Friday, May 31, 2013
Carrots
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Bee update 2013
Now that it's May it's bee swarm season. And since both of my hives died last year, I equate swarm season with free bees... So here's how it works:
Step 1: find a swarm of bees. Ok, done.
Step 2: Shake/scoop/snip the swarm (+/- the branch) into your hive, or any old box. Assuming the queen lands in the box, the workers follow her pheromones and stream into the box. Pretty cool video? I know, right?!
Step 3: Relocate the hive somewhere nice, and enjoy your new colony of honey bees.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Garlic
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Extinction
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Potato Patch
Yo, yo, yo.... POTATO!! Holler if you can hear me you Spuds!
This week was potato harvest time. Fortunately I had Maddy digging with me. She's a pro:
Here are the production totals, by type:
Russian Banana Fingerling: 8 oz planted, 3 lbs 13 oz harvested, yield=5.63x
California White: 10.5 oz planted, 2 lbs 13 oz harvested, yield=4.29x
Chieftan: 23 oz planted, 5 lbs 10 oz harvested, yield=4.09x
So all in all we pulled about 12 pounds of spud out of the ground, not bad from one row! I bet that our thick and unimproved soil held back yield, plus I didn't fertilize much and the seed potatoes were planted pretty tight. Next year we'll do even better!
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Tomato
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Fish
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Bee Update
Friday, July 6, 2012
July 6th
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Bee Update
It's been a little over 3 weeks since Swarmageddon. Before we left town I went into the hive and found lots of honey and pollen stores, and lots of capped brood (ie: growing babies scheduled to hatch in about a week). All in all, the departing swarm left things in good order. I also found about 12 queen cells which are intended to grow into new princesses. These young ladies then have to fight to the death to determine who will be the new queen.
But I was worried that there were too many queen cells (if more than one survives, then the hive will be broken up but yet another swarm(s). And there is only about an 80% chance of any of the princesses growing up to be functional queens--apparently fighting to the death and then getting eaten by a bluejay happens from time to time. So I took half of the bees, honey, and brood and two of the queen cells and moved them to my back up box. I left the other half of the bees, honey, brood, and two queen cells in the main hive. And the rest of the queen cells were destroyed.
The idea is that in three weeks a new Queen will be hatched, mated, and laying eggs. Since I have two boxes, I could end of with:
-two queens (sweet!)
-1 queen (and then I could recombine the two boxes into one larger hive
-or no queens (bummer!).
Fast forward to the present.... yesterday I checked on my backup box. Hmmm, no eggs, no brood. This hive is on borrowed time since all of the workers are growing old and there is not a younger generation. The main hive also has a lot of senior citizens, and no eggs, but I did find a queen. A queen... but she should have started laying eggs by now. Maybe she hasn't because the weather has been too bad to take a mating flight? Or maybe everything is going slow because it's been cool and rainy? Maybe she's just redecorating the nursery? Or worst case, maybe she's infertile. I'll give it another week, at which point we'd need to come up with a new queen ASAP.
Here are the bees resting in the backup box for bedtime: