Category Archives: Nature

Change of address

Bees, Land, Nature, WV, , , ,

Etched in my back…er mind…is a picture of a bad interaction with the bees last year.  It was shortly after that episode that I decided that if I was to continue to have bees, they had to be away from people.  We bought property out in the country early this Spring and one of its main purposes was to be a bee yard.  After this weekend of labor, I am happy to report that the majority of the bees have been relocated to the new bee yard and seem to be doing quite well.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  As you might have guessed, it was anything but.  Of course, any test of one’s mettle always makes for a good story if nothing else.  To ease the move, I decided we would mostly enclose the bees with screen and other stuff the night before.  To enclose the bees the morning of the move would only stir them up and make the process miserable.  Each hive got the screen treatment except for a small access ares for the bees to come and go.  The plan was to screen that final access point, throw the bees in a truck and go.

My father-in-law and I started before sunrise to carry the bees from his back hillside to the truck.  So, we grabbed ahold of 150 or so pounds of bees+hive+honey and prepared to stumble down the hill, guided solely by the sweet glow of the…yeah, it was dark.  We tried to carry a heavy bunch of bees down a hillside in the dark.  FAIL.  Oh don’t get me wrong, gravity works and we got the bees down the hill and into the truck but it wasn’t fun.  Luckily, the first one took us so long that it was daylight before we got to the next ones and they all went pretty smoothly.

 

We finished the electric fence of doom a week or so ago so hopefully any bears, raccoons, or bee-lovin’ dinosaurs will find that my bees are not on the menu.  I still have 4 more hives to move but it was such a relief to get the first batch moved to their new address in the country!

A little help

Nature, WV

So, we are already crazy cat people.  Since we have lived in WV, we have adopted 3 cats that have ended up on our doorstep (we already had one when we moved here).  Four cats is all we can handle along with our dog, Ginny.  The cats continue to pour in though and “Momma cat”,  who is involved in a great love affair with Ginny, decided to go and get pregnant a few months ago to some gigolo-cat passing through.  She birthed 5 kittens under our shed and they are adorable.  She is tame but her kittens initially appeared to be completely wild.  I have been hanging outside some at night as they come in to eat the food we give them.

 

One kitten has made up with me in a big way.  She is cute as can be and is now completely tame.  I cannot bear to take her to the shelter (which is where the others are headed as soon as I trap them), but I cannot take any more into the house.  Does anyone have interest in a sweet little kitten?  I will pay to have her de-clawed, fixed, whatever if someone will take her.  Please…I need a little help!

Solar wax melter

Bees, Nature, ,

In a comment yesterday, Ed mentioned reclaiming wax after the harvest is done.  For lots of people, honey is what they think of when they think of beekeeping.  There are tons of other things that beekeepers can harvest or use from the beehive though.  Wax is a big item on that list.  In one of yesterday’s pictures, you can see that wax capping that covers mature honey in the honeycomb.  When I extract the honey, I have to remove those cappings with a knife to allow the honey to be removed from the comb.  Some folks might be tempted to throw all of that wax away, but those wax cappings add up quickly.

When we process honey, we uncap the honeycomb on the frames, place it in the extractor, run the extracted honey through a kitchen strainer to remove cappings and pour it into a bottle.  That is the extent of our processing.  Besides making a more pleasant looking honey, we run it through the strainer to harvest the wax cappings in particular.  So, I collect the wax cappings from when I use the knife to uncap the comb as well as the little bits of cappings that come out in extraction and let them drain (as both are covered in/full of honey still).  The bees are given access afterwards and they complete the bulk of the clean-up for me.

After the bees have their time, the cappings get thrown into my solar wax melter.  It’s basically a black wooden box with a baking pan and a bread pan inside, covered by a sheet of plexiglas.  The box rests at an incline so it faces the sun properly.  The baking pan has 3-4 small holes drilled in one edge at the bottom of the incline, and the bread pan sits under those holes.  As the sun passes through the plexiglas,  it heats everything inside like crazy, just like any greenhouse would.

The honey begins to melt and runs down through the small holes into the bread pan.  Any bee parts or other detritus are too big to flow through the holes.  Honey sometimes flows with the wax but the melted wax floats on the honey very nicely.  After everything cools, the wax hardens and comes out very clean.  I pull the wax out, feed any honey to the bees and marvel at how awesome the wax looks.  And let me tell you, the smell is incredible!

So, once the honey is cleaned (and yes, truthfully, it sometimes takes a few runs), it can be used for anything where wax is needed.  Usually, people make candles but folks also use it in soap, for quilting and woodworking (as a lubricant) and for handlebar moustaches!  Honey is a major crop from the bees, but wax is also significant and just plain cool.  And what better wax to process honey than with the help of the same sun that allowed the bees to make it in the first place!

 

Your honey for nuthin’ and your licks for free

Bees, Family, Nature, , ,

We harvested honey this weekend.  We usually seem to pick the hottest day of the year to harvest.  It’s not because we like to do it on the hottest day of the year…it just works out that way.  So, my father-in-law came over on 6:30 am Saturday at my request.  “We’ll start early and beat the heat.”  Of course, it didn’t occur to me that the sun isn’t truly up then.  Bees get pretty testy when they are disturbed before the sun is shining bright in the sky.  It’s also best to give the worker bees time to get out into the field.  Fewer bees in the hive come harvest time is always a good thing.  So, our early start didn’t exactly start how I expected but we still did get going with the harvest.

 

My father-in-law holding honey in the comb and an edge-on piece of comb
 
 
 

I have previously sworn off smoking the bees and the smoke/no-smoke argument is a religious debate amongst beekeepers.  Personally, smoking bees leaves me with a bad cough and I can never find rolling papers anyhow.  Um, no, actually, smoking bees with a smoker is what I mean.  After last year’s episode, I decided that for the harvest, I would return to using smoke.  As much as I hate to admit it, I am certain that the smoker made our harvest easier.  For most interactions with the bees, I still do not think that using a smoker is necessary, but harvesting is not a typical interaction.

 

 

Brood (aka baby bees) on the left, honey on the right.  Don’t confuse them on harvest day!

 

 

So, we pulled off all of the honey from the hives and promptly headed off to a soccer-palooza in the heat of the day.  It was fantastic to…uh…have a break in the middle of honey harvest.  After 4 or so hours of  ball kicking, we returned to the honey-house and worked until every drop of honey was extracted, bottled and/or licked from our sticky (but exceedingly clean) fingers.

Click: Honey Flow Video                             Click:  Bees Cleaning Honey Supers

It’s great having bees.  We don’t pay for honey any more, but I am not sure you could say honey is free.  We definitely take our licks and they seem to be free though.  My back is sore and my arms are tired.  All told, we harvested around 150 pounds of honey which is much less than I expected or hoped for but it’s better than none!

Of course, the title to this post is a nod to the awesome Dire Straits Song linked here!  Nothing at all to do with bees unfortunately…

More info about my bees and beekeeping

Our car…the worm edition

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature,

So a few days ago, I told you all about the fun we had with crows on our honeymoon.  You may recall that my brother and a friend had put a bunch of birdseed into our suitcases as well as in the car.  By “in the car” I mean inside the car…literally.  There was birdseed in the dashboard, in the heater vents, down in the seats, floorboards, and even more in the dashboard.  Well, you get the point.  Anytime we drove around and hit a bump, even months later, birdseed would fall through the dash and onto the floor.

The start of the birdseed saga!

Jump ahead to our move to Kentucky for graduate school.  We were in marital bliss.  I suppose we didn’t see the world around us very clearly as we missed some obvious things…you’ll see in a second.  So, we were poor and all that but it was cool being married.  Emily seems to remember a rough few years as she attempted to train and civilize me.  Once she gave up, things got much better.  Anyhow, part-way through school, we moved to an apartment above a funeral home (more on that in another post!).

We noticed some wormy things in the backseat one day while unpacking groceries or something at the funeral home.  I didn’t think much of it.  I squished them and went on with my business.  Days later, we noticed them again…and again and again.  It started to get serious pretty quickly.

The car...already doomed!

I got a wild hair and decided to remove the back set of the car to see what was going on.  Why oh why didn’t I just remain ignorant?!  The entire back seat was infested with meal worms!  I don’t just mean there were a few crawling around.  Oh no, the foam in the seat was full.  The carpet in the floor was infested.  It was a regular larval zoo in our car!

I often deal with things like that with extreme overkill.  We had a Chevy Celebrity which, incidentally, was the best car ever made!  I loved that car!  Emily and I sanded the thing down in the weeks before our wedding so we could get it painted.  We wanted to make a flashy exit from the wedding ceremony.  Anyhow, back to overkill.  A Chevy Celebrity has maybe 30 sq ft of cabin space.  An insect bomb for a 2000 sq ft house seemed about right.  Makes sense, right?  If some is good, more is better!

On two separate occasions, I set off house-sized insect bombs in our little car.  The worms remained.  It’s a wonder we remained!  I am certain that a concentration of insecticide like that was not all that good for us.  After losing on the second bomb, I just re-installed the back seat and we looked no more.

How did we finally deal with the issue, you may ask?  Well, we traded that car in for a Chevy Prizm, the second best car ever made!  It was new and worm-free!  I blame those worms on the birdseed.  I have no doubt that the seed had meal worms in it.  They lived a good life for a couple of years on all of the birdseed in the car.  That wedding birdseed was the gift that kept on giving!

Thank you berry much

Food, Nature,

We have been busy as cats in a sandbox and it seems that we haven’t had time to do anything, much less anything interesting.  Every now and then, though, we get a chance to take a few minutes to do something simple.  Since it’s July (holy cow!  It’s July?!), something simple means berry picking for us.

 

We have an excellent raspberry patch at the house so I can stumble out in my pjs and grab a handful of berries.  Our patch makes many more than a handful though so we pick and freeze berries every day.  Our raspberry patch is pretty interesting.  Of course there are berries, but the new feral kittens hide out in there too (anyone want a kitten?  Energetic.  Free to a good home).   I have seen all manner of bugs and spiders also.  Honestly, our raspberry patch is a biology lesson (in a good way) waiting to happen!  I love picking berries just to see what will pop out next!

Black raspberries...not the same as blackberries

By the way, did you know you can spread berries out in a single layer on a plate, freeze them, and then put them in freezer bags.  The individual berries remain intact so you don’t end up with a berry blob.

Blackberries!

Anyhow, raspberries are easy for us.  It’s the blackberries that are painful.  I think they have to be that way for folks to appreciate their awesomeness and I am willing to let Emily make the sacrifice.  We all pick them actually.  By “we”, I mean Emily and I pick them.  The kids always seem to wander off into the woods at our secret blackberry location to “look for more berries”.  Uh huh.

Sweet reward! Blackberry pie!

So, blackberries are especially good right now and I love blackberry pies more than any other pie (except maybe Emily’s strawberry pies).  I have an excellent wife who not only helps pick the berries, but also makes me pies!  Thanks you berry much!  You are my favorite wife, Emily!

Coopers Rock

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature, WV, , , , ,

A few weekends ago, we went on a little getaway vacation to Coopers Rock State Park in Bruceton Mills, WV.  I was mainly excited for the cabin in which we were staying and the hot tub it advertised on the back deck.  Never did I imagine how cool the park would be.  More about that later.

So, we got to the cabin after navigating the Grand Canyon road back to the place.  The cabin itself was nice and did in fact have a hot tub.  The kids jumped right in as Emily and I unpacked and prepared for supper.  I am not sure why, but the power went out and we were without water or AC.  When you are not prepared, both are pretty important.  Anyhow, several hours later, it came back on and all was well…even the well.  We could shower and do dishes, etc.

On Saturday morning, we gorged on cheap powdered sugar donuts and Doritos then headed to Coopers Rock (it seems like there should be an apostrophe in there but there isn’t).  Little did we know, but there was a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the park.  The place was teeming with things to do as all sorts of groups offered nature talks, projects,  and hikes.

The kids built cool birdhouses and painted rocks.  We played on the play ground (where I tried my best to dislocate my shoulder).  We saw rescued birds of prey from the West Virginia Raptor Rescue Center and even got to touch a red tailed hawk who was very friendly.  It turns out, she was essentially raised in captivity so was not bothered by people.  The other rescued hawk and owl were not so friendly.  Still, they were awesome!

I think the best part of the park though, was walking the trails under the rocks.  We explored some and saw great rock formations.  The kids and I walked into a cave/tunnel and went all “Dora the Explorer”.  Abigail fell in the dirt and got muddy.  It was perfect and cool and a great time to be together as a family.

If you ever pass through the northern part of WV, stop in at Coopers Rock.  Its views are breathtaking and there is all sorts of fun to be had there.  It turns out that the hot tub was very popular, but it paled in comparison (for me at least) to the beauty of our state, just as it is!

Camping!

Family, Fun, Nature, WV, , ,

Holy cow it’s been awhile since I have posted. It seems like time is flying! I certainly need to remedy that. So, last weekend, the hottest weekend of the year (so far), we went camping on the bee farm. I had to set more fence posts in the ground and I have been itching to stay up and see the stars and listen to the crickets. You know, they say you can find the temperature by counting cricket chirps for 15 seconds and adding 37. I don’t think I could count fast enough to make a good measurement so I am sure that it works. It was hot!

Anyhow, I dug more fence posts and cut a bunch of trees and brush. The kids mostly read their kindles but they also went on a rock hunt. I told them I would pay them if they would find sufficient rocks to make a proper fire pit. I wanted to hear crickets and by golly, I wanted to smell like smoke before I laid down for the night. The kids were great. They actually dug some rocks out of the ground. I suppose they saw it as an easy way to make things happen fast…find huge rocks and dig them up…make Dad carry them to make for an instant fire pit. Well, they did a great job though my back may never forgive me after carrying some of their finds.

All of this is to say, we got pretty hot and sweaty outside working all day. Luckily, I bought that tank I mentioned in the last post. We had 35 gallons of water to set the concrete posts, cook and bathe. Of course, bathing was a relative thing, but we made the best of it taking a cold water bath at our campsite.

Oh, I don’t want to forget…on the way walking the path between the tent and the car (which housed the water tank), I happened upon a copperhead. He wasn’t wearing pants thankfully or there would have been two of us in a code brown status. I grabbed a shovel and went after him but he was headed for the woods too.

We finally got cleaned up and went to bed. Rather, we went to clumpy ground…it could hardly be called a bed (gee whiz have I become soft in my old age). I never did get a chance to really look at the stars.  Still, camping on our land was absolutely wonderful!  We ate mountain pies and roasted marshmallows.  We giggled in the tent and woke up groggy.  It was a marvelous weekend, stiff backs and necks aside.

There is lots more fun to report including driving the van 60 mph across our hay field…but you will have to wait until next time to read about that!

The beginning of our bee farm

Bees, Family, Nature, WV, ,

We bought a piece of property a few months ago.  There are lots of reasons we bought the place including it’s beauty, it’s size, etc.  One of the big reasons, however, was to have a place to move the bees.  You may recall that I had a bit of trouble last summer during the harvest.  It was after that event that I decided that we needed a place out somewhere where the bees could be away from people.  “The event” was probably a once in a lifetime thing (I hope) but I can’t take the chance.

Aren’t these daisies pretty?   They are everywhere in the hay field…

Our new place is outside of Charleston in the country so, of course, there is a potential for bears to be around.  If you remember your Winnie the Pooh, bears tend to like honey.  A determined bear cannot really be stopped, but a good electric fence will dissuade all but the most determined bears from messing with the bee hives.  So, the beginning of our bee farm has to be a good electric fence.

We found a nice sunny spot on the property away from where we plan to do most of our other messing around.  Emily, the kids and I laid out what is to become our first bee yard at the new place.  We set 4 corner posts in concrete.  Being thrifty as I am, we decided to hand dig the fence post holes.  When I put our fence in for the dog, I ran into all sorts of roots and rocks but the digging at the bee yard was easy…apart from the fact that we had to dig 3 foot deep holes.  It was warm and humid so we took turns digging.  Abigail and Isaac both wanted to help so I was happy to oblige…and they earned their supper for sure!  Really, the kids were great and a big help.  Let’s hope they will help with the bees too!

So, we will let the posts set up this week and add the rest of the supports, posts, wire, etc next weekend if all goes well.  After digging the holes, we are committed so the bee farm is officially underway!  Who knew a few fence posts would make me so excited!?!

Stay tuned tomorrow for a funny story about our posts!

Our woods

Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature, Thoughts, WV, , , , ,

We spent our time at the property on Saturday walking in the woods.  Our plan was to walk more of the property line as we still haven’t seen the entire place.  We did hike the better part of the boundary and discovered all sorts of excellent things!  Except for the constant chatter of kids, the sounds of the woods were magnificent.  Actually, the chatter wasn’t so bad either as the kids were having fun.

When I was a kid, hiking in the woods was not high on my list of fun.  I played in the woods a lot but plain old hiking wasn’t good for me.  I was so surprised that Isaac and Abigail walked the entire 2 miles in the woods with only a small handful of complaints.  Incredible!

We did walk the better part of the lower edge of the place and saw all sorts of beautiful flowers and animal tracks of all sorts.  There were too many deer tracks to even keep track of but the kids tried to identify every print they came across.

That's Abigail's finger...she's the brave one

We spooked a turkey and saw the biggest centipede the kids had ever seen.  We found just a little bit of poison ivy and a lot of slippery moss.  Squirrels barked and birds announced our path through the woods.  All around us was noise but it felt like silence.  It was marvelous walking in our woods and this weekend was the reason we bought the place!  I am absolutely positive that my blood pressure is still lowered because of it!