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Daily Ramble
Wednesday, 8 August 2007
It's Official! The Farm Blog has found a new home! I've
moved it over to
Wordpress, it makes life so much easier. I'm going to leave this page
up because I can't transfer these old posts to Wordpress so it will be
an archive. But as of right now, all the new posts will go onto the New Farm Blog
Sunday, 5 August 2007
Well, here we are, summer nearly over. We are officially
labeling our garden a failure for this year. I think it was a
combination of several things including bad weather, soil, pests, and
inexperience. It wasn't a total failure since we did learn from the
experience. I feel confident that next year's attempt with be better.
We did harvest a few things however, that seemed to grow better than
others. Peas...these did pretty well, we had fresh peas as a side with
a few meals and I made a yummy fresh pea soup. Next year we need to
plant more peas. We planted bush beans but those never came up. Our
fava beans on the other hand, did very well and currently the plants
are dying and the beans are drying on the vine. In a week or two we
will pull the plants up, let them finish drying and harvest what we can.
We had a few carrots (15!) but they were very small....like the size of
baby carrots. They did taste good though so I mixed them with the peas.
Our onions did a bit better than the carrots, they were also small but
we ended up with about 40 or so. I harvested about 20 of them and left
the small ones out for a few more weeks.
We love John
Seymour especially his writings on self sufficiency and
working on a small holding. Anyway, he recommends curing and storing
onions like this...
He's got a diagram in one of his books for tying them this way...it
looked simple enough, but let me tell you, it took me a whole hour to
figure this out, I felt like such a dummy, but I finally got it.
They've been curing like this for a week or so and are nearly ready to
store in the cellar.
I've also harvested a few white cabbages and made soup with them. I
think we will end up with about 8 more usable cabbages for the winter.
The slugs and snails really love cabbage but luckily they eat the loose
outer leaves first and seem to leave the hard cabbage head alone, at
least for now. I am watching them closely and will harvest the rest
early if it looks like the bugs are moving to the main part of the
cabbage.
The corn stalks are getting bigger but I don't think we'll actually get
any corn. We have several corn fields surrounding our village and those
all have fairly sizable ears, ours don't even have ears yet so I'm not
too hopeful.
The tomato plants dyed a long time ago without ever producing anything.
The potatoes were a huge disappointment. The plants grew really
well and then dyed down just like they should, but when we dug
for potatoes last week, we found about 15 small potatoes....we had at
least 30 plants and got...15 potatoes...it's just plain sad... I have
no idea what happened to them. Whether they got eaten by bugs or rotted
in the ground...alien abduction? ....I don't know...it's just
plain weird. The potatoes we did get tasted great.
Our apples and berries did really well for their first year. Now I just
need to figure out how to keep the worms out of the apples for next
year.
I don't want to discuss the brocolli....
So, that's my sad little garden tale...now we'll move on to the bees.
I'm not sure if the honey bees in the US have a problem with mites but
here in Germany they do. They can't deal with the mites themselves so
they have to be treated every year at just about this time. Peer
treated ours last week...let me tell you, they didn't like it, not at
all. I have never seen these bees so aggressive. Peer tells me that
they are naturally a bit more nervous at this time of year anyway
because winter is coming. I haven't been stung but they have dive
bombed me a few times when I go out into the garden. They seem to
prefer stinging Peer. Really though, they are not bad bees, it is
understandable that they get nervous at this time of year, and having
to disturb the hives to treat them for mites doesn't help. Peer wants
to try a different system for beekeeping next year. One that is a bit
less "hands on", which gives the bees a bit more freedom to do things
in their own way without some human sticking his hands in and mucking
stuff up every week or so...we think it will make for happier, maybe
even healthier, more content bees. But, more about that later.
So, that's about it for now. I'm thinking of moving this blog to a real
blog format. Mainly because those blog programs are set up really well
especially for things like archiving. I'm not sure yet if I'll do it or
not, I need to look into the different blog sites and see. I'd like to
be able to move the whole blog including past posts if I can, but I'm
thinking it won't work. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please
share.
Sunday, 22 July 2007
Wow, a whole month snuck by since the last post...where does
the time go? (You might want some coffee and maybe pack a lunch, this
post is pretty long!)
Where to begin...
Well, we've had a pretty icky summer so far. It's either hot as heck or
it's raining, cool and overcast. Mostly it's been rainy, cool and
overcast. Personally, I actually don't mind weather like this because I
hate the heat, I'd be happy if the temp. never got above 70°, but
it isn't so good for the garden. Our garden isn't doing as well as we'd
hoped but we try to keep in mind that it's our first real garden and it
is also the first time in decades that anything has been done with this
land, other than using it as a garbage dump. We've learned a lot
this year so even if we reap nothing, it was still worth the effort. I
took a stroll through the garden today with the camera and I've got
some pictures to share.
But first a bee update...this weekend is the last honey harvest of the
year. Our earlier harvest consisted of honey made from canola plants,
its much thicker than wildflower honey, it's a white color and
crystalizes easily so you can really cut it with a knife. It's good but
very sweet. This harvest is mainly honey from wild flowers. It's more
like what most people think of when they think of honey. A beautiful
amber color and much more fluid than our first harvest. We didn't get
much though, just about 12 jars. We could have left this honey for the
bees, but we wanted to taste it and see how it differed from the
earlier batch.
The bees are beginning to slow down a bit now and get ready for fall
and winter. They have thrown all of the drones out of the hives because
they serve no purpose anymore and are just dead weight for the hive.
The queens are starting to lay less and the hives will begin to produce
winter bees, the bees that will keep the hives alive over the winter.
These are the combs that Peer collected today.
Peer is going to have to put food (sugar water) into the hives so that
the bees can survive the winter, they didn't make enough honey to
support themselves, even with the honey we took today. You'll
remember that we started out this spring with 2 hives, we now have 6...
Peer is going to combine some of these hives before winter to try and
make them stronger.
Just a few minutes ago we went hunting for queens...well, Peer
hunted... I took pictures. In order to combine some of these hives,
Peer has to play musical queens. He needs to remove (and kill ) the
weaker queen and replace her with the stronger queen of the 2 hives.
When he combines them there can only be one queen. Let me tell you that
it is like looking for a needle in a hay stack trying to find one
certain bee out of 40,000!
The bees did not like this proceedure and proceeded to sting Peer 3
times. I stood very still in my " I'm just a tree, don't mind me"
pose...it actually worked this time!
In the picture above, see the second hive from the front? That's the
hive we are taking the queen from. She is the queen from one of our
original hives. She was our first swarm, the one that fell under the
original hive...I wrote about that one a few months ago.
So, how do
you catch the queen then? Here's how... 
First you
need one of these...it's a little white plastic thing that you use to
catch the queen in, once you find her.
And away we
go!
Like I said, until you're a seasoned beekeeper, trying to find a queen
in the middle of 40,000 other bees, is like trying to find a needle in
a hay stack.
All you can do is just start searching!
and searching....
and searching....
and searching....
and if you are lucky, you will find her!
We were lucky, this queen has a tiny white dot on her back, which is a
tiny piece of paper that was glued on her back for just this reason. It
sure makes life easier. Even with the little white dot, she was still
not easy to find.
Once you see her, you gently scoop her up with your little white
plastic thingie...
like so..
then she is transfered to a little cage...
This cage will be her home for a day or 2. It will be placed into the
new hive where the bees can slowly get used to her and take care of her
through the bars, before she is freed.
Then Peer began searching in the other hive for the queen he needs to
remove and kill.
You'll notice the addition of gloves...this hive wasn't too happy with
us. After 3 stings, Peer doned the gloves.
I wisely decided to move back and practise my " I'm just a tree...no
REALLY...just a tree...honest" pose, alittle farther away from the
action..
Well, Peer never did find the queen from this hive so he went ahead and
put the caged queen in and will check on her in the morning. We're not
sure what will happen. They might kill her or maybe they will begin
taking care of her. Tomorrow Peer will try again to find the other
queen and remove her.
And now on to some garden pictures!
As I said, the garden isn't doing so well. Too wet, too cool, not
enough sun, too many pests.
We planted a large patch of phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia), in Germany
this plant is called Bee's Friend, our bees definitely like it :)
Not everything in the garden is looking bad. I'm really happy with the
beans and peas.
These are fava beans.
We also have some bush beans but I can't find them, they're in the
middle of our fava beans and our peas...I know they are in there
somewhere..lol! I'll keep looking :p
Anyway, here are the peas. I can't wait to eat these. I think they'll
be ready in a week or so. I opened a pod today and they are still too
small, but looking good.
The onions are doing sort of ok and there are a few carrots planted
here too.
The broccolli....hmmm....
The broccolli is just weird. It's growing long and thin, it actually
looks kinda like a snake. I know this can't be right. It certainly
doesn't look like the broccolli that I buy in the grocery store. I'm
wondering if we have some strange Chernobylish variety....mutant
broccolli....
Things are looking a bit cheerier on the cabbage front....at least they
DO look rather cabbag-ish. There are definitely a few that are trying
to develop heads...now if the slugs will just leave them alone, we
might end up with a few decent cabbages.
I'm pleased with the apples. Even though most of them have worm holes,
they are looking nice and red and the trees have grown really well for
their first year.
And I will leave you with this picture of a bumble bee visiting the
last of my lavender blooms ...
Friday,
22 June 2007
I thought I'd add this nifty weather widget so you all would
know what our weather was like around here. I also found a clock :)
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
What's new? Well, our property got a major face
lift this past weekend :)
You know, bartering is such a great concept, I wish people would do it
more often, and I wish that money wasn't such an all encompassing,
driving force. We all have talents and skills, we all have self worth
and in a society that thought more along these lines, so much could be
done simply by exchanging these things for the special skills and
knowledge of others. This past weekend here at our house was a perfect
example of this concept in action. Over the past few years, Peer has
repaired and reinstalled the programs on our neighbor's computer
several times. He never asks for money and they never discussed how
Peer might be re-embursed for his time, because they just knew that
something would eventually come up.... a way to repay. This particular
neighbor is a mason. Knowing that we had some much needed landscape
work that we needed to do, and that we only had shovel and wheel barrow
to do it with, he brought his work backhoe home with him and spent the
day here on Saturday, doing the work we needed to get done. Something
that would have taken us weeks to finish, that guy did in about 6 hours
with that machine :)
The main thing we needed to do was to fill in a huge old fish pond. I
wish we could have repaired it and used it again as a fish pond, but it
was completely ruined and would have cost us a small fortune to repair.
So instead, we filled it in with stone and earth.
Here is a before picture of this area. Looks like a jungle doesn't it :p
It is so over grown you can't even see the pond, see those small yellow
dots in the middle? That's the pond, those are a big clump of swamp
marigolds growing in a barrel. There is also an old party shed on the
right side and along the whole left side are about 20 fir trees planted
as a hedge. It is totally over grown and impossible to walk around on
because the ground is so uneven, full of holes, hidden pipes, old
building stones, etc. Not to mention in the summer it is full of 5 ft
tall stinging nettle plants. Completely useless land....
Peer actually did quite a bit out here by hand. He cut down all of the
fir trees and cleared a lot of the foliage away and the garbage
that was hidden underneath.
Even after all his hard work, it still looked like this...still completely unuseable...
Then came the mason with his backhoe :)
He pushed all the piled up dirt and stone into the old pond, tore up
all the fir tree stumps and smoothed out the ground.
He even helped Peer to lay a new pipe to carry water away from the
house :)
And here is what it looks like now. The party shed is still there but
wow, what a difference and we can actually walk around out here now. :)
We are going to build a sitting area out here, put down some concrete
tiles and make a place for BBQing and just relaxing :) Peer will also
move his bees over here next spring and build a little shed for
himself, probably where the old shed is standing. And the thing that
really makes me happy is that this was done not for money, but in
exchange...one person's talent and knowledge exchanged for that of
another, not demanded up front, but freely given when it was needed.
More things should be done that way in my opinion.
And, moving on to the other side of the house....I hung window boxes on
my studio. I think it's totally adorable
Sometime later this week I plan on painting a business sign to hang
over the door.
Wednesday,
13 June 2007
Since today is a much more pleasant and cool day, I took
some photos of the garden to show you the progress.
First of all, here is the main garden. There are 5 planting beds.
In the first row, closest to the bottom of the picture, I've planted
some cooking herbs and some lavender. Everything is doing ok in here
except the parsely which the snails and slugs ate. There is also celery
planted in this row, or I should say there WAS...they ate that too.
There is some sort of cabbage planted at the end of this row, but I'm
not sure exactly what.
In the next row there is garlic, it's ok, but not great, you can see it
is a bit brown. Then there is onions and leeks those look better. And
another type of cabbage, doing pretty well. In the next row, the row
with all the tall plants there are beans, peas and potatoes, all of
those seem to be doing really well.
On the other side of that row is the corn row....
Nope...not doing well at all. They ate most of the plants, I think
there are 10 or so that MIGHT make it. Probably enough for us anyway. I
was pissed about the corn plants, I love corn and it isn't very popular
over here, except as pig food. :(
Then there is the berry patch, these are doing really well.
Raspberries
I think these are gooseberries but I could be wrong. They are called
Johannesberren in Germany.
And finally one of our apple trees. Both trees have a nice crop of
apples coming. The trees have a few aphids and some sort of sucking fly
is sucking the leaves of the apple tree and also the lavender plant.
I'm not sure what kind of fly it is. It acts like a mosquitoe except it
drinks from leaves. As far as bugs go though, I think we're doing
pretty well!
Sunday, 10 June 2007
I hate to whine, but I am really over this heat
now. We need some rain really badly. The garden is going to start
shriveling in a day or so if we don't get some. We can't use tap water
to water the garden, we don't have an outside spigot, and even if we
did, water is expensive here and so we wouldn't do it that way even if
we could. Normally what is done here is using water from rain barrels.
We don't have any yet. We're going to have to haul water by the bucket
full from the creek, probably tomorrow. I have rain barrels on my
wish list..
So anyway, while I'm here, I thought I'd share with you a recipe for a
nice summer salad. We had this with dinner tonight, it's a greek salad,
we eat it alot in the summer. If you grow parsely and peppermint, this
is a good thing to use them for. Ok here we go.... 
Couscous Salad
2 cups uncooked couscous
2 cups boiling water
2 cups chopped lettuce
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1/2 minced fresh parsely
2 tbsp. minsed fresh peppermint leaves
1/3 cup sliced green onions
200gm feta cheese crumbled
1/2 chopped green olives
1/4 cup olive oil
1/3 cup lemon juice
1 tbls water
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp salt
Put couscous in a large glass bowl and pour the boiling water over it.
Cover and let set for 10 minutes, then let it cool to room temp. I
usually do this part sometime in the morning or early afternoon so it
has time to cool by evening.
Add the lettuce, tomatoes, parsely, peppermint, green onions, feta
cheese and olives together with the couscous and stir until well mixed.
Note: the amount of feta and olives is more a personal preference so
adjust according to your taste. We like lots of feta and olives
in ours , if you don't then cut back on what I wrote up there :)
In a mixing bowl or coffe cup (that's what I use) mix together the
olive oil, lemon juice, water, crushed garlic and salt, mix well, pour
over the couscous mixture and toss until thoroughly mixed in. You can
chill it for a few hours, but we usually just eat it right away.
Saturday,
9 June 2007
Sorry, I guess I've been neglecting this page! Lots has
certainly happened since last update, I just haven't had time to stop
and write about it...til now. Now we're in the middle of another hot
spell so I'm staying indoors during most of the day.
Let's see, where
to begin...
The swarm I mentioned in my last update did end up flying away the next
morning. We were outside when they left and it was neat to watch. Seems
all the beekeepers in our area are having lots of swarms this year,
much more than
usual. You'll remember that when we began with the bees, just 2
short months ago, we began with 2 hives. Then Peer created a new hive
by
taking bees from the 2 original hives and putting them together in a
new
hive box which became hive #3. He took it to his beekeeper friend's
property where they would make a queen, get settled in and get on
with normal hive business. Then we had a swarm which Peer caught, put
in a new box and that became hive # 4...do you see where this is going?
LOL! So, last week Peer went to pick up that little hive (hive #3) to
bring it home . Well, several hours later, instead of coming home with
our little hive, he comes home with a completely new hive, seems his
friend had a swarm that same afternoon and since he already has 30
hives he gave it to Peer (hive # 5). The very next day, the farmer's
wife comes over and tells me, " I think those are your bees over there
hanging in that tree in the meadow"...sigh....
So when Peer got home, we went and took a look. Yup, sure enough, our
bees...and yup,
they're up in a tree. First thought, "Geez, do we even have any bee
boxes left?"....I'm telling
you, bees are worse than rabbits! There's hive #6 hanging in that
tree...so, up the ladder Peer goes with a branch saw...
I gotta admit though, these swarms are really neat. I love the way they
hang together in a big clump protecting their queen...They hung
together tightly all through the sawing and the carrying of the branch
out
of the tree. Peer used a spray bottle and sprayed them with water, they
don't fly in the rain so the mist of water helps to keep them together.
After Peer trimmed off the branches he put the bees into the swarm box,
the way you do this is similar to the way you sling water off your
hands, or that a dog gets water off his coat. Quick, hard slinging
motions makes the bees fall off in clumps. Once in the box we left them
there in the meadow under a tree to calm down for the night and to give
the stragglers a chance to join the hive before we moved it. Next
morning Peer put the swarm into a new box and lined them up with the
other 5 hives.. Like I said, worse than rabbits...
Here is something I thought was pretty cool. Peer looked into the
original 2 hives to try and figure out if the swarm came from one of
them, or if they were likely to swarm again. If they are intending to
swarm you will find lots of queen cells. Sure enough he found lots of
queen cells in one of the hives, some already hatched and some not. I
think these are really neat looking. They are so different from the
regular cells...
See how different the queen cell is? I think this one hasn't hatched
yet it looks sealed. The little white caps all around the queen cell
are what all the other bees are grown in. I have no idea why the bees
are blue in this picture, they definitely aren't blue normally :P
So, now you're up to date on the bee stuff. Peer is trying hard to hold
steady at 6 hives but it isn't easy. Our property though really isn't
big enough for more. I can really tell a difference with all these
extra hives...there are ALOT of bees flying around out there. Next year
we are moving them to the other side of the house where it will be
quieter and more secluded for them but till then, I prefer to work in
the garden and around that part of the house in the early mornings or
late evenings, when the bees are staying in the hives and the air isn't
so thick with them. We'll need an air traffic control tower soon if
we're not careful :D
Moving on to other things...
Our yard is quite out of control at the moment..or at least it was
until yesterday. We've got nettles and other weeds and grasses that are
taller than I am in places. The problem is that our property is NOT
lawn mower friendly and up til now, Peer usually cut it a few times a
year with a scythe but even this doesn't work very well with all
the hidden stumps and stuff scattered all over the place. So we
broke down and bought an industrial cutter. Expensive but it works oh
so well and should save us alot of time and sore back muscles. Did I
mention that this thing is LOUD? Worse than a chain saw.
Our garden is growing pretty well considering.... The peas and pole
beans are looking good. Potatoes are doing well, but we did lose a few
things to the slugs and snails.. they ate my corn ( the bastards) and
the bush beans, cabbage, celery and my parsley.... We were getting so
frustrated with them that we put down bait for them. We hated doing it
but there wasn't much alternative. We used something that is
environmentally friendly...not poison. Hopefully, as we get more of the
wild weeds under control, the trash picked up, all the slug and snail
friendly hiding places removed, and the land becomes accustomed to
being worked, our snail and slug problem will ease up...am I
dreaming?...could be...lol! It's a nice dream though :)
I put flower boxes on the front of my studio windows...too cute!. I'll
take some pictures once I actually get some flowers planted in there,
it's just too hot right now to even think about it.
So, there you have it. I'm sure I forgot something, but that's the gist
of it anyway.
Friday,
25 May 2007
It's hot and muggy today, we had rumbling thunder and heavy
dark skies all day, I wish it would just rain and get it over with!
Today we had another swarm. Peer called it an after swarm. It's a
second swarm from the same hive as the first one. The new queen in that
hive decided to leave instead of staying and so off they went. They are
currently hanging in a tree about 30ft above the hives. We can't reach
them so they are probably lost to us. They will fly away sometime
tomorrow or the next day 
Here they are flying around the tree directly above our hives. They are
slowly gathering together forming a big clump on a branch in this tree.
It took them just about 30 minutes from the time they started until
they were all settled in and calmed down.
Here they are after calming down.
There are still bees in the hive where these 2 swarms have come from.
There will be a new queen and then we'll see if she decides to stay
put, or make a 3rd swarm. Our other hives are doing fine.
The big beekeeper in our village has his bees just down the street from
our house, he has about 15 hives. He does alot of experimental breeding
and raises his own queens. He has managed to raise some really mean and
aggressive bees this year. They've stung me once and Peer has been
stung twice within the past 7 days...just for walking by the
place! Peer isn't allergic to bee stings but man, does he ever
swell up! Last weekend he got stung on the arm and this whole week his
arm have looked just like a blown up rubber glove, from armpit to
finger tips. Well, guess where he got stung yesterday....right on the
eyebrow. We're talking major case of balloon head. He can barely see.
Poor guy. I felt so sorry for him that I decided to play domestic
goddess today and I baked him some brownies..I even used honey from our
hives instead of sugar . Luckily, these stings aren't painful, just
annoying and inconvenient. He thought about trying to catch his swarm
this afternoon but he can't see well enough to even think about
climbing around on ladders etc.
Never a dull moment around here...I wonder what will happen tomorrow
Tuesday,
22 May 2007
Ya know... if someone would have told me, just 6 months ago,
that one day I'd willingly walk into the middle of a big black cloud of
angry bees, in order to pick up a 100 pound beehive (also full of angry
bees) and carry it around in said black cloud of angry bees, with
nothing between me and them but a silly veiled hat with the picture of
a happy little bee
printed on the front...well, I would have told them they were F..ing
Nuts...lol. But wouldn't you know it?... that's just what we did last
Sunday!
It all started when Peer noticed that there was a large clump of bees
hanging from the under side of one of the hives. When a hive gets too
big, the bees decide it is time to make a new queen. They then
push the
old queen out, along with enough bees and honey for her to establish a
new hive
somewhere else. Normally you would find the swarm hanging in a tree or
bush, but our queen can't fly because she only has one wing (this is a
common
practice amongst bee keepers, they cut off one wing so the queen can't
fly, they do this to lessen the possibility of a swarm...Ha!
Works really well don't it? I find it
totally barbaric and this is NOT something that we are going to do to
our
own bees.) Anyway, since she couldn't fly, she just crawled out of the
hive and ended up underneath it.
We waited until it was nearly dark, Peer put together a makeshift hive
since we didn't have all the pieces to make a complete new hive. It
consists of
just one hive box sitting on a wooden pallet and a few 2x4s with a
small hole left open in the front for the bees to fly through.
If you're lucky and the swarm is out in the open, you can just
pick
the whole thing up and the bees will all stay together like this...
But naturally, ours wasn't... Peer used his
long-handed bee brush and a piece of cardboard to try and scoop up
sections of the
swarm and then dump them into the new box.
If you manage to get the queen, then the bees will stay where you put
them. If not the bees will keep going back to where the queen was. We
couldn't get all of the swarm the way Peer was doing it because the
bottom of the hive they were clinging to isn't flat, it's concave and
so most of the bees (including the queen) were way up where he couldn't
reach them...that is when he decided that we would have to move the
other hive box out of the way. That was kind of scary for me because
like I said, the air was thick with bees and they weren't happy, I
really had no desire to get right into the middle of it....oddly
enough, neither of us got stung throughout this whole adventure...kind
of amazing I
thought.
Anyway, back to our story....
Peer kept dumping in more and more bees (there were a few thousand all
told), I don't have pictures of when we finally got to the main part of
the swarm because I was helping him and praying I wasn't going to get
stung by a ba-zillion bees..lol! But we finally got them all in the
box..
After we got them in and got the box closed, the bees immediately began
to gather around the new hive entrance....
Maybe you can see better in this close up. What they are doing is
signaling to all the other bees that the queen is here and this is the
new
hive. They are all just standing on the box, their butts lifted high in
the air, and they are just vibrating... Some
of them were also beginning to learn what the hive looks like. They fly
out of the hive a little ways then turn around and look back to see
what it looks like, they do this several times and from different
distances until they know what the hive looks like.
Well, that was our big bee adventure for the weekend. We also harvested
our first honey, so if you aren't totally bored yet with all of this,
here are some pictures of that...lol!
How to harvest honey...the cliff notes version 
First, you need one of these machines, this is a honey
extractor...(geez, I never in a million years would have guessed that I
would know about all this "bee stuff"...life is strange...)
Looks sort of like those really old washing machines doesn't it?
Then, you gather up all your honeycombs from the hives...
See the white stuff? That is wax...when a cell is full with honey, the
bees cap it off with wax, so the white parts on the comb are completely
full of honey..you can see the honey glistening in the other
cells...mmmm...honey :)
Before you can extract the honey you have to remove the wax caps and
you do it like this, by picking it off with a metal toothed comb...here
is a rare photo
of moi....I helped with this part :D
Here's a better picture of how you do this...
Ok, then when you have 3 combs ready, you put them into the extractor
The extractor is just a big centrifuge, it spins really fast and throws
all the honey out, the honey runs down the sides of the extractor and
pools at the bottom and then you drain it out into buckets. The
electric extractors cost a fortune so ours is powered by Peer...I think
I'll make a little sticker "Peer Inside" ...ha!...nevermind :p
Here is the honey draining into a bucket. See how clear it is? That's
because it is mainly honey from canola flowers, it is very light in
color, honey from different sources, is colored differently and also
tastes differently.
The honey goes through 2 metal filters, one with large holes one with
very fine holes, this is to catch all the debris that's in the honey,
like
little bits of wax and ummm....other stuff...
And here is the honey, ready for putting up into glass jars! Peer went
and got our jars last night so we'll be doing that sometime soon. We
ended up getting 1 1/2 buckets full. I think that's about 30 jars of
honey.
And so, there you have it...
Monday,
14 May 2007
We're still having alot of rain and cold weather so we
haven't done much outside. Peer discovered that something is already
eating alot of the things he planted. We won't use pesticides so I'm
not sure what we will do about it. We knew it would happen, we have
alot of slugs and snails around here, the really big snails are
protected by law because they are sort of rare, and of course we have
plenty of the little ones. I think we will collect all the big snails
and take them out into the forest or a meadow somewhere and let them go
there. I don't want to kill the big ones because they are endangered
but also just because I've always liked them. I'm not sure what we'll
do about the others yet...still thinking.
Yesterday Peer and his kids went over to the property where he is
keeping his new bee hive. His daughter made a video of him inspecting
the combs etc.. I put it up on YouTube, if you want to see it click here.
There is no sound unfortunately but you get a good view of inside the
hive and how Peer handles the bees. He says that they are doing really
well, they are collecting honey and pollen, they have made some queen
cells and are feeding up some queens since they don't have one right
now. The queens should hatch in a week or so, there will be around 10
of them, they will fight eachother and then the strongest one will
become the official queen of the new hive. She will then go on her
mating flight...but more about that later.
To previous rambles: page 2 page 1
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