The bees swarmed  Sunday morning. 

This shot, with the corner of the truck for reference, gives you a better idea of how high off the ground the swarm was. It's the dark spot in the center, about a third of the way down from the top.

There was a long ladder, and a saw, and I'd really rather not have a swarm of bees dumped down onto my head especially when there are three adults and only two bee suits, but it all ended without injury. I got stung once on the bare arm and my husband got one sting through his glove.

As I type this, the bees are in a new hive and they'd better stay there.

Beehive Alchemy

Hubby checked on Saturday and the bees are still in their hives, apparently doing what bees do. At the very least they're making and capping honey...but one hive didn't seem to have any newly laid eggs. That'll have me holding my breath for a while, even though there seem to be indicators that they've hatched a new queen and taken care of  the problem themselves. 

Did I mention that we've got Hawaiian bees? Sort of... These latest hives have Kona Italian queens. I'm not sure if that means the actual bugs came from Hawaii or if they're descended from queens that did (because I wasn't paying enough attention to remember) but they're definitely gentle bees. No one has been stung at all this year, even though I was standing close enough to touch this frame and not wearing a suit.

Hubby made beeswax lip balm which I've been happily using up. He did cheat and buy a hunk of beeswax from the bee supply place, but who said it had to be from your own hive?

I'm hoping that our hives will produce enough extra stuff that we'll be able to get more adventurous. Netgalley sent me a review copy of Beehive Alchemy: Projects and recipes using honey, beeswax, propolis, and pollen to make your own soap, candles, creams, salves, and more by Petra Ahnert. We could spend years experimenting with the recipes from this book. There are the soaps and candles you'd expect, but there's also sealing wax and beard balm and solid lotion bars. And there's a whole chapter on dying your own batik fabric! No matter how the hives work out, I'm sure we'll come up with some extra wax that's suitable for playing with fabric. I'm also curious about the beeswax ice cream.

Smart Bees and Dumb Bees

I hadn't realized how much I missed having bees to watch. I'd also forgotten how much I tend to worry about the bugs. The day after Hubby installed them into their hives, I left the house early in the morning. There wasn't a bee to be seen, which had me worried for half the day. I swear the other hives used to get an earlier start.

One hive seems to have lots of bees coming and going. The other doesn't. I didn't realize what was going on until Hubby pointed it out. The bees in the less busy looking hive are zipping in and out of their entrance.  The bees who look like they're being more productive are milling around trying to figure out how to get back inside...or maybe there's a purpose to their dawdling, but it sure looks like they don't know where to go.

A post shared by Michelle Marr (@romantictangle) on May 18, 2018 at 12:46pm PDT

I'd love to sit outside and knit by the hive, but I've been warned that bees don't like wool. Standing close enough to the hive to take this picture was probably enough recklessness for one day.

Bee Day

Remember how we spent our week scrambling to get the hives ready and then I found out the night before I was supposed to pick them up that the bees themselves wren't ready? I got lucky. 

These are nucs. We've always bought our bees in packages, which are a completely different thing. You can see those in this post. I've ridden with four kids and five hives worth of bees in the back of the minivan with no problem...and I told the guy we were going to drive the van and he said that there wouldn't be a problem.

See those little cardboard holes? The bees were already chewing their way out when we loaded them into the truck. Twenty or so bees in the covered bed of a pickup isn't a crisis. Twenty or so bees in the van would have been a lot more dramatic.

We got both nucs installed into the hives without any trouble or stings, even though I was standing way too close and not wearing a bee suit, but bee day can never go easily. One hive has two queens and two definitely aren't better than one. They'll fight to the death (that's how bees work) and hopefully they don't both die.

Maybe there's no such thing as a drama free hive?

Swarming Bees Don't Sting

That's what I kept reminding myself a couple of hours ago when I was reaching over my head and trying to shake a mass like this one (a swarm from 2013) into a cardboard box. Even in a full bee suit, that's not my idea of fun....and it didn't help that I could only find one of the gloves. 

I don't know whether I got the queen or not. If I did, there's a chance. If I didn't...then we've lost our last hive.  While Hubby was laid up last year we lost all but one of them.....and then a tree fell on that hive. Have I mentioned that 2014 was a really bad year?

Cross your fingers that my attempt at saving the bees was a success!  While I wait to find out, I'm linking up to Farmgirl Friday and Simple Saturdays.

{Whatcha Reading?} Buzz

My husband keeps bees. I help out when I can and try not to get stung. Most of what I know about bees is what he's told me, or what I've gleaned from watching documentaries with the family. They're fascinating little bugs.   Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee seemed like a good way to learn more about them, and I was curious about how people manage to keep bees in a big city.

From the book's Amazon page:

Bees are essential for human survival--one-third of all food on American dining tables depends on the labor of bees. Beyond pollination, the very idea of the bee is ubiquitous in our culture: we can feel buzzed; we can create buzz; we have worker bees, drones, and Queen bees; we establish collectives and even have communities that share a hive-mind. In Buzz, authors Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut convincingly argue that the power of bees goes beyond the food cycle, bees are our mascots, our models, and, unlike any other insect, are both feared and revered. 

In this fascinating account, Moore and Kosut travel into the land of urban beekeeping in New York City, where raising bees has become all the rage. We follow them as they climb up on rooftops, attend beekeeping workshops and honey festivals, and even put on full-body beekeeping suits and open up the hives. In the process, we meet a passionate, dedicated, and eclectic group of urban beekeepers who tend to their brood with an emotional and ecological connection that many find restorative and empowering. Kosut and Moore also interview professional beekeepers and many others who tend to their bees for their all-important production of a food staple: honey. The artisanal food shops that are so popular in Brooklyn are a perfect place to sell not just honey, but all manner of goods: soaps, candles, beeswax, beauty products, and even bee pollen.

  

Buzz also examines media representations of bees, such as children's books, films, and consumer culture, bringing to light the reciprocal way in which the bee and our idea of the bee inform one another. Partly an ethnographic investigation and partly a meditation on the very nature of human/insect relations, Moore and Kosut argue that how we define, visualize, and interact with bees clearly reflects our changing social and ecological landscape, pointing to how we conceive of and create culture, and how, in essence, we create ourselves.

I was hoping to read about the nuts and bolts of urban beekeeping -- how the beekeepers maneuver the equipment onto rooftops and what the bees feed off of (The landscaping in parks and around businesses? Window boxes?  Are there more dangerous pesticides in an urban environment?)

What I found was a somewhat overwhelming explanation of people's fear of bees and the ethics of beekeeping. It's all very different from our family's relationship with our own bees. We're annoyed when they swarm, and sad when we lose a hive. When one wanders into the house, I'll try to get it back outside, if I've got time. If I don't, I'll let the little bug fend for itself. And if one is caught in my hair, I'm going to try to squish her before she stings me. I just don't look at our bees the same way as I see our chickens, or geese or cats.

The book's title on Amazon (which I didn't see until I pulled up the page to link to it) says that it's part of the Biopolitics Series. That probably would have been a clue that it wasn't for me.

Disclosure -- the publisher provided me with an electronic ARC of Buzz

bees still don't like quilts...

Last year, I tried to get the bees to land on a quilt. They wouldn't cooperate, not even when the quilt was drenched in sugar water. Anything else with a bit of sugar on it will draw bees, but not a quilt. Hubby said I should've tried honey, but not grocery store honey because that's bad for the bees.

 

This year I pulled out a quilt that I hadn't shown on the blog in a while and already needed a trip through the washer. I sprinkled some honey on one of the buzz saws and spread it out in a good spot. Eventually, after three days of waiting and checking, some ants came and ate the honey.

 

So I gave up and borrowed my daughter's hedgehog, Josephine.  

 

 

I made this quilt back in 2009, using a pattern I'd found on a magazine's website and a bundle of fabrics from Connecting Threads. It was promptly claimed by the boys and I see it wrapped around them now and then. Chickens, for the record, will come stand on your quilt whether you want them near it or not.

It's swarming season!

I've seen two stories on the nightly news lately about bees swarming neighborhoods and how terrifying it was for local residents. One woman had a mass of bees on her decorative flag.

 

Something like this...

 

 

The only terrifying thing about the mass in this picture was that they're our bees and had decided, for whatever reason bees decide to do what they do, to leave their hive.  If hubby hadn't been out tinkering with one of the cars and heard the louder than usual buzzing, we would have lost them for good.

 

Instead, we suited up, cut down the branch they were hanging from, and shook their annoying little bee butts back into an empty hive box. They're at the far end of the yard now, and hopefully they're happy with their new residence.

 

See where Hubby is standing? The swarm is that darkish shape directly to the right of his arm... and I was standing in that same spot a few seconds later, sawing through the last of the branch so that he could lower it into the box. Did I mention that I don't have gloves for my suit?  (Teenage Son has been boasting that he's taller than me now, but he stopped that as soon as I told him that being taller meant that he got to help cut the next swarm out of the trees.)

 

I wish I'd taken time to learn how to shoot video with my new camera, because this was definitely an experience worth filming. All went well and neither of us got stung. Swarming bees don't have a hive to defend and have gorged themselves with honey before leaving their old hive, so they're at their gentlest. If you have allergies or if you live in an area with Africanized bees, I'm not going to argue with you.  But for the rest of us, swarms aren't anything to be afraid of.

 

When a hive swarms, the queen leaves the hive along with half of the bees, leaving behind the rest of the bees and a new queen.  Bee populations are dropping dramatically due to pesticides and Colony Collapse.  There are beekeepers out there who would be thrilled to come capture a swarm and set them up in a new home. Google "swarm list" along with your city and state and you should be able to find a whole list of them.

It's bee day!

Hubby decided to add five new hives this year and I've got to admit that, after the fun we had installing our new hives last year, I haven't been looking forward to bee day.  But the bugs are all in their new homes and I can write that post I was planning in my head last year before things went so painfully wrong.

No one got stung  this year. Partially because we got the variety of bees we'd actually ordered this time. And partially because we were expecting a repeat of last year and being extra careful. I  even wore my new bee suit.

The bees come in mesh cages.

 Ever wonder how you get the bees from the mesh cage into the hives? 

 

I'm glad things went calmly this year. And I'm staying out of the bee yard until I'm sure everyone is happily settled in.  

 

{What's Cooking?} Honey Walnut Shrimp

I was so excited when Judy picked honey for this week's challenge because that meant I had an excuse to get into the honey from our very own bees. We only got a couple of jars this year, so it takes a really special occasion to justify using it.

And then I needed to come up with a really special recipe. Teenage Daughter came to the rescue and suggested I try to make Honey Walnut Chicken. Have I mentioned that my girl is an absolute genius?

I did some searching  and there are quite a few different interpretations of the Honey Walnut Chicken from Panda Express. Most are fairly similar, but I didn't want to start with raw shrimp or deep fry it (we've had enough adventures in our kitchen with boiling oil this week), so I tweaked them and came up with my own version.

Start by mixing 2/3 a cup of granulated sugar and one cup of water in a small saucepan. Add 1/2 cup of walnuts. Bring to a boil for a couple of minutes then drain and spread the walnuts on a plate.

In a small bowl, mix 1/4 cup mayonnaise, 2 tablespoons honey, and 1 tablespoon sweetened condensed milk.

I used a bag of cooked frozen shrimp. Once they were thawed and I'd taken the tails off, I dusted them with corn starch and briefly cooked them in the frying pan with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  When they were hot, I poured the sauce and walnuts over them and cooked the whole thing for a couple more minutes, just until everything was heated through.

Alex and I both thought that it had a definite mayonnaise flavor to it that I don't remember from the shrimp I've had at Panda Express. We may have to go out to lunch soon  to compare our results. And I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with the rest of the can of sweetened condensed milk.  Can you freeze that stuff? If not, I guess I'll have to make another batch of those peanut butter biscuit mix cookies.

This post is linked to  What's Cooking at Patchwork Times and WFMW at We are THAT Family.

We have honey!

Last Monday (has that much time flown by already - how did that happen?), we extracted honey from the oldest of our four hives. The three new ones need all of their honey to get them through the winter and, honestly, I'm not anxious to get too close to those three hives again after what happened when we installed them this Spring.

I didn't get too close to any of the hives while my husband was removing the frames, except for that one time he called me over, handed me a piece of equipment, and told me to RUN with it back to the house. There were no stings, though. Not until a yellow jacket flew up my skirt four days later.

I meant to get pictures of the whole extraction process, but once we got going, Hubby, Teenage Daughter and I were all using both hands. These are the frames -

You use a heated knife to slice off the top layer of wax, then put the frames into the extractor, which is like a big metal bucket with a rack inside that holds the frames and a crank on top. Crank the handle and it spins the honey out, then the honey drains through a spout at the bottom.

Sounds easy, huh? And it mostly is. Except there's no stand for the heated knife so someone has to hold it, and there are a whole lot of other things that need to be held and balanced and it took three of us working together to get it all done.  Next year, we're hoping to have more honey. The boys will be bigger, so we'll also have more helping hands.

This post is linked to Farm Girl Friday at Deborah Jean's Dandelion House and the Homestead Barn Hop.

Is it bee week?

It must be -- so far this week, I've soaked a quilt in sugar water in an attempt to get bees to land on it for the Pets on Quilts show, gone over to Grandma's house to annoy the yellow jackets who took up residence in her favorite birdhouse, and watched three different documentaries on Africanized honey bees.

Today, Hubby went out to inspect the hives. I don't know if that was something he already had planned, or if all of my whining about the uncooperative bees inspired him. but he got into his bee suit and fired up the smoker.

I was keeping my distance, figuring that I'd pushed my luck enough this week. Then he handed me a frame full of honey and told me to get it into the house, fast.



Did I mention that I was in a sun dress and sandals, not my new bee suit? Happily, I made it into the house without incident. I don't think the bees even noticed me hurrying off with a chunk of their pantry. And now we've got about five pounds of comb in our pantry!

the bugs are fighting again

Remember last year's drama in the hive? Well, it's happening again. This time two of the new hives -- including the one I have a grudge against because they made my face swell up like I was wearing alien makeup -- are robbing the third of the new hives.

Hubby went to the hive that was being robbed and sprinkled flour onto the bees leaving the hive while he had me, wearing my new bee suit, crouch down near the entrances of the other hives and watched to see if anyone was coming back with flour on her butt. It works kind of like those dye-packs the banks use...

So now we know who's robbing who, but that doesn't mean we can stop them. All they're stealing is sugar water, and all of the hives have feeders full of the stuff. I swear, they're like little kids.

I'm using my Go! cutter and one of my newer dies to cut scraps into itty bitty triangles, because I've got an idea that's going to take a lot of them. These are the 1" finished half square triangles. I love this die, and see a whole ton of little doll-type quilts in my immediate future.

We've had so much fun this week I can barely stand it!

A year later, I'm still grateful to an acquaintance who described coping with bad luck as "finding new ways to have fun." That makes me feel so much better than hearing that things could be worse. I know they could be and I'm very grateful that they aren't.

But I've had so much fun this week I can barely stand it!

After we got the new bees installed, we discovered that there's a reason they look and act different than last year's bees. They're not the type we paid for. And they're already in our hives, so there's not much we can do about it at this point except hope they settle down.

Did you know that if you get multiple honeybee stings it can make you feel like you've got a mild case of the flu? That's according to the bee forums and explains exactly how my husband and I have both felt for the past two days. But that's not the REALLY fun part...

With stings to the scalp, the fluid has to drain somewhere...and the path of least resistance is the skin above the eyes. Which makes me look like I've got prosthetic alien makeup on. I'm not posting a picture of this, but trust me -- it looks freakish.

I can't tell you how glad I am to be a stay at home mom right now and not have any obligations to go out in public where I'd have to try and explain this!

I think the nice, very knowledgable lady at poison control said this was normal and it might take a week for the swelling to go down. I'm hoping I remember that part wrong because when I called and talked to her last night I was more concerned about whether or not I needed to call my husband to come home from work and drive me to the emergency room.

No stash report this week because I've been having too much fun to buy fabric or quilt! I am linking this post to Finding the Funny over at My Life and Kids, because all I can do at this point is laugh at the situation.

ouch!

Today is Bee Day. Last year, Bee Day went very smoothly and we got our package of bees installed with no stings.



I had a post all written in my head about how transferring the bees from their boxes into the hives isn't nearly as scary at it sounds. But this year's bees aren't nearly as friendly as the bees we got last year. In hindsight, that sting I got two weeks ago was nothing.

I think hubby got stung three times. I'm not sure about myself, since all of my stings are under my hair and fairly close together. I'm guessing at least four, maybe five or six.

I'm definitely getting my own bee suit. And I may just wear it every time I go out to the yard.

So... what's your favorite bee sting remedy that can be used through long hair?

This post is linked to Farm Girl Friday at Deborah Jean's Dandelion House.

watched wax doesn't melt

I wasn't going to let the beeswax from the new hive to go waste. After all of that trouble, we had to wind up with something! After the bees left, and the yellow jackets cleared out all of the brood and honey, my husband pulled all of the empty comb out of the hive.

And today, I decided to figure out how to melt it. I had already picked up a cheap sauce pan from the thrift store, so I went online and Googled "melting beeswax." The instructions I found assumed that I was melting nice wax from a commercial source.

My wax has a few dead bees in it, and yucky dark patches, and what might've been some capped brood the yellow jackets missed. So I set up my double boiler and hoped for the best.



An hour or so later, I strained the nasty stuff that looked like it was never going to melt through some cheesecloth and wound up with this:



It's not much, but it's mine!

This post is linked to Farmgirl Friday

more drama in the hive

If the chickens are picking on another chicken, you can remove the injured one from the coop. If the cats or kids are fighting, you can separate them.

If the bees are fighting, you can just stand there helplessly and wish for a can of bug spray. Not because the bug spray would solve anything, but because you're so ticked off at those stupid bees that just spraying them all suddenly seems like the best option.

To bring you up to date --

Husband relocated a hive from a co-worker's pump housing.

The new bees swarmed from their hive and attempted to invade our established hive.

Husband got the swarm back into their own box and moved them to the opposite end of our property.

I got a bee in my hair.

Tuesday, my husband discovered that the new bees had swarmed from their box again. Yellow jackets had moved into that hive and cleared out the little honey that was there. And the swarm was on the move, headed back in the direction of our established hive.

We thought we were going to have to wrap the hive in wet sheets to keep out the invaders. So of course I took sheets from the linen closet. Those are the ones I know I can replace! I wasn't sacrificing a vintage sheet, or one of my white ones, for the bugs.

Turned out, we didn't need the sheet after all, so it'll get washed and go back inside. But my oldest son is still telling anyone who will listen that I took his sheets for the bees. I'm learning from the experience and going to track down a set that isn't bed or quilt worthy to keep around just in case.

We tried putting swarm lure in the new hive, mainly to steer the swarm away from the established hive. Only a small handful of bees turned up there. I don't know where the rest went.

Now we're just hoping that they didn't weaken the big hive too much. With winter coming, this was the last thing the bugs needed.

I've saved the beeswax from the abandoned hive. There's no much, but I figure I can melt it down into a little lump to use for hand stitching.

I'll be linking this post to the Farmgirl Friday Blog Hop

Design Wall Monday

I've been having all kinds of fun this week, cutting and piecing and playing with new projects. The red and white half square triangles are part of something I'm not ready to show off quite yet. And there are the bow ties. And I finished a few more blocks for Quinn's green quilt.

I've also learned an important difference between bees and fabric. New fabric doesn't swarm and try to kill the stuff that you already had. Those bees hubby brought home and installed in a new hive swarmed and tried to invade our existing hive. He got them back into their own box and moved it to the opposite end of our property and we're hoping we didn't lose another queen.

These bugs are stressful!

When I walked out to the hives yesterday, just to look at them, not to touch anything or even get very close, a bee flew into my hair. Usually, you can ignore them and they'll fly off, but this girl was mad. I undid my hair clip and shook my hair out in case she was stuck -- and she flew a few feet away and then looped straight back into my hair again. I still can't believe she didn't sting me on the way back into the house or while I was trying to find a big kid to squish her for me. I do feel a little bad about squishing her, but not bad enough to get myself stung.

To see more design walls, click over to Patchwork Times

bees are like fabric

I hear that once people know you quilt or knit, they'll offer you all sorts of unwanted fabric and yarn. Apparently, it's the same with bees. So far, my husband has been told about the bees in two co-workers' pump houses. The first hive turned out to be yellow jackets. The second is honeybees. Those, we want.

And, like gifts of fabric and yarn, you need things to store them in. So we've been shopping for supers and frames and hive lids. Do I want my own bee suit?

This post is linked to Farm Girl Friday

Drama in the Hive

As if we didn't have enough stress around here lately already, our queen died this weekend. We found her during a hive inspection, breathing (do bees breathe?) her last. And without a queen to lay eggs, the clock is ticking as far as the rest of the hive is concerned. They hadn't made another queen of their own, and of course if something like this is going to happen it's going to happen on the holiday weekend because that's how life works...

We got lucky and found a new queen to buy yesterday and while we were installing her, I learned something new about our expensive bugs.

They will warn you before stinging.

While I was holding things for my husband, a bee whacked into my arm, hard. It felt deliberate, so I asked him about it later since he's the one who's read all of the bee books. That thwack was a warning to back off.

I haven't been stung by one of our own bees yet, but now that we've got a hive in the yard I'm expecting it to happen sooner or later. There are worse things in life than a bee sting.

What do you do for bee stings?

The last time I got stung, which was a couple of years ago, I couldn't find the baking soda, we don't use meat tenderizer, and I didn't want to go to the car for the bee sting stuff in the first aid kit. So I tried pressing a penny against it. Everything I can find about pennies and bee stings on the web today says it's an urban legend, but it made me feel better at the time.

The bee books say to take a couple of Benadryl.

Honestly, I'm hoping that I don't have an opportunity to test any of these suggestions anytime soon.