Monday 4 November 2013

Well Seasoned.

Joel, Anna and I met up with some other families at the Cambridge botanic Gardens recently.  We had been trying to time it right - the autumn colour has been late arriving this year, and with high winds, we ran the risk of there being no leaves at all.  And then there was the rain.....

But we picked the one perfect day. Azure blue sky, golden slanting sunshine and a wonderful setting.
Sadly, I realized there were no batteries in my camera when I arrived, but I caught a few nice impressions with the old phone.
Here are a few of the highlights:







Wednesday 30 October 2013

The Perils of British Bathrooms

Our life in Landbeach has been an eventful experience in home ownership.
Most of TAT's readers will be aware of the ongoing and multivarious sagas relating to things that go wrong with this house.
We are grateful to report that none of this has pertained to the significant fabric or construction of the house itself. But just about everything else has ....well....given us a wealth of learning opportunities, shall we say.

And none more than the bathrooms.
Showers that leak - but we have never found the source, baths that leak for months and only let you know when the wall is wet in the room next door....tiles that fall off the wall, shower thermostats that are welded to the cold setting....loos that don't flush, or constantly slightly flush.
Oh, and the times we could have sung 'Oh dear, what can the matter be? One of our guests is stuck in the lavatory....' (Only once had to get the local handyman to get them out though.....)

Then there is the decor aspect - those lovely coloured bathroom suits that were so popular in the 70s....candy pink, avocado green, Mother-in-Law beige, and then our own dearly beloved aquamarine.

But now, prepare yourself for the most fearsome bathroom peril of them all.....     
that autumnal nightmare....          
            The Spider in the Bath


yes, that is a standard sized penny....


Sadly this one ruined the poetic nature of such a peril by being in the sink instead.They can climb drains, but they can't scale shiny porcelain bowls.

I am too much of a nature lover to flush her down the plug hole; besides, she would have blocked the drain. So, here is the patent bug-eyed bath spider removal technique:
'Here we go again...'
The nature experts say that spiders, like mice, just turn right around once they've been ejected, and find their way back into the house. Who knows how many times I've already chucked this one out? If it is the same one, she's eating well, as she gets bigger every time!



Monday 28 October 2013

Apple Harvest

It has been an amazing Summer this year. With all the rain from last year making the foliage lush, and days of uninterrupted sunshine in late June and all of July, the apple harvest has been phenominal.
 Since we moved here two years ago, we have been systematically but conservatively pruning the overgrown fruit trees at the end of our very long garden.  We were not at all confident of the outcome....possibly reflected in the lone apple I put on this number plaque earlier in the year (Made at a potter friend's house)

The beehive is romanticised....perhaps one day Mark will make one for me like that.
However, our poor elderly Bramley trees were no exception to the national bounty.  Anna, Mark and I had a fun two hours picking them all.

Anna in her favourite habitat - up a tree.  I still need to prune for height, having done the untangling and removal of dead stuff the past two years.  I mean on the tree, of course....not Anna.

Mark kept a running total of weight - but we've forgotten what it all came to probably about 60lbs though.
 Sooty had fun pretending to be an apple. As Anna and Mark picked I chose the best ones to wrap up in newspaper for storage. I kept packing them around Sooty till he finally got the hint....
     
I blend in rather well, don't you think?

Even the little £3 Aldi Cox's Orange Pippin tree that I have had stuffed in a tomato pot for 3 years produced its first fruit - 18 lovely apples. And most delicious they were too.
Size was a little.....variable.
This year we need to hack back some of the overgrown shrubs around the 'Orchard' at the end to allow more light in to the trees.  I am hopeful that even the Victoria Plum will survive my ministrations and produce well next year - we had a few handfuls of scrumptious plams despite the tree looking most unhappy after a good haircut last autumn.

Friday 25 October 2013

Pork Pate - Vegetarians Look Away Now!

I've often said that if I really knew what went into pate it wouldn't eat it.
Well, now I have made it from first principles and its yummy.
We picked up our half a happy pig from Hempsal's Farm last week. This time I was spared no realities - we got the lot. Head, bones (extracted), feet.....
The rest of the family stayed totally clear of the kitchen while all this was going on.....
And here is why:

Liver, trotters and half a head: the cheek is the best meat...though not much of it.
What to do with half a pig's head?

I reasearched a little here and there....considered boiling the head as for brawn (Head cheese to US readers - sounds a bit like toe cheese to me....) Somehow, having a head in the pot and watching the gums recede as it boiled did not appeal. Settled on using the meat for a variant on Delia Smith's Coarse Country Pate.


The first job was to remove the meat from its various hiding places.
So I whipped out my nice sharp Sabatier and investigated. I left the brain alone - it was a lot smaller than I expected.
The teeth could have done with better brushing and flossing - another reason to avoid boiling the whole head.

I did boil the trotters because the meat was encapsulated in very tough connective tissue. Also, it made AMAZING stock.  Would you believe that from 6 trotters (Not bad when I had only bought for only half a pig....) this was all the meat I could find:

Apparently trotter meat is delicious.
I had about 600g of liver, a few micrograms of trotter meat (!), about 400g head meat, so I added 400g unsmoked streaky bacon and a chunk of unspecified weight from the belly.
Blend it all up with 3 cloves of garlic, 20 juniper berries crushed, 20 black pepper corns crushed, and a dollop of trotter stock.
I pressed it into a loaf pan and some ramekins and baked them in a bain marie at low heat for 1.5 hours.
Out of the oven, covered with foil, and weighted down with whatever I had to hand that was heavy....tomato cans, pestle and mortar, bookstand etc.

And here is the result:
I have sliced this up and frozen it now.
One member of the family couldn't wait to try the pate, so he jumped on the counter when no one was looking, knocked the weight off one of the ramekins, clawed back the foil and helped himself. I hope he had indigestion from all that pate - his breath was certainly rather garlicky, hence we identified the culprit after the event.
Who me?

We agree with him though - it was quite delicious on crusty bread with a cornichon.  Garlic breath all round.

Wednesday 2 October 2013

Winter feeding

The gurus said it was time to feed bees; especially new colonies that have not had long to build up their own stores for the winter.
So, I dutifully followed instructions, and fed them.

I was somewhat amazed to think that the jerry can of 'Invert sugar' syrup I had bought would all fit into one hive, but that's what them-in-the-know had said, so off I went to do the deed.
14 litre jerry can of syrup.

There are winter syrup feeders available to buy at vast expense (Can't use the type I had used during the summer because this syrup is too thick and sticky for the bees to suck through the tiny mesh of the bucket feeder.) But the experts said they always used 4 standard British rectangular plastic ice cream tubs placed inside an empty super directly on the brood frames - no queen excluder.

SO, I took four nice blue Walls ice cream tubs and filled them each with syrup.
The experts also said that bees drown if they have nothing to stand on, and so to place a nice wad of straw to float on each tub of syrup.  Straw floats......check!
Here are the feed tubs full of syrup ready to be placed in the hive.
Those self same experts said it would only take 2 to 3 days for the bees to suck that lot up and need the rest of the can pouring in to top them up, so off I trotted a few days later but.....HORROR!
I found each tub with half the syrup still in place and a crust of drowned sticky bees on each one!

Sorry, no photos- things got a little too sticky for camera.
My straw wads were not big enough. The bees had landed on them, and with the weight of them all, they had sunk!  I must have lost 100 to 200 bees. Not too awful in a hive of thousands, but it was a sorry sight.

I scraped them all off, refilled the tubs and this time, shoved enough straw in that it could not be flattened - more like a straw scaffold than a float.
Straw scaffold - mostly dead and dried cow parsley stalks this time. No namby pamby dried grass!
Another check in 4 days, and the syrup was all gone. The straw and tubs were not even sticky! And there were no drowned beese. just a bunch of very full frames underneath.

So, back to business. Normally, it wouold be a question of closing the hive up and leaving it there for the winter, but we have an added variable: ivy. Lots and lots of ivy. Bees love the stuff, and it has only just begun to flower. My babies are flying back and forth with loaded paniers of pollen, and stomachs full of nectar.
With the brood box full of syrup for the winter, time to add my super again, in the hope of a late season harvest of ivy honey.
I don't feel bad about fobbing bees off with syrup while I extract the good stuff. Ivy honey sets like rock after a few weeks, and the bees can't use it during the winter anyway - at least not unless the weather is good enough to allow them to fly out for water regularly.
Guess what the next bee post will be about????

Sunday 29 September 2013

Liquid Gold

I have honey!
Only 2.5 jars of it, but it is the best tasting honey ever - not that I am biased.
I am a month late posting this, and much has happened since our exciting and sticky extraction experience, but getting the goods is the most fun part, so the rest can wait a while.
The finished product - beautiful dark and delicious.

 Note the jar to the left says 'Nectar'?
I learned on the course that uncapped honey can't be called honey. It has to be called nectar, because the bees will only put a wax cap over it if it has evapourated enough water from the cells to be of a concentration that will not allow the honey to ferment. The second of the two batches of frames we extracted was mostly uncapped, but it kept beautifully all the same and tasted like honey to me!
I say it kept - of course we ate it within 3 weeks, so that wasn't much of a test, was it?


Close up of the 1/2 jar, which contained a chunk of comb for reasons that will become apparent shortly...   



here's how it happened:

In mid-august I attended a top up class where the experts imparted their know-how on helping a new colony to survive its first winter.  Very informative it was too.
Plan was: remove any honey-containing 'supers' then treat the bees for Varroa mite immediately. This means two sets of two week treatments, so the hive is a no go area for that month, any honey collected during that time can't be eaten by humans.

To my utter delight, there were four frames nearly full of honey/nectar, two of them mostly capped, two partly capped.

First job is to remove the 'cappings'; a thin layer of wax that the bees cover each cell with once it has reached the correct concentration of sugars. I used a bread knife. Most of this frame is uncapped, but you have to remove the top part of the cells anyway to couteract capillary action. Sorry, getting a little technical here...


Once uncapped we attached two frames at a time to Mark's rapidly engineered home made extractor.
This is effectively a slow spin centrifuge comprising a large polythene bucket, a long threaded steel rod, a couple of metal plates, some screws and....a drill and an index finger (!) to make the motor!!

All went well to begin with, the honey began to splatter against the sides of the bucket. We were amazed at how much there was in there, but there was still so much left in the comb. So Mark decided to press the trigger a little harder, and oops! a slight wobble of the hand, with the result as below:
Splat! The big holes in the honey comb and the splattered wax on the sides are not meant to be there!
 
Much hilarity ensued. We decided to cut our losses - literally - by cutting out the remaining comb and (ahem, horror on faces of food hygenists...) I squeezed the honey out of the bits that had flown out during extraction.
It was a very sticky experience. I washed the floor and counter tops (And a few cupboard faces) down twice afterwards, but the cat still had honey on his tail the next morning!

Next year I will borrow a commercial honey extractor for the 22 frames that I hope to have filled. This year, it was just so much fun to do it ourselves!




Sunday 21 July 2013

First Hive Inspection Report

At last! I have been treated to a glimpse into inner the world of my bees!


 Serious achievement: lighting my smoker all by myself!! 
Starting with a little soft cardboard from an egg box...
Add some bone dry rotted wood 

Pack it in nice and tighly and flip on the lid.
puff the bellows a few times to keep it all alight, and it was ready to go.




 A little smoke in the hive entrance tells the bees "There may be a fire nearby - gorge yourself on nectar in case we have to evacuate."
Once full of honey, the bees are conditioned not to sting:  stinging means death to a bee. Death for a full bee means a stomach full of honey lost for the colony. If you look at the pics below, you'll see a number of bees with their heads shoved in a cell - they are sucking up as much nectar as they can at that moment. 


The lid is off - I had a few lumps of rogue comb to remove from the tops of the frames, then...


lift out a frame to see what is going on. Just a few bees on there huh?
As I suspected, my resident ladies have been extremely busy.
In just two weeks they had pulled out the wax to make comb on about 80% of the brood frames, and the queen had clearly been hard at work laying - I had the full compliment of brood:  eggs, larvae in different stages of growth - all pearly white and curled up in their snug little cells - and capped larvae, pupating into bees behind a wax door.
All good healthy signs to see.

You need good eye sight for this, but if you look in the cells to the right of the bottom two bees, there are tiny little white commas. They look a bit like shine marks, but they are eggs. The amber liquid is stored nectar. The bees wait until most of the water evaporates from it before capping it. Only then is it honey.


At least 5 frames had brood laid in them, all showing a lovely classic pattern - an oval of eggs/larvae/capped larvae in the middle, pollen in an arc above that, and nectar or capped honey in the top corners.
Another good sign is that all the capped larval cells were for worker bees. No drones larvae means no one is planning on a mating flight, which means the colony is not planning to swarm again....phew.
The palest coloured open cells contain juicy fat larvae. The wax capped cells have pupating bees in them. All workers - nice flat wax caps.

Several frames at either end of the brood box were being drawn out and filled all over with nectar for food stores.
There were two frames at one end that had not been touched.  Bees tend to lay symmetrically starting in the middle of a brood box and working out evenly on each side.  I'll keep an eye on that. I might have to move my empty frames to be included in the symmetrical pattern so that they don't become wasted space.

Joy of joys! I saw the her majesty herself, calmly wondering around on a frame, attended by some workers, with plenty of tiny freshly laid eggs in evidence.
The queen is hard to spot for a beginner, so I was thrilled to see her. She is about 1/4 inch longer in the abdomen than the workers.
So, the bees are healthy and busy.
My biggest concern is to make sure there is plenty of space. Since they came as a swarm, they would not think twice to swarm again if I let them get cramped.
A quick reference back to my bee books and notes from my classes confirmed my hunch - time to get my first super in place. Perhaps having more space to store only honey will free up some of the brood frames for the queen to lay in.

Saturday 6 July 2013

The Bees Knees!

The latest news from the hive:  my bees have been coming home with loaded knees!
They are bringing in pollen - which is new - meaning that they are storing up food for larvae.
And THAT means my queen bee is laying eggs.....all is going as it should.
Hooray!
See the yellow bulges on the side of the bee entering the hive?  That's pollen. Mark was brave enough to take this picture - not an easy thing to do, as they buzz in and out remarkably fast!  He's getting the bee bug too...

Pollen can come in a huge number of different colours and shades. If the bees store enough of it, you can end up with honey comb that looks like a mosaic of hexagonal colours! (Blue, black, red, brown, yellow, green, orange....)

I am itching (not with hives) to open up the brood box and see what they are up to, but I have to wait at least until next Wednesday when they will have had two weeks to get established.   I'll just have to be satisfied with taking a quick peak in through a hole in the crown board when I change the feed bucket.  There was a mass of bees crawling all over the place last time I peaked....and the bees had eaten at least 3lbs of sugar after one week.

The other positive news is that the weather has improved vastly, so the bees are getting out and about a good deal to forage.

Will report further on Wednesday......

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Contemplating the stars

Warning, Mummy brag heading your way:
I set Joel a task this morning.
I had been looking at diagrams of star lifecycles to show the kids, but they all seemed to be a little different from each other depending on which website or book I looked at. I suspect some were out of date, others simplified, or being used to demonstrate one particular aspect of the process.
Either way, as usual, I was not satisfied with anyone else's answer, so I decided to make my own.
Except Joel knows far more than me about such things, so I delegated the job.

I was MOST impressed with the resulting diagram he came up with, using a simple graphics package.
Here it is.
Click on image to get a bigger readable version.

Monday 1 July 2013

Swarm again!

How exciting - I got to do it all over again!
I had a phone call from a friend at a local park to say "There are bees on the swing frame, are you interested?"  It just so happened that I had a friend who was, but since he couldn't get there in a hurry, I headed off to stand guard and be on hand to led a hand at redirecting bees.

This lot could not be snipped and pruned into their box - the park might not have approved of us chopping up the swing frame....but just look how they had wrapped around it!
the other side was covered too - lovely stripey orange bees again.
This time was not quite so text-bookish!  We tried to sweep them into a box using goose wings, and caught the main dangly bit at the bottom, but at least half the swarm flew off.

We placed the box on the ground with a pale sheet next to it.  A few bees were clustered on the outside of the box,doing their "Nasonov" fanning (the bottoms up thing I mentioned in the last post), which led us to believe that the queen was inside.

As time passed, some bees landed on the sheet, others re-clustered on the swing frame.  Then, the bees on the sheet made a nice straight line, and firmly marched their way onto the box.
So, we opened the lid a crack, and in they all went!  I was totally fascinated to watch them....and standing around waiting for them to do it themselves was much more fun than trying to herd bees.  They are worse than cats!

Periodically we swept the cluster on the frame off, and gradually they would land on the sheet and do the same thing.  Clever little critters that they are, nearly all of them ended up in the box!
We wrapped the sheet around, and as far as I know they are now safely in my friend's hive.

Thursday 27 June 2013

Bees move in!!

Wednesday began as an ordinary day.

Then there was a phone call at 4pm.  A swarm of honey bees had landed in a garden in Impington, 4 miles away and the swarm warden could meet me there at 8pm.  4 whole hours!!!!  I was like a cat on a tin roof!  Amazingly I did not chop any fingers off while cooking, and at 7-50pm Mark grabbed his camera, I donned my white telly tubby suit, and off we set.



The first time bee keeper in pristine white suit!
We arrived, met the swarm warden (the volunteer who take calls from distressed villagers saying "Help! There's a swarm of bees in my garden"), and wondered down the road to the find the swarm.
Does my bum look big in this? (comments with answers to this will be censored...)
And there it was. A huge, beautiful swarm clustered around some branches of a privet bush.
They did not look like the usual north European bees, which have black bodies. They are classic stripey orange and black bees - classic, but not like any I've have come across so far. I wonder what their story is?
Mark thought they looked a bit like a giant Tiger's Eye rock in a tree.

First we had to prune away a little of the greenery, then our swarm lady got on the ladder with the secateurs while I stood underneath with my ready prepared (ir. holes blocked up!) cardboard box. Very high tech...
Another bizarre and new experience in the Strivens household...
Then, plop, in the fell! They were quite a weight.  By the time we had snipped all four branches and dropped the clusters of bees in, a few of them had flown off the swarm, so it was time to quickly close the lid...
wrap it up in a sheet, and put it in the car... (note seat belt - Mark was worried about having a bee box on the head in case of an emergency stop!)
This boxful with the main swarm in it was humming gently. Ahhhh.
Time to wait a while for the AWOL bees to re-cluster in their original position, and try to catch them in a second box.  A few still got away, but we were confident that we had the queen in the main box, so into the car with the second box, and a slightly nervous Mark (not in a bee suit) drove us home on the smoothest drive he has ever done in his life!
The second box, with bees in a cluster and no queen, were a good deal less happy than the first - they BUZZED very loud all the way home.  BBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Not a very Royal way for a queen to be welcomed to her  new Palace
 Box one opened and unceremoniously dumped into the empty brood box. Shake shake bash. A few left on the sides, but most went in.  

On a nice warm sunny evening, the fun way to do this is to put the sheet on the ground and place a ramp up to the hive entrance. Put the swarm on the sheet and watch them march up the ramp (Bees ALWAYS walk upwards, never down) and into the hive. It was too late and too cold for that on Wednesday.

Note the expensive equipment: rubber washing up gloves!
Next it was time to remove the privet branches and shake of the hangers-on. Well, most of them.
All this time I am having to watch that I don't accidentally shake the queen onto the ground. She is impossible to see in the swarm....

In goes box two. They calmed down quickly once they were back with the rest.

Gently and slowly placing in the wax starter frames, avoiding squashing the bees
A lovely site - worker bees at the entrance with their backsides in the air! They are fanning their wings rapidly to send off a pheromone which tells the other bees "Here is a good place for a nest, come on in!"
A few bees did not want to leave me - I am not sure whether they were thinking I was a threat or a flower petal. 
I wasn't stung once throughout the whole episode. Unfortunately, after it was all over, Mark did get stung by a couple of adventurers that were stuck to my suit as I walked away from the hive. Another got tangled in my hair, but we brushed it out intact - obviously good tempered little things.

Mission accomplished.  I had a feeder-pail of sugar syrup ready to feed the bees - popped that over a hole in the crown board, super over that and then the lid.  Now I have to leave them alone for a couple of weeks while they pull out the wax starter to make comb, and the queen gets to laying eggs. 

By nightfall, all the stragglers and tail fanners had crept into their new home, and there was a low contented humming coming from the hive.  Utterly delightful. 



Wednesday 26 June 2013

Hive in place ready for occupants!

I am totally behind with my posts.
This should have been in two weeks ago, as since, we have had developments.....but you'll have to wait a day or so to hear about those...

Anyway, see below. It is all quite self explanatory.
Not the pretty white boarded peaked roof type hive, but its functional, and keeps the bees happy.


Just waiting for occupants...

Friday 14 June 2013

Saying goobye again....

Last weekend we had to face another emotionally traumatic event: saying goobye to some very very good friends.  We have known them over two years and they have now returned

Anna wrote a poem to try to express how it made her feel. I thought it was rather good and spot on.
Here it is. Read in conversational voice:

Goodbyes
by Anna Strivens

Goodbyes are the worst thing in the world,
Or at least that's how I feel.
They make you unhappy or angry or sad,
And it can take ages for your heart to heal.
It's as if tears refuse to show themselves,
And you don't feel it at the time;
The horrid empty feeling
That you later feel inside.
Parting with friends is the hardest to do,
Especially those you know well,
How much you will miss them; I'm afraid there are
No strong enough words to tell.
It's as though part of you is missing,
A part of your life suddenly gone,
And although at that moment you don't realise
Exactly how you feel your life has gone wrong.
Eventually you start to feel the sadness
As if it had been delayed.
As if you almost didn't want to believe that
Your friends had to leave that day.
When it comes to goodbyes,
I always find myself stuck.
But I can tell you honestly...
Goodbyes truly suck.

Tuesday 21 May 2013

And Even More Nettled...

My garden is full of nettles, but not all the stinging variety.
Here are some pics of a few of the huge variety of ornamental and "Dead" nettles scattered liberally around.
The bees love them, They fill spaces where little else would grow and cover bare earth to give a luscious feel even to the broken wall of my compost heap!

Just at their peak of flowers, which, for a humble nettle look remarkably exotic - almost orchid like.

These are already past best, but have provided a symphony of buzzing bumble and honey bees

This one is rather easy to confuse with the stinging variety. I'm not sure it would make such good soup! It gives a lovely understated highlight of white among the colours elsewhere.