20,000 tiny deaths in the family

OK, so I have some sad news I have been saving up.......we acknowledge the passing of Dear Queen Malina on the Front Deck and 20,000 of her best friends.

The girls didn't make it though winter.......

The forensic investigation is considering a number of possibilities.......when I checked the hive just before winter, I noticed a few strange things....there had been a massive die off of worker bees.....lots of their dried out bodies up above the queen excluder......and most of the extra honey stores I was planning on harvesting were gone.......I put this down to a wee bit of poisoning.......Mr Duck had oiled the decking around the hive, AND there had been lots of resealing of the roads in the suburb.....both of these could have set the girls back a bit.

Also, during this little peek I saw HRH Queen Malina herself! This was unexpected as I had assumed she would have been replaced by a daughter long before now.....she is a almost three years old. I was NOT expecting to see her little white dotty back at all.

So it is possible she was failing as the hive went into winter.......and that there were perhaps not enough girls in the hive or honey stores to get them through......


Anyhooo, the hive is empty and silent.

When I get around to it I will take the hive apart and check it more thoroughly, and get it ready for a new swarm in the spring.

Amen. 

little things

My daily affairs are quite ordinary;
but I'm in total harmony with them.
I don't hold on to anything, don't reject anything;
nowhere an obstacle or conflict.
Who cares about wealth and honor?
Even the poorest thing shines.
My miraculous power and spiritual activity:
drawing water and carrying wood.

Layman P'ang

Everything is pretty mellow here at duck central. Things are very quiet and still on the inside. The weather is just starting to heat up. The kiwi vines and other trees shelter and shade our house so we are dark and cool inside. Bruce the universe thinks I need to do a heap of traveling before Christmas. Armidale, Townsville, Noumea, Geelong and a conference. 

Queen Malina on the front deck is strong and amazing. The smell of ripening honey fills our house every evening.There will be honey for Christmas I think.

Bee Keeping for Complete Idiots

OK, so, today was/is lovely. Was because I have mucked around all morning, and most of the afternoon, and now I MUST chain myself to the 'puter and do some work....because I have a report due for a client this week, and because I won't get paid if I don't deliver!

SO naturally it is time to blog......

I thought more about the crazy comb, and decided on two things......


1) to minimise the chance of crazy comb happening in these new boxes I just added to both hives
2) to see if it is too late to salvage that box of crazy comb before it gets full of honey
 
OK, so, strategy 1: I did a thing called pyramiding...which involves pulling out one or two nicely built combs from the box below the one you are adding, and placing these in the centre of the new box which gives the girls something to work from when they draw out the rest of the frames......

Then, on the box below, move the frames all inwards to fill the space, and add empty frames to the outside to fill the gap.  Clear as mud.

Queen Malina on the Front Deck has plenty of lovely straight frames...... so I took an extra one for Queen Aprilia of the Crazy Comb.

Now both lots of bees have new boxes with at least 1 very straight well built comb so that they will hopefully build out all the remaining frames in the same way.


Which leaves the crazy comb box......the girls have not only half filled this box with random cross frame combs.... they are filling these up with honey as we speak. So, this box is already half full of un capped honey......so I am leaving it on.......and will deal with it later......Because if I trash it now, they won't have anywhere to store the honey, because there is no spare comb until they build it..... see my problem?

Sheesh. Some of you may realise that I do not seem to use conventional beekeeping methods. And you would be correct. I let the bees make their own comb - what ever size they like. I do not force them to use commercial, chemical filled foundation.......I do not mind if they need to spend extra energy and time building their own combs because I think they like it. I have a secret theory that this time of year especially, bees like to build comb....and if they don't have room to do this, then they are perhaps more likely to swarm. I do not know this for a fact. And, I do not particularly need or want to prevent the girls from swarming - I don't mind a bit. And it is just a theory.

Anyway, I model my bee herding methods on these folks here:
http://www.backwardsbeekeepers.com/
Yes, I am a backwards beekeeper! Who are we?

We're a group of organic, treatment-free beekeepers in Los Angeles, with branches now forming in other cities.

We're "Backwards" because we rely on observation and natural practices to keep our bees thriving rather than pesticides, chemicals, or treatments of any kind.

There is a really cool book you can buy which I think it s very handy resource. It is called Bee Keeping for Complete Idiots.

For any Oncian Urban Homesteaders - I have a spare copy if you would like to borrow it.

Anyway, this is my third year of bee herding....(or is it my fourth?) . So I am still a beginner - although I guess you always are.......and I love it.

Bee Crazy

OK so it wasn't quite the weather for it, but I snuck a look in both the bee hives today and popped another box on each. Both colonies have come through winter very strongly. What different operations those girls have going. Queen Malina on the Front Deck has used up all the honey I left her - I am glad I left that extra box of honey on for winter. It is all cleaned out and hopefully ready for a bit of a spring nectar flow. There are a few gum trees coming into flower - some iron barks and a couple of boxes....so fingers crossed we will get some more of the sweet stuff soon. her hive is mostly well organized with neat combs that follow the frames making having a look see and harvesting a breeze.

So now to Queen Aprilia - what a MESS. I left them some stickies from Queen Malina's hive in autumn....which they have cleaned up....and they are way ahead starting to build lots of lovely new comb already this season .....but they are building it across the frames - CRAZY comb! The bees don't give a shit, but it does make it more exciting to harvest as it is impossible to pull out combs individually without making a huge mess..... hee hee. I like their anarchic style!

 Here is Queen Aprilia's hive with the lid off - the girls are building in the lid cavity....AGAIN.

And here is the top box with the hive mat taken off - you can see how the combs are being build across the frames..... I need to think about how I deal with this - whether I take this box away, clean it out and start again......or leave them to make a big heaving mess......

Happy swarm season!

Queen of the Sun

Queen Malina one last look

Today was sunny and a little bit warm, so I took the opportunity to pack Queen Malina's hive down for the winter. Blogger won't let me upload portrait photos at the moment - so we are missing some nice before and after shots. But instead, here is one of Queen Malina's workers dancing on the frames.

And this one is for Mr BVVF if he is watching.....some CRAZY COMB just for you. I gave the girls some stickies earlier in the year to clean out - and never got around to removing them, and then there was a big honey flow, and the girls filled that box up with crazy comb. This box was above the clearer board, so there were no bees in there, but there was CAPPED HONEY, so I managed to harvest about 4 frames. 

 And this photo shows how it is meant to be done - perfectly perfect comb built on foundation-less frames. Easy to inspect, pull out and harvest. clever girls.

The frames on this box were all more or less half filled with capped honey. I will leave them this one to help get them through the winter. There is enough room to store a bit more honey if a winter nectar flow happens. There are a few gum trees threatening to flower this winter - so you never know. The Red Ironbarks flowered beautifully last winter, but they may miss this one......

Clever beautiful bees.

Lacuna Sabbath

 Yesterday we celebrated the Lacuna Sabbath in the usual moochy way.

We admired the lisbon lemons - almost ripe.

Queenie and I went down to the community garden The soil is so dry - it has been a dry autumn. So we watered some stuff. This is saffron. No flowers yet - perhaps they will not flower until next year....I am not sure.

The garlic is going well (three rows in the center), as are the onions growing in the tomato tunnel. There is rocket and silver beet, a few cabbages, lots of parsley. A gazzilion Jerusalem artichokes. We won't starve......

The other week we batched up a huge pile of compost. This will ferment away during winter and hopefully be ready in Spring.

I need to get around to cutting back the Asparagus - but it looks so pretty with those little red berries.

Here is Queen Aprilia. She has made it to her new location in the bee garden. She had some trouble with ants, and is going into winter a little depleted. I may have to feed her a little over winter. Not sure yet.

Later we had visits from friends. There was much dancing on the roof.

That is all.

A lot can happen in a week

Well, round 3 goes to Queen Malina.

I went back to put the clearer board under that second box of honey in anticipation of another warm day tomorrow - perfect for another honey harvest.

Its been a long wet week. Long enough for the girls to relocate most of the honey down into the lower regions of the hive and OUT OF  MY REACH.

Clever girls.

Clever clever.

A good day at the office

Things went very well indeed with the honey harvest yesterday. Queen Malina of the front deck and her team were numerous but placid. The smoker was perfectly behaved. After removing the box of honey a little away from the hive, I worked calmly and methodically to lift each frame, gently brush the girls off with a bee brush, and cut the honey comb out straight into a bucket. Each frame then went back into the box while I started on the next one. Once we were all done and I had two buckets of comb honey, the box full of stickies went straight back onto the hive.

Before I closed the hive up, I rearranged things a bit to pull another full box of honey up to the almost top of the hive and put the stickies box, and the new box below this full box so that it is easier to get to next time. There is one more box full of crazy comb - which I moved to the top while I work out what to do with it before winter. It is a bit of a mess, with unripe honey and unfilled comb in all crazy directions. I think I will need to cut this up and probably feed it back to the girls, but I will wait until they have had the chance to rebuild some comb on the stickies and new frames.

That sounds like a lot of boxes I know! - but I use manley sized supers, which really should be called "girly" sized supers, which are just over half the depth of normal ones. I will need to consolidate things before the cold weather sets in - the full box will come off and stay off, as will the crazy comb box, and probably the new box we well.

The girls were in my face, but not angry or aggressive. There was a lot of deep breathing and calm, slow, methodical movements. We all coped very well.

The brittle gums, of which there are many in Holder, are starting to flower (eucalyptus maniferi) which the girls are working hard so hopefully there will be a bit of a nectar flow this autumn and I can get away with harvesting the second box without leaving the girls short for winter.

Here is the very high tech way to get the honey out of the comb - squish it all up, turn it upside down over a mesh strainer over a big bucket and as kirkobeeo from Backwards Beekeepers says; "wait for gravity to do it's thing".

Kirk has a great video of him harvesting honey using this method. All the Backwards Beekeeping vids and resources are great. If you want to know how I get away without using chemically infused foundation in the hives and needing a spinner to harvest honey, you can read all about it on their blog. This method of bee herding is very low tech, low intervention, zero chemical, minimal work and low cost. I think our Northern Hemisphere folks are a bit ahead on natural beekeeping - mostly because they have very quickly had to rediscover bee herding in a post varroa mite and colony collapse disorder world.

Backwards is the new forwards.

lessons from the bees

Sometimes folks think (wrongly) I am very brave for beeing a keeper of the bees. Sometimes I get very scared and very overwhelmed. Usually this happens when I have the hive dismantled, the smoker has gone out and there are shitty amazons buzzing in my face, their shitty sisters have filled every nook, cranny and lid space with honey and crazy comb which I have broken getting the hive apart, which has dripped honey everywhere and innocent victims are stuck fast in stickiness and I have murdered zillions of their sisterfolk because a heavy box full of honey slipped and squished everyone who was dancing on the rim of the box below instead of being down eating honey where they would have been if the smoker hadn't gone out again and there is sweat dripping in my eyes and my heart is pounding ............................

Lessons from today:

• The idea that a hive mat will prevent bees from building comb up inside the lid is complete rubbish.
• Bee tending can be scary
• Those boxes full of honey are &%#%ing heavy.
• Bee tending is a DEEP INTENSE opportunity for spiritual practice - for staying calm when things are quickly turning to chaos and angry stingy custard all at once - it demands PRESENCE and deep calm breaths but not on the bees right NOW or you will completely %^&#* it up and be stung a zillion times.
• bee keeping brings you to your knees with the amazing majestic beautifulness and forgivingness of nature.
• I mourn every inadvertent death from my clumsiness and lack of skill and strength.
• I am humbled because many girls died today, and I didn't get stung once in retaliation, even-though I throughly deserved it.
• Sometimes I think I am too chicken to be a bee herder.

So, I managed to move a full box of honey to the top of the hive, insert a clearer board, put in an extra box and make some steps towards getting all the crazy comb out from under the lid.

Hopefully all the bees will have moved down through the clearer board overnight, and I can go back in tomorrow and take off that top box of honey..........

First Hooch of Summer - Cherry Melomel

Cherry Melomel - Duck Style

20 liters of rain water

12 liters of cherries

5 liters of honey (this equals 7 1/2 kg honey)

Hooch making is like life - there are some basic principles that are helpful, but really, you just make it up as you go along, using what you have at hand. My recipe today is, as usual, an adaptation from the beautiful "Wild Fermentation" bible of all things fermented and good.

The basic recipe is 1 cup of honey for every liter of water. In terms of fruit, try of at least 1 cup of fruit for every liter of water. If you are adding fruit juice (ie apple or pear juice for cyser or perri) I would go for not more than half juice half honey water - but thats just me, and REAL cider is just apple juice, not apple juice and honey water.

There is a lot of fruit in this batch.....so I might be able to dilute it with more honey water in a week or so once it is time to take the fruit out.

Where did all those cherries come from?

Mr Duck and I have just spent the last few days eating drinking and laughing with the Ukrainians at Orange. We stayed HERE at the Borrodell Winery / Orchard/ Trufflery in a little cottage hidden in the orchard overlooking a dam and within view of Mt Canobolas.

In case you are wondering, we didn't arrive by helicopter, and we didn't stay in those posh cider houses.....we always rent the Chardonnay Cottage because it is so cute and has such a lovely view.

Last time we stayed here it was winter, and the apples, cherries and grapes were bare. It was SNOWING.

All this rain means that the Cherries are all split. Our lovely hosts suggested we help our selves, so we did, and here they are, in a new vat of Cherry Melomel.

Thats the thing about making your own cider / wine / hooch / mead - its all those lovely words.

Melomel.

Demijohn.

Perri

need I go on.

Anyway I had forgotten how beautiful and fragrant hooch making is. All I need to do now is remember to stir and coo over these two big carboys for the next 5 days or so, waiting for the wild yeasts in the air and on the fruit to really get things going. Then I take the fruit out, put the lid on and pop in an airlock and just leave everything to ferment away for a few weeks. At some stage, once a bit of sedimentation has happened, it might be good to transfer the melomel to a new carboy and leave the lees behind. This produces a clearer wine, and prevents any funny taste that might eventuate because of the sediment. And at some stage, when fermentation has slowed, its time to bottle and get those little babies under the house.

Even after just one night I can see little white bubbles forming on the surface. And the SMELL - it is so lovely.

In other news, yesterday was our first hot day - perhaps 32 degrees? The girls on the front deck were hanging out on their own front porch after a hard day.

Finally it is warm enough to get in there and see how the honey situation is going. I will keep you posted.

That is all.

The Bee Dance

There is a lot of bee dancing going on around here. Some of it is this lovely stuff above - where the girls dance on the vertical surface of the comb letting everyone know how to get to the motherload they just found. This is cool........the angle of straight part of her dance through the center of her figure 8 in relation to the vertical, is the angle the girls have to fly relative to the position of the sun. So the dance about the same blossoming tree would change during the day as the position of the sun shifted. What wouldn't change is the number of bum waggles, which indicate distance. Cool huh.

The other kind of bee dancing is the solitary, crazy, freaked out head slapping jig I tend to do when a guard bee happens to get stuck in my long hair and starts hysterically buzzing and moving inevitably towards my skull as she frantically tries to escape.

Its a race to see who can kill who first.

Quick visit to the garden

Moving right along.....

Things are going well in the tomato mahals........

I can't get over how gorgeous the flowers are on what I am now calling the "multi-pea". Yup, when they are young they are snow peas, when they are older they are sugar snaps, and then they are pea peas, and then they are dried peas for soup. The multi-pea, also known as a field pea, $1.20 / kg from the produce store.

And here are a few of my favorite things, all in one photo......my gorgeous bike, Queen Aprilia, my white nectarine tree (on the right), a compost pile, and the community garden in the back ground.

Queen Aprilia is on the move. She needs to end up over here:

Thats over 20 meters away. I can only mover her 1 meter at a time, otherwise everyone gets lost. And I can only move her after dark, when everyone is inside. So me and my secret service gal are going back down there soon, to do the second shift....

Around the traps

We have MORE possum cuteness. Meet the second shift. These two turn up at 10:00pm, after Bitie has been and gone.

Today I got to see one of Eric's hives SWARM. One minute the air was FULL of bees, the next they were all clumped on this tree. It was beautiful. They are all in a box now, waiting to go to their new home.

And here is the garlic lookin good.

Bee Tradition - A new Bee Herder is Born.

Reprinted with kind permission from Elaine Supkis at http://emsnews.wordpress.com/

Its a tradition folks. A new bee herder should be gifted their first swarm of bees from another bee herder. And thats what happened tonight.

Some of Eric's girls at the community garden swarmed yesterday. I wasn't there but apparently they were BEAUTIFUL.

Anyway I rustled up some broccoli boxes and Eric pulled together some drawn out frames - some with honey and scooped up those little lovelies from the casurina trees into their temporary home.

Now I KNOW that Mr BVVF is a hankerin' for some stripy micro livestock of his own, so I suggested to Eric we see if he would like this particularly big and dark and lovely swarm, and he said yes. (hooray!)

So I phoned Mr BVVF who had serendipitously just purchased some second hand bee boxes, so it was perfect timing and all meant to bee.

Mr BVVF and I bundled his girls into the car tonight, and well, reports are mostly good. Apparently a GREAT NUMBER managed to get out on the trip home, and well, the latest report is that MOST are back in or on their box in their new home under some poplars, but it appears some may be spending the night in the car. oops.

The good news is that Mr BVVF is safe and well and remains at this early stage an unstung hero in the beekeeping world.


Congratulations Mr BVVF. Let me know when you want me to come out and give you a hand to move the kids into their new boxes.


Love Duckiexxx

All about the bees

Hi Folks. Last week I harvested another box of honey. Much less eventful than the first. I can not tell you how delightful it is to herd bees that don't want to kill you. Queen Malina is a sweetie. No one got hurt. Bloody amazing.


Can you believe I have a bucket of this stuff in the shed. Indeed.

When I harvest honey I use the "crush and drain"method. This leaves a mushy mass of crushed wax with a bit of honey in it. With the overconfidence of one who has made 3 batches of honey plum saba without failure, it was time to EXPERIMENT. I added some water to the crushed comb and heated it up until the wax melted. Using a big slotted spoon I scooped it off the top leaving the honey dissolved in the water. And what is the base ingredient of saba...honey water!


The wax I can use later.

But, back to the saba. last week I was in Condobolin which meant I got to visit my secret favourite patch of wild peaches and bloody hell they are beautiful this year. One tree in particular was full of huge peaches as big as grannysmiths. Well. We got right into those. Of course, they had to wait a few days in a box for me to be able to do something with them, which gave the fruit flies a bit of time to hatch but mostly they are OK.

And the week before I was coming back through Bungendore and Robin gave me a bag of plums that were on their last legs.......

And Sue from next door got me some fresh organic apples from Pialigo........

And anyhoo, now there is a batch of honey plum peach apple saba fermenting away.


And while we are on the subject, I managed to rack honey and plum saba number 3 and serendipitously, there was some left over, and well we got stuck strait into that as well.


This batch used the gorgeous dark splendour like plums from out the front. Isn't it an amazing colour. And it tastes pretty good too. Believe me. I know. *hick*

In other news, Mr & Mrs BVVF came and picked up their widdle ducks and some for Em too - hope they are all settlin' in ok! So I have three left - two girls and a boy. I have to decide whether to keep any of the girls......tricky. Better have another glass of saba and think about it.

tally ho!
Giddy up!

widdle babies

OK folks, here's what ya want. ready? One, Two Three......aaawwwww.



Stupid cute huh?




Yup. Stupid Cute has arrived at the princess castle. They haven't left the nest yet (that's mum just to the right) but why would you bother when you have a wading pool beside your bed?



Proud father hasn't shown infanticidal tendencies yet, just a little nibble/nudge.


Hot bees. Her Majesty Queen Malina's girls are very yellow huh?

that is all.



eeeyyyaaawww eeyyyaaaaw
I think the beer ambulance is here.

Keep cool everyone!

Hooch City

Fact: One of the nice things about blogging is that the 'puter is very close to Queen Malina's hive (as the bee flies - there is a wall between us) and when the window is open the sweet scent of ripening honey wafts past me into the house.

Fact: I am not sure there is a lovelier smell.

Unless of course we include the yummi smell of wildly fermenting honey and plum wine......




Technically this recipe is a T'ej which is Ethiopian for ....honey wine. There are lots of kinds of T'ej and apparently one kind is called "Saba T'ej" in reference to the Queen of Sheeba (Saba) who apparently shared a cuppla bottles with that old fox King Solomon once a long time ago.

Anyhoo, I really like the word "Saba" and have decided that my honey and plum wine will be called "Saba".

Fact: Even at 4 days old, Saba is DELICIOUS! The sweetness is being replaced by a nice tangy fizz which I like very much.

This whole Saba adventure is so much fun that I invested in a larger fermenting bucket and made another batch. Meet Honey and Plum Saba - Batch #2




Fact: you meet some nice people picking overhanging laneway plums just post dawn.


For more information about wild fermentation see here" Wild Fermentation

rain - can you believe it? (and bees)

Image Copyright David Hawgood. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

This crazy thing happened this Christmas. We woke up to RAIN. Gentle soaking rain that has lasted on and off for the past two days. The garden and the plants and the soil are so happy. Everything is moist and lovely.

Everyone is happy except Queen Malina on the front deck. I am not sure what happened but a few hundred bees were clustered below the hive entrance when the rain started and they are now all dead. I know that 50,000 minus a few hundred isn't much to worry about but it looks like a LOT. It is a HUGE STRONG colony but I am pretty sure there is enough room for them all in the hive. They may have been on fanning duty when the cold weather came in - leaving them too cold to move up into the hive.

Anyway I had a peek in there earlier in the week - there is another box ALMOST ready to harvest. Unlike the last box this box has CRAZY comb - the girls have ignored my starter strips and done a cool random thing so I will need to take the whole box rather than a few combs. The girls were calm and lovely when I opened the hive. Not buzzy at all and certainly not cranky. Yay Queen Malina. I am getting better at checking the hive without stirring them up at all. It helps not to have an psychotic killer queen for this though.....

I also checked Queen Aprilia down at the community garden. They have filled an entire full depth super with brood and honey and I am truly humbled and impressed. Just a few short weeks ago they were homeless and had nothing but the honey in their tummies.

They have also made a start on the other box I gave them a few weeks ago. I am trying something different with this hive - adding boxes to the bottom rather than the top, so they can continue to work downwards to establish their own brood areas just the way they like them. Next season when they are established enough to harvest, I should be able to take boxes of honey from the top (in 1 year old comb) and keep adding empty boxes to the bottom - sort of like a bottomless tree hollow. This will be good for honey but perhaps not good for honey comb as the comb would have been used to raise a few generations of bees.

This is based on the idea that given a choice, the bees prefer to raise brood in new comb and to store honey in old comb. This theory falls down a little when I also read that bees build small comb for brood and large comb for honey storage........it may be that when a big nectar flow is on I will need to put boxes on top as well and let them build larger combs as well. So much to learn but luckily I wont have to worry about this untill next spring.

In the meantime I will continue to run Queen Malina in a semi conventional way - leaving her three Manley sized boxes for her brood and honey storage with additional boxes on top during spring/summer/autumn for me! I am using a queen excluder between the third and fourth boxes. I have mixed feelings about these as well....but hopefully three whole boxes is enough for her to feel like there is enough space to do all the things she wants to.

I have been truly inspired by the folks at Backwards Beekeeping. This style of beekeeping feels intuitively right to me. My instincts dislike commercially made foundation, and I hate disturbing the girls any more than necessary and suspect that bees have a deep NEED to make their own comb in spring and that not giving them the space to do this frustrates them on some level and I like the low tech no machinery crush and drain method of honey extraction.

And oh how I LOVE the crazy curves and patterns of their natural comb.

Happy peaceful Christmas to you all.

an embarrassment of riches

Still too soon to tell if the girls have accepted the new queen. They have been MOST UPSET since last Friday - you know, the regicide day. (Forgive me Bruce) And then I went back and stole a box of honey.

The hot weather probably hasn't helped.

I will wait until Friday to go back in and see if Queen Malina of the White -Dot-On-Her-Head clan from Bathurst NSW (the peace maker) is still there. Then my darlings, I promise - no disturbances for as long possible.

The honey is divine. no, it really really is. And I should know - I have eaten about a liter of it already. I have paid off the neighbourhood with jars of honey and slabs of capped honey comb to make up for a week of suicide bombings and general anti neighbourliness.

Example 1 - Mr Duck Herder stopped on the street next door to say hello to the new neighbours who were just moving in. They were under the Cherry Tree. Whilst chatting, a bee landed on his thumb and promptly stung him. "Oh yeah", he said - holding out his thumb, "My wife keeps bees.............."

Guess I'd better give them a bottle too.....