Where our bees go in September

It doesn't seem that much is flowering these days. The bees, however, continue to zoom out of their hive as soon as the sun hits their entrance. I often wonder where they go. Here's one place:

The picture was taken with my iPhone so it's not the clearest photograph. Honeybees were all over this flowering plant. What is it?

DC State Fair 2012

Karl with his Blue Ribbon

The Barracks Row Day Festival was the home to the DC State Fair this past Saturday. Contests celebrating the culinary, craft and artistic talents were held all day. Aksel (with a bit of help from Karl) won an honorable mention for his DC-themed bike and Malin won a 2nd place red ribbon for her poem about tomatoes.

And Karl won a blue ribbon for his honey! It was really interesting to see how meticulous the judges were in their decision making. First, after lining up all 15 jars of honey in a row from darkest to lightest, they decided to give out three first place ribbons in three honey categories -- dark, medium and light.  They then tested the honey for water content and judged it's clarity and lack of "stuff" in it by shining a light through it. They graded the honey on the presentation and cleanliness of the bottle and cap and, of course, they tasted it.

Karl won the Blue Ribbon for dark honey. Top honors also went to two other Capitol Hill bee keepers for medium and light. Way to represent, Capitol Hill!

Ma'am, you know you have bees flying into your house??

As I was getting home from picking up kids after school, a well-meaning telephone repairman who was up on the pole adjacent to the back corner of the house called out and got my attention. "You know, you have a whole lot of bees flying around the back of your house," he said. "They're flying right up inside your wall. You and your kids really need to be careful!" He then went on to tell me that I should go to an auto parts store, buy some carburetor fluid because that comes in a container with a long nozzle and I can just squirt that on in there.

Do I fess up and tell him that we're beekeepers? Do I keep quiet? He was working just yards away from the hive. What if he got stung?

So I simply replied, "Huh. We need to do something about that." And told him we were sure to be careful.

I guess you really can't see the six foot tall set of supers just inside the window if you're not looking for it.

Who's Your Daddy?!

The sting hit my pinky knuckle 24 hrs ago

While taking out the trash on Monday at around 7 a.m., one of our honey bees must have been sitting on the trash can lid - or maybe she was on the door to the kitchen. As I walked in the door, zap, one of my girls got me on the knuckle of my pinky finger. Didn't she recognize her daddy?!?!

Or maybe she remembered me as the guy who took 80 lbs of their honey a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I pulled the stinger out, rinsed it off and went to an uneventful day at work. I felt fine, and even did a lot of typing. Sure, it was a bit sore, but by the kids bedtime it had started to swell. By morning, I figured I should ask a professional and called a nurse at Georgetown. By my 3 pm doctors appointment, the skin on my hand was so tight you could see every scar I've ever had. I was glad to get a 3 day supply of steroids to cut the swelling.

So it seems this is an allergic reaction, not an infection from a dirty stinger. The doc said that her training did not enable her to predict how I'd react to my next sting, but that an OTC antihistamine right off the bat would be a good idea. She also said I don't have to give up beekeeping - yet. Oh, and Mom, don't worry, she updated my Epi-pen prescription. :)

Looks like I'll keep using the gloves for a while yet. No matter how you slice it though, it's a bummer to love bee keeping and, possibly, not really react well to bee stings. Hummm.

Homemade Plum Fruit Leather

The other day when I wrote about our plum bonanza and all the different ways we've used up the hundreds of plums we picked, I forgot about fruit leather. The kids don't love it because it's not overly sweet, but Karl and I think it's pretty good.

Here's what I did:

I pitted and coarsely chopped about 4 cups of purple plums and put them in a sauce pan with about 3/4 cup of water and about 3/4 cup of honey. We had just harvested honey so instead of adding sugar, I used last year's honey in an effort to really start using it up. I cooked the plums at a simmer until they were really soft, about 15 minutes. I then poured the plums, in small batches, into a food processor and blended until the mixture was a thick puree.

After laying a Silpat baking sheet on a large jelly roll pan, I poured the plum puree into the pan and tried to get it as even a layer as a could. The first time I made fruit leather, I thought the mixture would seep under the edge of the Silpat and be a big mess, but I guess because the mixture is so thick and the mat is sticky, that just doesn't happen. After the mixture is fairly evenly spread, bake the leather in the oven at the lowest temperature at which your oven can be set for several hours (180 degrees is what our oven does) until it's dry to the touch. The fruit leather peels off the Silpat easily and then can be laid on a plastic wrap and rolled up.

Plum Brandy Part 2

After a couple of days on the counter, the plum brandy builds up a lot of pressure. The lids of the mason jars are bulging. I guess one of the jars wasn't closed exactly right, and that one began dented and started leaking all over the counter when we turned it upside down this morning. When I opened it, it exploded,  foaming and bubbling all over the place like a can of pop that's been shaken. Because it was so full, in order to close it up again -- with a brand new lid -- I had to remove three big, bloated plums. I tried to put a bit of the liquid caught in the cereal below back into the jar, but the jar is just too full. Not really sure what's going to happen with this jar so we'll just have to see.

Plums Galore

The community garden down the street has two plum trees -- one with small purple plums and the other with larger yellow plums -- that were just dripping with fruit this spring. Malin and I picked buckets of them over a couple of weeks. This week the temperature has been in the high nineties and I think the tree is finally done. We made plum jam (which cooked way too long and turned into plum butter), baked a half dozen plum cakes and ate dozens fresh. We still had about 15 pounds of them left so we made plum brandy. According to several recipes found on various blogs, the ingredients and process are simple. Fill glass jars with plums, add sugar, add cheap vodka and let sit for three months. We used quart jars and added 3/4 cup of sugar to each plus about a cup of vodka.


The jars are now on our counter awaiting a more permanent home for the rest of the summer. The white stuff at the bottom of the jars is sugar. It's been two days since we filled the jars and all that sugar has dissolved. One of the recipes says to flip the jars upside down every day. We'll probably do that for while until we go on vacation.

In other news, here is the potato harvest from one of my garden buckets. I honestly don't know how whole cultures survived on potatoes. I can't grow them.









And now for the drum roll......along with yellow squash that is already overflowing, here are our first tomatoes and cucumber of the season. The cucumber was grown from seed and I think I started it mid-March. The tomatoes are Super Sweet 100s and were planted by my GS troop in mid-April. They were pretty big when they went into the ground.

Baguettes

My latest obsession is baking baguettes. I've made Acme's Rustic Baguettes, a recipe from Maggie Glezer's "Artisan Baking" cookbook, four times in the last couple of weeks. I meant to take a picture of them before now, but they were eaten before I could get the camera out. It's not that much actual work time to make the baguettes, but you do have to start the dough the night before by making a poolish and a starter dough. The next day you have to mix the dough, knead it, shape it and shape it again. There's a short step nearly every hour for about 6 hours in a row. They're not perfect, but they are delicious.

Taking advantage of warm spring days

Let's see, in the back alley garden we planted onion sets and Easter egg radishes and I transplanted the arugula and Swiss chard. I also planted rhubarb inside our back garden in a spot close to the kitchen window. I am not a patient gardener and the thought that it will be two years before harvesting rhubarb is pretty annoying.

Kai and Malin want their own garden plot this summer so they've pulled a ton of weeds in the space next to the vegetable garden. I'd like to build a frame around this area to make the soil a bit deeper so that's a project for the weekend.

Down at the community garden, the snap peas that I've neglected are starting to come up. I planted a bunch more today and have resolved to water them more regularly. I also transplanted Swiss chard and argula and onions down there and planted lettuce seeds.

While I was working there today, a guy from the DC Department of Transportation rode up on his bike. He told me told me that his department was interested in placing four pairs of beehives in fenced community gardens in Ward 6 and was there to check out our garden. It's my understanding that a few years back, some folks wanted to place a beehive at the garden, but others were worried about allergies to bee stings.

As an aside, that sort of thinking drives me crazy. Honeybees don't fly around looking for people to sting. And, it really makes no difference if the beehive is located at the garden or if the hive is a block away, the honeybees will find their way into the garden. In our two full summers of having bees literally above our back door, our family has been stung two times by honeybees in the backyard. The first time, our older son stepped on a bee with bare feet. The other time, a honeybee somehow flew up the leg of our daughter's pants and instead of brushing it away, she freaked out (which was understandable) and it stung her.

Anyway, I outed us as beekeepers on the Hill and he was pleased to learn that there would be advocates for bees at the garden. In the end, however, after eyeballing the space, he didn't think there would be room for a hive. The Virginia Avenue garden is a pretty compact garden and nearly every square foot is used. Instead, his recommendation will be to avoid the politics of beekeeping at the garden and house the beehives in a fenced in yard that is used to store trees ready for planting. It's only a couple blocks away so the garden will still get the benefit of honeybees.

Finally, several of the fruit trees down at the community garden are in full bloom due to the mild winter and really warm days we've been having. Not a honeybee in sight that I could find, but the trees were covered with dozens of fast moving smaller bee-looking insects.

Potato Surprise

Malin and I had a surprise while turning over the garden. I guess I missed harvesting some potatoes last fall.

The peas I planted last month are finally sprouting.

Arugula and lettuce is taking off up on the porch.

And on top of the beehive, we've placed spinach, Swiss chard and tomato seedlings.

Sugar Snap Peas and Beekeeper Meet Up

The unseasonably warm weather continued with a 72 degree sunny day yesterday, and there were scores of honeybees flying around the hive all day. Karl keeps feeding them their own honey from an inverted mason jar with little holes pricked in the lid. They don't seem to be eating it very quickly so I assume -- at least I hope -- they are getting what they need from the few plants that are flowering.

Karl went to a meeting of local beekeepers tonight, and I'll be interested to know what the collective wisdom is about taking care of bees during this last month of this weird, warm winter.

The other rather banal new is that Aksel and I planted Sugar Snap Peas in the back alley garden and I re-potted a bunch of arugula seedlings into bigger pots. Swiss chard and spinach seedlings will probably have to be repotted in the next few days. I wasn't expecting all the seeds I planted to sprout and I know that it's dumb, but it pains me to thin those little plants.

Peas Planted

Aksel and I planted peas in the back garden yesterday. We also started spinach, Swiss chard and arugula up on the porch last week. The arugula and chard has sprouted and is already growing well. With its southern exposure, it must be 75 degrees out there during the day.