As the activities of beekeeping wind down for the year the educational aspects begin to gear up. The season of Fall Festivals and Fairs is a great time to get out and educate the general public about the importance of bees in food production and to recruit new bee keepers. I am looking forward to being an active participant in this year’s educational process since last year I was one of the unsuspecting masses. It will all start the weekend after next at the Kanawha County State Fair September 9-12th in Sissonville where the Kanawha Valley Beekeepers Association will set up an educational booth fully equipped with a demonstration hive.
If you have ever had any interest in beekeeping this is a great place to come and check it out. You can get lots of free and useful information about how to get started and why beekeeping is so important. In fact, this is where Fred and I got our first symptoms of beekeeping fever almost a year ago. We were trying to decide how to spend a lazy weekend and I had been debating entering some baking contests so we agreed that the fair was close and I could check out some of the possible competition. I was still in a medicated flux at the time, on leave from the FD, fighting depression and just generally at loose ends, desperate for something to give me a little direction.
I wandered around the fairgrounds in a medicated hazy when I happened upon the beekeeping demo. I had actually gone over there to look at the bunnies, goats and other 4-H displays as a way to waste time while Sarah rode the dangerous fair contraptions sure to induce a seizure in my already muddled state. I like to wander around and fantasize about farm life. Little did I know, a year from that fair visit Fred and I would be deeply immersed in the push towards green. The bees would merely be the tip of our iceberg.
It was while staring, transfixed, at the bees swarming about the comb through their Plexiglas walls that I was approached by the president of the KVBA. He asked me if I had any interest in keeping bees and on a pure whim I said yes. Sure I loved honey, and Fred and I had talked since we met about self-sufficiency, I found bees naturally fascinating but becoming a beekeeper had only ever been a fleeting fancy of my imagination. He told me how they could really use some young beekeepers in the association (and since Fred and I are both solidly in our thirties this should indicate to you the general age of the association) and provided me with lots of pamphlets, cookbooks and additional literature on bees. I thanked him and meandered away from the stall in search of Fred and Sarah.
When I found them the bees were already half forgotten in my dazed condition. When Fred asked me why I had all those papers, I told him about the beekeepers and the live bees and that piqued his interest enough that we turned around and headed back to the booth. Fred and the association president became instant cohorts and he promptly invited us to the next KVBA meeting. Fred and I went to the meeting I do not exactly remember when it was but it was sometime later that fall. Although we still had not acquired any bees at that point we were interested enough to pay the ten dollar fee and join the association for one year. This entitled us, also, to a membership in the state association as well as put us on the mailing list and updated us with any special information that may be made available.
We still were not entirely sure that we had the time or money to invest in beekeeping. Often setting up an initial hive or two from scratch can be very expensive. The bees themselves are relatively inexpensive but by the time you have built the hives and bought the necessary protective equipment you have made quite the initial investment. As we calculated we assumed just to get started with two hives (which is the minimum recommended in case of loss or disease) that we would have to invest between eight hundred and a thousand dollars.
Remember, I was out of work and unsure at that point if I would be able to return. Money was tight and that was a lot to invest in the potential failure of what we still deemed a hobby, however, while we were at the meeting we met the elderly gentleman who in due course would sell us his bees and hives and ultimately allow us to get into bee keeping at a much more affordable price. (If you are interested in the drama of how we came about actually acquiring our bees you can go back to the April entries of this blog and check out the details.)
Now, almost a year later, here we are, full-fledged beekeeper with three hives (no honey to speak of) out corrupting the youth of America, petitioning the local government and participating in all aspects of the social beekeepers network. I hope to see some of you at the fair, if not at Kanawha County’s fair then later on at some of the other fairs and festivals in which we will participate. I will try to update the blog as we nail down other dates. Please, if you read this blog and are at a fair, come introduce yourself. I would really love to meet you.
~
If you had asked me last September what my life would look like a year from that date I would never have guessed it would involve bees and chickens and homemade laundry detergent, green living or staying at home. I would have probably told you that I would be back to work at the FD within a matter of weeks if not months. God’s plans are not always the same as ours. I spent a good part of last year in a serious state of depression questioning every aspect of my life. Ir really never occurred to me, on any serious level, that I could be happy living a much simpler existence.
One thing I have come to realize is that I must be able to define myself outside of what I do to make money. I think this was one of the hardest things I had to come to grips with. I had a lot of pride in my career, I had accomplished something that few women before me had accomplished and I relished in the pride that went with that. This year has been humbling for me. It has been a year struggling to redefine our lives and our priorities. We have made lots of material sacrifices but we have gained a wealth of strength and knowledge and the contentment of knowing that we have struggled together and with God’s ever present guidance we have persevered.
Life is not easy. Life is not predictable, you can set a course and be blown off it in a heartbeat by death or illness or loss of a job or a car accident or anything. These worldly possessions that we put so much stock in can fall by the wayside in an instant. What do you have when they are gone?
In our family we had built a false sense of security with our things buying more stuff, going more places as filler, lacking any real satisfaction or contentment. I am not saying it was not tough. It was a serious lifestyle adjustment going from two salaries to one, having medical bill stream in and realizing that eating every meal out became a luxury instead of an everyday option. Being forced to budget when I went to the grocery store was especially humbling. We did not do it without heartache, arguments or tears but we did do it. Yes, we have fought, said mean things, questioned ourselves and God’s plan but ultimately we have grown. We have grown closer as a family and we have grown in our spiritual lives too.
As I have said before, this is a process for us, we are learning. We still hit stumbling blocks we still make mistakes ( I still can only remember my recycled grocery bags about fifty percent of the time) sometimes we still fight or argue but we have seen how small changes, baby steps, can make huge leaps in improving our quality of life. By slowly paring down our existence we have gained immeasurable wealth in our satisfaction with life and our general happiness. We take joy in the quiet moments and the little victories: fresh eggs from our hens, a successful hive split, clean clothes off the line.
I consider the words of Paul as he wrote to the Philippians about considering everything of this world a loss to gain Christ and I think about Christ talking to potential disciples and telling them to leave their worldly possessions behind and follow him. No, we have not given up all our worldly possession, but we have significantly reduced them and our gluttonous consumerism. Some of our reduction was by choice some by necessity, some of it was willfully and some of it was by painful pruning but ultimately the result has improved us as individuals and as a family and for the most part we are happier and healthier for it.
These are just some of the things that have been on my mind as we approach the first anniversary of the birth of our greener lifestyle. We are still in transition and in all actuality it will probably be a lifelong process. I want to thank everyone who has encouraged us with thoughtful reflection, as silent prayer warriors, with a kind word or a helpful piece of advice. I also want to thank everyone who takes a minute out of their own busy lives to immerse themselves in this blog and spend a few moments empathizing with us. Thank you for celebrating in our victories and mourning with us in our trials. We appreciate you.
Thank you for reading,
Much love on this journey to greener life,
Autumn
Showing posts with label Beehives and Beginnings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beehives and Beginnings. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Harvest: DENIED
Well yesterday evening we got in the hives. Let me start by saying this blog is not entirely negative just severely disappointing. We went through all three hives and we found all three queens (first time ever), workers, a few drones (summer is winding down so drones are being eliminated), capped brood, larva, some pollen and some capped honey. We saw no evidence of mites, brood foul or other disease. Now would be the time that most beekeepers have begun to medicate. Fred and I are choosing not to medicate our hives and I guess this time next year we will know if that was a wise avant-garde decision or a foolish novice mistake. Time will tell.
That is the good news. Here is the bad: the super/shallow that we placed on top of our most active hive had no more honey in it than it did at last inspection. This is really, really disappointing. When we placed that shallow above the queen excluder it was in hopes of harvesting our first honey crop of the year. The bees of that hive were very active and abounding in stored honey, pollen and babies in their brood box and shallows. We actually thought they were beginning to get crowded and running out of room for their own stores so we placed the shallow above the queen excluder in hopes of giving them more room and of harvesting a little honey this year.
We were denied and we still are not sure exactly why. Now granted, our goal this year was not to harvest honey but to raise healthy bees for a bountiful crop next year. On the premise that last year was a bad year for bees in general our goals were simply to sustain and thrive a generation of bees that would raise strong producers next year. We gained a hive this spring during swarm season when we split the larger of our two hives. We requeened our hateful hive with a pure bred, mated Italian queen (after believing the hive to have lost their queen and in need of a gentler temperament anyway) and we have since located all three queens and appear to have a healthy generation of bees.
So why do we not have any honey? I do not know and frankly I am really frustrated. There has been a second late summer bloom which means the bees would have plenty of pollen and nectar to gather. I’ve let the yard go to clover on several occasions to keep them happy at home. They have a source of fresh water in the creek that runs past the house and the weather has been fairly cooperative, if not somewhat too hot, with only intermittent rain showers which should allow the bees plenty of harvest time. So what did we do wrong?
Again, my answer is I just do not know. Yesterday when Fred and I went out to the hives I fully expected to be harvesting an entire super. We dragged a large Tupperware container out to the apiary, stoked the smoker and prepared a heavy concentration of sugar syrup to engage the bee’s attention while we pilfered their hive. We decided to start with the hive whose super we intended to harvest.
We smoked the entrance and popped the outer lid, smoked them a little more, waited a few seconds then popped the top. This is our most docile hive and the one from which we had made the split. These are gentle bees that will curiously crawl around your veil without even attempting to sting. So we can move through this hive and their stores in a relatively slow pace without fear of angering them to attack. We popped the inner lid, sprayed them with a little sugar water and disappointingly gazed into a practically empty super. Virtually no different than when we placed it a month ago.
We fully expected to harvest this entire super but it was just not meant to be. We sat it off to the side and moved down into the lower two shallows and the brood box. We found plenty of late summer stores, lots of bees, substantial brood, lots of workers and the queen. Everything a beekeeper could want, except our own honey to harvest. This hive consists of one brood box, two shallows, a queen excluder and another shallow on top which in theory would be ours to harvest. I have come up with two theories as to why our bees did not make enough honey for us to steal a little.
The first theory is this: we have given them entirely too much room. If you remember back this would have happened when I botched the placement of the queen excluder and inadvertently trapped her majesty above in a shallow for approximately a week. You see the bees should have the brood box (or deep) and one super (or shallow) which belongs exclusively to them. This allows the queen plenty of room to raise new bees and the workers plenty of room to put up stores to feed the hive. I had intended to add a harvest shallow and had put down a queen excluder towards this goal, somehow trapping the queen above it when I could not locate her. This allowed her a week or more to lay several frame of brood in the shallow which basically means it now belongs to the bees (no one wants honey with little bee eyeballs and body parts floating about in it).
So we gave that shallow up for naught and placed the queen excluder above it and added a third shallow. This seemed like a fine idea at the time considering the bees were actively filling up every available inch of space. We figured it would be no time at all before they had completely filled their own stores and begun working in ours. We were wrong.
The other theory is this: The main complaint people have with Italian bees (which all of ours now are since we requeened the mongrel hive) is that the queen never cycles dormant. Regardless of food stores, or lack thereof, an Italian queen will continuously lay brood all summer long. If food starts to become scarce she will continue to make babies, which means more mouths to feed from the stores since nothing new is coming about. So the other option is that they bees hit a dry spell where there was not enough bloom to sustain the new bees that the queen was making so they robbed their own store (or our super) to feed this new influx of mouths.
Although they had drawn out the wax in our harvest shallow (this means they built it up from flat to comb shaped to store honey) I still tend to go with the first theory. I just do not think they had enough time to fill and then eat that entire shallow. I think they simply had too much room and just did not bother with it as they continued to store honey in the brood box an two shallows which belonged to them. Still, regardless of the reason they did not fill it or robbed it, whichever, it was tremendously disappointing to see almost nothing in that shallow.
After we had moved through the bottom of the hive we put the lids back on and moved over into our hateful hive. I think after this we will save the hateful hive till last from now on when we do our inspections. After aggravating them they tend to stay angry for a while and disrupt our ability to move through the last hive which also tends to be fairly docile until annoyed by their more temperamental sisters. The nasty hive seemed to be thriving; we located their new queen easily due to the blue dot on her thorax. I got stung twice as we examined this hive. No amount of smoke or sugar water ever seems to dull their temper. We had hoped after requeening that they would become more pleasant but it seems their new monarch is equally as volatile as her predecessor. They too had all the necessary components to be pronounced healthy and we quickly put them back together to let them calm down.
As we moved into our last hive, this was the split we made earlier in the season, we located their queen almost immediately. She and her subjects all seemed in good condition although they were notably agitated as their neighbors continued to attack me due to the release of potent pheromones from the last two stings. We moved quickly through this hive with smoke and sugar water in attempts to keep them mostly calm and do a baseline check since we had already located the queen and could see she was in good condition. If you remember this was the hive I was sure I had completely annihilated with my beginner‘s fumblings when we attempted the split. Much to my joy they have thrived in spite of my clumsy and inept attempts to manage their existence.
Their stores seemed a little puny compared to the others and after much debate we decided to give them the shallow from the first hive that we had intended to keep for ourselves. Because, ultimately, it is our primary goal this year to keep all three hives in healthy robust condition. Harvesting a crop of honey would simply have been an added boon and apparently it was just not fated for this year. We are trying diligently not to be too disheartened after all they are still alive and we have one more hive than we started out with. This is more than we had hoped.
We will get back in them next week and decide how and when we will begin feeding for the fall and winter. We will probably have to feed at least the smaller of the three and we will probably feed all three just to keep them even and to prevent robbing. For all of you who were expecting a jar of honey for Christmas, I am sorry, maybe next year.
Please keep us and our endeavors in your prayers. Disappointments, even small ones, can sometimes weigh heavily on our motivation. We are not giving up, we know that we have to press forward and that every time cannot be a success but we just want to see a little fruit for what we are doing. We want to know that it is worth it and that we are making a difference, not just wasting time and money.
Thank you for reading,
Much love,
Autumn
That is the good news. Here is the bad: the super/shallow that we placed on top of our most active hive had no more honey in it than it did at last inspection. This is really, really disappointing. When we placed that shallow above the queen excluder it was in hopes of harvesting our first honey crop of the year. The bees of that hive were very active and abounding in stored honey, pollen and babies in their brood box and shallows. We actually thought they were beginning to get crowded and running out of room for their own stores so we placed the shallow above the queen excluder in hopes of giving them more room and of harvesting a little honey this year.
We were denied and we still are not sure exactly why. Now granted, our goal this year was not to harvest honey but to raise healthy bees for a bountiful crop next year. On the premise that last year was a bad year for bees in general our goals were simply to sustain and thrive a generation of bees that would raise strong producers next year. We gained a hive this spring during swarm season when we split the larger of our two hives. We requeened our hateful hive with a pure bred, mated Italian queen (after believing the hive to have lost their queen and in need of a gentler temperament anyway) and we have since located all three queens and appear to have a healthy generation of bees.
So why do we not have any honey? I do not know and frankly I am really frustrated. There has been a second late summer bloom which means the bees would have plenty of pollen and nectar to gather. I’ve let the yard go to clover on several occasions to keep them happy at home. They have a source of fresh water in the creek that runs past the house and the weather has been fairly cooperative, if not somewhat too hot, with only intermittent rain showers which should allow the bees plenty of harvest time. So what did we do wrong?
Again, my answer is I just do not know. Yesterday when Fred and I went out to the hives I fully expected to be harvesting an entire super. We dragged a large Tupperware container out to the apiary, stoked the smoker and prepared a heavy concentration of sugar syrup to engage the bee’s attention while we pilfered their hive. We decided to start with the hive whose super we intended to harvest.
We smoked the entrance and popped the outer lid, smoked them a little more, waited a few seconds then popped the top. This is our most docile hive and the one from which we had made the split. These are gentle bees that will curiously crawl around your veil without even attempting to sting. So we can move through this hive and their stores in a relatively slow pace without fear of angering them to attack. We popped the inner lid, sprayed them with a little sugar water and disappointingly gazed into a practically empty super. Virtually no different than when we placed it a month ago.
We fully expected to harvest this entire super but it was just not meant to be. We sat it off to the side and moved down into the lower two shallows and the brood box. We found plenty of late summer stores, lots of bees, substantial brood, lots of workers and the queen. Everything a beekeeper could want, except our own honey to harvest. This hive consists of one brood box, two shallows, a queen excluder and another shallow on top which in theory would be ours to harvest. I have come up with two theories as to why our bees did not make enough honey for us to steal a little.
The first theory is this: we have given them entirely too much room. If you remember back this would have happened when I botched the placement of the queen excluder and inadvertently trapped her majesty above in a shallow for approximately a week. You see the bees should have the brood box (or deep) and one super (or shallow) which belongs exclusively to them. This allows the queen plenty of room to raise new bees and the workers plenty of room to put up stores to feed the hive. I had intended to add a harvest shallow and had put down a queen excluder towards this goal, somehow trapping the queen above it when I could not locate her. This allowed her a week or more to lay several frame of brood in the shallow which basically means it now belongs to the bees (no one wants honey with little bee eyeballs and body parts floating about in it).
So we gave that shallow up for naught and placed the queen excluder above it and added a third shallow. This seemed like a fine idea at the time considering the bees were actively filling up every available inch of space. We figured it would be no time at all before they had completely filled their own stores and begun working in ours. We were wrong.
The other theory is this: The main complaint people have with Italian bees (which all of ours now are since we requeened the mongrel hive) is that the queen never cycles dormant. Regardless of food stores, or lack thereof, an Italian queen will continuously lay brood all summer long. If food starts to become scarce she will continue to make babies, which means more mouths to feed from the stores since nothing new is coming about. So the other option is that they bees hit a dry spell where there was not enough bloom to sustain the new bees that the queen was making so they robbed their own store (or our super) to feed this new influx of mouths.
Although they had drawn out the wax in our harvest shallow (this means they built it up from flat to comb shaped to store honey) I still tend to go with the first theory. I just do not think they had enough time to fill and then eat that entire shallow. I think they simply had too much room and just did not bother with it as they continued to store honey in the brood box an two shallows which belonged to them. Still, regardless of the reason they did not fill it or robbed it, whichever, it was tremendously disappointing to see almost nothing in that shallow.
After we had moved through the bottom of the hive we put the lids back on and moved over into our hateful hive. I think after this we will save the hateful hive till last from now on when we do our inspections. After aggravating them they tend to stay angry for a while and disrupt our ability to move through the last hive which also tends to be fairly docile until annoyed by their more temperamental sisters. The nasty hive seemed to be thriving; we located their new queen easily due to the blue dot on her thorax. I got stung twice as we examined this hive. No amount of smoke or sugar water ever seems to dull their temper. We had hoped after requeening that they would become more pleasant but it seems their new monarch is equally as volatile as her predecessor. They too had all the necessary components to be pronounced healthy and we quickly put them back together to let them calm down.
As we moved into our last hive, this was the split we made earlier in the season, we located their queen almost immediately. She and her subjects all seemed in good condition although they were notably agitated as their neighbors continued to attack me due to the release of potent pheromones from the last two stings. We moved quickly through this hive with smoke and sugar water in attempts to keep them mostly calm and do a baseline check since we had already located the queen and could see she was in good condition. If you remember this was the hive I was sure I had completely annihilated with my beginner‘s fumblings when we attempted the split. Much to my joy they have thrived in spite of my clumsy and inept attempts to manage their existence.
Their stores seemed a little puny compared to the others and after much debate we decided to give them the shallow from the first hive that we had intended to keep for ourselves. Because, ultimately, it is our primary goal this year to keep all three hives in healthy robust condition. Harvesting a crop of honey would simply have been an added boon and apparently it was just not fated for this year. We are trying diligently not to be too disheartened after all they are still alive and we have one more hive than we started out with. This is more than we had hoped.
We will get back in them next week and decide how and when we will begin feeding for the fall and winter. We will probably have to feed at least the smaller of the three and we will probably feed all three just to keep them even and to prevent robbing. For all of you who were expecting a jar of honey for Christmas, I am sorry, maybe next year.
Please keep us and our endeavors in your prayers. Disappointments, even small ones, can sometimes weigh heavily on our motivation. We are not giving up, we know that we have to press forward and that every time cannot be a success but we just want to see a little fruit for what we are doing. We want to know that it is worth it and that we are making a difference, not just wasting time and money.
Thank you for reading,
Much love,
Autumn
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Let's take this show on the road
Well here is the downside to collecting more and more animals and doing more and more self-sustaining stuff; it does not sustain itself! The “self” of self-sustaining is really referring to the person caring for the land/animal/project etc not the item itself. About the only remotely self-sustaining animals we have in our menagerie are the bees, and they are not really self-sustaining they are more like temporarily-able-to-be-left-to-their-own-devices-sustaining.
The least self-sustaining, and most high-maintenance, of our brood are the chickens, they must be cared for (at the very minimum) at least twice a day. This twice a day bare bones minimum maintenance includes letting them out around dawn with feeding and watering and then a return trip at dusk to close up the coop, this is really stretching it. In all actuality their water should be changed several times a day (especially in this heat), and the nest box should be checked with regularity.
Like any other social creature they enjoy your time and attention like to be talked to and especially want to befriend anyone bearing a treat so only interacting with them twice a day also leaves them unhappy and unsettled. I will tell you from firsthand experience; grouchy chickens can and will withhold/impede egg production. Happy chickens are much better layers and pets, however, they can be taken care of with the bare bones twice a day routine. If you add to the bees and chickens one dog and five inside cats you can see how going out of town becomes more and more challenging for our family the “greener” we become.
This past weekend my best friend got married in Gatlinburg, TN. Gatlinburg is about a six hour drive from here and we made plans well in advance. Originally we had intended to take Louie with us but our pet friendly cabin fell through and we ended up renting a condo. So Louie got farmed out to Fred’s mom. That left the care of the cats and chickens to my mom. The bees would be fine on their own for a few days. Luckily for us we live within a five mile radius of lots of friends and family and luckily for us my mom still enjoys the chickens as a novelty.
Our “going green” is quite the amusing joke of our family. Everyone wants to know what we are cooking up next so they can point and laugh and talk about us doing things the hard way and at this point everyone still finds it charming enough to indulge us our quirkiness by, for example, tending our chickens while we are gone for several days. So twice a day my mom schlepped up here to have her toes pecked and listen to a list of clucking complaints, for her trouble she was treated to one single egg by Mama who apparently was so put out with us for leaving she went on a laying strike.
This is really the only true “downside” we have reached in our push towards green. In our drive to wrest back our lives from corporate management we have taken on more work, more responsibility and more dependents in the form of animal life. Generally, this is a good thing. It is rewarding to be closer to our food source, to have a product for our labor at the end of each day, to accomplish things, to make things and to realize that everything does not stem from the ground clean and shrink wrapped in plastic but specifically it binds you to the land with an invisible and tenacious umbilical cord of responsibility. That nurturing connection goes both directions and can only be stretched so thin and cannot be completely broken lest one party starve from a lack of attention or nutrition.
Farming, which is what we quaintly call our endeavors, is not easily abandoned and is not something from which you get two weeks paid vacation a year. To leave the land and the animals, and expect them to carry on in our absence, careful preparation must be made. I think this is the only real draw back Fred and I have stumbled on so far. We never did so much “vacation” in the traditional sense, a week spent somewhere eating in restaurants we could eat in at home and sleeping in motels with skeevy beds and noisy ice machines, as we spontaneously camp. We love to just pick a state park or some out of the way campground or hike part of the Greenbrier trail or whatever. That is a little more difficult now. We can no longer just throw down enough cat food for several days grab Louie and take off.
Next year as we grow our endeavors and hopefully get a nanny goat (which will require twice a day milking all year long) I am not sure how we will manage to leave the homestead at all. While my mom finds the chickens amusing and enjoys watching them peck around for treats and what not, I do not think she would be equally charmed by an ill-tempered nanny goat more likely to head butt someone while they were not looking than to sweetly peck raisins from your palm. Who knows, she might surprise me and really enjoy milking a goat, but I doubt it.
So this time next year if Fred and I want to vacation anywhere we maybe in the market for a farm sitter. Is there such a thing? Maybe I have just stumbled upon a new career. If you live within a thirty mile radius of me and are also homesteading maybe we could work up a trade system? You tend my farm for a week or two a year while my family takes a break and we will do the same for you. This could work.
In all reality I think this is what we really need anyway and that is one of the goals of writing this blog; to reach out to other like-minded people and to create a support system. I know there are other people out there doing the same things we are doing, people who are fed up with having mass-produced everything shoved down their throats twenty-four hours a day. Some of these people are doing it on a larger scale than us, some are taking even smaller baby steps but I think, no matter where you are on this journey we all need each other. We need to support like minded people because, in reality, that is the only way we are ever going to effect change on a larger scale. Banded together we can bring the farm subsidies back where they belong and make a difference not only in our corner but in our country and ultimately in the world.
Ok, I will fold up my soap-box, it snuck out on me for a second. But I am serious about the trade everyone needs a break from routine sometimes. So think about it.
Much love,
Thank you for reading,
Autumn
The least self-sustaining, and most high-maintenance, of our brood are the chickens, they must be cared for (at the very minimum) at least twice a day. This twice a day bare bones minimum maintenance includes letting them out around dawn with feeding and watering and then a return trip at dusk to close up the coop, this is really stretching it. In all actuality their water should be changed several times a day (especially in this heat), and the nest box should be checked with regularity.
Like any other social creature they enjoy your time and attention like to be talked to and especially want to befriend anyone bearing a treat so only interacting with them twice a day also leaves them unhappy and unsettled. I will tell you from firsthand experience; grouchy chickens can and will withhold/impede egg production. Happy chickens are much better layers and pets, however, they can be taken care of with the bare bones twice a day routine. If you add to the bees and chickens one dog and five inside cats you can see how going out of town becomes more and more challenging for our family the “greener” we become.
This past weekend my best friend got married in Gatlinburg, TN. Gatlinburg is about a six hour drive from here and we made plans well in advance. Originally we had intended to take Louie with us but our pet friendly cabin fell through and we ended up renting a condo. So Louie got farmed out to Fred’s mom. That left the care of the cats and chickens to my mom. The bees would be fine on their own for a few days. Luckily for us we live within a five mile radius of lots of friends and family and luckily for us my mom still enjoys the chickens as a novelty.
Our “going green” is quite the amusing joke of our family. Everyone wants to know what we are cooking up next so they can point and laugh and talk about us doing things the hard way and at this point everyone still finds it charming enough to indulge us our quirkiness by, for example, tending our chickens while we are gone for several days. So twice a day my mom schlepped up here to have her toes pecked and listen to a list of clucking complaints, for her trouble she was treated to one single egg by Mama who apparently was so put out with us for leaving she went on a laying strike.
This is really the only true “downside” we have reached in our push towards green. In our drive to wrest back our lives from corporate management we have taken on more work, more responsibility and more dependents in the form of animal life. Generally, this is a good thing. It is rewarding to be closer to our food source, to have a product for our labor at the end of each day, to accomplish things, to make things and to realize that everything does not stem from the ground clean and shrink wrapped in plastic but specifically it binds you to the land with an invisible and tenacious umbilical cord of responsibility. That nurturing connection goes both directions and can only be stretched so thin and cannot be completely broken lest one party starve from a lack of attention or nutrition.
Farming, which is what we quaintly call our endeavors, is not easily abandoned and is not something from which you get two weeks paid vacation a year. To leave the land and the animals, and expect them to carry on in our absence, careful preparation must be made. I think this is the only real draw back Fred and I have stumbled on so far. We never did so much “vacation” in the traditional sense, a week spent somewhere eating in restaurants we could eat in at home and sleeping in motels with skeevy beds and noisy ice machines, as we spontaneously camp. We love to just pick a state park or some out of the way campground or hike part of the Greenbrier trail or whatever. That is a little more difficult now. We can no longer just throw down enough cat food for several days grab Louie and take off.
Next year as we grow our endeavors and hopefully get a nanny goat (which will require twice a day milking all year long) I am not sure how we will manage to leave the homestead at all. While my mom finds the chickens amusing and enjoys watching them peck around for treats and what not, I do not think she would be equally charmed by an ill-tempered nanny goat more likely to head butt someone while they were not looking than to sweetly peck raisins from your palm. Who knows, she might surprise me and really enjoy milking a goat, but I doubt it.
So this time next year if Fred and I want to vacation anywhere we maybe in the market for a farm sitter. Is there such a thing? Maybe I have just stumbled upon a new career. If you live within a thirty mile radius of me and are also homesteading maybe we could work up a trade system? You tend my farm for a week or two a year while my family takes a break and we will do the same for you. This could work.
In all reality I think this is what we really need anyway and that is one of the goals of writing this blog; to reach out to other like-minded people and to create a support system. I know there are other people out there doing the same things we are doing, people who are fed up with having mass-produced everything shoved down their throats twenty-four hours a day. Some of these people are doing it on a larger scale than us, some are taking even smaller baby steps but I think, no matter where you are on this journey we all need each other. We need to support like minded people because, in reality, that is the only way we are ever going to effect change on a larger scale. Banded together we can bring the farm subsidies back where they belong and make a difference not only in our corner but in our country and ultimately in the world.
Ok, I will fold up my soap-box, it snuck out on me for a second. But I am serious about the trade everyone needs a break from routine sometimes. So think about it.
Much love,
Thank you for reading,
Autumn
Thursday, June 3, 2010
WHAT'S MY MOTIVATION?!?
I’ve neglected the blog now for over a week, and frankly I’m not sure where this entry is going, however, I owe it to myself and the people following this blog, who are diligently praying for Fred and me, and our success, to give you an update. The last week or so has been fraught with disappointment both in our beekeeping endeavors and our personal lives. I had hoped this fall to open my own yoga studio here in the Elkview area. I needed some additional training for national certification and insurance purposes and had intended to take that training over the summer. The class I had enrolled in was canceled due to lack of interest. So God has closed that door for now.
That news and the seemingly ceaseless rains of the past week or so left me in a directionless funk. Logically I know that things happen in God’s time and according to his plan but logical reasoning and practical application do not always seem to go hand in hand. I like to be proactive and in motion so stillness and the ability to listen are not two of my strongest attributes. I find myself starting lots of little things and leaving a trail of half finished projects in my wake. I guess, for now, this is what I am supposed to be doing, caring for my family and the bees and chickens. I am not much of a housekeeper so it is especially trying for me to be stuck here on the rainy days when I cannot get out and work in the hives or tend the chicks.
Here is an update on the bees. We found the queen in our split. She is laying and the hive looked good. Last Saturday when we got into the hives and began poking around we saw evidence of what we thought was a queenless hive. This is especially frustrating because it was the hive from which we made the split originally. There did not appear to be any eggs or larva or brood at all so we assumed that when we made the split or sometime after we had accidentally killed the queen. We spent all day Saturday and part of the day Sunday trying to track down a queen producer within driving distance so that we could quickly obtain a queen and get the hive back in order.
Our biggest fear was that we would lose the rest of that hive to a swarm, apparently we had bigger things of which to be afraid. We called the president of the KVBA and he asked how long we thought the hive had been queenless. We believed it could not have been more that around a week because we try to get in the hives at least once a week sometimes more and a week ago we had not noticed anything alarming. He said we would probably be ok to mail order a queen since the hive apparently had not been without a queen for an extensive period of time but (and let me say this is a big but) if we left the hive queenless and there was no brood from which the workers could rear a queen eventually one of the worker bees would begin to lay eggs.
Well frankly this did not sound too bad to me. Seriously, why not just let one of the workers take over the queenly duty? The more I thought about it the better it sounded. Then he dropped the bomb on me. Yes a worker would begin to lay eggs but those eggs would strictly be drones, which means that very quickly the hive would be overrun with bees that could neither feed nor care for themselves or the hive. UGH! He also went on to elaborate on the fact that once you had a laying worker, not only was she almost impossible to find and snuff but that by the time the problem was caught it would be almost impossible to correct and usually the entire hive would be a loss. The frames would need to be destroyed and we would have to start from scratch with a new colony. Can I say again? UGH!
So we spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday calling everyone on the WV Queens producer registry trying to find a queen within driving distance that we could get right away. Remember this was a holiday weekend so even if we got one in the mail it would not ship out until Tuesday at the earliest and we were running out of time. We found one Italian queen in Wardensville, up in the panhandle, which was ready to ship. It would be a nine hour drive to get her. We debated what to do.
The beekeeper that reared the queen suggested we take a frame of young brood from one of our other hives, remove all the bees and stick it in the hive that was supposedly queenless. He said as long as there were brood to care for the workers would not begin to try and lay, his advice was this would buy us a few days grace period and allow the queen to ship USPS. We decided this was the most economical solution. It would have cost us nearly one hundred dollars by the time we had driven there, paid for the queen and driven home not to mention the entire weekend would have been shot. We did as our fellow beekeeper had suggested and switched a frame of brood for a frame of honey and waited for our queen to arrive.
Tuesday morning dawned bright and early with a call from the state inspector. Remember I have been trying to mesh schedules with him for weeks now. Our apiary was due for inspection but I wanted to be there when he came so I could take full advantage of his expertise. He did not give me much notice he was about an hour away and heading my direction, if I wanted him to stop he would. I told him yes and briefly explained what I thought the problem was. He gave a huge sigh, mumbled something about newbies and said he would see me in an hour. I scrambled to find someone to sit with my niece while I got in the hives. My mother-in-law came to the rescue and agreed to babysit for the hour or two it would take.
The inspector arrived and we suited up and headed to the hives. He pointed out about eight million and a half things that we were doing wrong, scoffed at my “Beekeeping for Dummies” bible that I live by and basically all around marveled that my split had lived at all after my caging them off debacle. However, most of the problems he found were minor and general he said (for newbies, of course) we were doing a pretty good job (for people who had no clue what they were doing). We did not have any major illnesses; one hive did have a couple of mites but nothing that was overly concerning. He pointed out a few changes we should make and then we moved into our queenless hive.
He went through both supers and the brood box and pulled out several frames. Unfortunately, it seems our inexperience has once again led us to the wrong conclusion. The inspector was of the opinion that we do have a queen in that hive and that she was probably a virgin on her mating flight. He said the empty cells in the brood box were an indication that the workers were cleaning out for the new queen to begin laying, not that they had left or that the queen was dead. He said the real proof of a queen was that the workers had not begun to pull an “emergency” queen from the frame of brood we had placed in the super. Well great. Not.
Now I have a twenty-five dollar queen and no hive to put her in. She just arrived this morning (Thursday) and I, frankly, have no clue what to do with her. I taped closed the sugar cork end of her cage and placed her on top of the hive frames. I’m getting ready now to gear up and head out. My options are (assuming that all of my hives have a queen):
a. Snuff one of the queens and replace it with the new queen.
b. Get another brood box and put some of my bees and a new queen in it and try for another split.
Or
c. Try and sell the new queen we just bought.
These are the options assuming that the inspector is right and there is a queen in the hive. If there is not a queen then I will simple un-tape the cork and let the new queen do her thing. Pray for me I will need it this afternoon!
Much love,
Autumn
Romans 5: 3-4 “And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulations bring about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character, and proven character hope.”
That news and the seemingly ceaseless rains of the past week or so left me in a directionless funk. Logically I know that things happen in God’s time and according to his plan but logical reasoning and practical application do not always seem to go hand in hand. I like to be proactive and in motion so stillness and the ability to listen are not two of my strongest attributes. I find myself starting lots of little things and leaving a trail of half finished projects in my wake. I guess, for now, this is what I am supposed to be doing, caring for my family and the bees and chickens. I am not much of a housekeeper so it is especially trying for me to be stuck here on the rainy days when I cannot get out and work in the hives or tend the chicks.
Here is an update on the bees. We found the queen in our split. She is laying and the hive looked good. Last Saturday when we got into the hives and began poking around we saw evidence of what we thought was a queenless hive. This is especially frustrating because it was the hive from which we made the split originally. There did not appear to be any eggs or larva or brood at all so we assumed that when we made the split or sometime after we had accidentally killed the queen. We spent all day Saturday and part of the day Sunday trying to track down a queen producer within driving distance so that we could quickly obtain a queen and get the hive back in order.
Our biggest fear was that we would lose the rest of that hive to a swarm, apparently we had bigger things of which to be afraid. We called the president of the KVBA and he asked how long we thought the hive had been queenless. We believed it could not have been more that around a week because we try to get in the hives at least once a week sometimes more and a week ago we had not noticed anything alarming. He said we would probably be ok to mail order a queen since the hive apparently had not been without a queen for an extensive period of time but (and let me say this is a big but) if we left the hive queenless and there was no brood from which the workers could rear a queen eventually one of the worker bees would begin to lay eggs.
Well frankly this did not sound too bad to me. Seriously, why not just let one of the workers take over the queenly duty? The more I thought about it the better it sounded. Then he dropped the bomb on me. Yes a worker would begin to lay eggs but those eggs would strictly be drones, which means that very quickly the hive would be overrun with bees that could neither feed nor care for themselves or the hive. UGH! He also went on to elaborate on the fact that once you had a laying worker, not only was she almost impossible to find and snuff but that by the time the problem was caught it would be almost impossible to correct and usually the entire hive would be a loss. The frames would need to be destroyed and we would have to start from scratch with a new colony. Can I say again? UGH!
So we spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday calling everyone on the WV Queens producer registry trying to find a queen within driving distance that we could get right away. Remember this was a holiday weekend so even if we got one in the mail it would not ship out until Tuesday at the earliest and we were running out of time. We found one Italian queen in Wardensville, up in the panhandle, which was ready to ship. It would be a nine hour drive to get her. We debated what to do.
The beekeeper that reared the queen suggested we take a frame of young brood from one of our other hives, remove all the bees and stick it in the hive that was supposedly queenless. He said as long as there were brood to care for the workers would not begin to try and lay, his advice was this would buy us a few days grace period and allow the queen to ship USPS. We decided this was the most economical solution. It would have cost us nearly one hundred dollars by the time we had driven there, paid for the queen and driven home not to mention the entire weekend would have been shot. We did as our fellow beekeeper had suggested and switched a frame of brood for a frame of honey and waited for our queen to arrive.
Tuesday morning dawned bright and early with a call from the state inspector. Remember I have been trying to mesh schedules with him for weeks now. Our apiary was due for inspection but I wanted to be there when he came so I could take full advantage of his expertise. He did not give me much notice he was about an hour away and heading my direction, if I wanted him to stop he would. I told him yes and briefly explained what I thought the problem was. He gave a huge sigh, mumbled something about newbies and said he would see me in an hour. I scrambled to find someone to sit with my niece while I got in the hives. My mother-in-law came to the rescue and agreed to babysit for the hour or two it would take.
The inspector arrived and we suited up and headed to the hives. He pointed out about eight million and a half things that we were doing wrong, scoffed at my “Beekeeping for Dummies” bible that I live by and basically all around marveled that my split had lived at all after my caging them off debacle. However, most of the problems he found were minor and general he said (for newbies, of course) we were doing a pretty good job (for people who had no clue what they were doing). We did not have any major illnesses; one hive did have a couple of mites but nothing that was overly concerning. He pointed out a few changes we should make and then we moved into our queenless hive.
He went through both supers and the brood box and pulled out several frames. Unfortunately, it seems our inexperience has once again led us to the wrong conclusion. The inspector was of the opinion that we do have a queen in that hive and that she was probably a virgin on her mating flight. He said the empty cells in the brood box were an indication that the workers were cleaning out for the new queen to begin laying, not that they had left or that the queen was dead. He said the real proof of a queen was that the workers had not begun to pull an “emergency” queen from the frame of brood we had placed in the super. Well great. Not.
Now I have a twenty-five dollar queen and no hive to put her in. She just arrived this morning (Thursday) and I, frankly, have no clue what to do with her. I taped closed the sugar cork end of her cage and placed her on top of the hive frames. I’m getting ready now to gear up and head out. My options are (assuming that all of my hives have a queen):
a. Snuff one of the queens and replace it with the new queen.
b. Get another brood box and put some of my bees and a new queen in it and try for another split.
Or
c. Try and sell the new queen we just bought.
These are the options assuming that the inspector is right and there is a queen in the hive. If there is not a queen then I will simple un-tape the cork and let the new queen do her thing. Pray for me I will need it this afternoon!
Much love,
Autumn
Romans 5: 3-4 “And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulations bring about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character, and proven character hope.”
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
A little about us, our hopes and our dreams.
Fred and I love to be outside. That is pretty much from where all of this, our desires for a "greener" life, stems: our love of the outdoors. This blog will chronicle our hopeful, baby steps towards a more earth friendly, God driven, sustainable life. We are dreamers by nature and sometimes we out dream our means. We are imperfect humans who get angry and make mistakes. We are Americans by birth so we want what we want and we want it now. We are learners by choice, with some formal (useful & useless) education between us. As we age and grow we find we have much more to learn from the Bible, from people with experience in our interests and from the endless resources available at the library and on the internet.
We aren't trying to start a revolution (except in our own home) we simply want to document what we are doing for ourselves, as a learning tool, & to interact with other like-minded people who also sense there is something more for all of us if we merely try to lead a more thoughtful, less busy existence.
I was a vegetarian for many years, I've been a Christian (although an imperfect one) since I was a child, I became interested in yoga as a young adult and since Fred and I have been married I've transitioned into a dietary vegan. Simply put, it is my personal belief that you are what you eat. If you eat things that are unsanitary, that have lived lives of pain and torture or that are chocked full of chemicals you will be unhealthy and unhappy. I will state once again I am not perfect I do own leather shoes & handbags, throwing those away will not save any more animals. I will point out though I am not eating my old shoes either :)
Fred is also a Christian, he is an accomplished outdoors man and an avid fisherman. He is obviously not a vegan but we share an equal passion for a more healthy, less separate connection to our food and our food sources. Fred works a factory job where he is trapped indoors all day. We know that for now that is where God has put him to financially provide for our family. Some day though, Fred & I both dream of a life less enslaved to a time clock. We are planning now and working towards our future. Fred will hopefully also make posts on this blog and not leave all the writing to me, so I will leave off here and let him tell you more about himself in a later post.
I am not opposed to others eating meat. I am opposed to them eating poison. We don't have some hidden agenda or any political ambitions we only want to help our family and work toward being the good stewards of the earth that God charged us to be. I myself would consider renouncing some of my vegan ways on a limited basis, were we able to raise our own eggs, milk and honey. This is part of what we will be documenting as we move towards green. We will try to discuss our choices and our reasoning. We know we can't do it all at once so we are taking small steps, starting with little things and dreaming of a bigger picture. We've started with two beehives & a porch garden. We hope to soon include some chickens and a compost pile. Some day we dream of solar & wind power, a few goats and a spring fed well.
People may call us liberals, people may call us hippies, people have already tried to discourage us although with nothing but the most well-intentioned motives. We have heard everything from it is too expensive, to bee/chicken/gardening is too difficult and too time consuming and too dirty. We are not afraid of hard work and we know that what is even more difficult than managing these tasks is battling cancer and other illnesses caused in part by the things we eat.
I made the transition to veganism in my life out of laziness and convenience. I could not live with the repercussions of eating things I knew to be so harmful yet I had neither the time nor the inclination to raise those things myself. Last year all that changed. As a medical condition made it impossible for me to continue in my job as a firefighter I found myself stuck at home eating over processed junk-food (yes there is vegan junk food) listless and with no direction. I am now left with scads of time and limited means of transportation. It took a while for me to get past the crushing disappointment of loosing a job I'd worked so intently to have, however I now realize that God has given me a great opportunity that very few people are ever afforded. I am home with unlimited time to make something out of our little patch of dirt.
So Fred and I have begun our journey with 2 beehives and a dream. We hope you will all feel free to post comments and suggestions. Don't be afraid to offend or correct us but please don't pick fights either. We want your help and your suggestions but we have plenty of our own sarcasm and challenges, so you can keep those :) We hope you will enjoy this journey with us and we hope maybe you'll be inspired too!
Thank you for reading and please come back,
Autumn
We aren't trying to start a revolution (except in our own home) we simply want to document what we are doing for ourselves, as a learning tool, & to interact with other like-minded people who also sense there is something more for all of us if we merely try to lead a more thoughtful, less busy existence.
I was a vegetarian for many years, I've been a Christian (although an imperfect one) since I was a child, I became interested in yoga as a young adult and since Fred and I have been married I've transitioned into a dietary vegan. Simply put, it is my personal belief that you are what you eat. If you eat things that are unsanitary, that have lived lives of pain and torture or that are chocked full of chemicals you will be unhealthy and unhappy. I will state once again I am not perfect I do own leather shoes & handbags, throwing those away will not save any more animals. I will point out though I am not eating my old shoes either :)
Fred is also a Christian, he is an accomplished outdoors man and an avid fisherman. He is obviously not a vegan but we share an equal passion for a more healthy, less separate connection to our food and our food sources. Fred works a factory job where he is trapped indoors all day. We know that for now that is where God has put him to financially provide for our family. Some day though, Fred & I both dream of a life less enslaved to a time clock. We are planning now and working towards our future. Fred will hopefully also make posts on this blog and not leave all the writing to me, so I will leave off here and let him tell you more about himself in a later post.
I am not opposed to others eating meat. I am opposed to them eating poison. We don't have some hidden agenda or any political ambitions we only want to help our family and work toward being the good stewards of the earth that God charged us to be. I myself would consider renouncing some of my vegan ways on a limited basis, were we able to raise our own eggs, milk and honey. This is part of what we will be documenting as we move towards green. We will try to discuss our choices and our reasoning. We know we can't do it all at once so we are taking small steps, starting with little things and dreaming of a bigger picture. We've started with two beehives & a porch garden. We hope to soon include some chickens and a compost pile. Some day we dream of solar & wind power, a few goats and a spring fed well.
People may call us liberals, people may call us hippies, people have already tried to discourage us although with nothing but the most well-intentioned motives. We have heard everything from it is too expensive, to bee/chicken/gardening is too difficult and too time consuming and too dirty. We are not afraid of hard work and we know that what is even more difficult than managing these tasks is battling cancer and other illnesses caused in part by the things we eat.
I made the transition to veganism in my life out of laziness and convenience. I could not live with the repercussions of eating things I knew to be so harmful yet I had neither the time nor the inclination to raise those things myself. Last year all that changed. As a medical condition made it impossible for me to continue in my job as a firefighter I found myself stuck at home eating over processed junk-food (yes there is vegan junk food) listless and with no direction. I am now left with scads of time and limited means of transportation. It took a while for me to get past the crushing disappointment of loosing a job I'd worked so intently to have, however I now realize that God has given me a great opportunity that very few people are ever afforded. I am home with unlimited time to make something out of our little patch of dirt.
So Fred and I have begun our journey with 2 beehives and a dream. We hope you will all feel free to post comments and suggestions. Don't be afraid to offend or correct us but please don't pick fights either. We want your help and your suggestions but we have plenty of our own sarcasm and challenges, so you can keep those :) We hope you will enjoy this journey with us and we hope maybe you'll be inspired too!
Thank you for reading and please come back,
Autumn
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