You Know You Really Love Your Bees When...

    My sweetie left yesterday to go to China for a five week stay as a volunteer at the Starfish Foster Home. So here I am a alone on Valentine's Day.  What better way to spend the evening than at a bee club meeting. Amazingly enough there were over 50 other people who must have felt the same way.  I expected there would be a light turnout tonight due to the special day but it was just the opposite.  It was the best attended bee club meeting in the last four 4 months.  I don't know if that means most beekeepers are so obsessed with their bees that they have no love life at all or if they just love their bees more than their enabling spouses.  We do have some beekeeping couples in our club and I expected to see them at the meeting.  I describe them as being co-dependently obsessive beekeepers.  However, I did not expect to see so many people who I know are married and had left their spouse alone on Valentine's Day to attend a bee club meeting. I guess you know you really love your bees when you still go to the bee meeting even when its Valentine's Day. I hope all of these people realize that its okay to love your bees just as long as you don't expect them to love you back. In my experience honeybees aren't very good at reciprocating the love of their beekeepers.

    I did find the meeting to be very interesting.  Ron Babcock, an experienced commercial beekeeper, talked about trapping pollen and the most important features to look for in a good pollen trap.  Ok, maybe you had to be there, but I found it interesting.

   Speaking of Linda, I still haven't heard that she and Rachel have arrived safely at the Starfish Foster Home.  Sarah told me that she had arranged for them to be picked up by a taxi at the airport. Hopefully they arrived safely and are sleeping off their jet lag. I have had numerous occasions in the past week or so to explain to people why my wife was going to china for 5 weeks. I had our bee club secretary in tears tonight when I told her how Amanda collects children with birth defects from the dying rooms in the state run orphanages.

   I am planning to actually take an few hours off tomorrow morning so I can start chipping away on my monster "honey do" list.  I need to disassemble the old deck stairs and remove the concrete pad from the old stairs before we can start work on the new deck.  Tomorrow I'm just going to take the old stairs apart. I'm planning to rent a jack hammer next Monday to bust up the concrete pad in order to recycle it into the goats' rock piles.  One reason I don't have to trim their hooves more often is that they have several large rocks they can climb on. Then we also have a youth temple trip scheduled for tomorrow evening.  So far, staying busy doesn't seem to be a problem.

 

Flower and Garden Show 2012

     This was our sixth year participating in the Seattle Flower and Garden Show.  The mason bee booth has been a lot of fun over the years and I have especially enjoyed having my children and grand children involved.  For the last three years Rachel Kang has served as our cashier.  This year Rachel passed the baton to her younger sister, Autumn. However, she still ended up working at the show for three days due to some emergency staffing problems.  I couldn't have gotten through it without a lot of help from family and friends, including the two smiling helpers pictured below.

Beth Tunnell and Sarah Kang showing off big smiles and this years mason bee shirts.

     I  didn't take many pictures to speak of because I didn't think to bring a camera besides my new iPhone, which was being used to process credit cards at the booth.  Whenever I was able to take a break and walk around the show I always had to leave the phone behind.  That little piece of technology worked very well. There were only a few times we had to imprint a card manually to be ran later at the store. Not that I wasn't already very thrilled with the new iPhone. Since the capability for real time credit card processing at the garden show was the original justification for the fancy phone it was very nice that it worked out so well.

    I have mixed feelings about doing the show again.  Linda has already made dire threats if I do it again next year.  On one hand, I love being at the show and the great experience it has been for some of the grandkids.  On the other hand, it is a lot of work.  We didn't do as well this year as we have in the past, That is probably a reflection of our sour economy more than anything else.  As always, I saw a number  of our regular bee store customers at the show and met some interesting people.  I guess if I don't do the garden show next year, the grandkids will just have to settle for quality time with grandpa at the bee store.

    This year our booth was directly across from the Italian Country Home and Kitchen booth. The booth belongs to a pleasant Italian woman from Cremona named Francesca.  Among other wonderful things, she sells traditional hand stamped Italian linens. She buys them from a family which has been making them for a number of generations.  She had a few of the hand carved wooden stamps on display at her booth.  It looked like a very worthy carving project, only I would have to make something with bees and straw skeps.  The stamps in the picture were hand carved from pear wood.

hand carved wooden stamps

        The booth on our left was selling these wonderful "Roo" garden aprons which are really just very nice apple picking aprons.  That booth belonged to a very nice young couple from Spokane. I thought the aprons were very reasonably priced so I bought one.  I also stocked up on seed potatoes and onion plants and sets at Irish Eyes Seeds, located just around the corner from our booth.

       As of the morning after the end of the garden show the score stands at Ducks 14, Chickens 0.  The chickens are falling farther and farther behind.
 

Ducks vs Chickens

    It's been well over a week since one of my hen ducks started laying.  I believe only one is laying as I am getting just one egg every morning.  The currant tally is Ducks 9 Chickens 0 as the ducks are pulling to an early lead.  I have other breaking news on the poultry front.  I was pretty sure one of my chickens was a rooster some time ago.  He made an official announcement to that effect as I went out early this morning to feed the animals.  The rooster was up on top of the duck pen crowing for all he was worth.  That means he will be chicken and dumplings before summer.  On the other hand, it gives me the opportunity to try my hand at incubating some chicken eggs.

    We made great progress with our new fireplace insert this week.  The stove is no longer living in my van but has taken up residence in the fireplace where a stove belongs.  I had to buy some hardware used to level the stove since our hearth is sunken a few inches.  The stove won't fit into the fireplace far enough to drop down into the slightly sunken hearth area so we had to add little leveling legs to the back end of the stove.  Then as the stove was missing its firebrick I had to spend about $85.00 on new firebrick.  I only paid $75.00 for the stove so even with the hardware, we're only at $165.00, a fairly reasonable price.  We still have to make a modification to the shield due to our fireplace's somewhat irregular shape.  I also have to cut and shape the firebrick to fit before the stove will be useable.   It may not make much difference in the short term, but I'm sure it will make a very big difference next winter. It will be a good feeling to know we will be better able to stay snug and warm the next time we are left without power for 5 days.

    The particular stove I purchased (on craigslist) is the Colony Hearth model made by Earth Stove.  It can be retrofitted with an electric blower which will be very helpful as long as we have power.  With or without the blower it should be a major improvement over the open fireplace.  If we are in the mood for an open fire, the door can be removed and temporarily replaced with a fireplace screen.  One feature I really like is that you can also cook on top of it if necessary, just like on Mom's wood stove down stairs.

 

Country Living Expo

    I taught two Mason Bee classes this past Saturday at the Country Living Expo in Stanwood, Washington.  It was a lot of fun as usual.  As an instructor I get a free prime rib lunch and can take any classes I want for free.  The prime rib lunch is a holdover from when it was called the Cattleman's Winter School. They have since diversified into many other areas, but fortunately they kept the prime rib lunch.  I enjoyed browsing at all of the commercial tables. There were at least five different vendors selling various types of fleeces to include llama, alpaca, angora goat, and a good number of sheep breeds. It was a hard thing to just walk away from all the fleeces, but I have a pretty good supply at home already. Instead I frittered some money away on goat cheese.  One of the fleece vendors had a very nice selection of drop spindles, but I can't bring myself to buy something that I know how to make.  All the more reason I need to buy a replacement wood lathe.

    One thing I enjoy about the Country Living Expo is that the people who attend it really are my kind of people.  I must have met close to thirty bee store customers while attending the show.  I don't know what their attendance was this year, but last year it was over 1200.  The place was packed so I'm sure it wasn't any less than that. What's not to love about 1200 people in one place who are all into raising animals, growing gardens, and general self-sufficiency.

    This year I didn't do a display table to sell my wares. Instead I took three classes.  My favorite was the one on growing dry beans in Western Washington, with the class on incubating eggs a close second.  I also took a class on ducks but it was less enjoyable as I didn't learn anything new from it.  I'd like to think that is a positive reflection on the level of my duck knowledge as opposed to a negative reflection on the duck knowledge of the instructor.

     The dry bean class was taught by one of the professors at the WSU extension farm in Mt. Vernon, Washington.  I've tried my hand at growing dry beans before and had some success. However, it will be nice to do it with a better base level of knowledge.  I think the threshing will be much less tedious after having taken the class. Also I learned about Uprising Seeds, a source for local heirloom bean seeds.  The down side to dry beans is that an average harvest is only one pound of dry beans for each ten feet of row.  At that rate I would need a pretty big garden to grow a year's supply of dry beans.  That is even less practical than my current obsession with indian corn.  I  still like the idea of learning to grow my own dry beans and corn.  Not everything in life has to be practical.

Duck Pen Update

     I spent about three hours today mucking out our duck pen.  Its a pretty nasty job that needs to be done more frequently during the wet weather.  If my drake, Popeye, could talk he probably would have quoted his namesake and described the duck pen as "absolutely disgustapatin".  I made good use of my pile of cedar sawdust in the front yard and put down a nice clean layer of sawdust throughout the duck pen.  I also had to do some repairs to the upper support structure of the pen.  The new chickens have taken to roosting on top of the duck pen. That, together with the foot of snow we got a few weeks ago resulted in a partial collapse of the duck pen roof.   Now that the duck pen roof is fixed I need to modify my chicken pen so the hens can't access the roof of the duck pen.

Popeye, Olive Oyle, and Sweetpea in their newly cleaned home 

Clean water in their wading pool is the ducks'  favorite part of a clean pen.

I was surprised to find eggs this early.

     I am trying a new "permaculture" technique in my garden this year.   I'm covering my new garden area with cardboard, covering the cardboard with a layer of old hay, and then topping it off with a layer of compost or duck pen muck.   The idea is that the cardboard helps smother the existing grass and weeds while the worms incorporate all of that organic matter deeper into the soil.  Supposedly it results in a lot less weeds compared to rototilling.  

      Its actually somewhat of a labor of love to muck out the duck pen.  I wouldn't go to that much work if I didn't really like having ducks.  The fact that it all is recycled into the vegetable garden makes the task less painful.  I also took advantage of the cleaning to force the ducks to spend a little time foraging in the yard and garden area. This particular trio of ducks are serious home bodies and don't seem inclined to wander around much.  I usually have to force them to leave the pen and then they will sneak back in as soon as they can.  I would like them to have some supervised foraging time over the next three months in order to knock down our slug and snail population before I plant my garden.  I say supervised because I'm not the only creature in the neighborhood that likes to eat duck.  Once the garden is planted I can't let them wander about as much. They are too inclined to eat the tender little garden plants or to carelessly trample them while they are foraging for slugs and snails.

    I was very pleasantly surprised to find eggs this early.  These eggs are a little under sized because these are the first eggs the ducks have laid.  I was also very happy that they chose to lay the eggs in their nesting area.  Sometimes when a hen duck first starts to lay she will drop the eggs just anywhere, including in the wading pond.  Obviously the eggs will be much cleaner if she lays them in the nest rather than just drops them in the mud.  I should add some kind of counter widget to my blog that I can use to keep a tally of the egg total for the ducks and chickens.  Right now its Ducks 3  Chickens 0.

Grandpa Jim's Lumberyard

     It took a little over two full days, a lot of sore muscles, and a very long suffering friend, but my cedar logs are now lumber.  There was more than 1200 board feet just in the 1x6 planks, about twice the amount we will need to make tongue and groove planks for the ceiling in our living room and loft.  We briefly considered using the surplus planks for deck boards but decided we didn't want to wait six months for the boards to cure.  Mark also cut a part of one log into 2 inch slabs that I can later cut into 2x4s or something else on the table saw.   I'm thinking I could use them to make a nice arbor over our new gate when I get around to building our new fence.  The fence is on my "To Do List" somewhere after the new deck so the cedar may be cured in time for that project.

    I was truly amazed at the amount of useable lumber we had amassed at the end.  The main reason I was so amazed was that we also had a very large pile of "off cuts", or less than useable lumber.  It looked like so much wood was being wasted and yet the piles of planks kept growing.  Its almost like the wood multiplied as it was cut into smaller dimensions.  I'm sure I have another cord of firewood in the off cuts.  I also have a nice pile of 1x1/2 cedar slats that can be used to make a trellis or two or three.

   I'm well over halfway getting all of the lumber stacked and "stickered" in the garage. Bee frame bottom bars made great stickers and I can still use them for their original use after the cedar planks are dried.  I estimate I have about 850 board feet in the stacks of 1x6 planks shown in the picture.

   We had a little kitten show up just as we were starting to mill the first log on Thursday.  I asked a number of the neighbors but no one claimed her.  I'm suspicious that someone abandoned her because she is way to friendly for a wild cat.  We tried for a while to find her a home while she lived in our garage.  She spent a good part of Thursday and Friday playing in the piles of lumber, scrap wood, sawdust and logs, looking for a good opportunity to get seriously hurt.  Initially it looked like Mr. Buttercup was looking at the kitten as a potential chew toy, but they seem to be getting along better now. It looks like we are stuck with her unless someone needs a little kitten. We'll be very happy to send this one your way if you need a kitten.

   Mr Buttercup and Little Miss Buzzsaw seem to be getting along much better now.  At least Mr. Buttercup isn't acting like the kitten is either a chew toy or a possible snack. Two days in a row I've found them taking a nap together on the back of a stuffed chair in the living room.  The kitten has also started taking naps snuggled up to Linda's laptop.  I'm afraid we've become a two cat family.