Farm Week

-Posted by Isaac

Change of pace this week.

 Big Ag

Everyone knows the recent plight of the honeybee. 

"All the bees are mysteriously dying!" "The end approaches!" "Einstein once said, if all the honeybees disappeared,   ...blah, blah, blah..."

Yes, bees have their troubles. 

Varroa Mites, tracheal mites, foul brood, nosema, hive beetles, chalk brood, CCD... the list goes on. (A few foolhardy idiot beekeepers continue to "save the world" in spite of it all.)

We've dissected the problems to death. We've come up with a few solutions. Some solutions lead to more problems. 

One rarely mentioned but very big problem (the biggest, in my opinion):

Big Ag

When there's nothing to eat, honeybees don't do very well.

Big Ag

CornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCornCorn

This stuff will be turned into Pepsi and cattle feed.
But if you're a honeybee, a corn field might as well be a parking lot. Just nothing tasty out there.
Back in the day, farms were small. Farms were diverse. There were fence rows. There were weeds. There were animals. Cows, pigs, horses, chickens, sheep, goats.... dogs, cats.... bees...
A little clover here, a little alfalfa there. A garden, a grape vine or two.
There were people.  It took a lot of caring hands, some responsibility, some love to watch over it all and see that things happened just so so.

See any of that now?

Agriculture has changed. And with it, beekeeping. (Society too, I might add.)
For the better? Progress? Hmmmm....
Listening to the radio this week I heard one particular ad (about a hundred times) for a new Syngenta fungicide / insecticide spray for soybeans. For next year! It's September, for God's sake!
Man oh man... What are they going to say about us in a hundred years?

Well, I'll get off my soap box. If you can't beat'em, join'em, right? My brother happens to be one of these big farmers. About this time of year the crops come off and he needs some help. I got to spend a rather enjoyable week driving this white Freightliner:

Yes, just like the Towns Van Zandt song.

But it wasn't all trucking.
One morning I worked in the buckwheat. The field had finished its bloom and thinking we might get another bloom in October, I bush hogged it and ran a cultiipacker through later to push the seeds down. Mason tried his hand at tractor driving.

After bush hogging over a few gardens, some puppies and cute little kittens, we decided that he'd  learned enough for one day.

We grabbed Mommy and made it to the Farm Science Review:

There, we found tractors.

Big Tractors.

Little Tractors.

And Big Sprayers.

And Little Sprayers.

And Combines Too!

Mason is quite the fan of Big Ag. It was better then Christmas. He probably climbed on thirty different things.
And he wanted nothing to do with the small hidden beekeeping display off in the corner of the OSU gardens.
Hmmm.
Maizy and Bridger just enjoyed giving their parental slaves a workout.

Generation Lazy

At least they aren't texting.

After two hours of Big Ag and Mason's perpetual excitement; running, climbing, yelling, trying on a new tractor about every ten feet... Mommy, Daddy and Bridger all felt the same:

Honeyfest is Over, Goldenrod Begins

-Posted by Isaac

What a crazy time was this year's Honeyfest! As usual Jayne was responsible for the beautiful display. I was able to snap a few pictures while she added some finishing touches. This was around 11 a.m. Friday morning:

An hour before the official start, the early birds trickled in.

By afternoon (and the entire next day) we were swamped. Thank you for all the support and nice compliments, honey lovers. It was a happy, fun, busy weekend.

Because of the perpetual crowd surrounding, sampling and buying, I'm left with just a couple small regrets: one, I didn't get to talk to you in a relaxed way... too many people needing help. And two, I wanted to make it around the festival, finding interesting things to post on this blog... well, I didn't get to; same reason, just too busy. I guess that's a good problem. Maybe next year we'll hire more workers.

The goldenrod has now started to bloom in earnest:

The pollen traps are filling up, and as you can see, the bees have found it. This is the beautiful orange (tasty!) goldenrod pollen. In just the span of a few days the color has completely changed from browns and yellows (clover, ragweed) to pure orange.

We have four bee yards with pollen traps. Around 50 hives in all. Until today I would come home with maybe a third to half a five-gallon bucket full of pollen. Not now. The skinny times are over, the Fat-Cat (Big-Bee) days begin. This evening I should have brought another bucket! We were overflowing... what a difference the goldenrod makes!

This is my favorite of the four yards:

Just step out the front door, girls!

I think this is the equivalent to having prime lakeside real estate. Or if you're like me, a Swiss chalet on a mountain trail.

This evening the family joined me for a "pollen run."

It took a little prodding to get the kids to come along. They're suddenly at the age where Legos and cartoons become much more important than, in Mason's words, "a boring pollen run."

We had a small stinging incidence. We had tears.

Oh no.
They'll never come with me again.

Maybe we'll just stick to the bee yard with the near-by backyard swing set.

Honeyfest Approaches

-Posted by Isaac

If you read this blog, you probably already know about the Lithopolis Honeyfest-- a big fun festival with everything bee related.

 Come on out this weekend! Honeybees! See, Experience, Learn, Listen, Taste, Enjoy! Friday and Saturday this year.

Last year the Honeyfest became our unveiling for the dark, rich tulip poplar honey. This year we'll of course have all the usuals, but here are a few new products we're trying:

This spring the black locust honey crop was so bountiful, we're now bottling a two pounder. Come get your locust fix!

We really wanted to unveil buckwheat honey at the Honeyfest, but the timing was off. The flowers are still in bloom, the bees are still busy. But it's coming! (More on this in a future post.)

Here's something new. I for one am pretty proud of it. Cinnamon Honey... delicious! This is granulated honey which we've simply mixed with a rich blend of ground cinnamon. I think it will be a hit.

If you've been at the markets you know we've had cut comb honey for a few weeks. But the Ross Rounds are making their first appearance this weekend. I pulled the supers off on Monday (15 of them), and have been busy packaging comb. As I said in the last blog post, it wasn't a great year for honey production. There is definitely a limited quantity of perfect round comb sections, so get'em while we got'em!

 The imperfect, not completely filled comb sections were cut up for chunk honey. This year probably 3/4ths of the comb went this route. Bridger took full advantage of this "windfall."

Our chunk honey is making its debut this weekend. I thought of something kinda cool (Or at least I think so...)  Comb shooters! These are pretty little 2 oz hex jars with a piece of comb (the jar on the left). Jayne isn't so sure about the name.  It's not alcohol, after all.

Jayne has around thirty varieties of handcrafted soap. Many of you know how awesome they are. Here are a few of the new ones you'll see this weekend:

 My personal favorite, The Good Earth, actually smells like fresh spring soil. I thought we should call it "Dirt." Jayne, classy and more cultured, elected to pay homage to Pearl S. Buck's famous novel.

Here's one more thing we've tried recently: Dipped Candles. Unique, rustic, gifty... I think they'll go fast. This was Jayne's idea. I'm liking it. Seems more artsy then pouring molds.

Oops, I almost forgot: Jayne's (Mommy's) Book! Just out this spring, I did a blog post about it in May. If you're into crafting or cooking, this is a great one. We'll bring plenty of copies.

So come on out this weekend! Bring the kids! Lithopolis is just a few miles from Canal Winchester, easy to find. The Honeyfest has been growing every year and it now takes up nearly the entire town.
You'll love it!

Summer Honey Time

-Posted by Isaac

It's Summer Honey Time.

This has been a familiar routine during the last month:

Full supers come off the hives and go to the honey house. Empty extracted supers, sticky and sweet, go back on hopefully to be filled again.
Well, here's hoping...
It hasn't exactly been a good year. I've got three bee yards left to pull, but judging from the previous twenty, I'm guessing we'll produce about a third of the summer crop of last year. Too bad. We had such high hopes.
Oh well, we'll just charge three times as much... hahaha!
Is that how it works? No?

Mr. Blair gets a taste of the hot extracting room.

As many of you know the Summer Honey is mild and sweet, a bit darker then Spring, a bit lighter then Fall. 

And every week at market I get asked what the bees are foraging on, making the different honeys. Spring and Fall are relatively easy: Black Locust and goldenrod respectively. Of course there are other nectar sources mixed in, but for simplicity's sake this is what I say... the major players: black locust trees in May and goldenrod blooming in September. The Summer Honey is more complex. And it can actually vary a little in taste and color from one bee yard to the next. This is because there is such a wide range of flowers available (or not) to the bees during the summer.

For this blog post I tried to capture the bees working a few of these nectar sources.

Clover- the old stand-by

This is Dutch clover. I've noticed that when the bees are on this it means there is nothing else available at the moment. Not a good sign. Yellow clover is a much better nectar source. (I missed getting a picture.)

Canadian Thistle- Makes pretty good light honey. Now if the farmers would just quit bush hogging it!

There is a wide assortment of thistles. The bees don't care.

The summer berries- Raspberries, black berries, blue berries, black raspberries... all welcome. You just about need acres of them to make a decent honey crop.

The above photo was from the berry patch in our garden. Here, Bridger shows off another garden flower the bees just love.

Yummy lavender!

 Milk Weed- Makes a clear, delicate honey. Unfortunately (for bees and butterflies) there isn't enough of this. Round-up ready crops took care of this little "problem." I miss the good ol' days of weedy fields!

Alfalfa- Makes a light spritely tasting honey. The farmers usually cut it (for hay) before it blooms, but every now and then we get lucky.

Soybean- Here's one that the farmers actually benefit from having a few bees around. Soybean honey is mild but somewhat bland. My experience with this as a honey crop is boom or bust. Hot and dry years are the best. This year was a bust.

We had maybe ten good days in July where the bees were bringing in soybean nectar.

Fireweed- Oops, sorry. Montana flashback.
But if you ever come across fireweed honey, buy it! It's delicate and water-white. Very unique taste.  This was in the Bitterroot Valley near Stevensville, MT.

 With agriculture everywhere, weather dictates the crop. Beekeeping is no different. Hopefully next year one of the many sources of summer honey will weigh in heavy with nectar. As I said, this year was a down year, but hearing some the the lack-of-honey horror stories around the state, I guess I can't complain. We didn't get skunked.

Surprises

-Posted by Isaac

"The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand"

-Annie Dillard

I've been thinking Annie Dillard lately. It was too long ago I read her great, philosophic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and I couldn't help picking through the book again, thinking about some of the things she was trying to get across to nitwits like me. It was all provoked by a butterfly.  

Maizy blustered into the honey house a couple months ago with her usual rush and boss: "Daddy! A butterfly! Take a picture!"

"Not now, Maizy, I'm working. It's just a butterfly." My hands were sticky with the extracting of Spring honey. Maizy rushed back out; about thirty seconds later slammed through the door again. "Daddy, it's got blue! Take A Picture! Please Daddy!"

I rolled my eyes, cleaned my hands and reluctantly walked out. As you can see, sure enough, it was a pretty cool butterfly. Just calmly stretching its wings in the morning sun while Maizy frantically pointed, "See! See! Look!  Take a picture!"

I obliged.

It wasn't so much the butterfly that made me pick up Dillard's book, it was Maizy's exuberant reaction. I remembered reading something in there about ways of seeing the world, noticing color and light and movement and hidden things; learning to see and appreciate. Through Maizy's excitement, almost contagious, it dawned on me that my three year old is doing better than I. She's actually noticing the many free gifts the universe throws her way.

With that in mind, here are a few small surprises I've managed to capture over the last two months.

The Accidental Gourds:

I thought goats were supposed to eat everything.

It seems they don't like the taste of these renegade gourd vines growing out of the compost pile:

So many cool gourds, all from stray thrown-away seeds. This should take care of a lot of Fall decorating.

Jayne's hydrangea made its summer debut:

I don't know if she planted it two or three years ago, but I do know it has never looked like this!

Our Monster Sunflower:

Mason planted it in the Spring from a packet of seeds he brought home from school (Thanks Ms. Gregg!).   It guards the driveway flowerbeds as we pull up to the house.

I missed capturing its full beaming glory, but in this shot you can see how many seeds this beauty is going to give us. 

The bees collected some good pollen off the sunflower. Speaking of which, I put the pollen traps back on the hives about two weeks ago. Surprise! Completely different forage paths for different hives. Here you can see the varied pollen from the first three hives in the line:

Makes me wonder.

"What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried?"

Of course the garden berry patch was a bountiful surprise. Bridger has become a berry eatin' machine... and then steps up the regularity of his own bountiful surprises.

This mammoth mushroom was practically an overnight sensation. I had just been working in this out-yard two days before. Stopped in to hive a July swarm and found it guarding the yard. (Now you don't see it, now you do.)

Mushrooms and Honey: an excellent brunch

Montana Surprise:

We hiked out of the dense scrubby woods into a clearing above a lake in Glacier Park. I looked up at this mighty pine and caught my breath. Is this a tree or is this God? I can hardly tell...

Ok, maybe it's just a big tree. But sights like this reaffirm my suspicion that the pagans had it right.

Same day, hiking above Bowman Lake; in the middle of beautiful nowhere. No bear, no moose, no mountain goats. Instead, a surprise pair of fishermen seemingly out of the thin mountain air.

And here's our own novice fisherman: ready for the pro tour.

Last week the Clintonville market was really getting frustrating. If not for these "free gifts from the universe" I think I would have killed a customer. Actually, the universe had nothing to do with it. Both perfect, delicious and unexpected, Amy with her peach and Jamie Thompson with her Bawdu  really turned my day around.

I came home from that market and found Jayne reading the latest Time Magazine. Surprise, surprise! Bees (and beekeepers) in the limelight... again.

THE PRICE WE'LL PAY... 

Hey, chill. As I've probably explained a hundred times every Saturday, it's not as bad as they make it sound. A problem, yes. Catastrophic? Extinctions? No.

Bees have been around for some 100 million years and I'm pretty sure they'll still be here long after we mere humans have checked out. 

But thanks for the attention, Time.

"I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."

Last and Best: My old bow making mentor, Ed Scott surprised us with a visit all the way from New Mexico. Ten or twelve years ago, by accident and a stroke of luck, Ed and I became friends. Through many miles, memories and bows we have since become good friends. I'm a decent bowyer because of Ed. Ed is the best in the world. And I'm not even slightly kidding. Nobody can do what he can. I feel humbled in his presence, shooting and admiring his bows. He's a scholar and philosopher to boot.

Two years ago he gifted Mason with his very own kids bow.

This year it was Maizy's turn. And she's really taken to it!

Bridger learns from the master

Thanks, Ed!

And thank you Maizy and Annie Dillard. You've opened my eyes.