Swarmageddon 2012

This seems like it'd be a good post for pictures, but I wasn't home when disaster hit.

It was Friday, 5/11, a beautiful day.  Such a beautiful sunny day that my bees decided to take off and move away.  My lovely and productive queen, and tens of thousands of hardworking foragers.  I'm told it was cool to see.  The neighbors thought it was "just like something you'd see on TV."  Apparently there was a vortex of buzzing bees that alighted overnight high up in the neighbors backyard.  The next day they were off to their new home.  No goodbyes, and since they all ate heavily before their journey, not even much honey left.

What is left?  Well there is a little stored honey and pollen and they left a few workers behind to tend the incubating larval brood.  The workers are trying to raise a few of these larvae to be a new queen, which supposedly has an ~80% chance of success.

Now I'm on vacation and when I return in 3 weeks I may have a dead and empty hive, or I'll have a new young queen, with some spacious honeycomb to fill.  Before leaving I took out some of the combs with an incubating queen and put them in a different box with some of the workers.  This was a risky move, because that leaves minimal resources for both boxes.  On the other hand, now they each have a chance of raising a queen, so hopefully one, if not both, will have a laying queen in a few weeks.  Worst case scenario would be that I return to no bees, and cross my fingers that I can catch someone else's escaping swarm.  Best case scenario, both boxes raise a queen but have to fight back from a population too small to make much honey.

Either way this will be a "rebuilding year" for the bees, and a year without a big honey flow for us.

Spring Update

I think it's safe to say that spring is officially here.  The bleeding hearts are up, and came up fast enough that the slugs couldn't get them.

And the wisteria is covered in fragrant blossoms.  Last year this vine flowered once in the spring and again in the summer, so I'll keep my fingers for that.

Even the girls are feeling Springy.  Here Juliet is sporting her new spring hairdo, and eating baby's first pancakes.  What a milestone!

Oh, and I ate the spring's first homegrown peapod today.  No picture of that, it's in my stomach now.

M, Sammy and Daddy plant lettuce.

Spring.

It must be spring, officially.  The sun is out, and things are growing in the garden...some good, some bad.

First the good.  The bees are hard at work.  Go bees!

Second, the first pea plant has decided to flower.  This is one of the plants that was started indoors, then spent a few weeks under a row cover, and has now been out in the open for the last few weeks.  Go peas!

And then the bad news: the pests are on to all the delicious happenings at the MCF.  What I used to call the cabbage moth is actually a Little White (Pieris rapae), an invasive from Europe that thrives all across North America, including the Miller City Farm.  This one (below, on the kale just L of center) showed up today, flitting from kale leaf to kale leaf, leaving single yellow-green eggs that will soon be unstoppable green caterpillars.  I guess the kale are headed for the brazing pot now while we still have them.

Bees!

Bees. It's been many weeks of anticipation and education as I attended bee class and read countless beekeeping references.  But all the preparation still didn't prepare me for the moment I popped the lid off of my box of 10,000 bees!

But first, getting them home.  I'd put a downpayment on a "nuc" of bees back in March.  (a nuc of bees cost $99, if you were wondering).  A nucleus is an active hive, scaled down to a small box with 5 frames.  The bees have been living in this hive for a few weeks, so the queen has been laying and the workers have the frames full of honey and pollen to feed the growing brood.  On the scheduled date of April 7th, Maddy and I went to the nursery to pick up our hive.  Being good Portlanders, we of course rode our bike.  Here's our new minivan-sized bike, Maddy, and the nuc:

We put the box in the backyard and pulled the plug blocking the entrance hole and....nothing happened.    But as soon as the sun had warmed up the box, the bees swarmed out and flew in a vortex, accomplishing their orientation flight to get there new bearings.  After an hour of buzzing vortex, the workers were off to investigate the neighborhood, leaving relatively fewer bees in the hive, and it was now the safest time to open the box.  I put on a white shirt (bees stay calm around white) and put on my veil:

I pulled the lid off, and to my pleasant surprise the bees remained happy and busy.  Unfortunately there aren't any pictures of this, since Gretel was holding Juliet and they wanted to stay a bit back from the action.  Trying to cause minimal bee casualties, I carefully transferred the 5 full frames to my first deep box, and added 5 empty frames to fill it out.  On went the cover, and the bees were settled into their new digs:

The unpainted wood is an entrance reduce that closes down the size of the entrance while the hive is still young and small.  This makes the entrance easier to defend in case of raiding by a stronger hive.  Here is a video of the girls in action 5 days later. Be sure to turn on the sound:

Springtime!

Greens

You may recall that a while back I put some lettuce and brassica starts in the ground under cover.  This week the weather has been pretty good, so I decided to take the cover off the row:

In there is a mix of lettuces with chard and kale as well.  Some of the chard took pretty heavy bug damage, but it looks like everything is still growing.  Strangely, the plants get larger the further along the row you get.  I wonder if there is a fertility gradient in the soil, or if its the moisture?  I'm not sure, but here is the last lettuce in line, with my hand for perspective.  It's almost salad time:

First Asparagus

I can't seem to remember what variety of asparagus I planted last season.  Apparently something purple because here it is, the first asparagus stalk of the season!  Yesterday it was 60 and sunny, and the long range forecasts are for warm and sun.  Maybe this stalk will grow and harden off before the slugs get it?

Seed Timing

Technically it's spring now, but I'll admit that its more "early spring" than "spring spring."  But on the rare sunny day that gets mixed in, a farmer gets tempted to plant.  I was recently reading the instructions on my pea packages and apparently starting the seedlings indoors is discouraged, and they should be planted outside "as soon as the soil can be worked."  With that advice under consideration and then ignored, I usual go ahead and start plants indoors, aiming for ~Presidents Day as ideal seeding time for peas.

Here's a comparison that backs up my thinking.  Check out these pictures taken today, the first one is of snow peas, planted outdoors on 2/24.  They're planted up against a nice warm piece of southern facing foundation.  Look how big they are (or aren't):

Ok, maybe you had to squint but they're there, right in the middle.  Now for comparison, here are some peas that I started on 3/15, indoors, then transplanted out the other day.  Time will tell which grow faster or produce more, but for plants that are about 4 weeks younger, these guys look pretty good:

In my experience-based opinion, it makes more sense to start peas indoors then transplant them out after they have 3+ leaf pairs.  This is because spring growing conditions are challenged by the reemergence of the local slug population.  Slugs like to eat my peas right at the surface as they first break ground, but they're less inclined to climb up to the higher leaves.  Hopefully these larger plants will have at least a fighting chance.

St. Patrick's Day

I'm not sure when potatoes are supposed to be planted.  But I do know when St. Patrick's Day is every year, so that's when I plant them.

A few days prior I dug out a ditch of a bed for them, and then backfilled with compost, fertilizer, and straw.

After her nap, I recruited my helpful assistant and the potatoes went right in.  We planted about 2# of spuds, so I'll be curious to see what our end-of-season yield is on this operation.