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!

How goes our garden? Well, it’s been going slow. While Lee and I were recovering from the flu last month, we slowly got the last of our squash starts and what-not planted.

Here is a picture of it from afar. The garden is looking a little better.

The things we planted late were mostly squash and melons. Though, due to the Aggie episode, I have no idea what a lot of the plants are. Since we were working on limited “after the flu energy” we just dug holes instead of manually tilling the whole bed, put fertilizer in the holes, and then planted the starts.

Our three potato rows still look really nice. You can see a size difference when you are out in the garden as all the rows were planted at different times. Lee planted some of his Painted Mountain corn in the middle row. We didn’t plant any popcorn or sweet corn as we were to late in the season to do that. The Painted Mountain corn doesn’t need as many days to mature so we took a gamble on it. After Lee planted it the weather decided to get cold and cloudy before it turned blazing hot. It’s been about two weeks now and nada. We aren’t sure what happened. My mom planted corn this year also and she had really spotty germination. Guess it’s not a corn year here for us.

On a potato note, we are seeing some blight in the non-certified seed potatoes we bought. We didn’t have this problem last year. Thankfully, only the red potatoes seem to be affected so far, as the Cal White’s in the rest of the row look great.

Only one type of carrot I planted germinated. So far they are growing okay, at least I think they are. Lee has been trying to trap voles and gophers in the garden again. Hopefully he can get them as I don’t want my root crops getting wiped out.

I swear I planted this lettuce two and a half months ago. I thought cool season plants would have liked all the rain we’ve had since then. Last year when I was planting lettuce we had it taking off like weeds–now a whole herd of turtles would have won a race about 20 times since I planted this year’s little patch.

My beets are still growing, YEAH! Hopefully I get a nice harvest as I am dying to can lots of beets using my most amazing beet recipe that I tried last year.

I bought a couple pepper starts and my mom gave me two more. I put some of that biofilm around them after the weather got cloudy to help them grow.

Yummy, I foresee cabbage soup in my future.

My collards are coming along. They need weeded but I can’t believe that they are growing. The slugs almost wiped them out at one point, but they survived. I planted them two months ago from seed.

My broccoli looks really great. These were planted as starts about two months ago too, and also got attacked by slugs. I’m always impressed with how well broccoli explodes into growth. It makes me feel like I’m such an amazing gardener even though I had nothing to do with it. I did notice a worm munching on it today so I need to break out my BT tomorrow.

We bought three cucumber starts as we were way behind due to the weather and then us getting sick. I find it humorous we only have three after my huge row I had planted last year. Ah, well, they seem to be growing fine.

Lee’s hops are winding themselves themselves up their posts. Since the first year of growth is not nearly as substantial as the second years, we are just using my pole bean poles. I didn’t get any beans planted this summer anyways, so I didn’t need to use them.

I’m probably going to harvest my garlic in the next day or so. It will be exciting trying the new varieties and seeing which ones we like the best and replant next year. I did pull my three remaining elephant garlic that survived the destruction of the fat pocket gopher. They didn’t get as big as I had hoped they would. On the other hand, each row was tunneled under so the remaining ones probably had some serious root damage going on.

One part of our garden still needs mowed. It’s pretty funny.

Aggie’s breeder had an English Shepherd gathering at her place. One of the activities planned that day was a duck herding course. We signed Aggie up, I was sweating bullets she was going to eat one, and then Lee took her out. She went through the course two times and ended up being the beginner dog that did the best. We were encouraged to take her to some herding classes. Lee and I are very happy to see this part of her breeding and personality come out because we hope to use her with herding animals we plan to get in the future.

Besides doing well in the duck herding, she also took the Canine Good Citizen test. Much to our surprise she passed the test. Who would have thought our little puppy would have so much talent inside her.

You’re never going to believe this. I hardly believe it, and it happened to us!

In a recent post about bee boxes, I mentioned that we planned to capture wild swarms to start our hives. We’ve since finished the boxes. Unfortunately, the weather this year has put a pretty serious damper on our chances of finding a swarm. It’s been cold and rainy, and bees eat more when it’s cold and can’t fly when it’s rainy. That’s a recipe for killing a lot of wild hives. (On a side note, the ones that survive should have really strong genetics.) We were also counting on catching at least one swarm from Robin’s uncle. He has two hives that live in the exterior walls of his house (he’s something of an eccentric fellow), and they throw several swarms each year. Sadly, one of those hives has now died as well (starved).

So, given this backdrop of bee-gloom, I stepped out onto the back porch of our house during my lunch break yesterday and heard a loud buzzing sound. About 50 feet away, a huge column of bees was swirling near an oak tree in our backyard.

My first thought was “Yellow Jackets!” because they were so loud and there weren’t that many in the air. I got the camera anyway, and while I was taking pictures (and noticing that none of them were trying to kill me) I realized there was a huge phone-book sized mass of bees clustered on a branch of the oak tree:

A honey bee swarm! In our backyard!!

Bees swarm to reproduce. If you think of a complete hive as a living organism, then swarming is a lot like cell division. The existing hive has got too crowded, so the current queen and about half the workers gorge themselves on honey (which puts them in a really good mood) and fly a short distance away (a few hundred yards at most). The queen lands on something and the rest of the bees cluster around her. I happened to walk out the door just as the cluster was landing. They quickly calmed down until only a few bees were flying around. Once clustered, a small number of scout bees begin flying out from the cluster site looking for suitable hive locations. The swarm will remain at its initial landing site until a collective decision is made regarding the most suitable site reported by scouts. This can take from a few hours to several days. The swarm will then fly as a group to their new home (up to a kilometer away). When swarming, bees are quite gentle as they have no hive to defend and their stomachs are full of honey. The procedure for capturing a swarm is to knock them off the branch they have clustered on into a box, and then dump the box into a waiting hive box. If you get the queen in the process, and she likes the hive, the rest of the colony will follow. (The stragglers will find their way into the hive by scent.)

So anyway, back to the problem at hand. Honey bee swarm! No place to put the hive. Ahhhhh. We hadn’t selected an apiary (beehive yard) site yet, so I dragged Robin outside and we talked out a location. We picked a spot in the field by the garden. I then started running around like a crazy person, trying to quickly build a hive stand using some concrete pier blocks and scrap treated 4×4 we had on hand, and leveling the stand with cedar shims and tacking it together with a few sinker nails.

We carried the hive base, box, frames, and feeder outside and set them up with an impromptu lid.

We were all ready to capture the swarm, but at this point a little thing called “my day job” got in the way. My lunch hour was over, and I had already taken too many days off because of the flu to take off another afternoon for bees. So, I checked on the bees one more time (still quietly massing on the tree limb) and went inside. A few hours to a few days right? We have lots of time.

Wrong. An hour later Robin went outside to check on the swarm, and they were again buzzing and flying about wildly. Suddenly, the whole swarm lifted up off the limb and began moving as a cloud about 8 feet off the ground. She chased it across our field into the hazelnut thicket, whereupon she lost track of it.

Darn bees! Where’s the indecisive bees when you need them? Two hours? Really? Did you have to make a decision so quickly? Going for some kind of record are we? Never read the book? Could you guys not have at least waited until evening, so I could put you in a box? It would have been a great home, I promise!!

So, that’s the story. A honey bee swarm literally landed in our backyard, but flew off before we could capture them. Robin and I retraced their path later in the evening, and assuming they flew in a straight line we think it’s unlikely they stayed on our property or the next. More likely they crossed the road, as the neighbors across the way have old orchards and some dead fir trees that probably have lots of large cavities for nesting sites. Here’s hoping they picked a good home. The only thing worse than them flying off is if they were promptly killed by some idiot with a can of bug spray.

Darn bees!