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.