What’s in the ground:

This time of year is all about watching and maintaing as the summer crops give their last harvest and the fall crops take root. But with these hurricanes and rain storms, this season will not be as easy. The main two suggestions I will give is to keep monitoring any parts of your garden that you seeded. If you don’t see anything germinate in the next week or so, chances are that the seeds were washed away in the deluge and that you’ll need to reseed. Also, this is the time of year weeds are supposed to subside. But with the massive rain and heat that is accompanying, keep up on those weeds. More on weeds next week.

What’s going on in sustainability:

Once again, I failed to take pictures of all the projects at our house due to the rain. But I do have a good alternative in this story. So this past Friday Elissa, our friend Zack and I were about to set the posts for our new tool shed. Just as we were about to set the first one, Zack stopped working and exclaimed, “Holy Shit!” I looked up and saw what he saw, a tornado of bees swarming around the edge of our proerty, forcing our neighbors walking down the street to take off running. Zack and Elissa panicked, but I told them to stay calm and went back to work. They weren’t too excited about this advice, but they followed. After about an hour, the bees settled on a nearby branch.

Once they were there, and we had two posts set, I told Elissa to grab a box. I then handed Zack a pair of loppers and we walked to the tree. At this point I explained to Zack that the bees were at their most docile and calmest, being that they no longer had a hive to protect. Once Elissa got back to the tree, I told her to put the box underneath, I grabbed the branch and told Zack to cut. Just like that the branch was on my hand and then the bees were in the box. And we went back to building the shed.

The next morning I ran to a fellow bee keepers house and picked up a few supers (bee boxes) where the new bees would live. I set them up close to the old hive, put in the frames and left room for a container of sugar water. Since there was no comb built on the frames, the bees will not have enough time to create and store honey, so I’ll have to feed them through out the winter. Once everything was in place, Elissa brought the box over, I opened it, grabbed the branch and shook the bees into the new hive. I earned a few “Bad ass points” for doing this from my housemate Rainer. But in all honesty, handling swarming bees is a less bad ass than it sounds. It was actually quite easy.

So why did my bees swarm? I initially thought that conditions were not good in the hive. But I was confused, because as many of the bees swarmed, I still saw a good many coming and going from the old hive. So I went into the hive and took out a frame. Aside from a ton of bees in the frame, inside the comb were little brown, peanut looking pieces. What I came to find out was that they were new queen cocoons. Apparently, my hive produced a new queen, forcing the old queen out in what is referred to as colony split. The bees I saw on the branch were led by the old queen out of the hive for a new place to live. Although this is odd for this time of year, I’m happy that I was able to catch them and give them their new hive. I just hope they survive.

So that’s my bee story. Next time, I promise to have pics. For now, I have to run out the door to the Shale Outrage protest outside of the Convention Center in Philadelphia. Inside many industry executives are meeting to plot the course for Natural Gas Extraction in the state. We hope that they will hear our voice that what they are doing is not only the definition of unsustainability, but more so insanity. In a last ditch effort to hang onto the fossil fuel resource economy, they are poisoning the land and water that we can’t afford to lose. We can live without fossil fuels, without water, not so much.

So I’m going to go fight the good fight. Until next time, this is the note from the urban homestead.