It's Spring!

Or at least as far as I'm concerned, it is.  In my world here in northern NJ, spring started over the weekend.  Not because of the rising temperatures, though that certainly makes me happy, but because Saturday night the clocks changed!  It wears me out, more than you'd think a one-hour time change should, but it also makes me happy to be leaving the office in daylight.

And the other reason it started to feel like spring this weekend is because on Saturday was the first annual FLOW Green Fair (FLOW = Franklin Lakes, Oakland, Wyckoff), and I had a hand in it!  It was organized and hosted by the three environmental commissions, with my own commission chair and town's green team really spearheading it.  If you ask me, although of course as a first year event it had a couple logistical issues, it was a raving success.

I did two things for the fair, specifically.  The first was getting the president of the Northeast NJ Beekeepers Association (my local club) to take a booth and teach everyone about bees.  He had a lot of interest, of course.

And the second?  I spent the day face panting, of course!  I figured they had enough help with the environmental displays and organization, and it was something I could offer that others couldn't.  I was a hit.

Then again, so were the displays and the hip hopping fruit.

Putting the Bees to Bed

A lot of people ask us where the bees stay during the cold, winter months.  I love that they're so concerned, as so are we!  Some have asked us if we bring them inside, put the hive in the garage, close up the openings, or what actually do we do with our girls?

The answer?  Pretty much nothing.

Crazy, right?

Well, it's not 100% nothing.  We did treat them for varroa mites for a month before it got too cold.  Varroa mites are the bane of a bee's existence.  And a beekeeper's too.  The mites are these horrendous tiny parasites (tinier than bees, obviously), with which all hives in the US are afflicted, but if the population gets too high, they'll kill an entire colony!  So we treated for mites, and then this past weekend went into the hive to remove the strips we used.

While in there, we got to see that our girls had a nice population going, and a bunch of full frames of honey in the top hive box.  We gave them some pollen and fondant to eat anyway, wished them well, and closed 'er back up.

That's it 'til spring, folks!  Now we just keep our fingers crossed that they make it through the winter, which here in NJ promises to be another brutally cold one, and see in the spring how they've fared.

In the meantime, the bees take care of themselves.  They've already kicked out their drones (the males, which are useless to them through the winter months when queens aren't mating and food - honey - is limited).  As it gets colder, the workers huddle in a ball around their queen, moving around the hive in sync to maintain body heat while they eat all the honey they've made throughout the spring and summer.  As long as there's enough honey to sustain them (plus the bit of fondant and pollen we provided), they should be ok when we check on them in the spring.  Through this whole time, they don't leave the hive.  Believe it or not, that also means that they don't go to the bathroom!  Bees are exceptionally clean critters and will not go to the bathroom in the hive.  Imagine all those little crossed legs!

If we do have an unseasonally warm day, one of those weird. sunny, 66 degree February days, the girls may come on out to relieve themselves and forage a bit.  If we can, we'll take the opportunity to get them some more fondant before spring.  If not, they're on their own.

Wish our girls luck!  Fingers crossed that they'll come through well and be all ready for the forsythia and dandelion blooms!

'Cause if they're healthy then?  It means honey for us in July!

The New Kid

There's a new addition to our family!  I haven't been without a dog for more than a couple months at a time since I was 9 years old, and now that Eric has had one, he can't be dogless either.

Enter Jack.

Our new guy is just over four months old, half yellow lab and half either great pyrenees or husky.  No matter what he is, how amazing is that smile?

We got him through the Save A Pet Rescue in Stroudsburg, PA, from their sister organization, Crossing Paths Animal Rescue in Alabama.  I have to say, working with Save A Pet and Crossing Paths has been an absolute pleasure.  They've got an amazing outlook regarding rescue work, and Eric and I would recommend them to anyone, not to mention work with them again ourselves.

They drove all night to transport Jack and his compatriots up from Alabama to Pennsylvania, where we picked him up at 7:30 on Saturday morning, and headed back to Petsmart to get him tags and let him pick out some treats and toys before bringing him home to settle in.

Because he was coming from down south, we couldn't meet him before adopting him, but we already loved him.  In fact, I spent three nights making this dog bed for him.  I made the pillow first, and then the bolster to fit around it.  I left it as two parts, and we brought the pillow to PA for him to lie on during the ride home.

He loved it immediately!  And after being in the truck all night with his puppy compatriots, he sacked out for most of the ride home.

A stop at Petsmart for some toys, a bone, and training stuff, and he was ready for a walk around the block and some fun in the yard.

It's love already!

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I Have This Bad Habit

Procrastination.  That's standard for me.  But that's compounded by my waxing and waning excitement about things too.

If you've been reading along, you know we have bees.  I may have mentioned sometime since last summer when we first decided to get bees that we really intended to get two colonies, in two hives.  In preparation, I finished painting and sealing the Winnie the Pooh hive and started the sea life (fish) hive.

And then I stalled.  We weren't getting bees last summer, as we'd hoped, since it was too late in the season and we couldn't risk them being unable to overwinter.  I was still excited at the prospect of bees, but it was happening somewhere in the distant future.

Then, spring started approaching... but we found out we were going to end up with one nuc, for one hive.  So I still didn't finish the fish hive.  Pooh was already done and we wouldn't need the fish hive this season.

[For those who may not know, a "nuc" is a nucleus hive; approximately 5 frames of drawn honeycomb filled with honey and various stages of brood (eggs, larvae, pupae), plus full of worker bees, a few drones, and one mated queen.  The benefit to having more than one hive is the ability to mix and match frames.  So for instance, recently when we found ourselves queenless, had we a second hive, we could have pulled frames of brood from the fish hive to install in the Pooh hive, and we wouldn't have the issue we're experiencing now, which is a decrease in population while the new queen's eggs become larvae and pupae before becoming worker bees.]

So the fish hive stagnated.

And stagnated.

And then at the May beekeepers' meeting, there was this guy.  He announced that he was splitting several of his hives into nucs.  I raced over to him after the meeting, found out the price, and gave him my card.

And then didn't hear from him.

So the fish hive continued to stagnate.

Until this past weekend, when he called and said the nucs would be ready at the end of this week!  Holy crow, I only had 5/8 of one deep painted and ready!  So last night, at my first opportunity, I had to finish the one hive box so we could seal it tonight and have it ready for the weekend.  With a nuc, we're only installing 5 frames in a 10-frame box, so we don't need a second box right away.  Of course, I'm going to get going on the second box now, because the breed we're getting are Buckfast bees and they're notorious for multiplying quickly.  That's a terrific thing for hive strength, especially this late in the season, but it also means they should need a second deep pretty soon.

Second deep later, though.  First, the first deep of the fish hive...

As you can see, I've been having fun.  We've got, so far, a cleaner shrimp and an oyster with a pearl, a hammerhead shark and some seahorses, a clownfish in an anemone and a hippo tang, and then a couple of jellyfish with a moorish idol.

Our girls will be living in style!

Wanna See What Royalty Looks Like?

So today we got to do our first inspection since releasing the queen into the hive.  I was so stressed out that I had a nightmare last night that all I saw flying in our yard were drones and the hive itself was being robbed.

[All drones is bad; you need the vast majority of a colony's population to be worker bees.  The drones are the males and only useful when a virgin queen needs to mate.  Robbing occurs when foreign bees or wasps smell the hive's honey and race in en force to steal it.  The hive's bees will fight the invaders to the death, leaving your colony very weak if you don't or can't move fast to help them.]

That didn't happen.  We did see a bunch of drone comb (capped cells that were shaped very bulbously, rather than flatish), which initially concerned us.  Until we got to frame 6.

On the 6th frame, we saw a lot of open cells filled with liquid, which Eric initially thought was honey.

And then he spotted her.

The queen!  She's honestly easy to spot right now, as most of our bees are still the original dark ones, and she's so light, we don't even need the green dot on her back yet.  But as her brood hatches, and their coloration will be more like hers, she'll be a little tougher, even though you can see the difference here.  She's much bigger than the workers, with no striping, and a very elongated abdomen.  That abdomen is like that because that's where she stores her eggs and the sperm from her bout of mating, whereas workers don't have the same needs.

What you're seeing happening here is that the workers surrounding her are attending to her and grooming her.  This is great behavior to see, especially since it's obvious they've taken to their new queen.  The biggest indicator of that is that she's alive.  But it's nice, for me, to see them caring for her as they should, since those are our original bees doing it, not her own brood.

So... what we initially thought was nothing more than honey, I'm now speculating is actually a frame full of royal jelly with eggs floating in it.  At least we hope so!  It seems reasonable, and eggs are really tiny and hard to see.  Next week will be the real telltale time, because by then we should see larvae and maybe even pupae.

Fingers crossed!

Nature is Resilient

The other day, our friends came over with their three-year old son.  He's a cutie, but he's really active.  And man, he loves his trains.

We have this big flowerpot that was here when we moved in.  I have no idea what was in it before, but last summer I planted some nasturtiums.  They're annuals, so I wasn't expecting to see them again, but the other day we were out working on the yard, and there they were!

See those heart-shaped leaves?  Nasturtiums!  Crazy, right?  They must have just re-seeded themselves.  Awesome.

But back to the friends' son and his trains.  All of a sudden, his parents noticed he was driving his trans around IN my flower pot, over and through the nasturtiums.  Guess what?  It's still kickin'!

Another example... last summer, Eric & I bought a second blackberry plant.  We planted it too late, and it seemed dead as a doornail.  This spring, I pulled it out of the ground like a plug, a solid, dead root ball.  But I left it in place, just because I was on my way into the house from work and didn't have time to trash it right then.

Boy, am I glad for my tendency toward procrastination!  This weekend I went to pull it out... and ended up putting it right back!  There were new, young roots and leaves growing from the base of the blackberry.  Talk about resilient!

Holy crow!  You have no idea how happy I am that I was a lazy slacker and hadn't yet thrown away the blackberry bush.  I love blackberries.  Love.  They're my favorite berry.  So losing it, especially unnecessarily, would just be sad.

So now I'm hoping that all of nature is just as resilient... like our bees.

When Eric and I did our weekly inspection of the hive on Memorial Day, we found this.

For those of you who  may not be well versed in the world of the honeybee, that frame of honeycomb is wrong.  We're still learning ourselves, for sure, but I had a feeling it just wasn't right... and I was correct.  The brood (those white-filled cells you see and the ones with little white dots in the bottom are larvae and pupae) are supposed to be clustered together, as are the capped cells and cells filled with pollen or honey.  Instead, this looks scattered, like a shotgun.

I mentioned this all last week.

I immediately posted the photo to our local beekeeping FB page, and was informed that we had a dead or failing queen.  Yikes!  So the very next evening, I was picking up a brand new queen and the beekeepers association president came on over to help us try and find the prior queen if she was still alive (we didn't, she's dead), and install the new one.

She went into the hive with her attendants, still in their cage.  And then this past Saturday, we went back into the hive.  Although they were definitely investigating, it didn't look like they had been biting the cage, which would be a sure sign that the old queen still lived or that they generally weren't accepting the newbies (haha, newbees!) so we released them.

You can totally tell the difference between the old crew and the new, as our original bees were really dark.  The new ones are very blond Cordovans.

 

Again, it looked a lot more like investigation than attack.  The queen went immediately into the comb, hopefully to start laying.  But at least she didn't seem to want to stick with her girls for protection.  And the next morning, I saw one of the blonds returning to the hive with pollen-packed legs.

I take this as a good sign that "business as usual" has resumed in the colony.

The toughest part now is waiting for this weekend to check in on them!  But we must.  So... until then, fingers crossed for the resilience of nature and its extension to our girls.

Abdication or Assassination?

When last we checked in with the Pooh hive, almost exactly a month ago, things were looking good.  Last weekend when we did our inspection, we thought things looked good then too.  In fact, more experienced beekeepers told us so.

We primarily checked the "new" frames - the ones that were ours, clean, and didn't come with the nuc - during that inspection, and we saw them building out a bunch of comb and filling it with pollen.  As one beekeeper pointed out, pollen is bee baby food, so things were looking pretty good.

And then we looked again this past Monday, Memorial Day.  First, a note that makes me proud of myself.  My brother-in-law was over, so I lent him my gear to wear for the inspection, while I stood just a foot or two away in jeans and a t-shirt, taking photos of the open hive.  Bees buzzing all around me, and I barely noticed.  I'm a beekeeper!

But back to the hive.  We checked the nuc frames for the first time in about two weeks, which is normal, but we didn't like what we saw.

Lots of larvae of varying stages and some capped brood too, but see  how spotty it is?  Kind of like a shotgun effect?  Yeah, that's not right.  It's supposed to be more clustered.  And we didn't see eggs, which isn't good.

Here's a couple of closeups for the curious.

Of course, the first move was to post these photos to our beekeeping group's Facebook forum and get some feedback.  As new beeks, we're not relying solely on our own shaky knowledge.  And the best thing about being a beek is the font of knowledge others are willing to share.

We got some varying opinions - some said we were queenless, some said we had a weak queen.  One said it looked like chalkbrood (it's not) and another that it looked like 100% drone comb and that we'd been sans queen for a long time and things were dire (it's not drone comb and things aren't so dire).  The key is to weed through the varying opinions and information and figure out who to trust.

We did that, and realized we've got a weak or defunct queen.  Not sure which.  I picked up a new queen after work today, and an experienced beekeeper came over to try & find our queen.  When re-queening a hive, the best thing to do is to kill the old queen.  Oddly, though with any other insect I wouldn't think twice about stomping it, the idea of killing our own queen, one of OUR girls, bothered me.  I didn't need to worry.  Yet.  Our experienced beek examined the hive three times and couldn't find her.

So the new queen went in still in her cage, and we're hoping that there's no old queen.  If that's the case, the workers will have time to acclimate to the new girl while she hangs out in her cage.  Tomorrow we need to check again for the old queen.  If we still can't find her, we have to hope she's simply not there anymore.  If we can, an assassination is in order to make room for the new.  Either way, in a few days we have to hope that the girls have worked the new queen out of her cage and accepted her.  If they don't, they'll simply kill her and we'll have to try again.

Wish us luck!

It's Embarrassing

... what our dining set looked like until a week or so ago.  It really is.  It was bad.  It didn't start it off bad.  I'm fairly certain it's circa 1980-something based on the style and the fabric on the chair seats.  I got it from my parents when I moved to my first apartment in 2002; they purchased it for me secondhand.  It was actually in great condition at the time.  Not totally my style as furniture goes, but in my first apartment with a huge, empty eat-in kitchen, "free" and "gift" were very much my style.

Over the years, there was obviously some wear and tear, especially on the fabric.  Most happened in recent years, though, after Eric and I got married.  Having three cats who loved sleeping on the very nubby, very loose-knit fabric created a situation where I didn't want my guests sitting on the chairs, which had become completely interwoven with cat hair.  And then at some point, something spilled on a chair.

And we'd been using the table to make soap and candles, and the overspill of molten soap and essential oils had marred the surface.  Also at some point, someone (*cough* Eric) left something on the table that leaked and caused water damage to the wood.

I grew to hate that dining set.  Despise it.  It made me scowl every time I looked at it.  Scowling isn't a great look for me.  People get intimidated.

So it was long past time to refinish it.  Since both Eric and I pretty much hate painted wood, the natural solution was sand and stain.  Lots of sanding.  Using quite a few belts and even more squares of sandpaper.

Have I mentioned sanding kind of sucks?  Especially when the damned chairs don't come apart and they've got rounded bits and close-together bits and a bunch needs to be done by hand?  It took for-freaking-ever.

Boo for sanding.

On the other hand, yay for staining.  We decided to go with a much more modern and formal "Kona" stain that's not black, but a very, very dark brown, dark as night.

A good coat of polyurethane, and that was done!

In the meantime, at night when I couldn't be outside sanding due to chill and lack of light, I was inside reupholstering.  I've never reupholstered a single thing in my life before!  Had to make new cushions too.  Personally, I think I did a damned good job.  We chose an also formal fabric that we ordered from JoAnn.com.  They didn't carry this particular fabric in store, but did you know you can order a swatch of their online fabrics for $3?  We discovered it while fabric shopping, and it's a stellar idea.  In this particular instance, we discovered that we loved it even more in person than online.

Seats back on the chairs, and all done!  The set was all ready for our Kenucky Derby Party!

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