When bees ruled the world

They kind of do rule the world, but that's a different post for a different day.  Here's the saga of how our bees hijacked our productivity for 3 days....

It started as just a typical Wednesday, I went to teach yoga, and Anna went to work at the clinic.  After meeting Anna for lunch, I headed home. As I was walking up the front steps, I could hear the lovely, familiar hum of bees, and I immediately started looking for the flowers that they were so obviously enjoying.  I saw many many flowers around our front steps, but no bees.  That's when I looked up to the left....shit.  I immediately knew that one of our hives had swarmed, and they decided that our house was a great place to live. Of course this happens when Anna's at the clinic.

Bees swarm when there isn't enough food, or if they population gets too big for the current home.  They make a new queen, and half the hive leaves with the old queen when the new one is about to hatch. Bees are pretty amazing.

This is where the bees were heading in and out of our house.  Bad picture, but you get the idea.

Four ladies hanging out on our kitchen window.  There were probably 20+ bees on the window, but only 4 stood still enough for this photo.  The bees were all gathering around windows in our house.  

Because the bees were new residents of our house (less than 4 hrs), if we made the environment undesirable, there was a chance they would leave on their own.  I chose Deadmau5 -- I enjoyed it, hopefully the bees did not.

The music was pretty loud in the house, so when Anna got home from work, I was ready with a gin and tonic and front row seats to the bee exodus.  Anna's talking to her beekeeping mentor about what we can do if/when they don't leave on their own.  

This is how Baxter feels about the whole ordeal despite being stung at least 3 times while trying to catch bees in his mouth -- he deserved it.

This is how Olive felt about the whole ordeal.  She's so sensitive.  Maybe she got stung?  Maybe it was just the bees swarming that freaked her out.  She was in pancake mode hiding by her bed.

If we were going to try to catch these bees, we needed to put some hives together.  So, we put all the frames together, but Anna had left the box down by one of our other hives.  When she walked down there to get it, this is what she saw....

This picture isn't sideways -- that's one of our tiny apple trees being totally bent over by a huge swarm of bees.  

It was pretty amazing. When bees are swarming like this, they're less likely to be aggressive so I felt fine getting really close without wearing any protection.  Bees sting to protect their hive, and since they're looking for a new home, they have nothing to protect.

It was awfully nice of them to swarm so low to the ground so we could easily catch them!

Here's Anna putting them in our hive:

See all those bee butts up in the air?  They are looking for their queen.  They stick their butts up in the air to try to smell the pheromone of the queen -- they have a scent gland on their abdomen.  Pretty cool!

Here, you can clearly see the bees all marching in one direction toward their queen -- and into our hive!

Here they are....marching towards their queen and into our hive. :)

After collecting this swarm, we went back to check on the bees having a dance party in our house.  No change.  We decided to go get some dinner and make a plan for the morning.  When we got home -- the bees were still rocking out --- and still in our house, but they had tucked themselves in for the night so we decided to do the same.

The next morning, we devised a plan by which we would tear down the sheetrock in our house and extract the bees.  Anna's mentor let us borrow his bee-vac -- a special vacuum that you can use to suck them all into a cage without killing them so you can keep the swarm.

Listening for the swarm -- we can definitely hear bees in there.

We made a plan for where we were going to start demolishing our house, and we set up the surgery table.  All possible tools at the ready.

We drilled a hole, then started cutting away.  Yikes!

Turns out, we have a lot of insulation up there....not anymore...

When we finally got all the insulation out, this is what we saw.  Some bees, but not enough to be the colony we were looking for.  Crap.  Useless hole in our ceiling #1.  We could see that all the bees were headed in one direction -- up.  This isn't too shocking since bees like to go up.  So....we followed.

We went up to the highest point they'd be able to reach.  When we looked through the hole....nothing. No bees. WTF. Useless hole in our ceiling #2.

This is what most of our house looked like yesterday afternoon -- at least we had a tarp downstairs.

At this point, we were feeling pretty defeated by the bees so we decided to get out of the dusty house and regroup on the deck by putting some frames together for our eventual capture of the swarm in the house.  While we were working, I noticed that the swarm we had put in the hive the day before had a lot of bees on the outside of the hive.  Bees often do this to cool down, so we figured that was probably what was happening, but since it was a new hive, we wanted to walk down there to check.  When we got down to the hives, this is what we saw in the tree above the hive.

Are you freaking kidding me?!?!  

This is what the hive looked like, and when we peaked in the cover, they were all still in there.  So, could this be a 3rd swarm?!?!

We donned our bee gear again, and headed down to catch this one.  This one was a bit higher in a tree, so we climbed up, cut the branch down,  and carefully lowered the branch over the hive.  Once there, Anna shook the bees into the box.

New bees in our hive.

So, since we were catching all these swarms, we were rapidly running out of boxes and frames.  After 2 trips to the bee supply store, we had enough to catch all three swarms.  This, however, meant putting more frames together.  So, we parked ourselves on the deck to get back to hammering.  While there, Anna glanced over to the lawn to see what Baxter was so interested in.  Lo and behold...it was our tortoise.  Over a month ago, one of our tortoises escaped our outdoor enclosure, and we've been searching for her since.  Yesterday, she just strolled out into the middle of the lawn.

This is seriously the craziest day on record.

After all that, we decided to call it a day and pick up again in the morning.  When we woke up on Friday, it was pretty cool, so there was limited bee activity from our house swarm.  We decided to wait until the day warmed up to make sure they were still in there and to see where they were coming from.  As the day got warmer and warmer....no bees. So, it turns out they left on their own accord.  We like to think it was the Deadmau5 and the hammering, drilling, cutting, etc. that drove them away.  At least then our efforts weren't for naught.

We're guessing that the second swarm we found on the cherry tree was the swarm from our house and they just left when we were demolishing our house.  Admittedly, we weren't paying too close attention to the bee traffic outside the house.  We are happy they're gone from our house, and we hope they like their new home.

Today, we put the house back in order -- except for those blasted holes in the ceiling...

450+ gallons in less than an hour!

It is a gorgeous day outside, and there are plenty of weeds to be pulled, but alas, I'm feeling less than optimal so I'm taking this time to write a much overdue post.  One of these days I'll finally get some sort of a regular schedule going on this blog...

We've all heard the talk about the benefit of using rain barrels to collect water, but it wasn't until my permaculture course that I realized just how much water we were 'wasting' by letting it just run off our house.  When we moved into our house, there were no gutters on, and we had a hard time keeping the basement from flooding with really heavy rains.  We wanted to add gutters to collect the rainwater, but we were also looking forward to the benefits of keeping the water away from the foundation of our house.

Enter rain barrel construction.  Now, you can buy rain barrels completely ready to go at many hardware stores, and there are even some cities that sell them or give them away.  We bought 3 barrels that were put together off 'Bob the Barrel Man' on Craigslist.  The put together barrels were about $75 and the plain barrels were $30, so we opted for doing the rest of the plumbing ourselves.  Our overall plan was to daisy-chain many barrels together uphill from our veggie beds, high tunnel, and duck pond so we can use the water as efficiently as possible.

Here we go...

Site prep -- remove grass, add gravel, repeat.

More prep work -- add cinder blocks on which to build a level platform.  This is the side of the house that will have the most barrels that will be used to water our veggies.

Here's the other side of the house -- these barrels will also be used for veggie watering, but also for duck pond flushing. The pond doesn't have a pond liner and is spring fed, but when we have a dry spell in the middle of the summer, it gets pretty low and can use some help.

Platform construction. I love building stuff. :)

Almost done.  We used left over cedar boards from our chick coop building.

Mighty fine!  

Unfortunately, we neglected to take any photos of the interim phase of rain barrel connection.  We had the barrel on the platform you see above connected to one other barrel, then one free standing barrel under each additional down spout.  So, in short, we had four barrels....and this is where it stayed for the winter.  We were thwarted by back ordered parts for the barrel connection, and by the time they arrived, it was too late in the fall to make our efforts worth it.  Now, one might think we would put the rain barrels in the garage or something so we could work on connecting them throughout the winter.....that would have been the logical thing to do.  Instead, they sat upside down just outside of the garage since the unfinished chicken tractor was taking up all the space in the garage.  Go figure.

At any rate, we finally got to the connecting part a week ago, so let's pick up there...

First, drill holes in the barrel -- watch out when that bit hits the barrel, it could send you flying!

Reason number 32879453785783280543 to marry Anna -- she can fit in a rain barrel.

Ear protection is essential -- and an adorable smile.

Did I mention these barrels used to hold Kalamata Olives, and they have not been cleaned?  Yum.

Yeah...

Duh....where did she go?!?!

And, if that photo montage wasn't enough...

We then used spa tubing to connect all the barrels.  We have caulked everything quite extensively, but we still have a bit of leaking going on.  Next time we empty them, we'll re-seal them, but it's ok for now as the leaks are really minor. 

It's a thing of beauty! I'm already regretting the high connection on the first two barrels, but alas, we were beginners at that point.  

Glorious.  About 500 gallons of water storage.  We have 5 more on the other side of the house, but we didn't photograph those.  

For those of you thinking that this seems excessive -- say you have 1000 sq. ft. of roof (not accounting for pitch), and you get 1 inch of rain.  You can collect 625 gallons of water from that one rain event.  Seriously.  The other day, the barrels were all totally full and overflowing after less than an hour of raining.  We still need to dig the overflow trenches to channel that water away from the house and into a more useful area, but the bulk of the work here is done. 

A delicate little flower

This is a blog about the newest member of our duck flock. Her name is Flower -- because she's a delicate little flower.

As you all know by now, Anna is a veterinarian.  Flower was bought by a family as an Easter present to their kids (that's a topic for another post) and was brought to the clinic where Anna works to be euthanized because she had a twisted neck.  Twisted neck can happen with improper diet, vitamin deficiency, toxicity, or more serious diseases.  When Anna found out about Flower, she knew she had to bring her to our farm.  If she could show us that she's capable of eating and living a normal life, there's no reason for her to be euthanized.

Here's what Flower looked like on day 1 with us.  She's probably about 2 weeks old in this photo. We were hopeful that increasing her vitamins would help her to straighten her neck out -- that and telling her regularly to "put your head on straight!"  She came with that teddy, and after we put it on the ground, she snuggled it nightly….adorable.

After a few days of having Flower at our house, Anna got some bad news.  When the previous owners got her, her neck was already like this.  She was only a couple days old at that point, and all the other ducklings with her were fine.  This made us pretty nervous that increasing her vitamins and bettering her diet wouldn't be enough.  We started preparing ourselves for having a very special needs duck, and if she proved to be unable to live a happy, healthy life, we were preparing ourselves for the tough decision to go ahead with the euthanasia.

So, we worked out a daily vitamin/greens routine which she enjoyed thoroughly.  Ducklings LOVE fresh greens -- I often feel like there should be some sort of signage a local ponds telling people to stop throwing bread and start throwing salad. We gave her water with some vitamins A, E, and B, and we added nutritional yeast to her food for more vitamin B -- B is a big one for duckling development and the main ingredient that commercial chick starter food (for chickens) is lacking.

Flower taking a break from greens and vitamins….still crooked. :\

Mmmmm….greeeeeeeens!

You can see that her neck is getting a little less crooked, but it still isn't quite right, and she still has some pretty severe episodes.  We started taking her outside with us if we were working in the garden or somewhere where she'd be protected from the dogs and we could keep an eye on her.  Outside, she was really good.  Her neck was pretty normal most of the time…unless she got stressed out. If we walked too far away from her, she would get really stressed, start freaking out, get twisted upside down, start stumbling backwards…it wasn't good.

Here's a video of Flower doing well in the garden with Anna in her early days.  You can see that her head is looking better but is definitely a little crooked still.

Filmed that same day -- one of her not so good moments. Anna stopped filming once she really started freaking out, but you get the idea.

At this point, she'd been with us for about a week and a half, and we were beginning to wonder if she was going to get better.  She was showing improvement, but she still wasn't as good as we would have liked.  Within a few days, however, she started getting better and better, and her episodes of upside-downness were getting fewer and fewer.  Given that she's a duck, we knew that if she was going to be fully integrated with our flock, she would need to be able to swim.  We decided to put her in the bath tub to check out her swimming abilities.  It wasn't pretty the first few times.  She freaked out, turned her head upside down and swam in backwards circles.  Upside down head in the water = no breathing.  Not good.  We really wanted to see if she could swim, so we kept at it.  We'd put her in the tub with enough water for her to stand so she didn't have to swim if she didn't want to.  Eventually, she got more and more comfortable in the water, and one day she just did it!  She started swimming happy laps around the tub splashing, bathing, and being a generally happy duck.

Since then, she's just gotten better and better.  I don't remember the last time she had an upside down neck moment.

Eventually, she got too big and the splashing got to be too much for the counter, so vitamin time got moved to the sink.  Her neck is MUCH better here!

Napping with the farm manager while we were doing some planting.

She's now been with us about 3 weeks, and we've been starting to give her a lot of unsupervised outside time.  We have a poultry seclusion pen -- we use it for new birds, sick birds, etc.  She's been spending almost every day that the weather's nice out there -- she doesn't quite have enough big girl feathers to spend rainy days outside yet.  Downy feathers + rain = waterlogged, chilly, unhappy duckling.  We've also been giving her supervised time with the entire flock -- adult ducks and teenager chickens.  They're definitely interested in her, but they haven't been too overly aggressive.  At first, she was pretty wary of going in the pond with the big girls, but she found a somewhat secluded corner of the pond and started swimming and dabbling at the greens we tossed in.  Within a few days, she took the big plunge into the middle of the pond and started swimming with her new friends.

Today, she's having her first unsupervised time with the flock -- though, admittedly, we keep looking out the window at her.  Some of the chickens are paying her a bit more attention than we'd like, but she's holding her own.  Naturally, we had to photo/video document the occasion.

Looking good!  Strutting her stuff in the yard.

Checking out the camera. Yep, it's adorable.

Look at that happy duckling.  Give her a few more weeks (and some more feathers!), and she's going to be with the full flock all the time.

Oh, I forgot to mention one more ridiculously adorable thing that happened as we were raising her. Any time she was out and about with us...

Yeah, that never gets old.  We're really looking forward to watching her grow into an adult duck.  Based on her voice, it appears that she is, indeed, a female.  We think she's a Pekin duck, so we'll have another decent layer in our flock.

We're really glad we adopted her, and we're even more glad she recovered so quickly and easily.  All she needed was proper nutrition. What a lucky duck! I couldn't help myself.

Your life will descend into chaos.

One thing they don't tell you about farming/homesteading -- your life will descend into total chaos.  It is completely unavoidable, at least at this stage of the game, and this Type-A, left-brained, organizer finds it hard to handle sometimes.

Here are a few examples:

1. The garage is a mess, we'll clean/organize it once we move the chicken tractor out. Chicken tractor moved out. The garage is a mess, we'll clean/organize it once the rain barrels are all put together and moved out. Garage is still a mess and housing the rain barrels.

2. Rain barrels need to be put together so we can harvest the rain to water our crops.  But, wait, if we don't plant our crops now it's going to be too late. But, wait, it's raining, and the barrels are overflowing with no over flow spout. But wait….the seeds!

3. The ground is frozen, but we need to start seedlings. No problem, do it in the basement and get soil/water all over the floor. It's ok that there's soil/water on the floor because it is already covered with wood scraps. It's ok that the floor is covered with wood scraps because we're raising 20 baby birds in the basement and there are pine shavings all over the place too….and it smells like poultry poop.

4. New special needs duckling needs a home?  No problem, we have a guest bedroom for that.  What? Guests are coming?  No problem, clean out the shavings and cover up the poultry smell (thanks, incense), and move the baby into your bedroom. Again, with the pine shavings.

5. Piles and piles of cardboard and newspaper for sheet mulching (again, with the disastrous garage) are  just lying around -- but this is useful stuff, people!  We can't recycle it in any way other than putting it on the ground.  As soon as we harvest truck load after truck load of seaweed from our river, then we'll do the sheet mulching.  But wait, we need to sheet mulch to plant the seedlings in our expanded beds. But wait, we need to plant the seedlings really soon!

6. High tunnel construction -- this is an entire blog post or two in itself.  Let's get it done in the fall so we can use the tunnel all winter and have early spring crops.  What?  The ground froze?  Crap.  So, the high tunnel stands incomplete like someone flipping me the bird every time I look at it.  But now it's spring, and we can finish construction so we can plant our seedlings in the tunnel!  It's raining?  Crap.  Well, at least the rain barrels are….crap.

You get the idea.  I'm not complaining -- I'm merely pointing out our reality.  Rest assured, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  I didn't even begin to touch on the things that need to be done in our house -- screens on the windows, vacuuming/mopping up the mess made by 3 dogs during mud season/spring shedding, actually cleaning something instead of just wiping it down, and I don't know, actually dusting for once in our lives.

And we don't even have kids!

I should end this post by saying that I do love our life, and I feel extremely fortunate to be able to live this way.  Sometimes, I just can't handle the piles of crap and disorganization.  I know it will get better over time as we figure things out and develop efficient/organized systems, but for now, I'm just going to do my best to breathe through it. :)

Also -- I'm making a concerted effort to post more.  So, there may be some posts sans pictures, but I'll do my best to put them as frequently as possible.

No till tilling

While we did decide to till the garden last year, we are not going to do it ever again.

There are things one can do to avoid tilling, and the long term effects of tilling are actually quite detrimental to the soil. Most people will tell you that they till to avoid weeds and enrich the soil.  The first year you till your land, it will produce an incredibly rich and bountiful crop.  In subsequent years, however, things won't be so great without a lot of amendments -- tilling exposes the precious topsoil resulting in topsoil loss and nutrient depletion.  As far as weeds go, there are lots of dormant weed seeds in the soil, and tilling simply brings them to to surface giving them the sun and air they need to grow.  They should thank us!

I'm not implying that tilling is some evil empire of agricultural practices, but for us, it isn't something we want to do.  For larger scale operations, it may be unavoidable, but on our scale, we're trying to avoid it. As I mentioned before, if you till, you'll need to add amendments to maintain fertile land, so why not skip the extra step and simply build soil from the ground up.

Many people claim that no-dig practices don't work and you end up with compacted soil.  This parsnip grew at a friend's house in Maine -- clearly there's no compaction there!  She's been building the soil without digging or tilling for years, and look at this bounty!  Credit: Lisa Fernandes.

Our plan is to use permaculture techniques to build soil that will get better every year.  Why simply go for sustainable (status quo) when you can make something better than how you found it?

One of the techniques we're using to improve our soil involves letting our chickens to the "tilling" work. :)  The jury is still out for us on whether or not we are going to get organic certified, so we can still do this.  If we go the organic certification route, we can't put our chickens directly on our veggie bed, but for now we're happy to have them eat weed seeds, spread manure, and generally stir things around.

In order for them to do this, they need a temporary and mobile home -- enter the chicken tractor.  It's a mobile home that we built for them that we'll move around the field.  And now, a photo montage…

Cheapo bike tires that are going to make our tractor mobile.  We ended up replacing the tubes and tires because they didn't hold air for crap.  

The bottom frame -- we struggled with how to attach the tires, but you'll see below that we figured it out quite nicely.

Oliver is always on hand for scale. :)  Bike tires need two points of attachment or they wobble all over the place.  With this setup, they are pretty secure and sturdy.

Dr. Trafton thinks it is a really good idea to ride the frame down the hill into our field.  I made her wear the helmet.

Dr. Knapp, however, thinks this is a supremely bad idea since there are no breaks and no ability to steer.  Here's what happened...

We have a floor, people.  Olive and Oliver were clearly more interested in a squirrel than being scale models.

Wall frames are up!  

…and we have a chicken door!  

We started building this in the fall, and this was our beautiful view.  Not too shabby!

Walls, big door, and more.  All we need now is a roof!

Here's the inside -- roosts and the nest boxes will go on the top ledge there.  Clearly, we built this entire thing from scrap wood we had lying around.

I heard a lot of flapping coming from the chicken yard, and this is what I found.  Wing clipping followed shortly thereafter.  Don't worry, it is just like cutting a fingernail, there is no pain involved.

Fast forward to now -- we got a corrugated plastic roof, and Dr. Trafton put it on.  Add some temporary fencing with a solar powered electric charger to keep dogs and other animals out, and the ladies are enjoying their first days on the veggie bed.  Naturally, we had to observe them for a little bit to make sure they weren't going to jump out or the dogs weren't going to try to get in.  The only dog to attempt getting in thus far is Baxter….shocker.  He learned his lesson and won't be trying it again any time soon.  Oliver is, obviously, on hand for supervising and keeping everyone in line.

Here's a better view of everything from our deck.  They worked the bed like champs, and we have since moved them to the perimeter of the bed where they're eating weed seeds.  We're going to swap out chickens for ducks once the seedlings are in the ground so they can work slug patrol.  

This is what was happening during our supervising.  This guy is such a snuggler, it is borderline ridiculous.  Please note his little smile. :)

…and then we attempted a family portrait...

So, we're really pleased with how quickly the chickens can work things over.  We're hoping to try to keep moving them around the field, especially where we've planted fruit trees.  It is our hope that we won't have to mow these areas, and we can keep to only mowing the very lower part of the field where we have no trees around which we'd have to navigate.

Stay tuned for how it works...