Monthly Archives: May 2011

Presentation on the weekend & the birds return

Posted on by
1

We’re well into spring now, with the rain this week! So far I’ve planted carrots,  beans, potatoes, three types of swiss chard, five types of peas, four types of specialty beets and two types of spinach. I’m excited to see what the beets look like when they’re beautifully bunched together. I planted most things last week and then we were all sitting waiting for some moisture.

A big thanks to the folks who came out and helped plant potatoes! It would have taken ages if I were out there on my own.

Yesterday I planted a cover crop of buckwheat, wheat and rye. The rye should keep the weeds suppressed (and hopefully will not become a weed itself), as should the wheat. The buckwheat will add lots of organic matter to the soil when I till it in. I’m also hoping it will be flowering at a time when not many other plants are flowering (mid-late July) so I’ll be able to get some buckwheat honey.

Other recent news: I now have five new bee hives! If all continues to go well I should have plenty of honey for the Terwillegar market this summer.

And there are more birds arriving by the day. So far there is a pair of American Kestrels setting up a summer home in an old woodpecker nest in a dead poplar tree. Some people might dislike standing dead trees, but if it means I get a first hand look at a breeding pair of kestrels out of my cabin’s loft window I’m all for them.

There is also a gang of yellow-bellied sapsuckers claiming the yard as their territory. One male drums all morning on an old chimney pipe (he’s the loudest) and the other drums on the powerpole twenty feet away. They’ve taken turns chasing at least one female, who mews like a sick cat. Between them and all the other birds, the yard is a pretty exciting place to be these days.

The only unwelcome visitors are the mice! I think it was an ideal winter for mice, what with all the snow, and there are more mice out there than I could have imagined possible. One ate all but two of my melons yesterday. Yes, I was growing melons. They were happy little plants but a mouse came along and ate off all their leaves so now they’re just stubs sticking out of the potting soil. I’ll keep the two or three I still have and maybe I’ll start more but probably not because it’s getting a bit late for melons.

The biggest (most intimidating?) news for this week is that I’ll be giving a talk for the South Edmonton Vegetarian & Gardening Club on the weekend about the contents of the Canadian organic standards and what we could ask farmers at farmers markets about how they grow their food. I’m doing it without powerpoint, in a workshop style format, which is a new style of presenting for me so I hope it goes okay!

If you’re planning on coming, please think about what prompts you to buy food from farmer’s markets. Between all of us, I’m sure there are a million reasons, which we will be brainstorming at the beginning of the talk/workshop. You can find more info here.


The Dead Hive Mystery, Part 2.

Posted on by
2

A few weeks ago I posted that my favorite hive, the one that made lots of honey last year, had died over the winter. At the time I didn’t have a good idea of what happened. My best guess was that the bees got dysentry, possibly from eating fermented sugar syrup. I think I’ve now come up with a better guess of what happened, thanks to the help of a couple of bee folks who know way more than I do.

Apparently fermeneted sugar syrup was probably not the problem because that would have made them sick right away, when they initially digested the syrup while filling the combs for the winter. Judging by how little food they ate from the combs, they probably died in November, so they made it past any bad syrup I may have fed them.

There is another salient observation about the hive: the cluster was split into two groups, one on the left side of the top box and another on the right side of the lower box. Apparently this is fairly unusual and indicative of a problem with the queen.

The folks-who-know-more-than-me wouldn’t even guess at what killed the colony until I mentioned the hive had been superceding in the fall. Sometimes a hive isn’t happy with their queen. When this happens, they will start rearing another queen, which is called superceding. This doesn’t always work and if the old queen is dying when the supercedure fails, the colony can end up without a queen. Without her pheremones to keep all the bees together and organized, the hive will die over the winter. I’ve been told those two pieces of information- the attempted supercedure in the fall and the split cluster in the hive- indicate there’s a pretty good chance the colony died because it was queenless.

Although sad, it’s good to know the colony probably didn’t die from a disease that I mis-managed. If I had more experience I may have noticed they were queenless going into winter but who knows. And I still don’t know for sure that’s what happened but it’s the best guess I have right now.

For those who are interested, the other hive is still doing really well. They’ve been bringing in lots of pollen so everything looks great.

And in a couple weeks I will be welcoming five new hives to the Beanstalk! I’ll post about their arrival when the time comes. I’ll have six or seven hives this summer, which probably won’t be enough to provide everyone who would like honey with some, but with my level of experience I’m cautious about getting much more than that.