In the Garden:: Week of May 2

This time of year things change so quickly.  We had rain all weekend, and the long sustained drink coupled with longer days have the flowers blooming and the pollen flying.  More and more we are starting to work on outdoor tasks.  The pool has been opened, chemicals adjusted and now just needs a good cleaning.  Unfortunately some four weeks later we are still waiting to hear back from the contractor who is bidding our deck.  Hopefully this project can still be completed this season.

We had our first asparagus with supper last night and the spinach is robust.  Sidney found a fantastic recipe for a asparagus, spinach and fennel soup that was delicious!  Everyone loved it, except the boy who grumbled at the vegetable based meal (there was sausage on the side for his benefit), but I did notice that despite his grumbles, every drop was eaten.

More and more there is green in the garden, and the flats in our grow room in the basement are just bursting.  We know we must remain patient until closer to the end of the month before much of it can go outdoors, but there is a constant pull, especially after a supper made mostly of our fresh beginnings.

The lilacs have just begun to bloom, which means regardless of temperature my kitchen windows are open wide so that I can enjoy the sweet smells for the oh too short time it lasts.

B was off yesterday, so when I got home form work we had a few errands and then after school he and Sidney went for a ride.  It was late in the day when we got the notification that our bee packages had arrived, and there is a limited window to pick them up.  So off they went while I worked on above referenced soup, to get our bees.  Now all of those flowers will truly be happy.

Honey Tree

Our bee hive began to be very active in very early spring, even on fairly cool days.  As a result, B supered (added a box to the top full of pure comb just to be filled with honey) the hive a month ago.  The week before Memorial Day was warm and the hive was increasingly active, and B had spotted some queen cells inside so we were concerned that they were preparing to swarm, but as we were headed out of town we left it to nature.  The hive is still full of bees, but Monday, B felt pretty confident that there had been swarm, and we figured c'est la vie since we had been gone.

Yesterday as the kids were spending some time outside, they came running in, did you know there are tons of bees in the tree with the mushroom in it?  Sure enough it appears that our swarm has found a new home inside of this tree.  I am happy they decided to stick around and pollinate our garden.  We may not be able to get any honey from this group, but it is pretty cool that we'll have a honey tree.....where's Pooh?

#100HappyDays :: Day 2

We let the first growth of lawn go perhaps longer than most, but it is for the benefit of the homestead.   It makes me happy to see the bees taking advantage of the multitude of blooming dandelions that we have left for them.

They are a busy bunch and already dramatically increasing their numbers.  Soon this one hive will become two.

The Ecology of the Farm

We are always fascinated by the new things that pop up around us.  Whether it is plants, insects or animals, we love to see what natives decide to call the farm home each season.  This year we have seen an inordinate number of bee species, they must be the fittest as they survived our harsh winter and are flourishing.

This morning I saw what appeared to be a small ant hill emerge in the garden.  Then I saw a green head poking out of it, and sinking back in each time it saw me.  B thinking it was a worm and being forever inquisitive decided to knock the hill down and see it closer up.  When that did not work, he took a small shovel to dig a little deeper finding these Metallic Green Bees.

After a little research we found out that they live in smallish colonies and are amazing pollinators in the garden.  Since they have very short tongues, they focus on plants that have clusters of flowers with an open architecture.  That must be why they decided to set up shop here.  This year we are experimenting with several new types of beans.  Though our green beans and broad beans are not flowering yet, a few others are. The above photo is of our row of chickpeas.  This ferny plant is gorgeous and we have just spotted our first little pod forming!

Keeping in line with the clusters of flowers that the Metallic Green Bees prefer, our first go at fava beans is treating us to an amazing square stemmed plant.

Of course the sugar snap peas are another grouping of flowers that are popular right now.  We always do our best to live along side the ecology on the farm.  These little green bees are not aggressive and we do not see any reason to rid ourselves of an important pollinator.  However, all bets are off if any of those nasty ground wasps re-appear this summer!

By the way!  We have named the farm and started its own facebook page.  Please 'like' Aisling SmallHolding-ASH   It is a place where we are sharing farm happenings.  Whether you live near or far, we hope it becomes a collective of ideas.  A place where you can share your recipes or creations from your own gardens or with the locally grown produce that you pick up.

The Politics of Bees

We are learning to become less distressed when one of our hives swarms.  We have had two swarms in the last week, one from each hive, and B has caught both and set up new colonies.  Sunday as we were grafting trees, I looked over at the garden and said "Oh no honey, there's a swarm!"  It looked like a tornado of bees.  They were all flying in crazy eight fashion and if you can see the small dark ball in the left side of the photo above, they were all catching the scent of and making their way to the queen that they chose to stay with.

You see, swarms are rarely total and many times as a result of there being a strong competing queen that has hatched.  The hive simply does not have the ability to handle these two strong women, so one vacates, and a portion of the population follows.  Just a little hive politics.

This was our giant Perone colony, and we know there to have been at least one large queen cell in development...it is still intact by the way, so there may be another swarm in the near future.  We were lucky this time, because the branch was not as high up as the previous swarm and she chose a rather flimsy one that B could cut easily, and place directly into a retrofitted bankers box.

As when leaving the hive, where the queen goes, the others follow and they all ended up nicely in the box within about half an hour.

Ironically, B had just installed two bate hives up in trees in our yard to either catch our own swarms or others looking for a home.  This group had not gotten so far as a permanent residence though and we used our last hive boxes to give them new digs.

We have set up housing for our most recent two hives on a different area of the property from the original two, and we hope this little colony takes on the attributes of the master across the yard and grows quickly.

So the positive way to look at your hives swarming, is that in many instances you have given home to robust colonies that are expanding in the ecosystem.  With both the importance of and danger to our honeybees, even if we do not catch a swarm, we have let something good off into our environment.

Pollinator

Our week is looking springlike.  Increasing to seasonal temperatures, a storm here and there, we are heading into Memorial Day weekend with a much needed taste of summer.  Our bees are robust so far this season, one of our hives may need to be split sooner than later.  Interestingly,  the sheer numbers of bumble bees around seems much increased over previous years.  Maybe it is because of the harsh winter, or maybe they have just decided to make our abode their home and help us with the work of the garden.  Love our built in pollinators.

Even The Bees

I have been somewhat absent this week, but along with work, busy school and sports schedules, and hosting a birthday party, we have family in town visiting.  It  has been a week of very cool temperatures and almost constant overcast skies with drizzle.  Though it was not the best for outdoor activities we have managed to escape, stay busy and enjoy one another.

Today for the first time all week we have real sunshine.  Perfect for soccer if not for the 22 mph sustained winds, making for a blustery hour.  Despite the wind we are basking in the sunny 62 degrees, soaking up as much Vitamin D as possible.  Even the bees who have been cooped up all week and are not fond of gusty wind are out and about coming home with legs caked full of pollen.  Aaahchooo Ah Spring!

Random 5 Friday

1.  We have tried for years to come up with the right name for our homestead.  We are now looking to some Celtic names for inspiration.  What do you think of Aisling Acres (Aisling =dream or vision)?

2.  We were thrilled to see our bees out and about for a few hours on Wednesday.  I am so glad they had the opportunity, since it appears that our temps are headed back down to the basement.

3.  I am going to try these muffins this weekend.  How can they be bad!?

4.  We got all of our seeds for the garden sorted this week, ordered some new ones, and have our plan for seed starts mapped out.  Now we will just wait and see what Mother Nature has in store for us...which at the moment that I am writing this is a 50 mph wind.

5. I recently finished Life after Life and have now been reading Monuments Men.   I have been digging being thrust into the WWII era and seeing it from such vastly different experiences.

Please join us!

Don't Eat Yellow Snow

Yesterday was the day we had been waiting for for over a week.  It was going to be warm enough that we could crack open the hives and take a peak.  We went out during lunch to begin to assess the situation.  To our excitement as we neared the hives, after trudging through knee deep snow, there was tons of activity.  Our two main hives seem to have maintained astonishingly large numbers through the winter.  Sadly our two smaller hives never became large enough to sustain themselves in the dramatic temperatures that we have had. 

They had two main activities yesterday as you can see from this photo, one was cleaning house.  They began to discard the dead bees from the hive.

The other, and arguably more important activity was getting out to poop!  Poor things.  It has been too consistently cold for them to get out and relieve themselves.  If you notice in the photos above, the snow is littered with little amber spots.  This my friends is bee poop.  You could sense their exuberance at the relief!

As we were checking each hive, they were all around us saying hi and it was as good a boost as the warm 42 degrees to our attitudes.

It appears that there is still some honey left for them to eat, but we also have ordered some fondant to supplement their feeding through the rest of the winter.  I ran to the store in the afternoon to pick up some pine shavings to replace what was in the quilt.  After B got home from work it was just twilight and we ran out to get that task done.  I wish that I had my camera with me, of course in my haste to get out before we lost the light, I forgot it in the house.  I can assure you it was a sight to see.  Aside from the little dots littering the snow for 50 feet around, a three foot circumference around the hive was completely saturated with amber.  I was going to try to catch it this morning, but the freezing rain started about 4 am and by the time it was light enough, snowball sized snowflakes were falling.  The sight around the hives gave completely new meaning to the old phrase 'don't eat yellow snow!'

Farm Frenzy

This weekend was all about plants and animals around the homestead.  The garden is thriving in our warm and muggy weather and the bees are pollinating like crazy.  I love walking through the garden and knowing that the bees doing their business are ours (or very likely so).  Even though the mosquitoes seem to be getting thicker by the hour we can not resist spending our time outdoors.

Our new little barn kitten Hickory (Cory for short) is adjusting wonderfully to her large kennel safe haven on the porch.  We named her after grandpa hickory out in the wooded area where we found her.  She is socializing beautifully and full of energy.  She is getting lots of love and play time and slowly exploring while always going back to home base to rest or if she gets spooked.  I am also happy to report she has litter box duties down pat!

We were so glad that we enticed her out when we did because Saturday night mama raccoon ushered all four of her kits out of the tree and scurried them off into the woods.  It seemed a little early for them to be out, but then fifteen or twenty minutes later Sid and I heard a large crash and the porch jumped.   A large branch from the hammock tree (where the raccoons had taken up residence) had just come down out of the blue.  I think maybe mama sensed pending danger and evacuated the household.  We have not seen her or the kits since.

Since both of the hives swarmed at the beginning of the summer, we have given them a little time to make a new queen.  After inspecting the hives on Friday, to our disappointment, neither hive had any new brood, so we knew that we had to get them new queens or give up on them.  We hate to give up on anything so we drove about an hour South yesterday to visit a gentlemen who has been beekeeping since the early 1970's and breeds queens.  After a tour of his hives and some advice, we left with two lovely queens who seemed to be immediately welcomed into their new homes.  Not thirty seconds after introducing the queen box to one of the hives, there were bees feeding her!

This is the time of year to buy herb plants because the season is in full swing and the garden centers are already trying to make room for fall mums.  That means that everything is on clearance and perfect when you are wanting to buy any volume of them.  We planted 18 lavender plants in one of the large raised garden beds.  I wanted a permanent place for a big stand of gorgeous purple and I recently found out that lavender is a great deer repellant.  Though I love that we have mama and fawn living in the back of the property, they have begun to take a bit of a toll on parts of the garden, so we will see if this acts as a gentle deterrent.

The homestead is just alive with plants and animals (us included) and they all have a symbiotic relationship; ebbing and flowing with one another in a controlled sort of farm frenzy.

If you want to see all of the homestead happenings over the weekend check this out.

What a Ride

There is such a delicate balance to nature.  Even with the most conscientious of care, it can be hard to predict which things will thrive, fail, or endure the slimmest of odds.  It can be all at once disheartening and uplifting, and we find that as we nurture different things, we become very connected to them.

Most days we walk the homestead three times, early morning, mid day and evening.  We peruse the garden, check the bees, plan for future crops or animals, let the chickens out into the yard, harvest, water, pet the bunnies, weed pull, dream, and simply enjoy.

There are ups and downs to this process, because we will notice even slight changes that lead us to investigate and sometimes worry.  Both of our bee hives have been vigorous all spring, so much so that we had to add an additional box to each of them.  This week we had slowly warming weather, then a sudden very warm day.  I noticed that one of our hives had a large number of bees congregating outside, and some beginning to beard there.  This sent me into a little bit of a panic.  Are they going to swarm?  Are they unhappy in their home?  Are they just too warm from this crazy weather and getting some air?  We watched them carefully over the last couple of days and they are hanging in there.  This morning B noticed that the other hive seems to have many fewer bees, and we wonder whether this hive swarmed.  This second hive though robust,  has not been nearly as active as the other.  Maybe it lost its queen, and they are in the process of making a new queen.   It could be the other just had a huge brood hatch and by comparison it looks much more populous.  It looks like we will be examining the boxes in more depth to see if we can see a problem, or detect a new queen cell. So many possibilities, one of which is hives sometimes just swarm, period.  We will be setting out our bait hives this weekend, hopefully looking to catch a wild swarm, and not one of our own!

There is something about relying on mother nature that is very rewarding and humbling.  Hard work can be rewarded or punished by such simple things when you are relying on the elements and ecosystem around you.  But wow, what a ride!

 **Update.  After I posted this B spoke with our bee keeper friend who is very seasoned and been doing this for many years.  It seems we anticipated everything right, and it would be unusual for one warm day to cause a sudden swarm, especially since this hive was not the one with the excess of bees.  He thinks it sounds more like a mass die off due to some contamination/poison.  It happens these days.  We will inspect the hive this weekend to see if there is still a queen, and if the numbers continue to die off.  It leaves me sad, this was not necessarily mother nature, it was man made.  Big Ag may have created crops and insecticides to increase yields, and make for cheap hybrids (where the nutrition has all but been removed; ie. today's grains).  But I wonder what the true cost will be?  We already see effects in the health of the natural ecology.   The long term health effects to humans is yet to be seen, though I think he tip of the iceberg is emerging.

Our Latest Dusting

To get a true sense that Spring in Wisconsin has finally arrived, all you need to do is take a look around.  The windshield of the car...

 The tops of the newly leafed out plants

The top of the BBQ

Or even, just the tracks made during the evening stroll around the homestead.

Ladies, and gentlemen....the pollen has arrived!  As you sit in awe of its beauty and how happy the bees must be, remember....take your zyrtec!

Habitats of the Homestead

This week has finally brought some warmer temperatures, and the homestead has begun to come alive.  All of its inhabitants are turning their faces toward the clear skies and sunshine, and soaking it all in.  The most telling sign of spring is the grass is finally green and growing like crazy.  The habitats of the homestead are coming alive, waking up from their winter drudgery.

The baby bunnies do not look so small anymore at over half the size of mom already.  They made their transition to the outside hutch easily and are enjoying the sights and sounds of the outdoors.  It has been such fun to watch them grow.  The time is soon approaching where three of the little ones will have to make their way to new homes.  I think there is a ribbon winner or two among this bunch!

The bees are emerging from the hives and testing their wings after a long winter.  We began to supplementally feed them, and though our own property has only a few flowers beginning to open, B spied a few flying home this morning with their legs coated in pollen!  We can easily spend lots of time watching these busy bees, they have such an amazing social structure, each one having an important task vital to the household.

The chickens spent some time scratching and dusting yesterday evening.  They have been cooped up (love figuring out where phrases come from!) since January when the outer enclosure roof collapsed during a heavy snow.  We had intended to repair it, but that is on hold until B's hand is healed.  So in lieu of unlimited access outside like they would normally have, we are letting them out for the last few hours of the day.  Then when they head into roost we close them in.  Despite having a large number of trees, the areas immediately around the house and barn are very open, and the chickens been subject to predatory birds in the past, so completely free access just does not work for them. 

The kale, spinach and lettuces that overwintered in the cold frame are robust and have been adorning our table all week.  We can hardly seem to make a dent in them.  I foresee a salad with every meal this week! 

With an almost non-existent spring until now, I leave you with our little hint that summer is right around the corner.  The lilacs are enjoying themselves and preparing for their own show...soon to come.  Happy Weekend!

The B word....

....or should I say a pair of B words.  The last few weeks on the homestead have been all about baby bunnies and bees.  Charles' blue ribbon winner Dot, had kits in the wee morning hours of March 8th.  This is our first experience with baby bunnies and it has been so much fun!  It is simply amazing how quickly they grow.  They have gone from little pink things to sweet bundles of fur, each developing their own little personalities.  We can't wait to see how they continue to develop.



We ordered two new colonies of bees the beginning of the month, and this weekend we picked up another hive from the beekeeper that we bought our hives from last year.  Of the two hives we went into the winter with, we lost one of them.  They were queen-less going into winter and already starting to thin out late last Fall.  The hive from the wild swarm that B captured last summer seems to be humming right along.  If all continues to go well we should be able to split that hive mid-spring, which will give us four hives total going into summer.  As a result of the lost hive, we had an unexpected honey harvest this weekend.  It is all draining now, but it looks to be more successful than the single boxes that we pulled off of the two hives last fall. To top it off, this honey has a completely different flavor...simply fantastic!

Though we were sad to lose the one hive, we know that it is a fact of life. It seems fitting that nature took something from us at the same time she gave us something in return, the two B's.

Silent Sunday ~ Buzz

Operation Swarm Containment

This morning as we were getting ready to head out the door, B called me out to the orchard.  There was a giant mass of bees swarming.  My first thought was panic.  Oh no is one of our hives vacating??  I checked them on my way there and they were both fine, humming along as normal.  Then, when I got to B's location it was amazing.  A funnel cloud shape of thousands, I think tens of thousands of bees all swarming up to a branch 30 feet above us.  What an amazing sight!  And the sound was hypnotic. ( you can take a listen by playing the video at the end of the post.)

So since it's a day and a half until we leave town and we've been racing around with laundry, currant harvest and cordial making, farm bag distribution, dress picking up, and soccer, of course we now must also attempt to capture a wild swarm to add to our homestead.  It's just how we roll.

We called our friendly beekeeper (the one who made our hives) and he gave us some directions on capturing it.  We did a little bit more research via the Google, then as soon as we got home set about operation swarm containment.



Since the swarm decided to settle very high up, B figured out which branch, and decided that with the combination of a partial cut and a pulley system we should be able to (hopefully) gently bring the branch down then shake the swarm into a box.



The key when trying to capture the swarm is to make sure that you get the queen.  Wherever the queen goes, the rest will follow.  The initial attempt jarred the branch a little more than we would have liked, but with a portion of the bees down and the branch lower we were able to watch and see where the bees congregated (i.e. queen).



B then rigged the branch so that the pulley had it bowed low enough that he could approach it with a box and a large stick,  give the branch a couple of good knocks, and the bees would fall into the box.  Spraying them with a little sugar water calms them and so he did that just prior to the transfer.



This went quite well though he felt that the queen was still with a small cluster on the tree branch.  At this point he could cut this small branch and add it directly into the box.



Within 15 minutes all of the bees were in the box!  So operation swarm containment was quite successful.  Now B is driving about an hour from here to pick up another hive, then at dusk, we'll transfer the lot into it.



Bees are amazing creatures.  Through all of this, even with thousands of bees flying around B, they didn't attack him.  He did get one sting, but not during the capture, only because when he lidded the box, one bee got squished and stung him on his gloved finger then.   During the whole process I was anywhere from 10 feet to right up close (depending on what stage) and never had any concern.  I am also thankful that our bee keeper resource is so generous as to have B go to his house while he's not home and retrieve what we need to get these guys situated.  He had even offered to come out and help us late tonight after he gets back from his family activities.  Such generosity warms the heart.

I can say we have checked one off of the bucket list.  Hmmm, now since bees swarm only a short distance from their previous hive, we may next have to search our hollow trees for some honey!!

Check out the video to get a feel for the amazing swarm symphony!