Lee and I have been fretting over our bees here. We haven’t been seeing much activity outside the bee box ever since we captured the honey bees. The most activity we saw was the following two days after capturing the swarm. Lee went up to the box today at dusk and he said he could hear some bees inside of it. We are wondering if the hive ditched us and there are some stragglers left behind. That, or maybe we have other bees robbing the sugar water in the feeder.

We do have a new problem though. Today we found a trail of ants robbing the sugar water.

Lee has been making steady and slow progress removing blackberry vines by our house. This is a before picture.

These are some after pictures.

But, you can’t have a cleanup job around here without finding some hidden treasure. Somebody needs to think of a story that somehow ties these items all together.

A one armed teddy bear.

One pry bar.

One ski pole.

One ski glove and one bottle of baby oil.

And last but not least, two balls. (What? Did you think we could do a cleanup project without finding a ball?”

I have a confession to make. I never thinned my carrot patch. Granted, I didn’t think that I had any carrots growing for the longest time. So I finally got around to thinning out a few, and while munching on the thinnings I had the bright idea to see if I had any big carrots. I pulled one and my eyes about bugged out! HOLY COW, I have a real carrot. This is a first for me as I have never grown carrots before.

I also had to pull a beet so I could look at it better. Sometimes you just have to be a little crazy and do something like that.

Tonight I planted kohlrabi, rutabaga, and broccoli for my winter garden. Hopefully I can get the seeds to sprout. I plan on taking over the potato bed that got decimated by blight and planting some more winter garden stuff there.

A bee swarm forms down at my Uncle’s house. We jump in the car and drive down there quick.

The bees are up in a tree so a ladder is found and legs are adjusted.

The ladder is put in position. Oh boy!

Lee is in place with the bee collecting receptacle (a hive box and base).

A quick whip of the tree branch and the bees fall into the hive box. Oh no, are those bees angry?

RUN!

RUN FASTER!!

RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

Let’s try this again. There is still a small cluster up in the tree that needs removed.

Maybe some duct tape around Lee’s sleeves will protect him from any more bee stings.

Checking on the bees.

My Dad comes to check on our bee progress from the safety of his car. He offers some sting kill that my Mom wanted him to bring to us. My Dad is very afraid of bee’s so I’m sure he had his foot poised on the gas peddle in case the bees got out of hand.

Hmm, maybe some gloves will make Lee feel more relaxed.

Take two. It’s time to brush the remaining swarm that stayed on the branch into a box.

Hey, don’t come near me until those straggler bees are all off your bee suit.

The hive box is duct taped and placed into the trunk of our car. I can’t believe that I am riding home with bees in the trunk!!! Lee drove home in his bee suit (he took the hood off first).

The box is in place and ready for the tape to be removed.

The Aftermath

Lee – I think our swarm capture went pretty well, all things considered. We definitely learned a few things. First, when the book says that swarms are “relatively gentle” compared to a normal hive, it’s like saying that Black Bears are “relatively gentle” compared to Grizzly Bears. When you knock 10,000 bees off a branch and into a box, a few of them are going to be angry. I got stung 7 times during that little operation. Fortunately, I didn’t go into anaphylactic shock when stung, and I didn’t even have any welts by the next day.

Second, collecting a swarm is art, not science. My in-law’s kept asking, “Do you think you got the queen yet?” I dunno. She’s only slightly larger than a worker. There’s no way to tell. She might have been captured in the first group, she might have been caught when I brushed the stragglers into a box and dumped them in front of the hive box, she might have been crushed when I put the lid on, or later that night when I slid in the missing frames. There is no way to know. In two weeks, we’ll smoke the hive and open it up. If we find comb and brood, that’s a good sign there is also a queen. If there is no brood, or if they all fly away, we probably lost her. As with most things, attempting something is no guarantee of success.

Third, bees are pretty forgiving. We knocked and brushed them into a box, duct taped it closed, hauled them 30 miles in a car, pestered them in the dark to add frames, and then filled the hive top feeder with 1:1 sugar syrup to get them started. Today, there were bees flying in and out as if nothing happened. Perhaps they forgave us. Perhaps we have the queen. Perhaps they will stay.

Fourth, next time I’m wearing the bee suite!

Back in November we had sheer braced the knee wall that spanned the front of the house. Tonight’s project was to add sheer bracing to the south rear knee wall. (The dormer divides the rear knee wall into two sections.)

Basically, it was much the same as in November, except we didn’t have to jack up anything (the span was shorter) and we didn’t add a plastic temporary ceiling. Maneuvering big sheets of OSB from a ladder is never fun. I’ll be glad when we have the last section of this done.

I harvested most of my broccoli crowns today. YUMMY! We ate a big ol’ serving of it and then I blanched and froze about 5 quarts. I think I should plant more of it next year because I am sad that it is mostly gone. Hopefully we will get a lot more side shoots, but the plants are looking a little rough.

While I was sitting in my camp chair taking it easy watching Lee hard at work slaying blackberry vines, I noticed a plum tree. It’s growing under a row of fir trees not to mention it has a Purple Robe Locust pretending it’s an umbrella above it. I think it must have gotten a little confused on where plum trees are supposed to grow.

I had a feeling revisit me that I haven’t had since last year. It was the feeling of, “I’m going to beat up some bozo deer” anger. It’s a valid feeling, really! The herd of deer that seems to hang out here in the summer time decided to get brave, come up to our house, and do a midnight munching on my aronia berry start. I was so happy with how much it had grown as I had bought it as a seedling last year.

I planted some cosmo’s in my garden this year. They are so bright and cheery that I always smile when I look at them.

Lee has found a new use for his 8″ grape hoe. It works amazingly well for cutting through the thick stems of the blackberries and even small branches. He makes sure to sharpen the blade every time before use and it seems to slice through like butter.

There is this section near our house that is solid 12 foot high wild blackberry vines. A fence runs through it, along with some random trees, so driving a tractor with a brush hog through it isn’t possible at the moment. We do want to put a fence there eventually, so we have to get it cleared out. The nice thing about when this section in cleaned out is we will be able to see out into our back fields. In between whacking the berry vines Lee has to stop to collect barb wire, some of it thrown on the ground, some of it on newly found fence posts.

We didn’t even know that there was an old corner post back in that mess.

When Lee finishes clearing out spaces he then drives his tractor with the brush hog through it. He has been working at this job here and there for small amounts of time in the evening. I must say that I think he has made an amazing amount of progress compared to me working on it with hand trimmers.

I pulled up all our garlic today, except for one late variety. I am very pleased with the results. Last year my mom had given me some starts and we planted them in the spring and harvested them in the summer. The garlic was much smaller, but we didn’t care.

Last fall we got our garlic planted at the right time and we added complete organic fertilizer to the soil. It’s amazing how much bigger the bulbs were for this year’s harvest. This is only the second time we have grown garlic but I can’t imagine not having it out in the garden from now on. It doesn’t need watering (in our climate), is easy to keep weeded, and has few pests. (Other than pocket gophers.)

Now we will have the hard task of trying out the varieties we planted and seeing how much we like them (yummy). Of course, when it comes time to plant again this fall, I will probably have to plant some new garlic varieties as well.

Two weeks from now when the garlic has dried, I will braid them and hang them in my kitchen. It’s nice having garlic cloves close at hand when you are cooking.

It finally got hot over here. It’s funny how when the good weather hits Oregon every one starts doing yard chores that were postponed during the wet times. We got a lot of really wet late rains this year that were interspersed with sunny breaks. That meant that our grass and weeds and everything else around the house turned into a JUNGLE.

Just outside our back porch there is a mess on both sides. I’d been putting off doing anything about it because I knew at least one side had buried trash in it. Sifting through dirt taking out someone else’s trash doesn’t really rate high on my usual want-to-do list. I decided to tackle it finally and got it cleaned up.

I filled up one trash can with garbage that I found while sifting through the dirt. It was the usual: bits of plastic, broken glass, tin can lids, rusty nails, but mostly old buried shingles. I also can’t forget about our property’s official garbage mascot, a matchbox car. The day I stop finding matchbox cars I will know that all the garbage has been unearthed on our property.

My aunt gave me some iris starts and I bought some annuals and Lee got me some bark-o-mulch to lay down. It looks much better now. I’m not going to plant anything permanent here because later on we will build a bigger porch and put a patio in. Not to mention we will need plenty of space to work in when Lee installs the new window above it and when we get around to painting the house. Once we get all that done then I can think about more permanent landscaping.

On the back left corner of the house where I was cleaning is a bush that is flowering again. I love this bush and think it is so pretty. I really wish I knew what it was. It looks like a rose, but it is not.

With the left side of the back porch cleaned up I then had the right side bugging me. It looked awful. Thankfully I didn’t find nearly as much buried trash this time.

Lee dug out two lilac bushes (they were badly placed) for me and we leveled and graded around the foundation like I did on the left side.

Along with the thick layer of bark-o-mulch (for weed control), I also laid down a strip of fabric weed barrier right next to the house. I was really getting tired of grass growing up the side of the house as we don’t often get the edger out. I plan on using the landscape fabric barrier along with bark-o-mulch on the south side of the house to help with that same problem. I would do it on the other two sides of the house but there are grading issues that need to be dealt with before it can be done.

We finally planted our Empress tree that we bought last year. I can’t believe that the poor thing survived a year in it’s little pot. Empress trees have leaves that are edible to livestock, easy to propagate, and they grow amazingly fast (up to 15 ft a year). We are thinking about experimenting with this tree, making new starts off it, and then using them as a sustainable firewood source. We shall see how it goes.

I went and limbed trees by our house. Mowing somehow becomes a more pleasant experience when you don’t have branches trying to poke out your eyes and you have to duck every few steps.

This section by the house was finally mowed after about a year. It looked a right mess. I also did some limbing here. I need to clean out the back area soon, which will involve picking up downed branches before I can do anything else. We finally discarded a pile of wood shingles from our roof remodel last year. Yeah I know, a year later and a big eyesore right in front of the house. We still have one wooden shingle pile left but it is farther back and doesn’t annoy me as much. Hopefully by next year that one will be gone too. We let my parents, uncle, and neighbor take what they wanted last winter to use as kindling.

With all the mowing that has been going on Lee was about ready to tidy up the back fields. He did a few passes with his tractor and then it started overheating. DOH! I hate it when that happens. I need a mowed field to make my cleaning happiness complete don’t you know!