Wicking planters

Totally forgot to publish this way back when... 

Rabbit setup

Set up the rabbit colony with 3 does and our sweet buck March 9th, 2014.  It's certainly an experiment since they're likely to dig out.  We are hoping once they start some burrows toward the center of the pen or shed that they'll focus the digging there and not so much on the perimeter.  Meanwhile, lots of concrete blocks are being put wherever they dig in the wrong place.  So far they are seeming content.

Vernonia

Genus is vernonia, haven't look up which species on oklahoma plant database yet.  A common name is Ironweed.
 

Krameria Rhatany Ratany

Still working on figuring this one out.  Let me know if you recognize it.  Jackie found it in one of her books - Krameria genus, or Ratany, or Rhatany.  I found several patches of it on the land (in central OK)  It's low growing and viny.  Growth habit resembles purslane.  Leaves are alternate and it's hairy. 

Found a great write up on this: http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/friday-flower-krameria-lanceolata/   In summary:  The flowers produce not nectar, but fatty oils.  Apparently bees of the genus Centris use the oils and pollen for their larvae.  There are other oil producing plants as well!  (who knew?) Also, these plants are "obligate semiparasites, forming haustoria on the roots of a broad range of host plants." 

Queens are laying!

Checked all the hives this morning:
Both the splits from Lloyd's hive had eggs and hence their queens must have mated properly and returned!
The queen right split will need a new box in a week or so.

The queenright split from the Observation hive was booming, so I gave them the second box.
The swarm from the observation hive had several queen cells (from the brood I gave them last Sunday) so I guess they didn't like the queen that came with them.  Will check again within 3 weeks to see if they end up with a laying queen.

The OH queen started laying yesterday!

All is good in beeland.

Queen cells!

Saturday, April 28th, I check the hive that I'd made queenless a week earlier.  Found queen cells on 2 frames, so I split them between 2 hives.  Hopefully not destroying all the queen cells in the process.  Gave the new location some extra frames of brood from the queenright split from the previous week.

So far the new split isn't flying, of course, but no robbing either.  I worry about queenless splits.  The OH that was split Wednesday took 2 days for its first queen cell to appear and 4 days for the second (and several more.)

bee increase part 2

Low this morning was 71.  Took the observation hive outside and managed to accomplish my plan!  Took all the bees out, cleaned it up (thanks hubs) and only put back the freshly drawn frame with eggs and larva.  I wasn't sure I had the queen in the new hive, so I just put ALL the bees in there and put the one frame back, plus 3 empty frames. (Hope that there's enough nurse bees that made it back in to raise their new queen.)  So many bees make it hard to spot her, so I hoped I had her.

We put the OH back into the house and before I removed the barrier to the outside entrance I looked around to make sure the queen wasn't just hanging out somewhere out there.  There was a small clump of bees near the ground and sure enough, the queen was right there in the middle.  Got her scooped up and put into the new hive!  Yay!  Put the queen and the 3 packed frames into their new home and now I'm just waiting for the mass migration of the foragers to return to the OH.  Only ended up with 3 bees in the house. ;)  So far so good.

Current status then:  Two outside hives with queens, one outside working on queens and the OH working on a queen.

Bee increase

Inspected the remaining outside hive yesterday.  Found the queen had completely laid up the 2 frames of comb I had inserted into the broodnest last Monday!  For a total of 6 (or more) frames of brood.  So, I made a split with the queen, 4 frames of brood, plus honey/pollen into a new 10 frame box and will continue feeding.

I left the original location with 2 boxes, all the foragers of course, and a new comb full of eggs.  (plus honey, pollen, and a frame or 2 of brood.)

The fun part was the long search for the queen.  I had to go back to the original hive and find her there.  I got her on my hive tool and put it down over the split and she walked right in.  Pretty cool.  It's nice with the new bee suit so I don't get so hot and have the patience and persistence to keep looking till I find her.

(Django playing with a drone.)

The original location hive now will have to raise a new queen.  Typically many queens are raised, but the first one to emerge from her cell goes around and kills all the others.  I plan to go back next weekend and any take any excess queen cells to start new hives.  This can supposedly be done with a frame of brood and a frame of honey, but I would worry that a hive that small would get robbed out.  We'll see how much  brood, honey and queen cells I end up with next week. I guess a hive that small with a frame of honey wouldn't need to be fed, which might help keep the robbers away.  (Or thief bees as Django calls them.)

So much to learn... bees

Well, since the observation hive was so full, I figured I could take 2 of the 4 frames and the queen and start a nuc.   Sounds easy enough, right?  Everything sounds easy when you're sitting in front of your computer.  

Here's how it went (for posterity):

Early Thursday, I put in the metal thing to keep all the bees in the OH.  Of course, it was cloudy and chilly so I had to wait till nearly 11 before it was 60 degrees and starting to clear.  The hubs carried the hive outside (heavy!) while I covered the hole so bees wouldn't fly in the house.  I also (thanks to Michael Bush) covered the outside entrance to the hive so there wouldn't be a crowd waiting when we put the hive back.  (this was very smart - there were tons of bees waiting by the door by the time we were done.)

Outside, we leaned the hive against the house near their entrance.  I unscrewed the side of the glass away from the queen cells.   (These were on the top 2 frames.)  I brushed the bees on the glass into the nuc box.  (Have I mentioned how many bees were in this hive?)   Then I put the bottom 2 frames into the nuc.  At this point, there are too many bees for me to be able to see the queen.  So I started hoping.  (Hubs cleaned the glass while I was doing all this.)  Then I brushed a TON of bees from the hive into a bucket and then into the nuc.  It looked like I was getting a whole lot.  

I decided to put the OH back together and just hope that I got the queen...  After we installed it back in the house, I saw the queen of course.  sigh.  But, I didn't want to mess with the frames that had queen cells on them.  At least that's the best excuse I have for not trying harder to find her.

Next I put the nuc over in a new location only a 150 ft (ish) away.  Shortly there after a zillion bees came out and were circling around.  Now I know that all the forager aged bees will come back to the parent hive, but this was looking like ALL the bees.  Sigh again.   So, the OH hive has tons of bees still and they've already started drawing out one of the empty frames I put in.  (Note to self: next time just seal the whole box for a day or three, and get the queen.)    I suppose I could have tried this again, but moving the OH outside is labor intensive for both of us.  But, the OH is still fine, it's just "wasting" a perfectly good queen because there's not much room for her to lay and I'd really like to be using her to her full potential now to make up for all the winter losses.

On to the next day:   The sun finally came out in the early afternoon, so I check on the nuc.  Sadly, there were only a handful of bees, the brood in the frames appeared to have gotten chilled and the one queen cell on that frame was empty. So this is a pretty hopeless situation for a bee.  I'm shocked that 90% of the bees I put in there could fly back home.... where they sit and do nothing.

Checked the queenright outside hive:  They're still small, but picking up steam.  After much deliberation about whether to just combing the sad little nuc with them or give the nuc some resources, or even the queen...  I decided to give them a frame of brood with nurse bees.  I also notched some of the cells with young larva in hopes of helping them make a queen.  They still have very few bees, but they only need to make one queen cell.  If this doesn't work, I'll combine them next check.  (Note: bring a sheet of newspaper to do the combine.)

Our neighbor's bees are robbers.  Fortunately, (or unfortunately) I've gotten really good at recognizing robbing.  So I completely sealed up the nuc (with lots of the robbers inside!)  If I leave it sealed long enough, the robbers will join the hive.   As soon as the sun comes out again, I'll see if they've managed to start queen cells.  If not, I should probably stop risking resources and just combine them with the good hive.

One good hive is better than 2 weak ones.  

My very humble goal is to have at least 2 strong outside hives going into the coming winter... I'd rather have more of course.  It is only April, so I should have plenty of time unless the weather is icky like last year.

Found the queen!

This is from the far west hive (the remaining one besides the observation hive) and it's growing!  It had about 3 full frames of brood, lots of pollen and honey.  In the pictures below you can see the queen, drones, emerging drones.  The queen was a bit harder to find since her abdomen is dark.  The queen in the observation hive is light colored.

 

 

 

 

 

bees, blooms and the weather

This week we've gotten about 2.5 inches of rain.  The pond is now only a couple feet low.  The pear and oaks are blooming and buzzing with bees.  Redbuds are blooming.  The remaining hives seem happy.  Spring is springing.

Bees

Good news:  The observation hive is booming.

Bad news: 3 of the 4 outside hives are dead.  Starved within inches of honey.  The neighbors bees have been cleaning out the remaining honey.   My current theory is that they didn't get a good round of broodrearing done in the fall (thanks to it being so hot and dry) so they didn't have a big enough cluster.  Then with the warm winter, they raised some brood and then starved with we had the cold spell.

The westernmost hive is still alive, but weak.  1.5 frames of brood.  I gave them extra honey from the dead-outs and reduced their entrances to the minimum.  Hope they can grow quickly.  Might end up making splits of the OH!

The above bees are dead!  But they look pretty healthy other than that. No deformed wings.

The observation hive doing great.  Drawing out new comb, queen laying in every cell possible.  Still expanding the broodnest which now covers the 2 middle frames nearly completely.

OH queen on new comb: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/421770_3560396127302_1194765696_33699441_274490565_n.jpg

sand plums blooming

Sand plums have just begun to bloom.  Henbit/deadnettle has been blooming forever. Must check bees again soon to see when will be the time to raise some queens.

early spring bee check

2012 has been unusually warm and we've even had some rain.  The pond looks like an oval again instead of 2 ponds.

I check the 3 west hives.  2 are doing fine, 1 seemed to be dwindling, they had honey so I moved frames of it closer to where the bees were clustered.  I didn't see a queen or brood in this one.  The other 2 had brood.

This week the highs are only in the 50's, so not much flying for a while.

bees

Checked 3 of the big hives since we had some rain lately and the temp was down to 76.  (Although the 72 percent humidity didn't help.)  All had brood and stores.  Not sure yet if we'll get to harvest any for ourselves.  Hope for more rain and lots of nectar producing flowers.  The swarm hive had left after the comb collapse which killed their queen.  So I took some of their old comb and put it into one of the big hives for safe keeping.

Hot bees!

It's been going up in 110's lately here.  Last night the hived swarm (of N weeks) had tons of bees bearding for the first time ever.  Gobs of bees outside the hive.  No fighting, so I knew it wasn't being robbed.  So this morning, while it was a mere 80 degrees, I went out to see what was going on.  (forgot to paste this paragraph earlier!)

Several of their combs had collapsed.  It was sad.  Empty frames with large combs falling over.  I had a spare deep box ready and ran into the house and found a whole bag of good rubber bands.  First I put the still standing  combs in the spare deep and set it aside.  Then I did what I've read about for cutouts.  I picked up the fallen comb (which is covered in bees of course) and set it gently on a flat surface inside a frame.  Then I wrapped lots of rubber bands on it to hold it in place.  I did this for the 3 fallen combs that were mostly brood.   I put those back in the bottom deep with a bunch of empty frames.  I put the bits of comb that had mostly nectar on top of the inner cover, covered by an empty deep then the outer cover for the bees to regain their nectar.  (Honey is too heavy to hold in with rubber bands, it just squishes and leaks everywhere.

so now they have 2 deeps, perhaps a wee bit prematurely, and an empty deep over the inner cover.  Shouldn't have problems keeping the brood warm, but might have issues keeping them cool.   I can only hope the queen survived the ordeal
.  
Click on the pictures to see them bigger.

Also checked on the big hive that hadn't worked on more than 2 frames in the 3rd deep.  They had some open brood, and I saw an empty queen cell.  They also have several empty frames in the lower deeps.  I'll just watch and wait on that one.  Might feed it later to get some comb drawn, and not pull "honey" from it, of course.

Update: Saturday July 16.  They are doing well, connecting comb, drawing new comb and they have lots of queen cells a few of which are capped.  Guess the old queen didn't make it through the collapse.  

Bee check

The hived swarm:  7 frames drawn, full of brood mostly with nectar and pollen around.  Will add second deep when at least 8 frames are full.
First to the west: Only the 2 frames drawn in the upper (3rd) deep..  Should do a more thorough check.
Second to the west: Top deep FULL of bees, all but 2 combs drawn and filling with nectar, only partially capped.
Last to the west (aka Lloyd's hive from last spring)  Top (3rd) deep full of bees, all but a few drawn, some capped brood including drones.  Saw a drone emerge.  (This is good because the observation hive's new queen will need drones out there when she goes on her mating flight.)
East hive: Top deep full of bees, drawn comb nectar, not yet capped.

All that took about 15 minutes.

quick bee check

The hived swarm (5 weeks) has 6 full combs now.  The nuc from last year is FULL of bees.  I checked them only because sometimes they seem less enthusiastic than the others.  I saw lots of capped brood and some open and closed them back up.

Saw the first graduating class on the swarm hive do their orientation flights.  :)

Waiting for the glass for the observation hive.  Need to drill a hole in the wall by Thursday, hopefully so I can install bees this weekend.

It's DRY.  The bees go out early and late, but I haven't figured out where.  It's getting dry enough now that I don't know if the sweet clover is producing nectar.  They're heading SW, so their hard to track.

Squash bug's final act.

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This morning I used duct tape to pick off as many squash bug eggs and nymphs as I could find. Felt like sisyphus.

Making Butter

We got a gallon of raw cream the other day to make butter so I thought I'd document my procedure.  I use a Bosch Universal mixer with the whips.  Put 1 quart of cream in the mixer.  It can be cold still, in fact, if it's too warm the butter will melt and be harder to separate from the "buttermilk" (not the same thing that you buy at the store.)  Most folks say to warm the cream, but with the Bosch it isn't necessary. I do let it set out for 5-10 minutes.

  If you put more than a quart of cream in at a time, when the butter separates it'll slosh around so much you'll have a big mess to clean up later.  So I did the gallon in 4 batches.  Cream is usually about half butter, so we get about 4 pounds of butter from a gallon of cream.  

So, you just let the mixer run on "1" for several minutes.  It passes through all the yummy whip cream stages.

At some point the butter will separate from the buttermilk. At this point, turn the machine off and just flip it to "1" briefly a couple times to get the butter into bigger clumps.

The picture below is how it should look when you're ready to pour off the buttermilk.  Pour it through a strainer and keep the buttermilk for pancakes or something.  Don't try to get the butter out yet though.  Next we want to wash the milk out of the butter.

To wash the butter I add cold water to the mixing bowl to about the same level as it was with the buttermilk, then pulse the machine several times. Our well water is cold enough, but if yours isn't, add some ice.  Then drain, then repeat.  I do this only 2 times and that seems to get the butter fairly clean.

Okay, now put all the butter in the strainer, then dump it all into a big bowl.  Don't try hard to get all the butter out of the mixer because the butter will help the next batch separate faster.  Now is the time to put the next quart of cream into the mixer and turn it on.  It will separate about the time you're done washing this batch.

The next goal is to get as much water out of the butter as possible.  I just tilt a bowl and smash the butter up against the high side.  The water will run down and you can dump it out occasionally.

Next, I put the butter on some wax paper and shape it into a long piece roughly the size of the usual butter sticks.

Then just wrap it up and throw it in the freezer.  If you're going to leave it in the fridge for a really long time rather than the freezer, you need to do a really good job of getting the buttermilk out and maybe even add salt.  I do neither, so I keep it in the freezer till we're ready to use it.