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.

Picking Carrots

I'm not very patient, and when gardening, you have to wait days, weeks, and months to realize the fruits of your labor. I'm ok with waiting for cucumbers to grow or checking up on ripening tomatoes because you can see progress, slowly but surely. Obviously, carrots are a different story. Malin and I jumped the gun by a few weeks yesterday when we picked this carrot. It was tasty, but a bit skinny.

Thirsty Bees

The heat and humidity in Washington is stifling -- we had our second day in a row of triple digits, and it's not really going to let up for a while. We also haven't had any rain for weeks. I never would have imagined that I would ever feel sorry for an insect, but I am feeling so bad for our poor little honeybees these days.

Karl set out a bucket of water with an old rag hanging in it that wicks water up on top of our shed. It's quickly become a popular hang out spot for the girls.

It's only July 7 and we have too much squash

Whoever said to only plant one zucchini plant in a home garden was a wise person indeed. We did heed that advice and only planted one zucchini, but for whatever reason, I planted two types of yellow squash. And now we have tons of it. Karl had zucchini and yellow squash for dinner a couple times while the kids and I were gone, we had it last night and there's still plenty more in the fridge. So, even though the temperature was in the triple digits, I turned the oven on for a half hour and made muffins. The kids have declared that they like this squash cooking method the best.

Mozzarella Cheese

We have a bumper crop of basil out back and had a few tomatoes around so I had a craving for Caprese Salad. Using Ricki the Cheese Queen's kit, Malin and I made mozzarella cheese in about a half hour. I took some pictures of the process, but I'm not going to post them because, honestly, stock pots full of curdled milk don't look that appetizing. The end result certainly tastes good though.

First Jar of Honey

Spinning Honey at the Fairmont Hotel

Karl spun three frames of honey last night with folks from the local beekeepers association. The Fairmont Washington, which keeps hives on its roof, hosted the event in their kitchen. From three frames, we collected about 10 lbs or so. I think this is Karl's best video yet.