What’s in the ground:

Once again, I hate to let my complaints of the weather dominate this section, but I really have no choice. Last week I was sweating in shorts. Today I’m in layers. The only thing I can suggest is getting ready to do some serious mulching. It’s a really good way to retain heat in the soil and with all of this rain, it will even out your moisture. It’s something that should be done all through out the year, but now more than ever. If you’re short on hay, try drying some green materials from your garden like pulled weeds, and then laying them down next to the plants. Make sure they are dry and you knock the seeds off though, you don’t want weed seed touching your soil.

What’s going on in sustainability:

Yep, that’s me in the DIY bee keeping gear. It just occurred to me that there really are no pictures of me on this blog, so I’m glad that the misquito netting is somewhat keeping that alive. So first, to explain my get up. I couldn’t find the box full of our bee keeping gear. So I went upstairs and found our misquito netting from India. I then took an old brimmed hat, and draped the netting over the brim, then tucking it into a denim jacket, put on some gloves and the result, was this super safe, very fashionable ensemble.

Also, since I couldn’t find my smoker, I used one of those charcoal cylinders that gets coals burning. Why did I do all this you may now be asking. If you remember back a few weeks, my hive mysteriously split and I had to catch the the swarm with the old queen. For three weeks they existed in boxes right next to each other. But at the advice of a good bee keeping friend, I decided to recombine the hives.

So I dressed up in this ridiculous outfit and started smoking the hive out. The smoke scares the bees and forces them to hide in the cells of the comb. The coal burner did a pretty good job. I then used a paint scraper (a new, clean one) to scrape the comb off of the piece of wood I was using as a temporary lid on the other hive. It was so interesting how they made the comb. Since I put a jar of sugar water in the box, they formed a circular comb like they would have in the wild.

Once the comb was off, I then took new, fresh frames and used a rubber band to secure the comb to the frame. I did this because the bees had worked so hard on building comb and probably wouldn’t have been able to make new comb, thus putting their survival in peril. This may sound dramatic, but that’s the only way to describe it. As much as I try to utilize zen movements and mindfulness when working with bees, it gets very intense when you’re dripping sweat inside a bee suit and bees are buzzing all around you. A few weeks back I didn’t have any gear on and I got stung behind my ear.

But thus all went off without a hitch. With a few neighbors watching on the other side of the fence, I rubberbanded the comb on the frames and slipped them back into the new top frame. I then shook off all the bees that were still congregated on the old lid, and put them in the new frame. And then I put the proper lid back on, collected the comb (which I intend to either eat or use for wax), harvested a little honey, and that was that.

Like I said, it was an intense few minutes, but in the end, the bees were fine, the hive was recombined, and wouldn’t you know, two days later I found all of the bee equipment in the basement. So I’ll be better equipped next time. But I got to tell you, I kind of liked the get up. Anyway, that’s the news from the homestead this week. Until next time, this is the note from the urban homestead.

-Nic