One of the Kids' Christmas Presents

Malin and Kai will be able to help Karl next year.

In other bee news, the month of December was unseasonably cold this year. As it's our first winter beekeeping, we're hopeful that our bees will make it, but we're just not sure. Two days ago, the temperature finally got up past 40 degrees and, surprisingly, a few bees were out an about. Today it's supposed to get past 50 so I maybe we'll see a few more flying around.

Pre-Christmas Baking

Wheat bread, hamburger rolls from the Professional Pastry Chef cookbook (they're really good, but it makes way too much dough for us to use without freezing half of them), peppermint coconut macaroons and toffee bars.

Cranberry-Pistachio Biscotti

Continuing on my baking binge...

Christmas Honey

Isn't it pretty?

Krumkake

I made two giant batches of Krumkake last weekend for a Christmas cookie exchange. Krumkake's a Norwegian butter cookie that's baked on a flat iron and then rolled on a wooden cone.

Another Article on Urban Beekeeping

Urban beekeeping really does seem to be a popular topic for mainstream media these days. Last week, the New York Times ran a story on the movement to legalize city beekeeping. Denver, Salt Lake City and Milwaukee are the latest cities to endorse backyard bees. Here's a link...

Thanksgiving Dinner

I made Parker House Rolls to go with Thanksgiving dinner. Following the recipe in Cook's Illustrated Baking cookbook, I made them earlier in the day, about 3 hours before dinner was ready. The rolls were absolutely delicious warm, but once they cooled, they seemed a bit dry. It's nearly impossible to bake something while a turkey is in the oven along with side dishes. Lesson learned.



Pies included pumpkin, chocolate pecan and sour cherry-peach. While alone in the kitchen with cooling pies, Aksel decided to help me "decorate" the pumpkin one by dragging sharp objects across the top. Another lesson learned: don't leave a two year old alone with pie. I should have known that one already.

Economics of Urban Beekeeping

We certainly aren't keeping bees to supplement our family income, but this article is an interesting take on the basic economics of beekeeping. Is it an endeavor that can pay off? Sure, if the bees survive the winter and harvested honey is sold for $15-$20 a pound like hipster Brooklyn honey.

Here's the full article.

Wheat Bread

I think I found a wheat bread recipe I like. I have white loaves down, but the wheat bread I've made has been too dense or the flavor has been off. Yesterday, I tried the recipe from Baking Illustrated which is by the editors of Cook's Illustrated. Cook's Illustrated recipes are sometimes pretty complicated, and the prose is kind of preachy, but you have to hand it to them -- the recipes work. This bread is a combination of white flour, wheat flour and a little bit of rye flour sweetened with our own honey.

Half a loaf is cut up for Thanksgiving stuffing. Yum.

November Bees

It's five days before Thanksgiving, but the weather has been great for the last few days. It was over 60 degrees, sunny and calm -- great flying weather for the bees. Karl removed the varroa mite poison from the hive this afternoon. Everything looked fine, and he actually saw bees with tons of pollen. I wonder what they could be collecting these days.

What our bees are visiting these days

We've had really great weather the last couple of weeks -- clear, sunny with temperatures in the '60s. Once it warms up in the morning, there are lots of bees going in and and out of the hive. Karl and I were just asking ourselves where the bees were going because it doesn't seem like there are many flowers in bloom these days. This weekend, we stumbled across a few flowering plants with a whole mess of bees buzzing around. Mystery solved. Now what are the names of these plants?



This big bushy plant had a couple dozen honey bees on buzzing around it.

Video of Honey Extracting

We made a short video of our honey extracting day. My favorite part is at the end. Karl put out the frames and the bees cleaned them up.

We don't need our burglar alarm turned on today

Yesterday's spinning is done and the frames are outside being cleaned up by thousands of busy bees. Karl set up the frames on our picnic table right outside our kitchen window.

October Honey Harvest

Here's the honey extracting set up in our kitchen.



We held a capped frame steady over the large gray tub. Karl then used a stiff wire comb-like tool to scrape the wax caps off the honeycomb and into the tub. We had a bunch of boys from Karl's Cub Scout Den, as well as a couple neighborhood families over and everyone got a chance to scrape off wax caps.



Once the honeycomb is opened up, we put four frames into the cylindrical extractor. You turn the crank on the side really fast and honey flies off the frame.



The moment of truth: you open the valve at the bottom of the extractor and honey gushes out into a cheesecloth lined bucket. Aksel was pretty excited, exclaiming "waterfall!" An amber waterfall of dark, flowery honey.



The final step is hanging the cheesecloth to filter the honey.




Haven't weighed it, but there's probably a good 18 pounds of the sweet stuff.

deformed wing virus

So here is a photo of one of the bees that was ejected from the hive by her sisters because she is a victim of deformed wing virus. Basically infected bees have stubs for wings. The mite that spreads the disease is a blood sucker, and spreads the illness much like a tick would spread Lyme disease. By killing the mites you end the virus. With winter close by (when the queen stops laying eggs) we had to treat for the illness or the population of bees could suffer.

It's pretty gross, but dozens of dead mites underneath the hive entrance is evidence that the poison is working.

Honey on the Counter

Karl removed a bunch of frames for spinning tomorrow and was able to check on the hive. The traps he put in last time have caught a bunch of small hive beetles. That's a good thing for sure, but kind of a bummer that there were so many beetles to trap in the first place. More good news: no sign of the dreaded wax moth. The only bad news is that there are signs that our bees are infected with the varroa mite which is causing a bunch of baby bees to be born deformed. After removing the frames of honey, Karl treated the hive with poison to get rid of them.

Here are the frames full of honey sitting on our counter waiting to spun. The one in front has comb all over it, but only has some honey in the center that is ready to go and capped. The frames behind it are the ones that are completely full and capped, but I didn't want to disturb them to take a picture.



There are lots of cells on the front frame that have some honey in them, but the bees haven't capped them because the honey isn't quite ready. We won't spin that side of the frame. I think it's cool that the bees have built the comb on a slight angle so the honey can just sit there and not drip out.



Tomorrow's the big day for honey harvesting!

Honey Extractor

I borrowed a honey extractor from the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association this afternoon. This is the large contraption in which you place your honey filled frames and then spin. I think our plan is to harvest some honey on Columbus Day on Monday. Any friends in DC that want to come over are welcome to join the fun.

A Sign of Fall -- Pumpkin-Apple Bread

Dessert

Some folks came over earlier this week, and I served coffee and dessert: spritz cookies, chocolate chip cookies, lemon cake and brownies. I may have gone a little overboard -- we probably have a hundred extra cookies in sitting in our freezer. I guess we just have to have another party.

The Week, part two

I almost forgot of one more thing we did this week. I tore up the zucchini plant because it wasn't producing much of anything anymore. I think it was too stressed from growing that enormous zucchini a few weeks ago and it never bounced back. Lettuce seeds were sown in place of the squash plant, and they're already sprouting.

The Week

Let's see...we went raspberry picking and made muffins with the fresh berries.



Karl fixed a leak in the hive from when he worked on the hive last weekend. Bees were getting out somehow and were flying around the porch so Karl had to fix that. Also, last weekend he put a "bee door" under the top super. The top super is full of capped honey ready to be harvested, but it's covered with bees. One way of moving all the bees on these frames is to install a bee door which is a one way exit-only contraption. The bees go down through this door, but can't get back into the top super. Supposedly, this happens pretty quickly and you should have empty frames in a couple of days. Unfortunately, after 5 or 6 days, we still had a mess of bees up in the top super. We learned later that these bee doors only work when it's cold. Who knew. So Karl fixed that yesterday.

And little Aksel got his first bee sting, but he survived with no allergic reaction. No picture of his fat lip, but it wasn't pretty. The funny thing was even though we live with tens of thousands of honeybees, he was stung by a wasp or a yellow jacket while we were on a picnic miles from our house. He had been drinking orange juice and the juice on his lip attracted an aggressive insect that got him. Our honeybee girls would never do that.

"The Honey Trail" on NPR

Today, NPR's Diane Rehm interviewed Grace Pundyk, author of "The Honey Trail."

From the NPR website (which has some great photographs taken by Ms. Pundyk):

"Honey is a global food -- part of tradition, culture and trade. But it's not all sweet: the story also involves smuggling, deforestation and climate change. One woman explains what she found out when she went around the world in pursuit of liquid gold and vanishing bees."

Interesting interview -- the book's now on my reading list.

Montgomery County Beekeepers Association

Karl's a member of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Beekeepers Association. We just got the September, 2010 newsletter, the Honeypot, that talked all about everyone's favorite topic these days -- small hive beetles -- as well as what everyone needs to do in the coming weeks to help their bees make it through the winter. They're good folks who have helped us throughout our first year of beekeeping so I had to provide a link to their website.

Hive seems in good shape

Karl opened the hive up this morning for the first time in over a month. Before we left for vacation at the end of July, we were concerned that the girls were working on a new queen and may be unhappy and ready to swarm. Karl was eager to check the hive since we've gotten back a couple weeks ago, but waited a bit until he had a chance to order some bee supplies -- small-hive-beetle traps and some post-honey harvesting pesticides to kill off mites or beetles.

The best news of all is that they definitely have a queen and she is making tons of babies! Karl didn't see her, but he also didn't dig around for her. He simply wanted to make sure there wasn't an infestation of anything, check for bee larva (aka, make sure we had a healthy queen), see where they were in terms of honey for the winter - and get out.

More good news: there's plenty of honey. Here's a picture of a honey filled, capped frame.



When he was done looking around and was ready to close up the hive, Karl also put several small hive beetle traps in the hive. These plastic vegetable oil filled traps simply lay between the frames and have spaces too small for bees to get through, but just right for beetles. The beetles are constantly under attack in the hive and so they look for places to hide. The idea is the bees chase them through the small holes and they then fall into the oil and die.

The bad news is that Karl found two strange larvae in the hive. They were little grubs about as long as a quarter -- disgusting. Karl saw the first one and squished it with his finger but then immediately regretted it when the bees gathered around the squished larvae to carry it out of the hive. Karl later found another one on the baseboard of the hive, and the bees were not being nice to it, either. He didn't squish this one right away because he wanted a picture of it to use to identify it later. Even when he removed it from the hive and placed it on the windowsill, the bees followed it over there, gathered around and continued to sting and bite at it. Pretty amazing.


Now we'll get ready for cold weather and winter. Karl thinks we have enough honey to pull off some more frames for spinning. Once we clear the bees from those supers, we can take that honey off and put beetle and mite poison into the hive for pest control.

DC State Fair

It's not the Iowa State Fair. There is no life size cow sculpted in butter, and there aren't any pig races. But, for a city without any agriculture except for backyard and community gardens, the first DC State Fair got off to a great start. There was a photography contest, largest and strangest looking vegetable competition and contests for home brew, cupcakes, pickles, jam and pie. I had to enter Blueberry Jam, Cinnamon Peach Jam, Bread & Butter Pickles and Sour Cherry-Peach Pie.



To be honest, I didn't think there would be much competition. How many folks in DC actually make jam and pickles? But folks did come out -- dozens of them -- and my jam and plain old pickles (pickled peaches won the blue ribbon) didn't place. I admit I was a bit bummed out and didn't really feel like sticking it out in the heat for the pie judging.

So imagine my surprise when my pie won first place! Slices were sold off for donations to the DC State Fair so this is all that was left of it. The lead judge and sponsor of the competition, Fat Man After Dark, told me my pie was the only one he gave a perfect score. I'm so proud!

Blackberry Peach Pie

We had blackberry peach pie for dessert last night with some peaches and blackberries we had picked late last week. Once again, the cookbook, Pie, was the inspiration.

The Bees are Fine -- We Think

We came home from vacation earlier this week really wondering if our girls had swarmed while we were gone. Knock on wood, but I think they're fine. It sure seems like it anyway. Karl hasn't opened the hive to check things out yet, but by the amount of activity coming and going, it seems like we still have bees.



I read in one of Karl's beekeeping books that there's a way to estimate the number of bees you had in your hive. You count the bees returning into the hive for one minute. To estimate the number of deep frames of bees in the colony, you multiply that number (the bees per minute) by 30 minutes (the amount of time one bee needs to make a return trip) then you multiply that by .0005. This gives you the number of deep frames of bees and you assume that one deep frame, covered with bees on both sides contains 2000 bees.

I've actually tried to count the number of returning bees, and it seems impossible. They just fly way too fast and there's just too many of them coming and going. I can't imagine ever getting an accurate count. I guess that's why I'm not out doing biology field work.

The Great Zucchini

We're back from our nearly three week vacation to Colorado and Chicago. While we were gone, a kind neighbor watered our garden, and I told her to please help herself to anything ripe. I guess she missed a zucchini!

Hill Rag

The Hill Rag, a local Capitol Hill newspaper, recently printed an article on urban beekeeping. I might know that guy named "Kurt."

Wild Blueberries

Hiking in the Colorado Rockies is always beautiful. It's extra special when you stumble across ripe wild blueberries. We had a great time eating them out of hand and it was fun for the kids to see the difference between these tiny wild berries and the giant ones we had picked earlier this summer.

Alpine Bee

We're in Colorado near the Rocky Mountain National Park this week. It's not a honeybee, but we had to stop to look at this hardy bee we found collecting pollen on the tundra at 11,000 feet.

Watermelon Harvest

Before we left on vacation we picked our first watermelon. Vegetables are fine, but it sure is fun to grow something sweet!

Long, Hot Beekeeping Weekend

What a long, hot, annoying weekend full of bees. Karl hadn't opened the hive for nearly a month and he was getting concerned that it was too crowded. If a hive is too crowded, the queen freaks out that she doesn't have enough room to lay eggs and she up and leaves the hive, taking a whole lot of worker bees with her. Some folks say that when a queen leaves and the hive swarms it's a sign of a healthy hive, but nobody really wants their hive to swarm. If it swarms, you need to hope that the hive will have raised a new queen and that she's healthy, mates, and then comes back to the hive to start laying eggs. This all takes time and while this all happens, your diminished hive of worker bees is growing older and bees are dying with no new baby bees to take their place. Anyway, Karl was concerned that they were running out of room so he built these frames from the materials I picked up last week.



The other problem is that Karl saw a couple hive beetles in the top of part of the hive. Apparently, hive beetles are fairly common in the southern hives. They have adapted so well that the honeybees can't sting them, can't chase them out and the beetles actually mess with the honeybees in such a way that when the bees are surrounding the beetles to isolate them, the bees feed honey to them. Karl wanted to battle the beetles.

So on Saturday morning, with the temperature expected to crack 100 degrees, Karl donned his bee suit and opened the hive. To make a long story short, the hive was a mess. He found that the frames in the top super had melted because they had been made of paraffin, not beeswax. The bees had started building honeycomb on the frames, but everything just collapsed. These were frames that Karl's dad had brought down for us from Massachusetts to get us started. New England hives can have paraffin frames for the bees to build comb on because it doesn't get as hot as it does down here. Southern bees need beeswax frames in their hives.


Karl then tried out a homemade made trap for the hive beetles. Bottom line -- it didn't work, made a huge mess, Karl got really upset and I was able to have a teachable moment with Kai and Malin about YouTube not always being expert advice.

Then, when Karl started checking on the frames below the queen excluder, he never did find the queen. Unfortunately, he did see a couple of queen cells that the bees had built which mean that the hive was getting ready for their queen to leave. We hope that now that Karl took out the messy melted frames and added a new super to give them more room, the queen and a bunch of workers won't leave. Unfortunately, Karl's dad says that once a queen decides to leave there's no stopping her. So either Karl just averted a swarm that was only days away, or we'll have the bees move away in the next few days. We'll just have to see.

Just to top it off, Karl put the melted frames out in the backyard. Even though there wasn't that much comb on the frames and that which was there was really messy, there was some honey stored on it. Karl put in a cooler so that the bees could rob it and bring the honey back to the hive. We had dozens of bees flying around our backyard all day.

The weekend's over. We hope we still have happy bees.

NPR on the Beekeeping Trend

NPR has an article on the urban beekeeping trend. Seems like a lot of new beekeepers are women. I don't claim to be a beekeeper -- that's all Karl -- but I share a house with them. That certainly makes them "our" bees, right?

New Frames, Peaches and Blackberries

Our bees are doing really well and need more space! Karl found someone through the local beekeeping group that had new frames and supers to sell us so the kids and I went out to the suburbs to pick up the hive pieces. In pieces, they don't look like much of anything -- Karl has to put everything together. Yet another project that is being stored in our dining room.



Since we were already up in Montgomery County, we continued on to Homestead Farm in Poolsville, MD and picked peaches and blackberries. The peaches were not quite perfectly ripe, but I think in a couple days they'll be great.

Book Club: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Book Club was at my house last night and we read Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I admit that I actually read it last year, but it's was one of my favorites so I decided to subject my friends to it, too. It documents a year in the life of the Kingsolver family as they ate only locally grown and raised food, and it was the inspiration for my tiny garden this summer.

As is the custom for our book club, we discussed the book over dinner. And, in keeping with the theme of the book, much of supper was grown in our tiny plot. We had cucumber soup made with our cukes and homemade yogurt, zucchini frittata, a Caprese salad with homemade mozzarella, backyard basil and Eastern Market bought West Virginia tomatoes and baguettes with our own honey and strawberry jam. I did make a non-local chicken salad (no one I know is processing chickens in the city) to round out dinner.



Karl made mojitos with our fresh mint, and for dessert we had peach cake. Yum!

Russian Sage

Russian Sage is in bloom these days and the bees love it. On every clump we pass we look for our girls.

Our Day

We picked these this morning -- a yellow squash and two kinds of cucumbers. Malin had some sort of plan for the mint she harvested, but I'm not sure what that was. We need to teach her to make us mojitos.



In between swim lessons and picking up from summer camp, we baked bread. It's my standard recipe for white sandwich bread: 1 tablespoon yeast, 2.5 cups water, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon salt and 7 cups flour. Usually it's a lovely golden brown, but it's a bit paler today. I always add a half stick of softened butter to the dough after about 10 minutes of kneading, but we were completely out.

Blueberry Picking

Last week the temperature was in the triple digits so what did I do with my two small children? We went blueberry picking.



We were covered in sun block, had a large cooler of ice water and were among the blueberry bushes by 10 am, but it was still sort of ridiculous. The kids were beet red within minutes.



Anyway, my small migrant farm workers-in-training and I picked over 11 lbs of berries. Lots were eaten by the handful, a couple pounds are now in our freezer, another pound or so are in blueberry jam,



lots were eaten by the handful, and another couple of cups are in this cake. The recipe's one of my favorites to make in summer, and because it's from Cooking Light, I can say that it's almost healthy.