Bees.

I believe the bees are enjoying their new homes. These photos by our friend Ashley Rose are of the installation of 2 packages of bees back on Monday April 4.

I started with gloves and rubberbanded trousers and sleeves. Ended up keeping the rubberbands on but ditching the gloves since they were cumbersome.

the package of bees come with a feeder (a can full of sugar syrup that the bees access through tiny holes punched in the lid) that we removed. Then, the bees can be dumped gently into the hive or the whole box can be placed in the hive and they can exit on their own. I chose the gentle dump for various reasons.

We are using frames without foundation (wax or plastic base). The bees build directly on the wooden comb guides along the top bars of the frames. We leveled the hives on the pallet since the bees build with gravity in mind. Some people melt beeswax and paint a bit on to entice them to build on the guides. I didn't use it and they knew exactly what to do and where to build.

There she is in my left hand, the lovely queen in her little box.

Our tiny beeyard.

Taking a moment and collecting myself.

I placed my own inverted pail feeders

over the clusters of bees so they would have syrup

to make wax with until the nectar really starts coming in.

Empty hive bodies went around the pails and the covers on top.

Awaiting the Bees

Langstroth Hives10 FramesPail Feeder made from a bucket with 1/16" drill bit holes for bees to suck syrup from.

I'd like to call them 'The Wilkinsburg Ladies'...perhaps make them a little sign and post it by their hives. The ladies arrive in a week, via 2 southern packages, 3 lb boxes of bees, containing about 10,000 bees and 1 queen each in a little cage. She is in a cage so the bees can get used to her on the ride up north and accept her (hopefully). These packages were obtained from Lee Miller, a reputable source recommended by my Burgh Bees class instructor. In retrospect, I if I could do it again, I may have chosen bees bred locally, nucleus colonies from local beekeepers, as they have proven that they have what it takes to survive in our locale, and tried to find bees with resistance to the biggest bee threat around, the Varroa destructor mite. However, I followed the common beginner path of getting packages, and I'm going to try and give them the best home possible.

The photos above are the 2 hives that have been residing in our living room for the past month, getting assembled, moving to the porch for coatings of paint when the weather warms and coming back inside after. The hives are Langstroth hives, one of many hive designs, and a popular one here in the US. Stacked boxes are filled with frames that the bees build comb onto, secreting wax they make by eating honey, or sugar syrup if there is no nectar flowing yet. The queen lays eggs and the lady worker bees raise up the young and do all other manner of things to strengthen and care for the colony: gather food as soon as nectar and pollen are available, store it around the eggs and in frames above them, take out the dead, clean the hive, attend to the queen, help the pampered boys (drones) out of their cells and feed them. Drones may appear as freeloaders, whose sole purpose in life is to try to mate with a queen, which is true, but they are quite important in keeping a good gene pool going. They are also brutally pushed out of the hive to starve once their job is done, winter approaches, and all food is needed for the ladies to eat and keep the cluster of their sisters warm over winter by shivering their little flight muscles and generating heat. The honey that people harvest (should) only be the bees' excess, leaving them with plenty of their hard-earned honey to get through the winter.

Bees, quite simply amaze me. They are what may be called a "super organism" - a colony of individuals that cannot survive and flourish outside of the group. Ants and termites also fit this bill. They work together as a well-oiled machine, sacrificing themselves for the safety of the hive if necessary, and at times, doing the brutal work of advancing the strength of the hive in a different way, by a swarm cell queen aborting all her sister queens, or the drones being pushed out of the hive once their job is done. I find myself going on about what I am learning and how absolutely astonishing the little buggers are and sometimes don't notice people's eyes glazing over. I've gone on quite a bit here, I notice. Well, best of luck to The Wilkinsburg Ladies and all the bees out there this year. A lot of what I have learned so far has come from Burgh Bees, Michael Bush's great website, and Ross Conrad's Book Natural Beekeeping.

I leave you with a fun factual bit about the Reverend Langstroth, developer of the hive currently employed by most American beekeepers, and author of The Hive and the Honeybee.

The Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is credited with introducing the idea of "bee space" into American beehive design. Bee space is the space in bees' homes that they will fill with propolis (antimicrobial glue they make from plant resin) if it is smaller than 1/4" and in which they will build comb to store food if it is larger than 3/8". While this idea had already been incorporated into hive designs in Europe, in 1852, Langstroth patented the first movable-frame beehive in the United States, built for him by a Philadelphia cabinet maker and bee lover, which used the ideas of precise bee space within the hive, movable frames and stacked boxes.

Return of the Ramps

Last year our friends Yve and Marty let us dig up some ramps from the woods behind their house. We ate some with relish and planted some is our shady back yard, hoping they would return this year, which they have, and they've brought friends, much to our delight.

Farming for the Future Conference & The Way Wheat Grows

(Photos are of a large-scale grain harvest (courtesy USDA ARS Image Gallery) and harvesting wheat with a cradle.)

I am excited to be attending the Farming for the Future Conference next week, an annual event organized by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA). PASA does everything from addressing farm and food policy issues to offering farm-based educational workshops.

The theme of this year's conference is "Claiming our Food - System Future" and the featured keynote speaker is Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute in Kansas. Mr. Jackson's work centers on solving the problem he calls "the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture." His view of industrial agriculture is one that seriously degrades land through unnatural systems, filling it with salts and chemicals as well as simply encouraging it to blow and wash away through erosion. The Land Institute is experimenting with what they call Natural Systems Agriculture. Much modern agriculture is based on annual crops (grains, soy) that last a year and then get removed and the land tilled under. The Land Institute hopes to grow perennial grains, based on the Kansas prairie, to supplement the annual monoculture food-system. From their website... "Our purpose is to develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops." I agree, large scale farming wreaks havoc, and I must admit, perennial grains sound dreamy.

As far as the conference workshops go, I'm really excited about some offerings in Beekeeping, The Farm Bill, Late-Blight Management (it is really affecting tomatoes these days), Forage & Cover Crops (woo hoo!), and other general organic/food-production stuffs. There should be a lot of great conversations going on, and I'm looking forward to meeting some pretty awesome folks.

Drip Irrigation

These are images from Quiet Creek Farm's drip irrigation system for raised beds.

Quiet Creek Herb Farm

These are some more photos from Quiet Creek Herb Farm, where I took a cheesemaking class. These are their high tunnels, in which they are growing lettuce and figs in raised beds. The side of the greenhouse can be rolled up with a crank to allow ventilation when it is warm enough.