Green Grape/Black Cherry

These are my two favorite cherry-sized tomatoes. They are not overly sweet, more tomatoey and acidic. Plus, don't they look pretty together? These are the first Green Grape of the season. The plants, 4 in number, are growing in burlap bags across the street from our house, against a brick wall. They are untrained and sprawling. Looking for tomatoes is like going on an easter egg hunt. The guys that come to mow the lot have graciously avoided weed wacking them. I plan to repay their kindness with tomatoes. A fun fact? Green Grape was introduced in 1983 by Tom Wagner of Tater Mater Seeds in California. He crossed the green heirloom Evergreen with the diminutive Yellow Pear. What a good idea.

Time for Garlic and Wineberries

Costata Romanesco zucchini (the best...has a nutty flavor!), Benning's Green Pattypan Squash and some pickling cukes.

Rubus phoenicolasius, or wineberry, grows wild and crazy in the back of our garden lot. The spiny canes produces very juicy, delicate berries for just a few short weeks. Farewell, wineberry.

Jason is flabbergasted by delicious garlic fumes.

Garlic going for a rest.

Czech Black Pepper. So showy. So nice.

Queen Bee and Such.

Here are a few photos Jason took of our last hive inspection.

See that long abdomen hiding along the wooden endbar? Thats Queen Bee from Hive B. I would wager the bees circled around her are her attendants.

Here she is again, a bit blurry, the bee with the white dot.

Gosh. Wow. Honey.

Bees and brood. When the new workers are ready to come out, they chew their way out and come out as new, fuzzy, slightly lighter colored new bees. Then, of course, they get right to work.

Queen Cups and The Urge to Leave the Hive

I came back from a lovely trip to see my folks and family and found yesterday that the bees had been real busy while I was away. They were feeling cramped and built what are known as queen cups, potential places to raise new queens. If this train of thought proceeds, half the hive can leave with the old queen and the half can stay behind in their newly roomy hive with their new queen (whichever one hatches first and aborts her sister queens). While this is a natural thing, I'd like to keep my bees around by giving them their desired space when needed, but not before. Not quite as easy as I thought!

On advice from more knowledgeable beekeepers, we went back and found the queen in both hives, determining that they hadn't swarmed yet. We then removed the queen cups. Last night, my coworker Bob and I put together frames and hive bodies and Jason and I added the third story to their hive apartment today, interspersing empty frames within their brood nest to give them a roomy feeling but keeping enough brood together so it doesn't catch a chill. The bees need it together so they can keep it warm. Ideally, if we had frames lying around already drawn with wax comb, we would have used those, so the queen could pop eggs right in, but she will have to wait for the workers to build out the cells for her. When I first saw the "swarm cells" I thought half the bees were long gone but my untrained eye can now see they are the eggless, less finished "queen cups".

Images of Queen Cells from the book

The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture

1920 Edition by A.I. and E.R. Root

One of the little queen cups we removed.

Queen cup, view from the bottom

Deceased worker bee

The 3 Bee castes:

• Queen (1 per hive, egg laying machine attended to by workers, lives longest and stays in the hive after her mating flight or until she dies or the bees decide it is time for her to go)
• Drone (male, taken care of by female workers, important to the genetic diversity of hives)
• Worker (female...may have many jobs throughout her life: nursing the young, cleaning the hive, carrying out the dead, and then foraging in the field until her short life expires.)

While we don't see the queen, except for a lucky glance when looking in the hive, we get to hang out with the bug-eyed drones and workers daily. The bees are always about at Garden Dreams, the workers coming and going from the wild overgrown lots of Wilkinsburg were I imagine they are finding food. They love to follow us around when we water the seedlings and suck water out of the soil in the pots. They largely ignore the 5 gallon bucket of water I put by their hive and try to keep pristine for them, complete with floating rafts so they won't drown. They prefer the plant pots. They rest for a bit, preening their antennae after a drink, and then they are off into the distance.

Bees in May and June

A swarm: bees reproducing at the colony level.

Brood - the bumpy ones are the drones (guys) and the flatter cells the workers (ladies)

100% natural comb. Pretty!

Starting to draw out foundation.

More brood, with honey at the top.

Here is a belated bee update of our two new, 2 month old hives, lovingly named A and B for now. Jason took a few photos of our last hive inspection. Also included, an image of a swarm of bees that alighted here in Wilkinsburg on Rebecca Street a few weeks ago and me grinning goofily beside them. I "helped" (as in mostly watched and moved the box to catch them) my bee mentor catch them. They were about 2 feet from the sidewalk in a front yard.

Our bees are doing well. In the second hive bodies we added, we interspersed foundation frames and foundationless frames. The foundationless frames have comb guides along the top bars as a starting point for the bees to build on, but they were building a bit crooked on them. Jason sanded down the comb guides in the foundationless frames so they came to a sharper point. These steps seem to lead to straighter comb building, making it easier for us to take the frames out to look at them with out damaging the bees' hard work.

We lost the queen in Hive A to some unknown fate, but the bees raised a new one and she was spotted two weeks ago, running around happily laying eggs. My mentor was able to mark her with a white dot so if I need to find her, it may be a touch easier.

The ladies are out flying today, sometimes crashlanding at the hive entrances with heavy loads of pollen on their back legs and nectar, storing up food for the winter. Til next time, we wish them luck!

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.