Fox Point Community Garden

Does Hop Guard Work?

/ lizbaessler / 2 Comments

Fans of the blog might remember that we treated our colony for mites back in August with Hop Guard, a newly legal concoction derived from the hops plant that’s supposed to kill varroa mites while going easy on the bees.

Fans of natural mite treatment might be hoping for good news.

Well…

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After the designated 30 days it takes for Hop Guard to work its magic, I opened up the hive to take a sample for testing. You test samples because mites are so small and dispersed, it’s almost impossible to tell at a glance if you have an infestation.

Bearing that in mind, check this out. The brown dots the blue arrows are pointing to are varroa mites, clinging to the backs of their host bees. Being able to spot two of them so easily is a bad sign.

The red arrow is pointing to a worse sign, though. This bee almost certainly has deformed wing virus, a disease that’s almost always connected with a heavy mite infestation.

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Here’s another shot of the deformed wing bee. She probably won’t live longer than 48 hours, and she’ll likely be driven from the hive before then. Bees don’t offer much in the way of healthcare, and will evict sick members of the colony to try to prevent outbreaks.

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With lowering hopes, I scooped a half cup sample of bees into a jar. My assistants for the day were my boyfriend Ben and his brother Matt, who was visiting from New York. I like to think this was just as exciting as anything the big city has to offer.

We dumped some powdered sugar on the bees and shook them up. Then we inverted the jar so the sugar and the mites would slip through the mesh lid onto a piece of paper. Before treating with Hop Guard, we counted 4 mites in our sample. So by now we ought to have fewer…

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Oh.

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Oh boy. I counted up to 38 and got lost.

So did the Hop Guard work? It sure doesn’t seem like it.

Has the mite population literally grown ten times? …Maybe. When taking a sample for a mite test, it’s important to select bees from a frame of uncapped brood. (The mites grow primarily on the bee larvae, so their population is always densest in brood comb). When I took my pre-treatment sample, I used a capped brood frame, which means most of the mites were sealed away under wax. (In other words, I screwed up). This time I used an uncapped frame, meaning I got the technique right, but the numbers were bound to be artificially higher.

But ten times higher is a lot. Particularly after treatment. If the hop guard knocked the mite population down at all, it wasn’t much.

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So what do we do now? We treat again. But not with Hop Guard. Hop Guard had its chance. We’ve already installed some strips of Apivar, a tried and true chemical application that by all accounts should do the job.

In a few weeks we’ll check again and see if it has.

Kajari Melon

/ lizbaessler / 1 Comment

2016 was the year of heirloom vegetables. Way back in March I bought a pile of heirloom seed packets, including one for Kajari melon. Kajari is an Indian heirloom melon that I chose because it has a short time to maturity and because it looks cool.  I started some inside and planted them out too early, so they disintegrated in the cold. In June I replaced them with seeds sown directly in the ground. The vines took off, and by late August I had a single ripe melon. It did indeed look cool.

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At least from some angles it did. From other angles it was clearly rotting. I tried to let it ripen on the vine and left it too long. It was about the size of a tennis ball and tasted horrible.

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The vines kept growing and, among the three of them, they managed to produce one more fruit, about four times the size of the first. I picked it green to save it from an impending frost and left it on the kitchen table to ripen. After about a week of being poked and prodded by my housemates (it even spent a few days wrapped up in a ribbon) it turned a satisfying orange color.

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I undid the ribbon and sliced the melon in half. The flesh was firm but juicy and smelled great.

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Unfortunately a lot of the space inside was taken up by seeds. I scooped them out, washed and dried them, and stored them away for next year. At $4.50 per 15 seed packet at Baker Creek, I could start a racket.

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All told, I got a shy bowl’s worth of fruit. Was it good? Yes! It was sweet and juicy, with a slight vegetable aftertaste I’ve never noticed in a melon before. Like it was 6 parts melon but 1 part squash. I liked it – it felt earthy and satisfying.

But was it worth seven months of waiting? Maybe not.

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Rhode Island is a tough place to grow melons. It can technically be done, but it ain’t easy and it ain’t guaranteed. Our summers just aren’t quite long enough. I did enjoy this one melon, though, so I’ll probably give it another shot. I’ll try to time my spring transplants better so I don’t have to resow in the summer.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get three melons.

A girl can dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Mothy Day

/ lizbaessler / 2 Comments

I had every intention of checking on the bees. I’d gotten the smoker out and everything. When I went to open the plastic bin we keep the bee suits in, however, I found some unwelcome guests. They were everywhere, and the bee checking had to be postponed.

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It wasn’t hard to find the source of the problem. We were storing the bee suit bin on top of another bin with some old frames of comb in it. And those frames, wouldn’t you know it, were completely full of wax moths.

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Wax moths are a perpetual threat if you’re storing used comb without bees to protect it. Fans of the blog may remember that our hive was infested with wax moths last spring, after it was abandoned. Wax moths are rarely a problem in active hives, because the bees will drive them out before they can take hold. But if the comb is unprotected, like in the empty hive or the shed, moths are almost certain to move in.

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Despite their name, wax moths don’t actually eat wax. A frame of unused foundation in the same bin was untouched. What the moths like is the thin, protein-rich skin that’s left behind on the cell walls by the bee larvae when they emerge as fully formed bees. Think of it like a bee amniotic sac. Moths lay their eggs in the wax, and those eggs hatch into grubs that burrow through the wax, feeding on these old protein skins.

Because they’re disgusting.

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I thought the bin we were keeping the frames in was tight enough to keep the moths out. I thought wrong. Here you can see a few of those little grubs on the move.

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And here are some adult moths.

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Will and I dragged the bins outside to clear them out. We wiped out all the bugs and their bizarrely stretchy webbing.

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The moths clearly started in the bin with the frames, but they’d been migrating. I found a few little cocoons in the bee suits.

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I picked off all the cocoons I could find and shook everything out. For good measure, I took the suits home and washed them. I sprayed the bins down with the hose and let them dry in the sun. I’m pretty sure we’re moth-free.

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As we were working, a few of the bees came over from the hive to see what we were up to. This one found a single globule of honey on one of the frames.

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Some others flocked to the honey that dripped out of the frames onto the ground. They will have drunk as much as they could hold, then carried it back to the hive to store.

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This wasp showed up for the free food, too.

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So what became of the frames? I didn’t want to keep them around so full of moths, but I couldn’t stand the idea of throwing away all that good wax. I brought the frames home and tried to render the wax in my kitchen.

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Stay tuned for that tale of hardship and woe.

Beeing Along Nicely

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Last week we went in to check on the bees and take stock. Things are looking good, though we did notice this beautiful and disgusting phenomenon underneath the hive. Some opportunistic spider has set up shop under our screened bottom board. Maybe he’s after mites, maybe he’s after bees. Whatever he was after, what he got was all that nasty debris that’s fallen down out of the hive. Poor guy.

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We swept out the cobwebs and opened up the hive. My last time in I’d taken off a “full” honey super and replaced it with a new one. Unfortunately, the full one was none too full, and the new one is filling up slowly.

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So where is that honey? Turns out a lot of it is in the top hive body. Whoops. This deep frame is totally capped.

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As is this one.

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The capped honey has such a satisfying, smooth look to it. I genuinely don’t know what this little huddle of bees is up to. Since the honey is all capped, I don’t think there’s any work to do in this part of the frame. They’re probably talking to each other, but about what? If anyone has a guess, I’d love to hear it!

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This frame is closer to the center of the box, and it’s much busier. The very top right corner has some capped honey, but the bulk of the frame is full of brood. Some of it is capped, but you can just make out the white grubs in a few of the uncapped cells. You can also clearly see a drone with his big eyes and body, a third of the way from the top. Winter is coming, and this poor guy doesn’t have much time left. Pretty soon he’ll be too much trouble to feed and will be driven from the hive.

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We managed to spot the queen, busy laying in one of the middle frames. The white thing is the remnant of one of our Hop Guard strips, with another week and a half left in its 30 day period of effectiveness. I’m no expert, but it looks to me like its effective days have passed. I’d read about Hop Guard I and the need to replace it when it dries out, but I was under the impression that Hop Guard II (what we’re working with) was an improved version that would last for the full 30 days.

Whelp. In a few days the month-long period will actually be up, and I’ll do another mite count to see if it’s been effective or not.

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This strip isn’t as empty, but it looks pretty dried out. In fact, it looks like the bees have covered it up with wax… I have to say I’m skeptical that this is doing much. On the plus side, our mite count was so low to begin with that it may not even matter. But we won’t know anything for sure until we take stock of the current mite population. If worse comes  to worst, we can always treat again in the fall.

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No great changes were made during this inspection, but we got a good sense of where we stand.

We know that the bees are storing just as much honey in the hive body as in the honey supers. Next time we go in, we’ll take a couple of those full deep frames and swap them for empty ones. We’ll get some honey, and hopefully the queen will lay in the empty frames. In the meantime we’ve left both honey supers on top of the queen excluder, so with any luck they’ll fill those up some more.

We’ve seen that the queen is healthy and still laying and doesn’t seem to have been hurt by the mite treatment. Unfortunately, we’ve also seen that the mite treatment may not be living up to its potential. Only time will tell on that front.

In any event, the colony itself seems healthy and productive. The bees’ numbers have soared since we got them in the spring, and just like last year’s colony they’re extraordinarily cooperative.

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I’m coming up on two years of beekeeping without being stung.

 

Concord Grape Juice

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Storm’s comin!

New England has been battening down for Tropical Storm Hermine. So far she hasn’t brought much more than a dreary break in the stunning fall weather, but Monday had some high winds that got me worried about the fruit in the garden. The perimeter fence has a few big old concord grape vines that belong to no one in particular. This year I decided (with the garden manager’s permission, mind you) that at least some of them belong to me. So I braved the pre-Hermine gusts and rescued the ripest ones.

I didn’t weigh at the time, but I’d guess I picked about ten pounds.

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My initial plan was to make a big batch of wine. The king of concord grape wine is Manischewitz, which I’ve always had a soft spot for because it tastes just like grape juice. I followed that logic and asked myself: wouldn’t it be nicer just to have grape juice?

Yes it would.

My parents have made grape juice for years. I think it might be my grandmother’s recipe. The jars line a shelf in the basement, and a couple always get brought up for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Gosh is it good. The ingredients, emailed by my mom, are:

  • 1 heavy cup concord grapes
  • 2/3 cup white sugar
  • boiling water

And that’s it! Since it’s not fermented, it has to be processed in the canner. I heated up a bunch of quart jars to sanitize them.

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I dealt with the jars one at a time. I removed one from the canner, dumped in the sugar and grapes, and filled it almost to the top with boiling water. The water turned out to be the limiting factor, since my kettle only held three jars’ worth.

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The jar full, I fitted the screw top lid and put it back in the canner. Once all the jars were done, I added more water so the jars were completely submerged. I raised the heat to a hard boil, put the lid on the canner, and processed for 20 minutes. During those 20 minutes I made an unsettling discovery – my canner is so big it has to straddle two burners, and with the water high enough to cover the quart jars, it spills over the sides… straight onto the open gas flames below. Twice I had to turn off a burner when the flame went out completely. I can’t imagine this is good for the stove, and it sure wasn’t good for my peace of mind. Maybe I’ll have to invest in an outdoor camp stove.

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I processed two batches, making for a dozen jars and 3 gallons of juice. At this point I ran out of quart jars (and patience watching for gas leaks). I had about 3 1/2 pounds of grapes left, so I mixed them up with some sugar and yeast. We’ll have about a gallon of knockoff Manischewitz after all!

There are three distinct layers in the jars, but I have it on good authority from my mom that this is normal: “Do not stir or shake the juice. You’ll think you’ve screwed up because the grapes and sugar will sit in the bottom. As times passes, the grapes will move, the sugar dissolve, and the juice turn pink/red.”

Well, my grapes are on the top. Hopefully that doesn’t matter.

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Of the twelve jars, one didn’t seal properly for some reason. Since I can’t store it, I’ll just have to drink it. I shook it up to mix in the sugar and poured a glass. It’s not as dark or as strong as the goal, but the taste is perfect. Three gallons may not be enough.

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Glass courtesy of Endless Brewing, my beloved hometown brewery. Go see them and tell them I sent you. You probably won’t get a free beer, but you’ll almost definitely get a smile of recognition. And the beer is worth it.

Garlic Forever

/ lizbaessler / 7 Comments

I harvested my garlic a month ago, and since then it’s been dangling from strings wherever I could find space in the basement.

It’s time to consolidate.

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I hung the whole plants, bulbs down, in three bundles spaced loosely enough to allow good airflow. Since the plants are good and dry now, I can cut the bulbs away. I just snipped through the stalks  with a pair of scissors about an inch above the bulbs.

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I also trimmed off the excess roots, mostly for aesthetics and to keep the bulbs from tangling with each other.

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Here they are nicely shorn.

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Last summer I harvested about half a dozen bubs. If I keep expanding at this rate I can go into production soon.

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I’m not going into production yet. (I’m not even sharing with my housemates!) But I do want my garlic looking its best. I gently peeled off the outer, dirty layer of papery skin.

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And that’s it! I tucked them an old mesh onion bag and hung them from a nail in a dark alcove of the cellar. Last year’s garlic lasted all winter like that, so I have high hopes. Around Halloween I’ll break up one or two and plant the cloves – I’m excited to get a multi-generational crop and finally become garlic self-sufficient.

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I’m using “self-sufficient” very loosely. There’s no way this is lasting a year.

Mite Fight

/ lizbaessler / 5 Comments

It’s hot out. So hot that I’ve been afraid to go into the hive. The last thing I need is to pass out face first in a pile of bees.

This morning, before the sun got too high, I went down to the hive to do some much-needed maintenance. Since I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I brought along my boyfriend Ben to do the heavy lifting.

It was his first time going into the hive, and he was a little nervous.

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Our first order of business was to replace the honey super. Last week we’d put a triangle board under the honey super to clear the bees out. The triangle board gives them an easy way out of the super, but an almost impossible way back in. It’s really effective if you want a bee-free honey super, but I was worried that if we left it too long they might get crowded and be in danger of swarming.

They did look tightly packed through the screen of the triangle board, but it may just have been early enough in the morning that the foragers hadn’t left for the day yet.

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We removed the honey super and set it a few hundred feet away so the bees wouldn’t steal it right back from us. Then I removed the triangle board.

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I removed most of it, anyway. The bees sealed it tightly to the frames below with propolis and wax, and a whole side of the triangle pulled free of its nails when I lifted it off. This is coming out of their wages.

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I was determined to do a successful sugar shake mite check this time, since my last attempt… left something to be desired. I shuffled through the top hive body frames for one full of brood. It took me four frames, because the first three were solid capped honey! It’s a good thing we didn’t leave the triangle board any longer – it seems like they’ve really been stocking up.

When I finally found a brood frame, I gave it a good shake over a pot. The bees dropped in, and I knocked them all into one corner and scooped ’em up in my measuring cup. I got a slightly shy half cup, which I dumped into a mason jar and set aside for later.

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Today we went for the slightly unorthodox method of treating for mites before testing to see if we needed to do it. Is this responsible beekeeping? Nope. But the day was getting hot and the bees were getting ornery, and it was a lot easier to test the bees in the shade after closing up the hive. For philosophical musings on why this probably is okay, hold out til the end of this post.

We dug deeper and lifted off the top hive body, because the mite treatment has to be applied to both. A while ago we put a shim between the two, hoping for some cool burr comb. The bees have been playing along, making this very cool structure that’s about the width of the frames but almost perpendicular to them.

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I cleared away the burr comb and applied the Hop Guard. What it is is a pack of foot-long cardboard strips soaked in something with the consistency and messiness of hot molasses. This stuff oozed everywhere. The packaging is covered in warnings about getting on your skin, but by the end of the day I had it all over my hands and legs. (That being said, I washed it right off and seem to be fine. I don’t condone eating a spoonful of the stuff, but the danger may be over-hyped).

The instructions said to apply two strips per 10 frame hive body, draped 4 inches apart over two central frames. There they are!

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We replaced the second hive body and draped two more strips in that one. Then we topped it off with the queen excluder and a fresh honey super to catch the fall honey flow. We closed up the hive and beat it out of there. All that was left was to give those bees in the jar a good shake.

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The round piece of screen I was given at bee school fit perfectly into a wide mouthed canning jar. The mesh in the screen is just the right size to let mites out and keep bees in.

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Even if the bees really want to get out.

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We dumped a few tablespoons of powdered sugar through the screen and shook the jar up for a couple minutes. It was a like a grotesque snow globe.

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Once the bees were good and coated, we turned the jar on its end and shook it hard over a white piece of paper.

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Between the white paper and the white sugar, the dark mites stand out pretty well.

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Reasonably well, at least. Can you spot the one in this picture? Zoomed in this much, he’s actually hard to distinguish from the tiny sugar clumps’ shadows. He’s in the horizontal middle, just south of the vertical middle. If you look very closely you can see his little legs in the air.

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In case you were worried, no bees were killed in the testing of these mites. They were a little dazed, to be sure, but they came out of it okay.

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I dumped them out right next to the hive. Once they got their bearings, they should have flown right back into the hive. They’ll have a wild story to tell their friends as they get licked clean. This day will pass into bee lore, and the powdered sugar will probably be turned into honey.

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So how many mites did we find? 4. From a sample of 300 bees, that’s an infestation rate of 1.33%. For this time of year, that’s actually remarkably low. In all honesty, we probably could have held off a while on treating. Given the way it went, though, I’m glad we did.

The thing is, all hives have mites, and the reasons to delay treatment hold a little less sway over us than usual. A lot of treatments are toxic to humans, meaning it’s a good idea to continually test mite levels while collecting honey, then harvest the honey and treat only when the mites get out of hand. Hop Guard, on the other hand, supposedly does not contaminate the honey, so there’s no need for strategic timing.

Another reason to wait is that mite treatment can be pretty hard on bees. If by some chance your mite levels never get high enough to have to treat, it’s better not to treat. Supposedly Hop Guard is gentler than other products, though, so it should be okay.

We got burned by mites last year, so we want to go in guns blazing this time. Our number one priority is getting these bees through the winter, and hopefully this knocks their mite levels low enough that they stand a fighting chance.

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It was a good and productive day. It was only a little sweltering, and Ben survived his first bee excursion. He says he even had fun.

Tales of Bees Past

/ lizbaessler / 3 Comments

A few weeks ago we went into the hive to check on the bees’ progress, but I never got around to writing about it. This means, incidentally, that almost every bee you’re about to see is dead of old age by now.

Even this one.

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This is as spooky as beekeeping blogs get.

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We went in to check on the state of things and, if the state was good, to add a honey super. Until this point we’ve been letting the bees focus on building up their numbers. Once they get established, however, it’s time to start concentrating on honey production.

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We opened up the top hive body and took a look. This frame against the outside wall was still bare.

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A little farther in, though, production was in full swing. We’d put a shim between the two hive bodies, hoping the bees would build some interesting burr comb to fill in the empty space. And they did! Here’s some of it, hanging off the bottom of the frame.

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This next frame has hardly any burr comb – the structures hanging off the bottom are 100% bee. And that white arc across the top is all capped honey.

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Since the bees seemed to be moving right along (and running out of room), we plopped our honey super on top, with the queen excluder (the metal screen in my hands) between it and the hive bodies. This will keep the queen laying in the hive bodies and allow the workers to store honey in the honey super.

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Some beekeepers don’t believe in them, but anything that keeps grubs out of your honey sounds good to me.

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The bees are still happy and healthy. (At least they were last time we checked). Soon we’ll be going back in to scope out the honey and the mite population.

I hope they haven’t gotten too used to us being gone.

Uncle Beth’s Home Grown Mead

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Last November Kim and I started a gallon of mead with our bees’ honey. Since then I’ve been racking it occasionally but mostly forgetting about it. I discovered it again recently and declared it ready to bottle.

It was, like everything I make, extremely dry and boozy, so I back sweetened it with 1/4 cup of honey. Booziness aside, I’m very happy with it. It’s so different from the store honey mead and, dare I say it, better. I’d say it tastes richer and has a stronger honey base. There’s also a lot less of it. I’ve been free with the 5 gallon batch of mead, taking it to parties and pawning it off on friends, because 5 gallons is a lot to have of anything. One gallon, on the other hand, filled just 11 beer bottles. Beer bottles are perfect for gallon batches, because they can be portioned out more slowly.

They’re also perfect for my small homemade labels. Technically this was the prototype for the official label, but I think I like it more.

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Honey Take Two

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Everything’s coming up bee.

We went into the hive recently to check on the state of the honey box, and we were shocked to see that it was almost full. These bees are not playing games when it comes to preparedness. It’s bad news for the impending winter, but it’s good news for honey!

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We threw in a triangle board and a shim and waited a few days. In that time the bees not only abandoned the honey box, they also set to work on filling in the shim with comb. I’ve been reading a lot about Bee Space lately. It’s the distance we leave between frames so we can pull each out individually without ripping through comb. About a centimeter, it’s the magic distance at which bees won’t fill things in. Bees are all about filling things in – any less than a centimeter is patched up with propolis to prevent drafts. Any more than a centimeter, as we can see here, is fair game for expansion and will be filled in with comb. They built all of this over the course of a weekend. Bees don’t get time off.

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We made off with the honey box, just like last time. With all that burr comb we had to break apart to get inside, though, this theft was a little messier. Some of the equipment got sticky, and the bees were wise to it. As I was putting out the smokers, this little guy was frantically cleaning up a thumbprint of honey.

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Soon after collecting the honey, we had one heck of a storm. The bees stuck it out like champs, but we were so afraid the hive would get toppled. The fact that we’d just removed the honey box and a foot of height may be what saved us. In order to sleep a little easier, we put up this windbreak. The hive is already nicely protected to the west by a picket fence, and the lattice is at an ESE angle that should break up any gusts coming up the river.

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With the hive secure, we could turn our attention to more important things. Like honey! The bees had really done a stellar job collecting, and had filled and capped almost all ten frames.

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There were, sadly, a few casualties.

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We made sure to get another hot knife. It uncaps frames like a dream. I did drip a drop of honey from it onto my hand, however, and I got decent burn from it. I’m a little worried the heat may affect the quality of our honey…

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Heat notwithstanding, the honey is gorgeous. It’s so dark and rich it’s impossible to see through. Here it is dripping its way through our filter. Only in the thinnest spots, with the light shining straight through, does it approach a color I might be willing to call “honey.”

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We’re pretty excited about it.

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The garden is pairing with a fabulous and very locally-driven restaurant for a cooking class later this month. Kim is speaking at the class and I, purely by chance, won two free tickets to it in the garden’s fundraising raffle. Some may claim nepotism. I’m claiming that I put close to $30 worth of tickets in the cup. I also put my blood sweat and tears into this class, meticulously filling twenty little 3 oz bears to be given as favors.

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The honey is the most impressive when you look at it next to the batch we harvested in the summer. I have almost a full jar because I’m a hoarder and can’t bear the thought of it disappearing forever. Both jars were collected from the same hive in exactly the same spot, but two months apart: the jar on the right on August 10th and the jar on the left on October 12th. The difference is, as far as I know, purely floral. Spring and summer mean delicate light flowers like pea and squash blossoms, but late summer and fall mean rougher, darker flowers like Black Eyed Susans and sunflowers.

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Am I making all this up? Maybe. But whatever the reason, this honey is so dark it’s almost black, and it tastes, I swear, like elderflowers. The summer stuff was great, but this is a world apart.