Signs of Spring and Fruit Forecast

     The daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, but it isn't officially spring until I've grafted some new fruit trees.  This year I did an asian pear and four apple trees for Rachel to plant at her new house in Hillsboro, Oregon.  I've also continued to reform an unknown variety of apple tree in our orchard.  I don't know what kind it was originally (possibly a Yellow Delicious), but in our wet climate it has consistently produced the scabbiest apples year after year.   I've been grafting on new varieties each year for the past four years.  At present it is one quarter Aroma, one eighth Red Cort, one quarter Yellow Bellflower, and one eighth  Winter Banana.  I just grafted in a few more branches of Winter Banana and Aroma so it's reformation is now complete.   I did get some Aroma apples last year, but the other grafted branches aren't producing yet.  Aroma is not a common variety, but it had hardly any scab, a minor miracle considering how wet our spring was last year. It also seemed like a very nice tart sweet crisp apple and made a very nice pie. The other apple varieties I've collected thus far are Wealthy, Mott Pink, Akane, Pristine, Sansa, Lodi, Ashmead's Kernal, Chehalis, Melrose, Spartan, and Jonagold. Most of those have not produced yet. My favorite so far is the Melrose, but the Melrose did have some scab problems last year.

    The other main sign of spring's arrival is crazy times at the bee store.  Package bee orders are coming in thick and fast and we're working hard to stay ahead on equipment orders. We passed 400 package bee orders on Saturday (March 26).

   I salvaged about twenty hyacinth plants from one of the display gardens at the Seattle Flower and Garden Show.  They throw them away as they are not sellable after they've been forced and it takes them several years to recover before they will produce a nice bloom again.  I can give them plenty of time to recover and I don't care if it takes a few years before they bloom nicely.  I planted them along the garden path by the currants. Even a mediocre hyacinth bloom still adds some nice aroma to the garden.    Speaking of currants this is going to be the year without currants. I've had a lot of trouble with some kind of currant saw fly which is reproducing in the fruit and pupating in the ground. It hasn't bothered the black currants much but has trashed the red currant crop the past few years.  I tried replacing all of the mulch to get rid of the pupating adults,but they were still there the following year.  This year I'm sacrificing the entire currant crop in order to get rid of them.  The theory is that if they have no currant fruit to reproduce in they will go a way.  Anyhow, I'm pruning all of the currants way back to eliminate all of the blooms.

   I am looking forward to finally getting some fruit from our hardy kiwis this year.  The male plant is now big enough and hopefully we'll have a better spring than last year.  Last year we had no asian pears, a small crop of plums, a handfull of cherries, and only a bucket of apples that weren't scabby.  The only fruit that produced well last year was the blueberries. I'm anxious to have a good fruit year. 

      

Observation Hive

    I finally installed the new observation hive in the store about three weeks ago.  The bees seem to have adapted to their new location. I spent about five days gradually moving the nuc hive closer and closer to the exit I had made to the outside.  They were finally close enough on Saturday, October 2.  This was a day I taught a beginning beekeeeping class for the bee club.  Whenj the class was over I invited those who wished to come over and watch the installation. It actually went fairly smoothly which is nice when you've got a lot of spectators.

    I built a base for the observation hive which includes one deep box with a cleanout tray for removal of dead bees. It also has a second deep box which has ten frames the bees can use for future expansion.  The second deep connects to the observation hive through the lid by means of a 6 inch piece of pvc pipe.  The observation hive can be rotated so that either side can be viewed. Their is another connector goiong out the front of the second deep box which connects to the feeding station and their tube leading to the outside world. They seem to have figured out both the feeding station and the exit.  On nice warm sunny days there is a cloud of bees coming and going from the exit.  They're using the feeding station as well, but for the first three weeks they seem to have gathered mostly wild forage.  They're only using one quart of sugar syrup per week so far.  The queen has decided to stay upstairs so far. I'm thinking the six inch section of pvc pipe is a long stretch of nothing for her so she has had no incentive to go down. Its been a big hit with bee store customers who are predominately serious bee geeks any how.

Better Lucky than Good

     I took Madelynn,  Abby, and their friend Cassie to the Evergreen State Fair on Saturday.  We couldn't leave until after 4:00 p.m. when I closed the Beez Neez.  By the time I went home and picked up the kids, drove to Monroe, parked the car, and walked in from the parking lot, it was 4:55 p.m. when we finally walked through the gates.  The girls wanted to run right away to the Beany Baby booth under the grandstands so they could enter a drawing for  a free beany baby.  They filled out their entry tickets and stuffed them into the box within a minute of the drawing.  One minute later Abby was walking away with her new beanie baby.

     Next on the agenda we shared two elephant ears, one cinnamon and sugar and one with raspberry jam, while we listened to a zydeco band.  Then we walked over to the petting farm where the girls promptly ditched me to spend the next hour or so holding chickens and bunnies. The person in charge of the petting farm is a good friend so I have connections to get them in as helpers.

      While the girls were occupied with cute farm animals, I stopped by the honey and beeswax exhibit to check on my observation hive.  It wasn't looking good as the dead bees had collected at the bottom and were blocking the entrance to the feeder.  We had to take it over to the bee tent at the outside bee booth and do some maintenance, namely removing the top, pulling up the glass sides, and removing the dead bees. I think there were so many dead bees because the weather had been cool and the display hall has the doors open to the outside until 10:00 p.m. every night.  I think they must have gotten chilled as there were also a lot of dead pupae.

     Now that the observation hive was in better shape, I went back to the petting farm to check on the girls.  They were just getting ready to close down and were putting the animals away.  I got to watch Madelynn trying to catch a pig to move him back to his pen. It was pretty funny but unfortunate that I didn't have a camera handy.

     After the petting farm closed we went through the dinosaur exhibit (cheesy and overpriced), looked at some 4H exhibits and all had fair scones with raspberry jam.  I think the two things they enjoyed the most were the petting farm and the 4H exhibits, both of which were free.  The kids took great delight in finding things which had been made by someone their own age.   

A visit from Aunt Dolores

    Aunt Dolores came to visit a few weeks ago. It was such great fun. She is one of those cheerful people that is just very fun to be around. She brought her guitar so we were able to play some together and she yodeled for the grandkids. It makes you feel kind of sorry for those cuturally deprived kids who don't have a great aunt who can yodel. Yodeling is such a lost art these days that I image that would be over 99 per cent of the population in most parts of the country.

    Dolores spends the summers living next door to her daughter near Eugene. During the winter she lives in Lake Havisu, Arizona, the town that bought the London Bridge.  Its a shame we don't see her more often, but she only lives near us when the bee store is at its busiest.  By the time things slow down in the fall she has gone back south to Arizona.  In addition to the music we did get to spend some time talking about genealogy and their youth in Arkansas and elsewhere, but not as much as we should have done.

     After playing with Dolores, I feel inspired to work harder on my fiddle playing. I even spent a few evenings watching instructional videos on You Tube and have set a goal to learn to do a decent vibrato. A slow song like a waltz sounds kind of flat if you can't vibrato some of the long notes.  I also need to commit more songs to memory.  I'm working on memorizing Ashoken Farewell as that is one of her favorite waltzes.

     My other main incentive to improve my fiddle playing is the weekly violin lessons I'm giving to Madelyn Rosenauer, a friend's 9 year old daughter.  I feel a little guilty nagging her to practice more if  I"m not getting my fiddle out more often.  That is also another incentive for me to watch violin instructional videos so I can do a better job teaching fundamentals to Madelyn.   

Evergreen State Fair

    It's that time of year again.  A friend relieved me a few hours early at the bee store on Friday so I could spend the evening working at one of the bee booths at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, Washington. I worked as a host at the honey and beeswax exhibit in the display hall with the able assistance of two of my grandchildren, Autumn and Chloe Kang.  The exhibit features various hive products people have entered in the fair.  Some of the categories include extracted honey, various types of comb honey, pollen, beeswax, candles, mead, and beekeeping gadgets.  The exhibit also has an observation hive which is a pretty big attraction to the general public.  Its a great opportunity to help educate the public about bees and honey and reduce people's fears about bees.  The booth is located between the grange displays and the handspinners and photography exhibits.  Chloe and Autumn are both a little on the shy side but they did talk to some of the visitors and helped people locate the queen bee in the observation hive. Locating the queen is like an insect version of  "Where's Waldo".

    I had 5 fair entries this year.  They have eight classes of extracted honey according to the color of the honey. The color descriptions range from "water white" to "extra dark amber".  Since I had some maple honey this year and it was slightly darker than my blackberry honey I was able to do two extracted honey entries.  Each honey entry consists of three jars, equally filled.  The honey is graded on things like cleanliness and the absence of air bubbles and foam on the top.  I also entered pollen (again three jars), cut comb honey, and a chunk honey entry.  The cut comb honey is simply a square of honey comb cut from a frame and placed in a square clear plastic container.  The chunk honey consists of three jars with a chunk of honey comb covered with extracted honey.

     I did pretty well with my entries.  All five got blue ribbons and three got big purple "Best of Division" ribbons.  I also got a creative presentation ribbon for my chunk honey entry for a grand total of nine ribbons for my five entries.  Rather than just have three uniform pieces of honey comb in the chunk honey entry I did "I Love Bees" using a letter "I" , a heart, and two letter "B"s in the respective jars.  It didn't turn out as well as I wanted as the heart floated to the top of the jar so that it wasn't as readily apparent that it was a heart.  The pollen entry also got a best of division ribbon, but then it was the only pollen entry.  I have to admit that my main motivation for doing a pollen entry was not particularly pure.  The honey judge is a personal friend.  I knew the judge didn't care for the taste of pollen and he would be  required to taste each pollen entry. The pollen is tasted to make sure it has the proper texture and isn't over dried.

    It is somewhat ironic that my maple honey entry got best of division for the extracted honey.  The extracted honey isn't graded based on how wonderful it tastes as that is very subjective and different people prefer different types of honey.  If the general public were to taste the various entries and grade them based on flavor my maple entry would probably have been rated pretty low.  Maple honey has an odd medicinal flavor that many people don't care for. Rachel has described it as tasting like cough syrup. While I think it tastes a lot better than cough syrup that is a great example of "Damning with faint praise". It is by far not one of my favorite honeys.  However, it was very pretty and clean so it won the beauty contest so to speak. 

The Bee Club Picnic

   We hosted the bee club picnic today.  The preparation for the picnic brought a lot of stress into Linda's life, some of which she transferred to me in the form of a lengthy "honey do" list. However, after all was said and done I have to admit that Linda and Rachel did a lot more of the work than I did.  I kept telling her that we were hosting the bee club, not the garden club.  The place ended up looking very nice although we never quite got to everything on Linda's list. Last year the picnic was held at Flowing Lake Park and only about 15 people came.  Rachel suggested that we could jazz up the picnic and improve attendance by having a bee beard contest.  That seemed somewhat inappropriate to do at a county park  so the next thing I knew the picnic was set to be held at our house.

    The picnic turned out very well.  We had over 60 people there.  There was lots of great food and the house and garden got rave reviews.  My favorite comment was when Kinga Thomas told me that she loved our "whimsical" gardens.  Many of the bee club members are into gardening, chickens, or other small animal projects so it was nice that they all said nice things about our place.  The numerous children in attendance were thrilled with the various attractions we have for the grandkids. The bee beard contest was the big finale to the whole thing.  It got a bit of a slow start, but was pretty spectacular at the end.  The slow start was due to a few technical difficulties since none of us had ever done a bee beard before.  I went to great pains to spray the bees with sugar syrup so they would be nice and gentle.  It turns out that I over did that as some of them were a little sticky and couldn't fly when we first dumped them out.   I really love all of the wonderful quirky friends I have from the bee club and the bee store. Most of them have just enough loopiness to make them fun and interesting.

    The biggest surprise for me was when Linda told me that she wouldn't mind hosting the picnic again next year.  The following pictures include our nicely weeded and mulched blueberries, my relatively well weeded cabbage patch, and the front of the house. I'll have to add some of the bee beard pictures a little later.

Good times at the Beez Neez

     My granddaughter Madelynn spent part of the day at the bee store with me on Wednesday.  It was somewhat of a short day because I didn't go into the store until noon.  Rachel covered for me while I prepared a new queen bank before going in to the store.  I had to pull some frames from one of my hives to make up a small queenless hive that will take good care of the queens until they're sold.

     I'm glad that some of my grandchildren really enjoy coming with me to the bee store.  I think some of the attraction is the idea of being involved in a retail business.  They seem to enjoy things like working the cash register or putting prices on merchandise.  Madelynn seems to be more attracted to the bees themselves.  By the time we got down to the store the UPS man had already delivered the queen bees.  The first order of business was to transfer the queens from the shipping container to the queen bank. This is actually fairly involved.  The queens are shipped in a two part cardboard box with ventilating screens.  Inside the carton are 50 queens in small wooden cages, a damp sponge, a hunk of sugar fondant, and about a half a pound of loose worker bees. The process of transferring the queens to the queen bank results in lots of loose bees in the air.  While I was replacing the corks with candy plugs, Madelynn acted like the surgical nurse, handing me the candy plug as I was ready with each cage. She had a veil on, but no gloves and she was also wearing shorts and flip flops.  She has assisted me when I worked a few hives once and seems pretty comfortable with the bees. I think she has what it takes to be a beekeeper. I think some of my best memories of the bee store will be the times I had grandkids helping out.   

     I also had a visitor before I went into work.  Kenny the Frog Guy came by to remove the comb from a stack of old bee boxes.  He uses the wax to raise wax moth larvae. He then feeds the larvae to the poison arrow frogs he breeds.  What I get out of the deal is someone else removing the wax from the old frames so I can put in new foundation.  Apparently, poison arrow frogs raised in captivity are not toxic like the ones in the wild.  What makes them toxic is their diet.  In the wild the frogs mainly eat ants and are able to concentrate the venom in the ants into their skin until the frogs are toxic.  When fed a diet of fruit flies and wax moth larvae the frogs aren't toxic at all.