the tube goes into my stomach, then wrapped gauze around that.

Toss in some other stress, and Thursday was a shitty, shitty day. I’ll explain the oil in the next post, as I’m typing this right now and suddenly feel like I’m about to barf.

Until next time, peeps, be well.

Bees and beekeeping, Weather

Winter has arrived

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Floridians in general are not pleased when we have a real winter, despite the shortness of our exposure to said winter. I – a native Floridian – absolutely hate the few real winter days we have. I just don’t like the cold at all. I’ve been wearing two pairs of socks since September because my feet are cold almost all the time. Now, for the arrival of this:

I have on three pairs of socks, my sweats under my jeans, and a sweatshirt over my t-shirt.  For the outside times – like throwing a moving blanket over the big hive out back, a tarp on top of that because it’s supposed to rain through the day tomorrow – I put on my hat, my jacket with the heavy lining zipped in, and gloves. I made a run to the grocery store to avoid having to go anywhere at all this week if it can be avoided.

In other news, the forecast also shifted to the point where we may have sleet and/or snow  in the morning.

While I detest the extended forecast of too damn cold, I am hoping that we get some flurries tomorrow, so my niece and nephew can see snow.

On the bee front, the barn bees may not make it. When I checked on them this afternoon after covering the hive in the beeyard and the wellhead and bladder to keep them from freezing/being iced over from the rain/sleet, there were a number of dead bees on the landing board, frozen to death. I did pull a couple of frames to look down into the hive and did see some bees in there, and I am hopeful they will make it through.

I know the northerners amongst my handful of readers are laughing about my whining about the cold. But hey, there’s a reason I live here and not there, you know.

We will survive the great freezapocalypse that has our local meteorologists having weathergasms much like they did with the hurricanes that visited us last year.  But some of us – me – won’t be terribly happy about it.

Until the next time, peeps: be well. And bundle up if you’re anywhere other than SoCal or south Florida. It’s damn cold.

 

Bees and beekeeping, Cats, dogs, chickens, and other critters, Gardening, Homestead, Weather

Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year

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Not quite exactly, as it happens. Last year, our redneck neighbor people were pretty quiet on all the “Let’s light fuses on gigantic, big boom fireworks, and oh yeah, the ones that make tiny sounds but have lots of color, and the whirly ones that sound like a drunken piccolo player.”

It seems, however, that redneck neighbor people saved up their pennies from the ass end of 2015 to the ass end of this year, as they are setting off some mammoth (and probably illegal in Florida) booms over there. On the other neighbor side, they are having a new year’s eve party to which they invited people plus all the folks in the neighborhood. The invite said there would be live entertainment. Because we can hear the bass thanks to the amps over there, and because I had to let one of the dogs out, it seems the live entertainment is a mediocre cover band. I suppose in the long run, that’s better than hookers and blow performing the live entertainment.

I don’t make new year’s resolutions because resolutions are basically an every day sort of thing to me, given that I’m fairly constantly berating myself for not doing the things I really need to get done. That makes the first day of the new year just like any other day to me except it has a lot of football games on.

In other news, the beeyard is officially down to two hives. The larger one is doing well, so I left that one in place. They have plenty of bees to keep warm as we move into cold cold weather, not Florida cold weather when it’s 53F outside and we’re wearing jackets.

At some point in the past few days, the rain chances were at the times the temps would be freezing or lower. Alas, now those are gone, and it probably will not happen.

Earlier today:

Now:

The front is sinking down us and WHY CAN’T YOU PEOPLE UP NORTH CONTAIN YOUR INVASIVENESS?

Ahem.

I am not a fan of cold, and neither are my bees or plants. The dogs don’t seem to care as long as there are treats in the house.

Speaking of bees , the smaller hive that has made it through this season absolutely would not make it this week in the beeyard. While there are bees in the hive, the population is too low.  So I thought about it for about 80 seconds and decided I’d overwinter them either in the shed or in the barn. The barn won out simply because it’s a smaller space in which I can run a heater, and there wasn’t anything that needed to be moved in the barn to get a good setup. Now, we have barn bees.

The trees around them are lemons and limes I picked up on Friday. All of them are in bloom, as they are generally everbearing down here, and I didn’t want them out in the deep freeze. I figure I’ll keep them inside for the remainder of the spring, and since I already have grow lights in the barn for the seedling flats, I’ll be able to give the trees an the bees some sun-like light.

The fireworks are going off pretty regularly here now, so I guess it’s time to put my headphones on, jam out to some music and do something or other that needs to be done.

Happy new year, peeps, and may 2018 be a better year than 2017 aspired to be. Be well.

 

 

 

 

Bees and beekeeping, Homestead, Life in general, Odds and ends

Merry what?

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I’m not that big on holidays – although in the past, I’ve loved cooking for them – and christmas is no different. I’m also not really good about birthdays, either. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy them per se. I’m not the Grinch, after all. I think once some people (like me) reach a certain age and a certain level of having stuff, I’d rather just take a pass. This most recent thanksgiving, I did take a pass and only made some food to go to the place, without taking myself to the place. Some of that was because I’d have had to wear a mask while I sat and watched other people eat since one, groups of people + kids = germs, and two, I can’t eat like a regular person. So, best to avoid the whole thing. They all had fun, I enjoyed the quiet, and everyone came out a winner.

This year, I even toyed with the idea of not bothering with a tree at all, but (as my mother rightly pointed out) I do have a very young nephew and an even younger niece, and the holiday is for them anyhow. I had to get a followup xray, and after that, I popped over to the Home Depot near it only to find they didn’t have a single christmas tree there.  I did, however, find that they had a very good assortment of citrus trees available. THAT got me excited. I’ll be heading over there to pick up several of them and bring them back to the ranch.

The tree: luckily, it not only ’tis the season for christmas trees, it is also the season where stores are trying to dump their christmas stuff, from trees to wrapping paper to lights. Now, we have a tree that will last for many years – probably well past the time of my own demise – and real tree prices being what they are, will pay for itself next year. It even came with lights, although one is broken in its socket, so I need to do a bit of DIY and get that light out of the socket and get it replaced. It looks pretty good, for an artificial tree. I’ve had them here and there over the years, and christmas tree technology, such as it is, has improved a bit.

Sparkling!

What else is happening at the ranch? Not a whole lot, since your humble narrator has been forced to the sidelines for much of the year. The year has been horrendous in the beeyard, and I’ll be lucky to have three hives when spring/summer ramps up next year. My internal odds are telling me I’ll probably only have one. I did order package bees, with queens, from a place in Georgia, and they’ll likely arrive in May sometime. I’m hoping 2018 will be much less disastrous from a health standpoint, and I’ll actually be able to manage them better in the coming year than I was this year.

The gardens lie silent, waiting. I still haven’t put together a seed order, but I plan to do that over the next couple of days. For 2018, I’m just going to (trying to) stick to core staples and not get a bunch of new/exotic stuff. We’ll see how that works out, because anyone who gardens knows seed catalogs are like crack.

Speaking of the health front, as of yesterday, my latest round of pneumo has hit the road finally and my lungs are totally clear. This time, six weeks to clear. We’re not loving that. Goal for 2018: unsubscribe from that crap. I’ve been wearing a mask when I have to go to places like the grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Anywhere there are a fair amount of people, and those people are touching everything, the mask goes on.  It also keeps me from touching my face while I’m wandering around, and when I get back to my car, I have to wipe my hands down with those germ-killing towels before I can take off the mask. It’s kind of a pain in the ass way to live,  annoying, and probably looks strange to people, but it beats picking up some random bug somewhere thanks to a compromised immune system. Another point: I’m planning to have the feeding tube removed in early 2018. I weighed in at 122 with all my clothes/boots on at the doc’s office, which means 118-119 without them, and that’s about where I was around Halloween 2016, before the first round of pancreatitis hit. It’s enough to give me a bump in the reserve I need in the event I do pick up some malady, and enough that my gastro guy will agree to pull out the tube.

All the news that’s fit to update! Until next time, peeps: be well. And be safe.