All posts by warren

Honeybees – splitting a colony

Awesome, Bees, Nature, ,

The number of bees in a honeybee colony ranges depending on the season.  Sometime in the middle of the honey flow (April-July or so here in WV) a good colony will have somewhere around 60,000-80,000 bees in it.  In the middle of winter, the colony will only have 20,000 or so bees.  Typically, the more bees there are in a colony, the more honey they can make.  So, sometime around the end of January or the beginning of February, the queen starts to ramp up her egg production and the colony starts to grow in number to get ready for Spring.

My helper

Most queens are egg-laying machines, capable of laying up to 2000 eggs per day.  When a hive gets too full of bees, spring fever hits and the colony makes preparation to swarm.  Swarming is a natural reaction to over-crowding and is the typical way the species propagates.  The old queen and a bunch of workers (half give or take) will leave the hive and find a new location.  Prior to leaving, the workers make several queen cells (they feed fertilized eggs/larvae the proper amount of royal jelly and the larvae will turn into a queen) so the remaining colony will still have a queen after the swarm leaves.

Lots of worker brood in the pupal stage...changing from larvae into bee. The flat cardboard-colored covering gives it away
Note the white larvae. Once the eggs hatch, the resulting larvae eat and eat and grow into pretty large "worms". They eventually are capped over (see above picture) and pupate. This stage is the conversion from "worm" into bee.

An observant beekeeper will watch for the Spring build-up and may consider splitting a colony that grows too big.  Swarms are a lot of fun to watch and to catch, but a beekeeper runs the risk of irritating his neighbors or losing the colony to the wilds.  I prefer to split a colony before it gets the urge to swarm so I can retain all of my bees.  So, last night I split a few of my “booming” colonies.  I simply take 3-5 frames with a mixture of bees, brood, eggs, pollen and honey and move them to a different hive box.  I make sure to leave the queen in the original location.  The original colony will remain strong as the queen finds she has lots of room to lay more eggs (in the empty frames I put in place of the ones I removed) and the colony will make lots of honey.

Notice the different bands...the outer bad has a somewhat wet looking yellow cap over the honeycomb. That is capped honey. Inside of that is a yellow paste down inside the cells. That is stored pollen. Inside of that band is more capped brood. The "nest" always has these bands of honey, pollen and brood.

The new colony will feed royal jelly to a number of eggs (in essence, making their own little swarm condition without actually flying off) and end up with a queen in 3 weeks (if all goes well).  The split probably won’t make honey this season as they have to hatch a queen and wait for her to get to full egg-laying capacity, but they should be strong going into the Fall.

Lots of pollen stored by the hive. This is protein for the bees and essential for raising new bees

I was able to find a few queen cells in the original hives so I took them and put them in the splits so I know there is a queen already pretty far along in the development process.  These splits have an even better chance of having a good queen and growing rapidly since they won’t suffer the 3 week delay to make a new queen from scratch.

Too bad it is blurry but this is one of the queen cells I found...a new queen in the making!

I make splits every year and have great luck at it.  I will probably re-queen these splits later this season or maybe next spring as I want to maintain genetic diversity, but in the short term, I now have more colonies than I did 2 days ago and I will almost assuredly make more honey than I otherwise would have made.  Honeybees are so cool!

Water and poop and flowers

Uncategorized

We were at the farm last weekend after Emily’s return from FL.  She was exhausted so we sent up an awning for her to sit under (and sleep).  That was the idea anyhow.  It turns out the wind was so bad that she ended up holding on to the thing so it wouldn’t blow away.  Meanwhile, the kids and I scurried off to do other things.

Isaac and Abigail found the neighbor kids.  Isaac borrowed a bike and the kids pedaled about 3-4 miles down the old dirt road.  Someone had a phone to call a pickup truck to haul them back (the up-hill part).  Abigail played in the mud mostly and made some serious mud-pies.

I have not yet seen the entirety of the property so I took off exploring.  I was hoping to find some morel mushrooms on my hunt for the property lines.  I know it’s prime mushroom season right now but I found not a single one.  I did find one edge of the property line though so that was cool.

In my hunt for stuff, I found a few interesting things…sort of an impromptu scavenger hunt.  I love a good scavenger hunt.  I also love peanut butter and waffles and pina coladas and getting caught in the rain…and the feel of the ocean and the taste of champagne…wait…sorry…channeling Jimmy Buffett (EDIT:  apparently this song was actually done by Rupert Holmes though there are tons of references to JB too…) there for a second.

My Dad calls these "Smart pills" I don't think they helped me at all...

Anyhow, it turns out there are at least three small streams on the property.  I am not sure whether they run all year but as I was walking, all I could hear was the sound of running water.  No cars, no horns, no planes.  It was magnificent.  I walked several deer trails (which wandered past the water of course) and stepped in deer poop.  It was magnificent.  I saw the tiniest white and blue and purple flowers everywhere.  The trees had pink and green tinges to them as spring appears to finally be taking hole.  It was magnificent!

Our house is haunted

WV

Emily was in Florida all week for a training so I was on kid duty.  Call me Mr Mom.  Fortunately, I had some logistical help from family so getting everyone to practice on time was ok.  We really had a great time and I even got all of the laundry and ironing done.  Normally I am not allowed to touch either.  My jobs are dishes, sweeping and toilets…stuff I can’t screw up.  Anyhow, Emily wasn’t there to tell me I couldn’t do laundry so I did it out of spite.

The Ghostbusters shirt was pure coincidence!

Since Emily wasn’t there to do the right thing regarding watching tv with the kids, we decided to watch a ghost hunter show.  They were visiting the Trans-Allegheny Insane Asylum in Weston, WV.  The Asylum is a huge old building where the mentally impared (in all sorts of forms) were sent from pre-Civil War days until the early 1990s.  Emily and I were in an abnormal psychology class together in college and visited the place when there were still patients in residence.  It was much better managed and humane when we were there as compared to when it was “in full bloom” but it was still a horrendous and scary place when we were there.

So, these goof-balls went in and started creeping around listening for spooks and specters of the dead within.  They took pictures of all sorts of stuff and discovered “ghosts” everywhere.  I can’t figure out if those folks actually believed in ghosts or if they were just getting rich making the show.  In either case, the kids and I had a blast debunking their ghosts and spirits.  In so doing, we discovered that our house was full of ghosts too!

Take note of the spirits as indicated by the arrows.  We had discussion with the ghosts and we agreed that we would not exorcise them if they would keep termites away.  We’ll see whether they live up to their end of the bargain…

Eight is Great!

Awesome, Family, Fun

I have been a bit behind in posting this…Abigail turned 8 this weekend!  Holy cow it is hard to believe how time has passed!  Abigail is a delight (except first thing in the morning) and she brings a smile to my face just thinking about her!

Abigail - age 4

Since this post is about her, I am going to brag a little.  I have said before that we are a bunch of reading fiends.  Both kids tend to get in trouble in school a lot for reading too much.  Normally one wouldn’t think of squelching a child’s desire to read, but my kids read non-stop, even when they are not supposed to be reading.  So, here’s the bragging part – Abigail has more Accelerated Reader points than anyone else in her whole school (not grade) and she is only in 2nd grade.  And I mean she has a lot more points!

Just this morning I had to fuss at Abigail to brush her teeth rather than read.  You see, she got a new book on the Greek and Roman gods.  She is entranced by their stories.  Her fascination with this one though, is that it has the gods’ names written in Greek letters.  She took it upon herself to learn the letters and sounds and copy every god’s name in Greek.  Isn’t that cool?

So, this weekend we had a big party for her at the local rec center.  We rented “the party deck” at the pool and invited family and a bunch of her friends.  Usually the place is not crowded but this weekend another group was there that illustrated every single bad stereotype of West Virginia.  Oh. My. WORD!  In spite of their antics, we had a great time and just stuck to our end of the pool.  It was so fun to see Abigail and a gaggle of little girls running around having an absolute ball!  We ate pizza and drank fizzy drinks and had rainbow colored cupcakes!

My folks and Emily’s people were all in attendance so I suspect we had 30-40 people all together.  Abigail, being a socialite, was delighted to make her rounds and it was really great to see her shine.  Instead of presents, she asked people to donate money to the Red Cross for Japan.  Isn’t she cool!?  Honest to goodness, it was totally her idea.  She started the trend with asking people to donate pet supplies for the shelter last year.  Isn’t she cool?!

Well, we are back to the daily drudge of being an 8 year old.  It’s a grind you know?  Still, I see her and I could not be more proud of that beautiful little girl.  Eight is indeed great!

Pregnant by Postcard

Fun

I think my favorite April Fool’s prank involved a postcard.  You may wonder what fun could possibly come from a simple postcard…let me tell you a story

Emily and I met our first day of college.  We knew each other but didn’t hang out much the first semester.  By the end of the second semester though, we decided we ought to start dating.  We hung around all the time and were great friends even before we started dating.  We wrote letters steady through the first summer and talked on the phone quite a bit.  I bet we wrote a letter 4-5 days each week.  We were a bit of a high point for profitability in the post office.  Most times our writing was silly stuff but it kept us going very well through the long summers.  I think it was probably cooler writing letters and courting long-distance than it would be nowadays.  Phone calls were still expensive and no one had computers so we communicated because it was worth it.

During spring break of our sophomore year, we decided to play a prank on my mom.  She worked downtown (Tionesta, my hometown with a population of around 600) so got the mail every day at the post office.  My parents got a PO box after the 900th time the mail box at the house was destroyed by the snow plows.  It was a prefect part of my plan!

Since human nature requires that anyone who touches a postcard reads the message, we decided to exploit the fact that my mom would in fact touch the post card when she picked it up.  As a bonus, since the town was so small, we were certain that the postal workers would also read the post card which would add to the fun.

So, Emily and I worked it out and on the fateful day, my mom called the house where I was waiting.  “We need to talk.  Come down town right now.”  The trap was playing out perfectly.  You see, Emily wrote a postcard informing me she was pregnant.  “What are we going to do?”, she lamented.  Of course, she was not even partially pregnant.

Mom confronted me, I confronted her (afterall, it was addressed to me, not her) and we eventually had a great laugh over the whole thing.  So, while I do not ever condone pulling the “I’m pregnant” trick on your significant other, it is pretty funny if you pull the trick on folks once removed.  Although, such a trick may be harmful to your health!

We are so stupid…or…how my wife became the crazy cat woman

Family,

So just about a year ago, we found a little orange kitten on our doorstep.  We nursed it for weeks (my nipples are still sore), we helped it poop and it grew up to be an enthusiastic orange cat.  Somewhere around the same time we got a stray dog named Ginny from the pound.  She had parvo and fleas and whooping cough and scurvy and an ingrown toenail.  Well, she had some of that.  Anyhow, like Seph, the little orange cat, Ginny was fairly expensive.

We have had stray cats all around for quite awhile but today, one got too pathetic for us to watch any longer.  In a moment of weakness, we snatched her up and took her to the vet.  Several dollars later, we now have another cat in our household…another orange cat.

We have been calling this cat “Flash” since she first showed up on our doorstep last fall.  She was skinny and pathetic but seemed to perk right up with the food we left out for her.  She did great through the entire winter and seemed to be fine outside until recently.  We watched her go down hill for awhile but I could not stand seeing a cat die on my doorstep.  So, Flash makes 4 cats in our house.  FOUR FREAKIN’ CATS! (The other two)

Now you never hear about crazy cat men so I am sure this is all Emily’s fault.  She is the new crazy cat lady on our street.  We are so stupid…

Holy hail!

Nature, WV,

It has been pretty nice the last few days, and now, with the weekend approaching, it turns to junk.  Last night, just as I was driving home, it decided to come a gully washer (for you Yankees, that means it rained like crazy).  As I walked to the car, it poured and I got wet clear inside my skin.  About half way home, the rain turned to hail and all hail broke loose.  It quickly turned to hail-so-loud-I-coudn’t-hear-myself-yell-in-the-car hail.  I mean it put down hail and meant it.

A friend suggested the hail had challenged her car to a MMA fight and the winner was not clear.  That pretty well sums it up.  I am sure that if we see the sun again, I will have dents all over my car.  Poor Steve…

Of course, hail is really ice and it became abundantly clear that I needed to be careful on the hail.  I slid at one stop sign which was an attention grabber.  Anyhow, I slowed down and got home just in time for it all to stop as fast as it started.

There were tons of blooms out and the bees had been busy on them.  It remains to be seen how the hail might affect the build-up of bees.  This is a critical time for them to be making more bees and collecting pollen and nectar.

I love spring for all of the new life that comes and the rain that sparks the world to green up again.  I might be able to do with out the hail though…just spring please!

Yellow one

Family, Fun,

When I was a kid, we always played “the punch buggy game” wherein you would search for Volkswagen bugs and smack the daylights out of your smaller, helpless brother, just hard enough to torment but not hard enough to leave a bruise so your mom and dad would ever know.  You know?  That game.  It was a bunch of fun but, of course, it became more and more rare to see them as time went on since they stopped production.  We stopped playing at some point.

Of course, VW now has the beetles and the advertising campaign that goes along with them.  Adults saying, “Green one” and slugging a co-worker’s arm.  My kids started playing that (was it a year ago?) and we still have a big competition pretty much every day to see who can rack up the most “hits”.  We do not actually hit each other but rather just collect points.

Some other friends play a game where they get points any time they see a yellow car.  We play that game too.  As we live near a 3 schools (who ever thought it was a good idea to put three large schools near each other?  I mean traffic…hello?!), there are numerous school buses which do indeed count.

Now, the holy grail of this game is the elusive yellow VW.  It’s double points you see.  We always require that someone else sees the car so no one can make up sightings, especially for yellow VWs.  For the kids, that puts them at a disadvantage since they are stuck in class all day or are riding with Emily or me who are always playing the game too.  I take a little extra liberty with the rules too.  All I need is proof of a sighting, so I take pictures of any yellow cars or VW beetles and text/email them to Emily and the kids.

All of these pictures are my trophies.  That’s right, I am on a constant VW safari across the hills and hollers of Charleston, West-by-God-Virginia.  I am on the hunt and I am a mighty hunter!

Does anyone else play these games?  All the time or just on trips?  Can you help fuel our madness?

Sore legs are nice sometimes

Adventure, Family, Nature, WV, ,

I had an itch.  I simply needed to walk in the woods.  This weekend was all sorts of busy but I was determined to get outside some and enjoy the sun.  Sure enough, the sun was out .  The wind couldn’t miss the fun though.  Honest to goodness, there were times when I thought I was going to blow away.

Anyhow, we wandered around in the hay field on our property for a little bit but the wind made it impossible to stay upright.  My parents tell a tale about taking my brother and me on a walk into the woods.  As the story goes, we started complaining while the house was still in sight.  Of course, as parents some times do, I think they embellished the tale a bit.  Still, we apparently were not good wilderness travelers.  My kids were flat out awesome and never complained once on our hike though.  We walked around for about 2 hours and the kids were awesome to watch.  Isaac plowed through the woods like a bull at first, but that slowed pretty quickly as he got into some serious thorns…Brer Rabbit he ain’t.  After he got some proper respect, it was pure delight to watch them as they wandered around and checked things out.

Isaac discovered the fun of crawling around in the stream that runs through the property.  I have a stream!  And a spring!  Somehow through the magic of the wood sprites, he did not get covered in mud.  Abigail, on the other hand was covered head to toe!  Anyhow, they were like  couple of…well, like a couple of kids in the woods!  Abigail found a bird’s nest that she wanted to put somewhere safe  She found a cool rock on which she could leave it. ( I have a rock!  And a stream!)  As she placed it just perfectly so the wind wouldn’t get ahold of it, she discovered a small snake.  I was sure she would freak but she was really cool and calm about it.  She wanted to touch it so I touched first so she would see that I am super cool and brave.  Both kids ended up touching the little snake and I figure he liked it too.

So, by the end of the day, we were all pretty tired and had sore legs from walking through the woods.  It’s one of those sore feelings though, that’s pretty nice when it comes down to it….plus, I have a stream!

Biker chick

Adventure, Family, Fun, ,

When we live in Nashville, we had a really nice situation for walking and learning to ride bikes.  We had a flat acre of land on a dead-end street.  I bet we walked 5 days a week while Isaac was learning to ride his bike.  We started with a Red Rider tricycle, graduated through various plastic trikes and finally onto a 2-wheeler with training wheels.  We spent a bunch of time riding, now and then raising the training wheels a little so he would have to balance more and more on his own.  One day he had enough and asked me to take the trainers off completely.  I figured we were in for a few skinned knees, but I kid you not, he jumped on the bike and never wrecked a single time!  He was about 5 when he figured it all out.

Isaac’s first time riding w/o training wheels – 2005

We moved to WV when Abigail was 3 so she didn’t have much time to ride bikes like Isaac did.  There is plenty of land here in WV.  In fact, there may be more land here than in Nebraska.  WV is just wrinkled into a small package that is straight up and down!  So, learning to ride a bike here requires that you find a flat piece of ground somewhere.  Last weekend, Emily was at a training class so the kids and I headed over to the track at the nearby high school.  Even at almost-8, Abigail was still in training wheels on her bike.  Before heading to the track, I raised her training wheels a little so she would have to balance a little.

Click the image for a movie!

(Click here if the above movie will not play on your machine)

We walked a few laps and Abigail was beyond fed up.  She got so mad she said, “I wish you would just take those stupid training wheels off.”  Being a good Boy Scout, I had a wrench with me so I had them off in 5 minutes.  I helped her a few laps around but she pretty quickly caught on and is now officially a bike rider!  Now that I have no more training-wheel-encumbered kids in the house, I think I have finally figured out that training wheels do more to slow kids from learning to ride a bike than they help.

So, Abigail is now a biker chick.  She loves riding and wants to go all of the time!  I am super happy for her and so proud that she got mad and decided what she wanted…and made it happen!  Bikes first…next, the world!