The serenity of hummmm....

We were lucky to have a nice sunny day for my new bees' first complete day in their new hive homes. They spent a lot of time today getting their bearings and flying close around the hives, though some were already busy bringing in pollen. This is a little video just to give an idea of the pleasantness of watching and being around bees. Please excuse the unevenness of the sound volume- I must have blocked the microphone holes with my finger on the camera for a little while.

The new honeybees are hived.

Today I installed the two 'nuc' colonies of honeybees into their waiting new hives. My friend Cris helped me., and he was not afraid. We weren't sure what kind of mood the bees would be in when we pried open their shipping boxes, so we had the smoker ready and had veils and gloves on just in case the bees were unhappy about having been cooped up in a little box for 2 days.
As it turns out, the bees were unbelievably sweet natured, and our precautions seemed a bit overdone. Neither Cris nor I were stung despite handling thousands of bees on the ten frames that had been shipped to me in the two nucs.
Here we are, installing the frames of bees and brood into my waiting hive boxes along with some new frames as well, to fill the spaces out. Click on each photo to enlarge and see it better. The nucs came with lots of nice looking brood in capped cells, developing into new young bees which emerge over the coming days. The top picture above shows a nice patch of capped worker bee brood being covered and cared for by nurse bees.
We did get to check the two queens which were in their little queen cages and active. Over the next couple of days the worker bees will continue to chew off the little candy 'door' on the queen cages and release the queens each in their own hive. By that time the bees will be familiar with their new queen's scent and will accept her. In a couple of days I will check to see whether the queens have been released from their cages yet.

Me and Cris (on the right) having lots of bee fun. :)

After getting the frames of bees and the queen cages safely situated in the two hives, I made sure they each had a full frame of honey (saved from my old hive) and also some sugar syrup as a tonic for them after their journey of hundreds of miles rumbling down the highway to get to me from down south in Georgia. My thanks to Don Kuchenmeister, the "Fat Bee Man", for shipping such wonderful healthy bees to me!

I named the hives Esperanza (which means Hope) on the left, and Aurora (which means Morning) on the right. They are named after two of Cris' sisters, all of whom seem to have been blessed with lovely names...

The new Honeybees are here!!

I am SO EXCITED!! My two nuc/colonies of honeybees have arrived, unexpectedly early. It's a good thing I had already gotten everything prepared ahead of time. Each of the two boxes contains five frames full of bees plus a queen in a little cage for her travel protection. Literally thousands of honeybees.

I will be installing them into their brand new hives tomorrow afternoon once the day warms up. Meanwhile, they remain in their travel boxes overnight on my kitchen table....humming quietly and waiting to start their new adventure tomorrow.
Here is a little video I took today to capture the fascinating sight and sound of the boxes full of bees. If you click on it and watch it directly on YouTube, it will be a nicer sized (uncropped) view...

I've got stinging nettle

A few days ago i was surprised to find a young new scattering of wild stinging nettle growing near the lilac bush, amongst some other 'weeds'. It was already about a foot high. I've never had stinging nettle in my yard before. The next day I had the opportunity to ask my herb-wise friend Lauren about how to use and prepare nettle for both eating and making nettle tea. Nettle is supposed to be a very beneficial herb and tonic, also a highly nutritional green. I knew Lauren had been using nettle for years and loved it. Here is an informative Wikipedia page on stinging nettle and its uses.

Lauren gave me a lot of good information about how to use stinging nettle. Of course one must be very careful when coming into contact or harvesting nettle, for the tiny barbs are quite painful- I knew this from experience years ago! Once the nettle leaves and stems are steamed, cooked, or dried for tea, they completely lose their ability to sting.
I plan to try drying some nettle for use as a tea, and also hope eventually to have enough harvest of the tender plant tips to try cooking it like a Spring green, in the manner of spinach. Apparently the taste is delicious to some people and not to others. We shall see.
Unfortunately, before I had a chance to caution my husband about mowing the nettle down with the lawn mower, they were already mowed! However, being a weed I am sure they will grow up again in the same spot if allowed to, and I also found a few more undamaged shoots nearby that had escaped the mower. These I photographed...

tiny sprouts in the garden

This is one of my favorite things about the garden... when the seed has sprouted and fresh green shoots appear with their first tender bright green leaves against the black soil. I love how completely distinctive the plant varieties are from each other, even at this early stage.
I couldn't resist taking a few 'baby portraits' in the vegetable garden in the afternoon sun.

Spinach...

Black seeded Simpson leaf lettuce...

French breakfast radishes...

Borage... (especially planted for my bees)

made bread today

Today I made bread. I rolled in some chopped calamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and browned onions with garlic. A simple flour dusting and slash pattern on the crust. It came out well- fluffy, with a nice crispy crust. (click on photos to enlarge)

First mason bee nesting tube is full!

A nice warm 70F sunny day today, and the solitary bees are very busy. Today is a special day, April 21 2010... today the very first mason bee nesting tube was filled and sealed with mud! I watched the female bringing in balls of mud and putting the finishing touches on the outermost mud plug...

The leafcutter bee block is up...

I asked Dave of Dave's Bees to make me a special nesting block for leafcutter bees.
Leafcutter bees line and seal their egg chambers with circular pieces of green leaves that they chew off with their precise mandibles. This is different from the mason bees, who use mud to seal their egg cocoon chambers. Leafcutter bees supposedly like slightly smaller and shorter tubes (1/4" diameter x 4" length) than mason bees like (5/16" diam. x 6" length). They also do their nesting just a bit later in the Spring than the mason bees typically do, from what I have read. So Dave made me a really nice nesting block with the requested sized holes (lined with parchment so as to discourage mites and fungus by replacing the liner each year).
I put it up underneath my other two boxes. The new leafcutter bee box is at the bottom in the photo, on our back kitchen porch post. The morning sun shines right at the fronts of the nesting blocks, warming up the bees nicely on chilly mornings for a couple of hours. Again, I stapled on chicken wire to keep any hungry woodpeckers from getting the bees or cocoons. It will be very interesting to see who, if anyone, moves into the new bee block with the smaller holes. (Clicking the blog pictures will enlarge them)

Here just before sunset today I got a couple of shots of the Osmia taurus mason bee going in and out of one of the tubes. This little bee must be living around here and discovered the nice nesting tubes and moved in right alongside my blue orchard mason bees! They seem to be getting along just fine. It's nice to have two different species to watch. The first photo shows her flying in, the next photo is when she emerged from the tube to do another pollen run. It's very hard to photograph them, as they seldom seem to stay still for a second, unlike honeybees who often laze about photogenically. ;)



And here is my first video of my solitary bees using the nest boxes on my kitchen porch!:

Fabre and my dreams as a 12 year old girl

Too often I find that in garden discussions, the subject of insects is limited to referring to them as 'pests' and subsequently discussing practical ways to kill insects in one way or another. I find this attitude a bit odd.
Consider that experienced gardeners seem fully aware of the direct relationship between their healthy plants and the soil conditions and nutrients that directly effect them. They recognize that plants do not exist in complete isolation from their natural environment, that there is in fact an ecosystem that is best kept in healthy balance if one desires optimum results in the garden. Yet beneficial garden insects are rarely given a thought, except for the usual advice on how to get rid of garden pests.

In reality, most insects in our gardens are beneficial and work tirelessly to contribute to a healthy ecosystem despite our best efforts to destroy them at every turn. Airborne insects and soil dwelling creatures pollinate our flowers, fruits, and vegetables, they fertilize and aerate the soil and help break down waste and bacteria. I feel a healthy population of industrious and beneficial garden insects and invertebrates of various kinds are important to garden health in the same way that healthy soil is important.

When I was a young girl I used to read the wonderful writings about insects by French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre. Fabre's lifetime work ever since boyhood was observing and studying the habits of all manner of nature's creatures in the wild and in his immediate surroundings, insects in particular. His field studies were written in a very enjoyable and accessible style- The Mason Bees, The Life of the Spider, Insect Adventures...

I can still find my young 12 year old signature on one of the worn library books in my hometown here, books written by naturalist authors Fabre, Edwin Way Teale (Grassroot Jungles, Dune Boy), Konrad Lorenz (King Solomon's Ring), and Gerald Durrell (Birds Beasts and Relatives, My Family and Other Animals). Musty books even back then almost 45 years ago, that I avidly borrowed from the library and read as a young girl, dreaming about becoming a naturalist one day myself. Life had other plans for me, and I never became a naturalist, though I never ceased studying and observing insects, plants, and all manner of animals with a passion.


One can peruse a very delightful sampling of Fabre's writings and observations on this wonderful website I recently stumbled upon, wholly dedicated to his work: http://www.efabre.net/


When we study and understand the lives of insects and other tiny hard working creatures in the garden, we can better appreciate the vital part they play in the natural world around us, and in our garden too. We then see the garden environment as a whole picture instead of the strange partial view we've adopted by mentally filtering out what we might consider to be the 'undesirables', in other words every creature less superficially appealing than butterflies, chickadees, cute toads, and hummingbirds.
Let's try to learn little ways of providing hospitable insect habitats within our gardens and yards, providing water and shelter, especially avoiding the use of poisons on our plants and in our soil, allowing some areas for protective tall seeded grasses or brush, letting a hollow tree or rotting log remain in place a bit longer to house animals and birds and even bees, perhaps allowing bees to enjoy the pollen of 'weed' flowers such as dandelions (a bee favorite). The whole concept of an artificially sterile lawn devoid of all wildlife is getting so old.

Let's stop viewing insects merely as pests to be ruthlessly eliminated. Indeed, if we did successfully kill off all the insects with our continued obscene use of pesticides and herbicides...our planet (ourselves included) would die along with them.

Solitary bees are discovering the nesting boxes...

I'm quite excited! Yesterday was a beautiful warm sunny day, and things are really hopping at the solitary bee boxes.
First, I was able to see another blue orchard mason female bee emerge from the cocoon tubes I had purchase. So things are still happening in that department.
But even more exciting is that over the past two days there have been quite a few female mason bees coming to the boxes and going in and out of the new nesting tubes!

Here are two blue orchard mason bee females using the tubes in my drilled wooden nesting block made by Dave at Dave's Bees:




Here is a blue orchard bee going into tubes in my 'can' nesting unit... it's easy to identify the blue orchard mason bees by their beautiful metallic blue sheen and black body:


I was amazed to see a second species of mason bee coming and going to my nesting sites. This other species is a soft warm brown color and has a fuzzy overall look, clearly a different solitary bee altogether than the blue orchard mason:
I asked on a bee forum what species this might be, and it was suggested by a knowledgeable person that it might be Osmia taurus. After looking at many online images I agree that this is likely Osmia taurus. This solitary bee species has no common English name...yet. I think I will invent one for my own use!. It is not one of our native solitary bees, but was imported to Maryland in the northeastern U.S. from China and Japan many years ago and is now established here all over the northeastern U.S. where I live. Unfortunate that there are introduced species around, but not much I can do to change that ...so the welcome mat on my little bee inns will remain for all little bees who need an abode. In that same photo you can also see the black feet of a blue orchard bee (Osmia lignaria) peeking out from one of the other tubes.

Here is an Osmia taurus bee-girl peering out happily from her chosen tube...
Click on any picture and it will enlarge.

Kitties.....

Just thought I'd put up a couple of pictures of our beloved kitties...

nine year old Pearl, the 'prima donna' silver Main Coon cat is on the left. She mostly puts up with the rambunctious

Suki, on the right, who was adopted from the Humane Shelter only a few months ago.
Suki likes to really 'get in yer face', as you can see here.

My mason bees are hatching!

My solitary mason bee cocoons are hatching!!
After 4 days of over 50F in the nesting box out on my kitchen porch, this morning I noticed one of the little mud caps was missing on one of the six cocoon tubes, and I could see the empty chamber. The mud cap had been there intact yesterday. I could faintly hear little clicking noises from the tubes...somebody was inside the tube trying to chew their way out!

Shortly after that, I saw a couple other mud caps coming off in little chunks. I took a flashlight and a magnifying glass and I could see the fuzzy brown movements of a wiggling cocoon inside. By hanging around the box and checking every few minutes, I was able to watch two new adult mason bee males emerge from their cocoons! I had to be very quick with my camera, because once they exited the tube they only sat for a few moments stretching their wings before they took off flying to parts unknown! Here I thought they were supposed to hang around the box waiting for females, but no, they seemed to have an agenda. Maybe they were thirsty or just doing orientation flights?

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to know I was responsible for adding some new little mason bees to my neighborhood. I feel lucky to have seen at least two being born and to have gotten any pictures at all!
I think the rest will likely hatch later today and tomorrow. I hope to see the bees come back and hang around the nesting boxes soon. I'll be watching the garden flowers and the nesting boxes over the coming weeks...

I love that in the close up you can see a little bit of blue metallic sheen on the abdomen of the first male...and look at his little antennae sections! Click on the photos and they will enlarge to see more details.

More seeds into the ground

Today was the start of our mini Spring heat wave, a forecast of a whole week of temperatures in the 60's and 70'sF and sunny.
I went out in the vegetable garden again to hoe and plant seeds in a second nine feet section of my 3 foot wide first bed.
Today I added a couple of short rows each of:
Rainbow Swiss chard
Divina butterhead lettuce
Really Red Deer Tongue lettuce
French Breakfast radishes
Calendula flower
Scallions
Bok Choy

Still not seeing any sign of sprouting from my first planting a few days ago.

I also started seeds of Heavenly Blue morning glory, and Only the Lonely tall white nicotiana, in little peat pots indoors

Time to put out the mason bee cocoons

Yesterday, I put my 6 tubes of cocoons out in the lower mason bee box, alongside the two 'cans' of nesting tubes, inside the box for protection.
Tomorrow will be in the mid 50'sF, followed by about 9 more days predicted in the high 50's through the 70's (!!) Surely it will be hatching time if the cocoons I bought are alive.
If not, then I will have to wait and hope for the wild local solitary bees to find my boxes. I have high hopes.

My two boxes are right on the back porch near the kitchen door, and several visitors have already been examining them and asking about them-

First, Jim the mailman who delivers our mail to the kitchen porch. Jim loves to photograph flowers close up, and he also got a kick out of delivering my composting worms last year for my worm bin, so naturally he loved hearing about the new little bee condos.
Then, the milkman who delivers our milk in glass bottles every week to the milk box on the porch there. I caught him peering right into the boxes this morning trying to see what the heck was in there. lol! He loved my explanation and seemed fascinated.
Also, the lady who comes to cut my husband's hair every 6 weeks or so. She runs a 4H club, and she actually got all the kids to do a worm composting bin project last year after she was inspired by my worm bin. Today I told her maybe their next 4H project will have to be native bee nesting boxes. She seemed mighty interested. ;)

First plantings of the year

Lettuce seedlings from my garden, last year (2009)

Tomorrow night will be that last deep freeze- predicted about 18F. After that, I don't think there will be any more nights colder than 25F degrees or so. So today I got out in the new vegetable garden and began some modest direct seeding of some of the cold weather loving Springs veggies.
I used a garden fork to do some deep soil loosening to a depth of about eight inches, then I sprinkled some organic fertilizer and hoed that in, then made furrows and began to plant a few small rows of this and that. My method will be to practice succession planting of seeds directly in the ground- one or two 3 foot rows of any particular thing, and then planting more short rows as the season progresses. This gives a more constant supply than simply planting one or two main patches at a time, of say beets or carrots. Greens do especially well with seeding small amounts more often.

Today I began with a couple of short 3 foot rows each of:
Chatenay carrots
Winter red Russian kale
White Russian kale
Rouge d'hiver lettuce
Nevada Batavian lettuce
Japanese bunching onions
Springer spinach
Gigante inverno spinach

Later on I'll plant Swiss chard, leeks, chioggia and bull's blood beets, some other lettuces, bok choy, radishes, and purple kohlrabi. Then I'll wait a couple more weeks before planting seeds of veggies that respond better to slightly warmer temperatures.

I learned from experience that I should sprinkle the seeds more carefully and slowly, really one seed at a time along the furrow. Last year I had to thin out way too many seedlings of lettuce, beets, carrots, radishes, ..it was a sad lesson to pinch out those poor adorable extra seedlings and basically waste precious seed. Now I will only plant a few things on any given day, preparing the soil and planting the seed with more care and precision.

This weekend I will also put out my blue orchard mason bee cocoons into the nesting boxes. I can't wait to see if they hatch out in a week or two!

Spring

Today I was out in this rare warm sunny Spring day, doing the last of garden cleanup. I will be planting seed of the cold-loving chard, kale, carrots, beets, radishes, and spinach in another week or so- finally!
Honeybees were flying about, their gentle humming very mesmerizing in the sun while I turned the dark garden soil with my hoe, picking out last year's remaining dried stumps of kohlrabi and leeks.

Mason Bee nesting boxes are up

Today Brian helped me get the two new nesting boxes up for our native pollinating bees- the blue orchard mason bees.


The upper box is a solid block of wood drilled with long tunnels, in which the mason bee female will lay her series of cocoon chambers in sequence, separating each cocoon with a little wall of mud ('bee masonry' if you will). All the tunnels are lined with parchment paper which will discourage the accumulation of mites, fungus and such. The paper liners get replaced every Spring.
The lower box contains two 'cans' which are filled with cardboard nesting tubes, each of which is also lined with parchment paper.
The boxes are facing SE to catch the morning sun, and I installed chicken wire guards to keep woodpeckers from trying to get to the bee larvae in the nesting tubes.

It's still too early to put out the actual mason bee cocoons I have hibernating in tubes in the refrigerator alongside the cucumbers and alfalfa sprouts in the vegetable drawer. Another big cold snap is in the forecast for next week, so I'll likely put the cocoons out right after that. I hope the boxes will also attract some of the mason bees I have seen foraging in my garden in past years. I know there are some nearby somewhere. Between watching for local native mason bees and getting new honeybees, it should be an interesting season!
In the photos, you can see a few purple crocus blooming on the lawn, but that's about the only thing blooming yet.

Gardens and bees....

Even though there is snow on the ground and it's in the 20's F at night, I'm still getting excited about Spring almost here. I see in the forecast that daytime highs are now going to be in the 40's and 50's rather than the 30's and 40's. Big difference!

My food gardening plans include planting a few dozen blueberry and raspberry bushes, in addition to being able to utilize the big new veggie garden for a whole season for the first time starting this Spring. My last post detailed the seeds I received in the mail.

My Compost bin of eisenia foetida composting earthworms are doing just fine in my basement. Their metabolism has slowed down during the cool basement winter temps, but as Spring progresses the basement will be warmer and they will speed up again with the kitchen scraps, eggshells, and cardboard/paper roughage I feed them. There are several thousand worms of different developmental stages in the bin, working various of the three tray levels. I have a couple of gallons at least of pure castings already waiting to add to the garden, and more is in the works from the hard working little worms.

My honeybee plans for the new year are to rev up to between 2 and 4 hives, depending on how things go. I did order some new bees in the mail, and of course I worry about them in transit, but things usually go smoothly. I also will be attending bee club meetings and/or a short 'bee school' course, both offered by local beekeepers.
Those mail order honeybees will not arrive until first week of May. But there is plenty to do in the meantime, inspecting and cleaning up my current hive and building new frames and settin gup the additional new empty hives in preparation.
I also plan to set out a 'swarm bait' small hive box, with used comb, bee pheromones, and lemongrass oil- all of which are irresistable to swarm scout bees out looking for a new home to move into.

The other thing I have looked into and ordered are nesting supplies, houses, and some cocoons of our local native bees- the blue orchard mason bee. Honeybees are actually European imports. Our U.S. native bee pollinators are solitary small bees who do not maintain a hive society, do not sting, and do not make honey. But they do pollinate trees and gardens like mad, are beneficial to our planet in many ways, and are cute as a button as well. What a great little bee to encourage and keep in your garden or yard, especially for those who are not able to keep honeybee hives where they live.
I know they are in my area, because I saw some on my flowers during the past two summers. I plan on providing ideal nesting tube houses, water, and a source of nest-building mud for the little blue mason bees to thrive on so they hang around my house and garden. Learn more about providing nesting and housing environments for solitary native bees: HERE. I ordered mason bee supplies and houses from HERE, and HERE.



Here is a mason nesting box i bought from Dave's bees...it came complete with paper tube liners all set up for the first year:
And go HERE to watch Dave's video in case you'd like to build a mason bee nesting box yourself!

We should all consider providing for our beneficial insects and other wild animal friends who are struggling. I ordered a bat house as well, which we will attach to the eaves of the house.


More cool links to sites about solitary native bees and mason bees:
Pollinator paradise
Solitary Bees
Knoxcellars
Crown Bees
Dave's Bees
Seedcake.com
Foxleas.com
WildBienen
Freshdirt
ncsu.edu
Bee Species photo collection
Jean-Henri Fabre's The Mason Bees
Wings In Flight
Native Bees info
French solitary bee blog
xerces society
pencilandleaf.blogspot

Spring seeds

My garden seeds have arrived for Spring 2010, and I'm excited! I ordered them from John Scheeper's Kitchen Garden Seeds.
For our big new vegetable garden, there are carrots, Swiss chard, pickling cucumbers, Russian kale, kohlrabi, leeks, bunching onions, beets, spinach, and many kinds of interesting lettuces, mesclun, and greens. For my honeybees, there is borage, anise hyssop, nicotiana, and calendula. I always buy my tomatoes as plants since the season is so very short here and I don't start seed indoors.
Seed sowing time is still many weeks away....patience.

Coventry Carol on the double bowed psaltery

Still struggling along after two months of practice in playing my bowed psaltery using double bows. Getting slowly better in tiny increments each week. I've always loved this old tune, Coventry Carol.

First bread of the new year, 2010

I made two white boules today- the first bread of the new year 2010. I topped one with sesame seed and one with poppy seed. They came out nicely!

December harvest

Amazingly, I am still harvesting some good eats from our new vegetable garden, even in mid December. We've had lots of nights below freezing and even a few in the teens, and mostly daytime highs in the 30'sF...yet I'm still getting some very lovely carrots and turnips that seem not to have minded much at all.

After today's harvest, I believe there are only some more carrots left in the ground. If I'm very lucky, I may be able to pull some of those in early January- it will be interesting to discover. I like the short fat varieties of carrot I planted.

Winter

I was able to look in under the top of my beehive yesterday, and the bees were acting calm and busy and in a good mood. This, I am told, might indicate that there is a queen in residence. Even if there is a queen, however, it will remain uncertain until Springtime whether she was able to mate and is fertile, since all males have been dead and gone for almost two months now in the cold autumn weather. I have to hope for the best. These particular bees are pretty amazing and they might just surprise me.

We are having our first snow now. Here is a picture looking out my office window a few minutes ago.
I'm glad I pulled up all the little beets in the garden yesterday, and hoed those patches. Less work for me in the Spring when the ground is wet and heavy. Nice to see the fresh earth all fluffed up, waiting for next year's seeds.

The mailman brought my big order of strings for my dulcimers, banjos, and bowed psaltery. I order strings every few years in one large batch and they last me for several years. I was running low. Now I will have no more excuses not to restring that rusty psaltery which has...32 strings! Hmmm...I had better set aside two or three hours for that little project.

Tonight I am going to a contra dance in town just down the hill.
"We're fools whether we dance or not, so we may as well dance." -Japanese proverb
that about sums up my contra dancing skills. Oh well, good exercise.

The Queen is dead.

Well this is a rather upsetting post to make, and hard to know exactly what it means for the future.
Yesterday morning I found my queen bee lying dead outside the hive on the ground. here is a picture of her in the middle, surrounded by a few dead worker bees for comparison (click the photo and it will enlarge):

After discussing this with experienced beekeepers on two forums, and also with the most excellent 'natural' beekeeper who is my local mentor, it's hard to know what this event actually might mean.
The death of this queen can be distilled down to three possible current hive situations:
1) For some reason the queen died and now there is no queen. I'll have to wait 'til Spring to replace her with a new bought queen from somewhere.
2) The bees made a new queen who replaced this old queen. This is pretty unusual this late in the year and the virgin queen would not have any drones left now to mate with. A virgin queen emerging now would not likely be in vigorous enough condition by Spring to mate and start laying. There have not been any drones (males) left for over a month now. All drones get kicked out of the hive to die once the chilly weather sets in. There are no males left around for mating with.
3) This third is the least likely explanation, but is still slightly possible- Occasionally when a new queen is raised, the hive will allow the old queen to coexist until she finally dies off naturally. Some beekeepers have told me they had a two queen hive of mother and daughter for a couple of months. One showed me a photo she took of her two queens calmly going about their business side by side in her hive. If this happened, then perhaps that new queen hatched six or eight weeks ago when there were still drones around and mated and is fertile. If that's the case then all is well, but I tend to think this is the least likely explanation.

In any case, I won't know for sure what the hive status is until Spring, when I can check for eggs and larvae. Having to wait for four months without knowing is of course very difficult, but I have little choice. Meanwhile, to maintain my sanity through the long winter, I choose to resolutely believe in the optimistic explanation #3 above.

This morning I sat by the hive for a while and watched the girls. It's a sunny day and they are coming in and out, doing normal bee things.... removing dead workers from the hive and discarding them, cleaning 'washboarding' around the upper entrance, some bees were even coming in from the field with little bits of pollen on their leg baskets. They seemed to be acting as though nothing was wrong at all. ??
I take this as a good sign, since people tell me bees get agitated and act upset when there is no queen. Today is warm and sunny enough so that feel I can peek in under the top cover later this sunny afternoon to give them a quick visual check without disturbing them. It'll be interesting to see if they are in an agitated state or if they are as calm and genttle as they usually are.
UPDATE: I did open the hive and examine them a bit this afternoon. The bees were acting happy and normal. Again I was told that this might indicate there is indeed a queen in there. Apparent bees in a hive know within 24 hours that there is no queen and they act agitated and confused and a bit aggressive, making more of a buzz 'roar' than the usual mellow hive buzz. I saw none of those described 'queenless' signs and it must have been at least 48 hours after that queen died, so I will keep hoping through the winter.

Digging out the old bowed psaltery

I felt some holiday spirit this week and dusted off the bowed psaltery that I had bought twelve years ago and never gotten the hang of.This is the first real tune I have played on it, and I decided to try adding a harmony by double bowing it. Not easy! I obviously need a lot more practice, but the bowed psaltery has such a lovely haunting voice, it is very forgiving.

Crummy camera angle and some rough bowing yet, but here it is- my second day's work on the beautiful old carol "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming". One of my favorite winter tunes...

Mother/daughter bee time...

We were very lucky to have beautiful 55F degree sunny weather on Thanksgiving Day, right when my older daughter was visiting us! Unusually warm nice weather for late November here! She has a degree in entomology and has done honeybee research at Cornell U., so I felt very fortunate to have her take a peek inside my hive. I also felt she would bring 'good bee karma' to my hive. This day I planned to remove the last syrup feeding and put in some dry sugar as a little extra insurance against my bees running out of their stored honey supplies during the coming winter. Soon it will be too cold to open the hive at all until Spring.

My daughter is the younger one in the red skirt, working the smoker.... ;)

I was so happy to have this pleasant little time to be a mother and daughter 'beekeeping team' together. I was so proud to show her my bees! She said they appeared to be healthy bees and they looked to have some good honey stored up for the cold winter ahead.
Here I've already removed the old syrup baggie feeder from inside the hive, and we have gotten the bees to retreat a bit so we could lay a sheet of newspaper on top of the frames and pour some dry sugar on. I chose to give them this extra sugar food supply for this winter because the hive has recently been consolidated and moved to my house, which must have caused some amount of stress for them. In future winters I anticipate that they will have full larders of honey stored and will hopefully not really need such sugar feedings. But I wanted to give them every chance to survive their first winter here in their new location.


After pouring in ten pounds of sugar, I trimmed the newspaper that was sticking up at the edges. Notice I left gaps in the front and back of hive so the bees could maneuver in and around the frames, sugar, and top entrance. Then I sprayed the sugar surface down with some water to which I had added a small amount of lemongrass and spearmint oil, so they would view it as food rather than as debris to be carted away grain by grain. Bees are very fond of lemongrass oil.

Here we have successfully finished our little hive chore and the bees are basically set for the winter.

The only thing left for me to do is to wrap some tarpaper around the hive to protect from cold wind drafts. I'll do that when it gets a little colder and we no longer have any 50 degree days.