Honey Dot Comb

Should the bees move to town?

2012-01-08T15:37:00.001-05:00

There's an argument out there that bees are, in today's world, better off in urban areas than they are in the countryside.

Supporters merely point to what Big Agriculture has done to the agricultural landscape:-- acres of just one or two crops (called monoculture) that don't offer the bees very much-- pesticides and herbicides

One of the people who makes that argument is Bryon Waibel, who runs the Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper store in San Francisco -- a store, he says, is the only urban beekeeping store in the world. A video of Waibel talking about his store, and a longer story about it, has been produced by Fair Companies and is shown below.)

"It would not surprise me at all if the future of beekeeping itself is in urban beekeeping," Waibel said.

There is some logic to this argument, particularly when you think about how diverse urban and particularly suburban areas are in terms of flowers and other plants. There would be plenty for an enterprising bee to find in a well-kept neighborhood.

But there are problems as well, of course.

Pollution is the first thing that springs to mind.Another problem is acceptance. Many people do not understand bees and think they should be subjected to a can of Raid just like other insects.

Still, Waibel's point about urbanites is a good one.

People in the city could get really interested in bees and become evangelists for them. A hive in a neighborhood might be just the tool to get people to see that having some bees around wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

So, if bees are going to give up the country life and move to town, they have their work cut out for them. But, in the end, it might pay off for everyone.

My grandfather and the bees

2012-01-04T18:06:00.000-05:00

In the early 1960s, a few years before he died in 1965, my grandfather -- the Rev. Irl Thomas Stovall -- sat down and wrote about what he remember as a child growing up in rural Missouri and as a young preacher and farmer in Kentucky and elsewhere. Here's part of what he wrote:

I enjoyed hunting wild honey bees in the Missouri timber. I found a dozen or more bee trees. Some were rich and others had no honey. I would find the trees and father would robthem. There was not much objection tocutting a tree on anyone's property as timber was not very valuable. I remember the richest tree I found. It was about two miles from home. We loaded into the wagon an axe, a crosscutsaw, several pans and buckets and drove near the tree. We sawed the tree down and Father with beehat on, and with some smoke, got out about fifty pounds of honey.

A neighbor boy and I found some bees watering at the river bank. We coursed them to two large trees in theriver bottom. This nearly got us intotrouble. The trees were a large, tallsycamore and a large tall water oak. Thelatter was very valuable for making boards. Soon we sawed them down and did not find enough honey in both of themfor one person to eat. A few days laterthe neighbor who owned the trees said he ought to make us work up the oak intoboards. There the matter ended.

The Rev. I.T. Stovall as a young man

My grandfather was born in 1890, so the time when this incident occurred was probably between 1900 and 1910.

There are not many details here, but he does mention his father using a "bee hat" and smoke to help get to the bee's honey. I don't not know if this family actually kept bees or not. They very well might have since they were farmers and did anything they could to live off the land.

But wild bees were probably not very hard to find, and to find a stash with 50 pounds of honey must have been a pretty good day's haul. Wild bees, unfortunately, are no long plentiful enough for a young boy to enjoy hunting them.

I knew my grandfather well and remember him vividly. I was a teenager when he died.

Like just about everyone else I know, I wish my parents and grandparents were still around. There are so many things I would like to ask them about what it was like when they were young. Only now am I smart enough to know the good questions. Like, "What was it like to hunt for wild bees?"

Happy birthday, Rev. L.

2011-12-22T17:25:00.006-05:00

As Christmas closes in on us, beekeepers have another reason to note December 25. It is the birthday of Rev. Lorenzo L. Langstroth.

The inventor of the Langstroth beehive, the one that most of us use, was born on Dec. 25, 1810, in Philadelphia, Penn. From his earliest days, he took an interest in insects of all kinds, but interest lay dormant as he obtained his college education at Yale. After his graduation, he was a math tutor there for a couple of years and then became an ordained minister in the Congregationalist Church. His first pastorates were in Massachusetts. There he married Anne Tucker, and they had three children.

In 1848 he moved back to Philadelphia to become a principal of a young ladies' school, and there his interest in insects -- and specifically in bees -- revived.

Langstroth was meticulous and exacting in his pursuit. He read all of the latest writings on beekeeping, most of which were coming from Europe. The concept of bee space was well known there (Langstroth is often erroneously credited with having discovered it), but hives were not constructed to take full advantage of it. Langstroth did come up with the term "bee space" and set about re-thinking the design of the hive so that beekeepers could inspect the hive and extract the honey with, in his words, "enraging the bees."

In Europe, most hives were opened from the side. Langstroth combined the concept of bee space in a hive that could be opened from the top. In that way, the frames could be pried loose one at a time and taken out of the hive. This allowed the beekeeper to more easily manage the hive -- to check for problems, the prevent swarming, to replace a queen, and most of all, to extract honey. Langstroth knew what all of us beekeepers have come to know: bees spend most of their energy making comb. If the comb and be preserved and re-used, the amount of honey the bees will produce increases.

Langstroth applied for a patent for his hives in 1852. His description of the Langstroth hive makes fascinating reading.

But Langstroth never made any money off his invention. Instead, he became involved in a number of lawsuits trying to defend his patent from predators. His invention was quickly adopted by many beekeepers, and because North America is an ideal place for honeybees, the industry of beekeeping and producing honey quickly expanded.

Langstroth set down his observations about beekeeping in an 1853 book now known as The Hive and the Honey-Bee.

My wife recently gave me a copy of this book (which is still in print after more than 150 years) for our anniversary, and I was astonished by what I found when I sat down and started reading it. It is written in simple, straightforward language and so full of practical, modern advice that it is quickly becoming my favorite beekeeping book.

In the coming weeks, I plan to write some more about what I am finding out by reading Langstroth.

The reverend moved to Oxford, Ohio in 1858 and continued keeping bees. He became an advocate of using Italian bees, rather than the more popular European bees because of their productivity. He and his son made a profitable business out of selling Italian queens.

Langstroth lived on 10 acres in Oxford and had much of it planted with Linden and apple trees. He also sowed buckwheat and clover and filled his formal garden with bee-friendly flowers. He lived in Oxford for nearly 20 years before moving to Dayton to live with his daughter. He died in1895 on a Sunday morning when he was about to deliver a sermon at the Wayne Avenue Presbyterian Church in Dayton.

Varroa should be a constant in the beekeeper's plans

2011-05-03T15:30:00.006-04:00

Varroa remains the most persistent and widespread threats to bees and bee colonies. No beekeeper in the world – except maybe in Australia where varroa has not yet invaded – can ignore this threat.

But knowing what to do about varroa is not easy. There are no standard procedures or treatments to rid a hive of varroa. Most beekeepers are coming to the conclusion that varroa must be managed rather than eradicated. They must also consider varroa with everything they do with their hives.

So, what can you do?

Experts say finding the most varroa-resistant types of bees is the first step to keeping a healthy hive. Re-queening with a Russian queen or some other variety that shows some tolerance of varroa is a procedure that is recommended.

Another procedure is monitoring to see if varroa mites are becoming a problem for the hive. There are several ways of doing this, and they are described in detail in many beekeeping manuals. One of the easiest is the use of a sticky board and counting the varroa mites you catch. This should be done consistently so you can compare what you find to previous inspections.

The treatment methods for varroa confront beekeepers with a dizzying array of choices. Beekeepers should decide what treatments they are comfortable with and which ones they can perform on a regular basis.

Treatments include:

• drone brood removal

• dusting with powdered sugar

• screened bottom boards

• thymol-based products before or after the honey flow

• regular replacement of old comb

• soft chemical treatments

• working with other beekeepers in your area to keep varroa infestation down

• continual monitoring for varroa

Many beekepers use a combination of these procedures and treatments to ward off varroa. A few years ago, we depended soley on chemical treatments but have found that varroa mites can grow resistant to most chemicals that are used year after year.

The persistence of varroa is a discouraging problem for beekeepers. Despite their best efforts sometimes, varroa can weaken or destroy a colony that only a few weeks before seemed strong.

Still, beekeepers must continue in their anti-varroa efforts. We have little choice but to try to find ways to keep this pest in check.

They should also remember that the efforts of many scientists and apiculturists are devoted to helping them in this regard. These folks are working to develop organic treatments and varroa tolerant strains and are making significant progress. Beekeepers would do well to stay informed about these efforts.

A week of weather and planting

2011-05-01T06:06:00.003-04:00

Weather is always important, but this week it has been overwhelming.

The storms on Monday and Wednesday with their rain, wind and hail did much damage around East Tennessee. Fortunately, the farm was spared most of this. We had hail on Wednesday and then lost power for 24 hours. But things in the garden were big enough to be too affect by any of these things.

Our situation, of course, pales in comparison to that of our former hometown of Tusclaoosa, where the pictures and video have been surreal. Tornadoes are nature's most powerful concentrated form, and the one that swept through Tuscaloosa and central Alabama was nature at its worst.

Our many friends in Tuscaloosa are, for the most part, in good shape, suffering only the inconvenience of power outages and the like. Still, everyone in that city is facing massive disruption and clean-up efforts that will take a very long time. Our hearts go out to them.

Planting

The garden is finally in.

While there are spots here and there that need to be filled in, all of the rows have been planted. We put in white corn, peppers, tomatoes and sunflowers yesterday to complete the set. Here's how things line up:

Row 6 (east to west): Yukon Gold; mixture
Row 7: Red Gold; Russian banana (fingerlings)
Row 8: Russian bananas
Row 9: French fingerlings
Row 10: Peanut fingerlings
Row 11: Onions
Row 12: Okra
Row 13: Peppers; sunflowers; pumpkins
Row 14: Tomatoes (Early Girl, German Queen, Sweet 100s); cucumbers
Row 15: White corn
Row 16: White corn
Row 17: Snow Peas
Row 18: Beans | Peas
Row 19: Beans | Peas
Row 20: Yellow corn
Row 21: Yellow corn
Row 22: Yellow corn
Row 23: Yellow corn
Row 24: Peanuts

The corn is coming up nicely, and the potatoes are beginning stand up after the battering by the hail. Weeding is the next order of business.

Weeding is always the next order of business.

Bees

We acquired one more beehive yesterday. It was a nuc hive I purchased from a friend in the beekeepers association. Peter wants to give Vera a third hive for her birthday, and I said I would try to put one together for her. So this is it.

I think John and I will be up for a beehive inspection today.

A weekend of planting, rain and bees

2011-04-18T07:45:00.005-04:00

Three days on the farm this weekend netted us more crops in the ground, more rain and more bees.

We put in a row of snow peas just below the other beans peas we had planted last week. Then I skipped a few rows and planted some okra next to the onions, which, along with the potatoes, are beginning to poke their leaves through the ground. The rows of potatoes are becoming distinct -- and so are the weeds. The yellow corn we planted a bit more than a week ago is also coming up. We need to do some tilling/weeding soon.

Here's the garden at present:

Row 6 (east to west): Yukon Gold; mixture
Row 7: Red Gold; Russian banana (fingerlings)
Row 8: Russian bananas
Row 9: French fingerlings
Row 10: Peanut fingerlings
Row 11: Onions
Row 12: Okra
Row 13:
Row 14:
Row 15:
Row 16:
Row 17: Snow Peas
Row 18: Beans | Peas
Row 19: Beans | Peas
Row 20: Yellow corn
Row 21: Yellow corn
Row 22: Yellow corn
Row 23: Yellow corn
Row 24: Peanuts

Rain

It started raining late Friday night and came on hard all night long. By morning, it had quit but had left 2.5 inches in and on the ground. The timing was pretty perfect. Saturday was bright and clear -- too muddy to get into the garden but nice enough to allow other work to be done.

Bees

John and I acquired two complete hives on Saturday night. A member of the association wanted to sell them, and we jumped at the chance to get them. They were in great shape. The guy who had them had been exceptionally meticulous in caring for them and estimated there were 60,000 in each hive.

We placed them up in the barnyard, just beyond the toolshed.

We now have a dozen hives on the place. Lots of bees.

Capturing a swarm

2011-04-14T04:51:00.003-04:00

My friend Doug Hardwick made this rather amazing video while capturing a swarm of bees last week. Doug is holding the camera himself, while doing everything else -- climbing the ladder, holding the bucket, shaking the bees, etc.

The amazing part of the video comes in the middle where the bees are on the ground and marching, in military-like formation, into the hive.

Take a look:

Progress in the garden, then rain

2011-04-13T07:44:00.005-04:00

Progress in the garden. Then rain. A good combination.

The weekend turned pretty beautiful on us, so we were able to set some things out this weekend: corn, peanuts, beans and peas. Plus a couple of early-bearing tomatoes (so they say).

Then it started raining Monday night and didn't stop until Tuesday afternoon.

This morning we awoke to all kinds of new shades of green.

So, here's the garden so far.

Row 6 (east to west): Yukon Gold; mixture
Row 7: Red Gold; Russian banana (fingerlings)
Row 8: Russian bananas
Row 9: French fingerlings
Row 10: Peanut fingerlings
Row 11: Onions
Row 12:
Row 13:
Row 14:
Row 15:
Row 16:
Row 17:
Row 18: Beans | Peas
Row 19: Beans | Peas
Row 20: Yellow corn
Row 21: Yellow corn
Row 22: Yellow corn
Row 23: Yellow corn
Row 24: (a new row, made with plenty of tilling on Sunday) Peanuts

We planted the two tomatoes off the rows at the west end of the garden, just to give them more space. We'll see how they do.

Spud Day on the farm

2011-03-19T11:18:00.003-04:00

The third week in March has grown into Potato Planting Week here on the farm in East Tennessee, and today was unofficially Spud Day. The first of the seed potatoes went into the ground.

(Unfortunately, all we have is the "after" pictures, none "during." The crew does not always take kindly to having a photographer on the scene while work is being done, and I did not want to risk a work stoppage.)

We put in more than 130 pounds of potatoes -- a few more than 80 pounds in the potato garden, east of the vegetable garden which John operates. Then we put in 50 pounds in the first rows of my part of the vegetable garden. For the record, here's how they went in:

Row 6 (east to west): Yukon Gold; mixture
Row 7: Red Gold; Russian banana (fingerlings)
Row 8: Russian bananas
Row 9: French fingerlings
Row 10: Peanut fingerlings

As usual, we ordered our seed potatoes from Roninger's out in Colorado, and our hopes are high. Roninger's has good products and we have been very satisfied with their service.

The weather for planting today was nearly perfect: dry, cloudy and temps in the mid 50s. We will remember this day when we are harvesting in July.

This is actually been a two-day process to get the garden read (and protected) for planting. Cattle from the field next to ours have been getting through the fences, and they do every spring. Unfortunately, the owner of the cattle figures they will be back, no matter where they wander, and doesn't see his job as keeping the cattle in. Consequently, I have to work to the keep the cattle out.

So, yesterday morning starting with my doing some fence mending. It's just one of the things I've learned to do since we have been on the first. I found a couple of spots where the cattle were getting through and had to string some new lines of barbed wire to discourage them.

This will probably not be the last time I have to go through this process.

But for now, the cattle are on the other side of the fence, the potatoes are in the ground, spring is in the air and all seems to be well.

Jim Brown talks about plants that are good for bees

2010-05-11T09:33:00.010-04:00

Herbalist and Blount County Beekeepers Association member Jim Brown talked about a variety of plants that are good for bees at the last meeting of the BCBA on May 9, 2010.

Brown had an extensive list of plants, and I have included short audio clips of five of the plants that he discussed:

Bee balm

"It's a bit of a spreader, and sometimes the leaves will turn a bit of a gray on you. . . . It makes a lot of nice, pretty flowers. It's a mid-summer bloomer."

(1 minute 22 seconds)

Catnip

Bees love it as well as cats, and it repels mosquitos.

(1:25)

Rosemary

Rosemary is one of the more common plants that people grow. Bees like the pretty blue flowers, but it blooms at a variety of times -- sometimes early, sometime late. Rosemary, the legend says, is only suppose to grow in the garden of a righteous person. Rosemary does not grown well inside, so don't bring them in your house.

(2:52)

Thyme

"I've seen a hundred honeybees on a thyme plant over at UT gardens." There are lots of varieties, and thyme is a herb that goes well in just about any recipe. The blooms are tiny, but the bees love them.

(1:30)

Vitex-Chasetree

Vitex is a great bee plant. It blooms late in the summer and into the fall, and the bees are all over it. It has a beautiful blue bloom that looks a little like a lilac. Vitex grows very fast. It is actually a tree, but gardeners can do a lot with it according to how they want it to look in their garden.

(3:12)

Jim and his wife Delores operate the Honey Rock Herb Farm in Louisville.

The beginning of the season

2010-05-04T11:48:00.005-04:00

Well, we are considerably past the beginning of the season, and I am considerably behind in the posts that I wanted to put here, but I will try to catch up.

Here's a bullet-point list of items that I will be posting more about:

A potato garden now exists with some 1,800 row feet of potatoes.
New bees have arrived and new hives have been started.
Topbar hives are beginning to appear around the place. How did that happen? (Much more later.)
House additions and renovations are complete, including a garage that changes the look of the place entirely.
Everything (except the bees) seemed to survive the winter, including the 17 semi-dwarf apple trees that we set out in November.
I am becoming anti-apiary. I'll explain later.
I read most of Gene Logsdon's The Contrary Farmer over the winter and feel well on my way to becoming a contrary farmer.
Tractor-shopping is in my near future.
Corn, beans, cucumbers, potatoes -- all up.
Cardinals are off to an excellent start. Summer should be fun.
Lots of unread books in the stack.

Pictures of a couple of weeks ago are below:

As I said, more later.

Day 1 of beekeepers workshop draws 130 people

2010-02-09T08:36:00.002-05:00

The first day of the Blount County Beekeepers Association drew 130 people, many potentially new beekeepers, to the Blount County Library on Monday night (Feb. 8).

The second and final night of the workshop will be on Tuesday (Feb. 9).

The participants heard presentations about what it's like to be a new beekeeper, how to get started, and what kind of equipment you need to be a beekeeper.

Below are pictures of the event:

These pictures show the first day of the short course for beekeepers presented by the Blount County Beekeepers Association in Maryville, TN, on Feb. 8, 2010.

JPROF.com celebrates 5th anniversary

2009-12-31T07:39:00.001-05:00

JPROF celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

In the past five years the site has grown in size (more than 400), expanded in purpose and reached around the globe to people I never would have touched or heard from.

JPROF was originally conceived (in my small study in Emory, VA, where we were living at the time) as a large, personal filing cabinet for material that I had accumulated during more than 25 years of teaching journalism. The amount of material on the web was expanding exponentially (as it still is), and I also wanted a place to store the things I had found that I might be able to use.

And, because I had several textbooks in print at the time, I wanted a web site that would give users more expanded and up-to-date material.

Since that time, JPROF has also become a forum (particularly through the companion blog http://jprof.blogspot.com for my impressions of what is happpening in the world of journalism and a site for all of the courses that I teach.

Because of JPROF, I have taken on some interesting and exciting projects, particularly this year for Edgenics.com -- something you will hear a great deal about during 2010.

Much has changed in my life during the last five years. I am now on the faculty of the University of Tennesse, having moved from Emory and Henry College in 2006. I am the faculty adviser for the Tennessee Journalist, the students news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, and through it, we have been able to launch a national organization of campus news web sites, the Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN). At UT, we have been able to change our curriculum in an interesting and innovative way, and I have the privilege of being in the midst of those changes.

The field of journalism offers many excellent opportunities for our students, and I am happy to still be a part of it.

Personally, 2009 brought Sally and me a move to the farm where she grew up and a new daughter-in-law. Our video review of the year is now on YouTube.

As ever, I am profoundly grateful for the friends I have made through JPROF and for all of the people who have contacted me over the years because what they have found here.

Now, as is my usual custom on this date and because it is New Year's Eve, I bid you: Party on!

Have a great New Year.

(In case you're interested, you can read what we said about JPROF on each of the previous anniversaries on JPROF's About page.)

Another round in the British beekeepers dustup

2009-12-08T09:11:00.001-05:00

An ongoing dispute among beekeepers in the UK has boiled over again.

Phil Chandler, an advocate of topbar hives and what he calls a more natural form of beekeeping, has been at odds with the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) for a number of reasons, most recently because of what he terms a "secret" deal between the BBKA and medications companies Bayer and Syngenta.

Now the association has struck back with an editorial by the former BBKA president which has taken Chandler to task for what he calls a churlish email that "condemned Syngenta... for announcing a major investment in research into the declining population of honeybees. It is better that Syngenta does not further research the possible role of its own pesticides. Others are independently."

The president condemns Chandler and his organization, Friends of the Bees, as wanting "to deprive bees of the treatments and medicines they need to help them overcome the pests and pathogens that modern trade and transport have spread around."

And further, "The exposed hatred in the email for the entire agrochemical industry shows that the core concerns of the writer are more political to the point of religion than apicultural."

Chandler doesn't taken the editorial silently:

Well, Glyn, it's hard for me to show any respect for an industry that has done so much damage to the planet, its people and its animals. And religion is not something I suffer from.

I take it as a sign that we are having an impact on people's thinking about bees in the context of our toxic agricultural system when someone with such a big axe to grind starts attacking us in public - and simultaneously exposes his own prejudices and ignorance.

Being savaged by a dead sheep comes to mind.

Early morning feeding of the bees

2009-10-19T09:23:00.003-04:00

With Venus looking down from the east and fog shrouding the trees, I tramped through the dark and the frost this morning to give the bees some food.

It all felt great.

I had done a quick inspection of my three hives late yesterday -- the first for several weeks -- and found all three with plenty of bees. We have had way too much rain this fall, and I hadn't been able to open the hives for a while. I was wondering if the bees had survived.

They had, fortunately.

So now, for the next three or four weeks, let's hope for semi-warm, dry weather. I plan on feeding them at least through the middle of November, maybe even up through Thanksgiving, just to try to keep their numbers up as they head into the winter. Then I will plan to put food in a top feeder with maybe a grease patty or two and close the hives up for the winter.

One worrisome note was that I found small hive beetles in one of the hives. There's not much to be done about them at this point, but that could cause a problem if the hive continues to weaken.

A weather note: Out of 19 days in October, we have had only seven without rain. We have had nearly three inches this month, all of which has not done the bees much good. Any of the fall blooms run the danger of having the nectar washed out of them. If the next few days stay dry, as they are supposed to, we'll see how the bees feed and if they can make any stores for themselves. We have a patch of buckwheat behind the hives that is in full bloom, and I want to see if the bees go for it.

How bees make honey - and how we get it from the bees

2009-06-09T12:01:00.004-04:00

How do bees make honey?

I got asked that question on Monday. Here's the answer:

Honey is a combination of nectar and water. The bee does it all.

Worker bees gather nectar, which contains complex sugars, from flowers and store it in a special stomach they have for that purpose. When they bring it back to the hive, the nectar is sucked out of the forager's stomach by a house bee and inside the house bee, the complex sugars of the nectar are broken down into what will eventually be honey.

Once that process is complete, the nectar is placed in the cells of the honeycomb. The moisture content is too high at this point for it to be real honey, so the bees have to work to dehumidify it,
often by simply flapping their wings. One the moisture content of the honey is down to about 19 percent, the bees cap the cell with a wax coating so no additional moisture can intrude.

The beekeeper looks for an entire frame of this "capped honey" when the time come to harvest the honey. The picture at the right shows a frame full of bees. The white stuff on the upper part of the frame is capped honey. When this frame is covered with capped honey, it is pulled from the hive, and a hot knife is used to shear off the caps. Then the frame is put into an extractor, which rotates the frame at a high enough speed so that the honey is thrown out of the cells. The honey collects at the bottom of the extractor and is drained into another container.

The honey is then filtered through something like sheer curtain material. And that's it. No cooking or processing. Local honey, or "raw honey," is this stuff, bought from a local beekeeper.

Commercial honey is "flash heated." That is, it is heated quickly and then cooled. This flash heating will keep it from crystallizing on the store shelf. The flash heating doesn't change the honey; it just eradicates the crystals that might make it crystalize.

Honey should not be refrigerated. Properly contained, it will last for a very long time.
Some of this information comes from the the Michigan State University web site.

Inspecting the bees in the middle of the honey season

2009-06-07T09:36:00.014-04:00

Probably the most fun a beekeeper can have is extracting honey from the hives. But since you do that only once, maybe twice, a year, you have to get your pleasures elsewhere.

You can stand there and watch the hive on a day when the bees are active. That can be fascinating.

But pretty soon, you begin to wonder: "What's going on INSIDE the hive?"

And that's the second "most-fun" part of beekeeping: inspecting the hives.

My friend John and I have six hives on the little farm that Sally and I have in East Tennessee. John is just starting and has two hives. I have four. Since it's the middle of the honey season, John and I both stay eaten up with curiosity about what's going on inside the hives, and yesterday we decided to take a look.

(We try to keep the curiosity in check during this time of year because the bees need to concentrate on making honey rather than dealing with a couple of bumbling humans disrupting their ancient routines. Still, inspecting the hives is a necessary part of beekeeping. You're looking for problems -- overcrowding, critter invasions, etc. -- so that you can help the bees along.)

My first hive is a prize-winner. Rather, the queen is some kind of champ. She has been laying from the moment she was released from the cage back in April, and the hive is full of bees, and those bees are storing up a load of honey. In fact, she is making so many bees that I decided that maybe that hive could share with one of the weaker hives. So, one of my goals yesterday was to find a frame or two of brood cell to put in one of the other hives.

I did just that, and the situation in one of the weaker hives, I found, is more dire than I had suspected. Something must have happened to the queen in the weaker hive because there is some brood cell but not very many bees. I put a frame of brood into that hive, but I'm going to have to watch it closely. I may have to get a new queen before long.

My other two hives are doing well. One has lots of brood, which means the queen has been laying and the population will increase substantially before long. I'm still hopeful of getting some honey from those gals. The other hive is coming along but slowly.

John found both of his hives in good shape with lots of bees and lots of brood. Good queens are doing their work for him. He may not get any honey this year because it's his first year, but he should be in good shape going into the fall.

The wet weather has been both good and bad for the bees this spring. The good part is that it has produced plenty of sources of nectar and pollen for the bees to work. The garden is beginning to come in, and they should enjoy the cucumbers, beans, cantaloupes and sunflowers -- among many other things available to them.

But the bees hate wet weather. The rain cuts down on their ability to forage, and it raises the humidity levels inside the hive. That's right. The bees are far more weather sensitive than we realize. When the inside of the hive gets damp, they have to work to dry it out -- the old fashion way, by flapping their wings.

That's because the honey they're making -- in order to be real honey -- has to be less than 19 percent water. It starts out as more than that, and one of the bees' jobs right now is to get it down to that level so it can be capped. Good dry days in June help that process.

So, now that we've had plenty of rain this spring, pray for dry.

And enjoy the video. (You can also find the video on Vimeo.)

Late-night delivery of nuc hives; the garden is taking shape

2009-04-27T21:46:00.010-04:00

• A "bee-running" expedition on Saturday nets us four new hives.

John said it felt like we were running moonshine.

Saturday night, somewhere in the darkness of Blount County, we picked up four nuc hives of bees from Coley Odell, who had put them together for us. The hives were strapped down in the back of the truck and made it to the farm. We pulled them off the truck and set them up on their hive stands, stuck an extra box on top of each, put some feed on the front, and then waited for them to wake up on their new homes on Sunday morning.

It all went well, and now there are six hives in the fold, four for me and two for John.

We took a look inside the hives on Sunday afternoon. Coley had done his work well, and the nuc hives that John had bought and saw plenty of brood cell and no problems.

We also looked inside the hives of package bees that I installed three weeks ago, and we found much that was comforting -- lots of brood cell and even some nicely capped honey. (See the picture to the right.) I decided to put a queen excluder on top of the third box and a box of drawn comb on top of that. Now that the feeders are off, that hive is ready to make honey.

The situation was essentially the same with the second hive of packaged bees, although for some reason there seem to be fewer bees at work. Still, there were plenty with brood cell, larva, pollen and honey. I slipped a deep box of mostly drawn comb on top of the bottom box to see if the bees would go down and start working it. I also put a queen excluder on top of the third box and made the top box the hive's first honey super.

Both hives give every indication of being productive with no apparent tendencies to swarm, so I will check them this weekend and see what kind of progress they are making.

Meanwhile, the garden is coming under control.

I spent a good bit of time Sunday taking up the string markers where where the rows of plants have become visible and tilling out the weeds where it was safe to do that. To me, that says the garden is beginning to grow much as I had planned it, and the soil, the plants, the water and God's miracles of biology have to take over. I become more of a secondary player in this drama.

John and I are planning a second raised bed -- this one to be filled with herbs -- and we took advantage of my master carpentry skills (ha!) to put together with some old wood from the smokehouse and the barn. As long as you're not finicky about the way the wood looks, the fact that there might be a few 40-year-old rusty nails here and there in it, and the sizes to which the boards need to be cut, that kind of wood is perfect for our project.

This evening after supper, Sally and I trekked back to the garden where we put some okra and cucumber see in the group, dug the holes for the feet of the new raised bed box and put that into the ground.

So, here's how the garden is shaping up (I have renumbered the row, beginning at the top -- north -- end):

Row 1: yellow corn
Row 2: yellow corn
Row 3: yellow corn
Row 4: beans
Row 5: beans
Row 6: horticulture beans (planted Saturday, April 25)
Row 7: white corn (to be planted next week)
Row 8: white corn (to be planted next week)
Row 9: white corn (to be planted next week)
Row 10: tomatoes
Row 11: beans (striped half runners)
Row 12: okra, cucumbers
Row 13: onions, potatoes (planted March 22)
Row 14: potatoes (Red russets, French fingerlings, Yukon gold from Colorado)
Row 15: potatoes (legacy)
Row 16: peas, potatoes (I may put something else in between these two)

And, finally, as usual: pictures, taken Sunday, April 26.

The queens are alive

2009-04-19T05:56:00.003-04:00

Despite a nagging headcold -- irritating because we are having such beautiful weather in East Tennessee -- I looked inside the two-week-old hives yesterday and found what I wanted to find: brood cell.

That shows there is a working queen inside each hive.

I was having some doubts. You always worry that a hive is not going to accept a queen. Then, I made a mistake in introducing the queen to one of the hives a couple of weeks (pulled out the wrong cork in the queen cage, and she escaped).

And last weekend I looked inside the hives and didn't see any eggs in either hive.

So, what I saw yesterday was a great relief. Both hives are healthy and full of bees. One hive has even capped some honey. I have been feeding both hives heavily, so the honey can't be harvested, but it shows the bees are working.

I will continue to feed these hives for another week or two and then let them have at the ever-increasing set of flowers and blooms that the spring is offering. My friend John and I are due to get to nuc hives from Coley Odell this week, which will bring my total to four fives and put me about where I was last spring. The difference is that this year, I have lots of drawn comb, so the honey production can begin quickly.

Now, if I can just shed this cold . . .

A final note: Worrying about queen acceptance is common among beekeepers. Take a look at this entry from MissBeek, and the excellent photos that go along with it.

Easter planting - finally

2009-04-12T20:53:00.005-04:00

Big time doings in the garden today (Easter).

Finally, after a week of frustration, we had a couple of dry days, which allowed some serious garden work. So here's what happened:

The strawberries that John Neal had given me finally got planted in the raised bed box that I made last weekend.
Sally planted here lettuce, rhubarb and shallots in the bed at the top of the garden.
Sally planted peas in Row 1, which finished most of it out.
Jane, Sally and I put yellow corn in Rows 14, 13, and 12. (See picture above.)
Sally and I put peanut beans in Rows 10 and 11. Row 9 has been tilled and ready for some horticulture beans.
John and I took a thorough look inside the bee hives, and all seems to be well so far. They are busy, making honey and doing what bees should do at this stage.

Friday was rainy, Saturday was cloudy and cool, but today was glorious. Maybe we can get a couple of more days like this in the next week or so to finish the planting.

The pictures below will give you an idea of how the day looked.

A dry garden and more potatoes

2009-04-08T08:39:00.007-04:00

The garden dried out enough over the weekend so that we able to put in some potatoes on Sunday (April 5). So, for the record, here's what we planted:

Row 3: French fingerings, Red Russets, Yukon Gold
Row 2: legacy potatoes (these are a mix of those left from last year)
Row 1: [unplanted], legacy, Red Pontiacs

The west part of row 1 still has some room, and if I can find some potatoes I like, I'll put some more in to fill out the row.

Here's what the Washington State University comprehensive description of potato varieties says about Red Pontiacs:

Tubers are "oblong to round; smooth, sometimes netted, red skin; medium deep eyes; white flesh.... High yielding variety of attractive appearance, widely adapted (especially to muck soils). Some drought resistance, bruises easily; susceptible to air cracking at harvest. Low total solids. Good storability, medium dormancy."

And more about this variety can be found at the Red Pontiac page of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

I am interested to see how the potatoes from last year (which I have named "legacy" potatoes) do. They are relatively small and shriveled, but they came from stock that produced well last year, so I have some hope for them. Most of them look like Russian bananas, but we'll see.

Because of the bad weather, we have been late getting these things into the ground, so it will be well into July before we can see how well they are doing. We harvested the potatoes last year a little too early (July 4), and I am determined to wait until at least the end of July before digging them up. Which is not to say I won't be sneaking a few new potatoes out of the garden toward the end of June.

In any event, it's good to have things in the ground.

Cold weather for the past couple of nights gave us a scare, more for the new bees than anything else. But it never got much below freezing, and it looks like today will be sunny with temps climbing to the 60s.

Are we done with winter yet?

Pouring the bees - 40,000 insects get a new home

2009-04-05T05:53:00.009-04:00

Finally, I'm back in the bee business.

I acquired two boxes of bees yesterday, and - along with my friend John - introduced them to their new homes in my apiary. This was an exciting event for all concerned, particularly John, who wants to start beekeeping this year and had never had this experience.

It must have been pretty exciting for the bees, too.

When you acquire bees in this way, they come in boxes somewhat larger than shoebox size made of wood on four sides and screen mesh on two. The screen allows them to have air, of course, but the great thing is that you can look inside and see them hanging together, usually fairly patiently, until they are put into the hive.

In the picture to the right, you can see that a few of the bees had escaped the box, but they didn't leave the colony. Bees are social creatures. They cannot exist alone; they must live in colonies. So, even though these bees found themselves on the outside of the box, they didn't go anywhere.

Seeing the bees like this can be scary for the uninitiated. They look as though they are ready to fly out and attack the nearest creature, but in truth they are docile and most unlikely to sting. They're not protecting anything right now. They are just waiting to see what will hapen with the colony.

My bees came from some place in Georgia and were delivered by long time local beekeeper Howard Kerr. Howard told me he had more orders than he could fill this year because bee die-offs had been somewhat heavy. Since I had lost all of my bees over the winter, I could certain testify to that.

I had prepared two hives for these bees this week. They consisted of three medium boxes, two of which were filled with drawn comb, which will help the bees get started quick on their honey-making procedures. The third box, the top one, is empty for reasons explained below. (See the top picture.)

When John arrived in the early afternoon, we donned our bee suits and veils and got to work.

We opened up the hives, and I took the first box and pried open the top piece of wood, which revealed a can of sugar water (we call it bee juice in our house) hanging within the top of the box. This gives the bees something to eat while they are being transported, and the can in this case was still pretty full.

The next step is to pull the can out of the box and also to pull the queen cage out. The queen comes in her own special cage -- a very small wooden and wire box that protects her from the hive while she is being accepted as the queen. This one insect -- the queen -- is the most important single entity of the hive. She is the one who will keep the hive going because her job is to constantly lay eggs and replenish the hive. Bees instinctively know this, but it still takes a few days for her to establish her position, and she has to be protected in the process.

Once the food and the queen are out of the box, the fun begins -- pouring the bees.

The bees are literally poured, and then shaken, into their new home. You simply turn the box of bees upside down over the empty hive box and let them fall into the hive.

Most of the bees will go in at that point. The sudden move will stir them up to some extent, but they are more surprised than angry and are simply likely to fly up into the air. Eventually they will come down into the hive.

The bees that remain in their original box need to be shaken loose from their moorings -- either other bees or the side of the box -- so they can be dropped into the hive. Stir and shake as you will, you won't get all of them loose, so eventually you have to set the box down next to the hive and trust that sometime during the afternoon they will make their way into the hive.

After that, two more things need to be done. A cork must be extracted from the queen cage that will allow the bees to east on a sugar stopper. Once that sugar stopper is eaten through, the queen will be release, and she can go about her business. Second, the can of food should be place inside the hive, so the bees can continue to eat. In this instance, I place a couple of jars of bee juice on the front of the hive so the bees can have the extra nourishment. In the next few days, the bees will need all of the food they can get.

Once these tasks are done, the top cover goes back onto the hive, and that's it. The front of the hive is open, so the bees that are outside the hive at this moment will find their way inside. It may take a couple of hours, but by dark it will happen because the social instincts will kick in. Bees always want to be with the colony.

Our operations did not go perfectly smoothly yesterday because of a rookie mistake I made. I pulled out the wrong cork from one of the queen cages, which released her immediately into the hive. I did that same thing the first time I poured bees a couple of years ago. It turned out to be okay then because the queen had spent enough time with the other bees already that they accepted her without a problem. I am hopeful that will happen again.

If not, we'll have another problem -- but not an insolvable one -- to deal with.

. . .

Installing the bees was just one thing that happened in the garden yesterday. It was a beautiful day, and even though it was still to wet to plow, I was able to till a bit and do some other things. Here's how it looked:

Blessing the sprouting seed -- with work and a bit of prayer

2009-03-22T17:28:00.007-04:00

First Day of Spring 2009
Jim Stovall on Vimeo
(Music by Frank Story)

Finally, some quality time in the garden this weekend.

It's been a rainy winter (I have undoubtedly mentioned that before now), and since December the rain and inclement weather has occurred on the weekends more than not. Getting into the garden, or even outside, to do most anything has been frustrating. Even last weekend, the first weekend of our spring break, was rainy and cold.

But we've now had several days of dry weather, and Friday it was good enough to walk across the plowed dirt of the garden without getting bogged down. And that's exactly what I did. I had been anxious to start marking off the rows of the garden and pulling the string, which will keep me straight, and I was able to accomplish much of that on Friday.

Saturday was an all-day writing workshop in Knoxville with friends Cyn Mobley, Katrina Belcher and Bryce Anderson, so there was no garden work there.

But today, it was glorious.

Onions

Last year, the first thing that went into the ground was potatoes, and I didn't do that until the last day of March. This year, getting serious about onions gave me the excuse to start a bit earlier.

I planted more than 50 white onion sprouts and near 100 red onions (Row 4) and watered them thoroughly. Digging the ground with the hoe to make the rows and then moving the dirt around to get the sprouts in and standing straight felt awfully good. Onions have the advantage of your being able to see them immediately. You don't have to wait for them to "come up."

So, the garden has begun.

(The pictures on the right were taken today after the work was done. The audio slide show above was done on Friday.)

Potatoes

I decided to finish out Row 4 with some potatoes that I had left over from last year. It may be a bit early to plant them, but I just couldn't help it. The potatoes I put into the ground are of various types, and they all had sprouts on them, so I can see many of them even after I had covered them with dirt.

I am curious to see what will happen with these potatoes. They came from Colorado last year and did very well and then stayed in the basement all winter long. They are somewhat shriveled, which is not preferable for what you want to put in the ground, but there is nothing I could do about them.

If these potatoes do well at all, they should be a little early because they have such long and healthy sprouts. At least, that's what I have read.

More on potatoes later.

The main point is, they're in the ground and doing the Lord's work.

The Lord's work

And speaking of the Lord's work, my friend Chuck Warnock pointed to an interesting site the other day: In-formatio.

The site is the work of Michael Rich, a guy who lives in North Carolina on the other side of the mountains from me, and Michael describes his site as one that is a "space to make ongoing observations about my life of faith in formation. From my perspective, we are always in formation and in the process of being transformed."

On Saturday, Michael included the Blessing of the Sprouting Seed, which comes from The Rural Life Prayerbook (published in 1956) from the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. It's beautiful:

Let us pray.

We ask and beg of You, Lord, to bless this sprouting seed. Warm it with the gentle breath of soft winds, make it fruitful with dew from heaven, and be so kind as to bring it to its fullest maturity for the good of our souls and bodies, through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

And all the people said, Amen.

First light at the end of winter's long tunnel

2009-03-08T18:13:00.004-04:00

The first light at the end of winter's long, cold and wet tunnel appeared this weekend. With temperatures in the 60s and no rain, it was the first time this year I've had the chance to do any real work in the garden and elsewhere.

So, I took advantage.

The first thing I did Saturday morning was sort the potatoes. I had about 15 pounds of potatoes left over from last year's harvest. They had been stored in the basement, and nearly every one of them, even the very smallest, had developed sprouts. I checked with the good folks at Ronniger's in Colorado, where I had ordered them last year, to see if there was any reason not to put those in the ground this spring.

There isn't. So, Saturday morning I sorted.

I ended up with what will be enough seed potatoes for a row of banana ("the superstar of fingerling potatoes," according to Ronniger's) potatoes. I'll also have enough Russets and various others -- French fingerlings, Yukon gold -- for another row. This morning I ordered enough from Ronniger's to fill a third row with Russets, French fingerlings and Yukon Gold.

The Russets and French fingerlings did very well last year, so I thought I would go with what has worked before. The Yukon golds were bought locally and didn't produce so well, so I thought I would give them another shot with the Colorado imports.

Growing potatoes was one of the great gardening thrills I had last year, and I hope I can duplicate it this year.

The garden

I had mentioned here before that Kenneth, the fellow who plowed my garden last fall, got enthusiastic and just about doubled the size of the plot. I got a taste of just how big he had made the garden on Saturday when I pulled out the tiller and started breaking up the ground.

The garden is now 125 feet long and about 75 feet wide. That's a very long row. I tilled for about an hour and got about a third of the plot turned over. Much more tilling in my near future.

The bees

I have been reluctant to post much about the bees lately because disaster struck about three weeks ago. We had a brief warm spell, and I had decided to put some Apistan strips in the two hive that I had left, but when I opened them up, there was nothing left but a few dead bees. Both hives had died out completely.

My guess, confirmed by my friend Jim, was that the winter was simply too long and cold and they starved to death.

This was a huge disappointment because I believe both hives to be healthy and active, and I had been looking forward to just this time so I could shift the boxes around and get them ready for the spring. Instead, I have had to call Howard and reserve some boxes of bees that he will be bringing on April 4.

The one slightly silver lining in all this is that I have plenty of drawn comb -- pure gold for the beekeeper -- so when the new bees show up, they shouldn't have any trouble getting started. I still look forward to a honey harvest in July.

The coming of spring

The first paragraph of this post described winter as long, cold and wet. The good thing about that was the "wet" part. East Tennessee made a valiant attempt to climb out of its drought this winter with goodly amounts of rain in November, December and January. The ground is moist, and nature seems anxious to take off in these last three weeks before spring officially descends.

February 3: The Day the Music Died

2009-02-03T07:30:00.002-05:00

It was 50 years ago that rock 'n roll star Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in Iowa. National Public Radio has a remembrance.

A Christmas Day hike in the Smokies

2008-12-26T08:05:00.005-05:00

Christmas Day 2008 was made memorable by a walk along the Middle Prong Trail of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

I had two companions, my son Jeff and his girlfriend Francoise, and we had a nearly perfect day for our short hike. The weather was clear and coolish, so we could leave the heavy stuff in the car and warm ourselves with the trek.

The absence of crowds of people, which are commonplace for the Smokies, was another plus. We met a few folks on the trail, but not enough to be bothersome.

The Middle Prong Trail runs along the Middle Prong of the Little River (thus the name) and is easily accessible from the end of Tremont Road, past the Tremont Institute. It begins at a bridge crossing the river, and that's where you get the first of some spectacular views or white and cascading water. All of that continues unabated was you move up the trail.

The white water is the major feature of the trail this time of year, but there is much vegetation to be seen at other times, according to the, according to the Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association's book Hiking Trails of the Smokies. Winter doesn't offer much in the way of vegetation, but you can see the trees and bushes stripped of their leaves and get an idea of how they work.

A most satisfying trip.

Jan Kemp: Interesting and ultimately sad story

2008-12-12T06:24:00.003-05:00

The obituary of Jan Kemp appeared in the New York Times today.

Kemp was an English instructor at the University of Georgia in the 1980s when she called the athletic department on the preferential treatment of football players who did not meet the university's academic standards.

While coordinator of Georgia’s remedial English program, Dr. Kemp was among several faculty members who had complained that officials at Georgia intervened in the fall of 1981 to enable nine football players to pass a remedial English course in which they had received failing grades. The athletes remained eligible to play for Georgia against Pittsburgh in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day 1982.

Kemp was demoted and then fired. She sued and was eventually reinstated and given a substantial settlement. But she paid a terrible emotional and physical price. She attempted suicide twice.

She retired in 1990 and died last week of Alzheimer's. She was 59.

As an academic, I find this an extremely sad story.

December ponderings, mixed with a bit of snow

2008-12-06T13:57:00.004-05:00

A large plowed field will be waiting for me in the spring

A couple of weeks ago, a neighbor drove his tractor and plow up the road to my garden and gave it a once-over. We had been generous with the honey we had given to him and his wife, so he returned the favor, and we are grateful to him.

I had in mind extending the garden from last year's dimensions, and I had marked off -- more or less -- the borders that I wanted him to plow.

Kenneth (the neighbor) apparently didn't think I was working hard enough, however, so he proceeded to plow beyond my markings, and now I have a garden that's about 150 feet long and 50 feet. I suspect that gives me nearly twice the growing space that I had last spring and summer.

Whew!

That will certainly make for an interesting planting and growing season next year. Right now, and for the next three months, its planning season. And right on schedule, the seed catalogues have begun to show up. Today, we got one from Totally Tomato.

Looking at the pictures, I begin to imagine what next year might be like.

I do that after walking around the garden this morning as the snow was coming down and even beginning to stick. The snow won't amount to much today, but it was pretty and pleasant and non-threatening.

It reminds me of how different things will look six months from now.

And that difference is one of God's blessings to us.

Bees Without Borders: NYT article

2008-11-29T20:27:00.004-05:00

An interesting article in the New York Times today describes a couple of Connecticut beekeepers (father and son) who have traveled around the world, teaching people how to become beekeepers. Andrew Cote and his father Norm are passionate about bees and beekeeping and rightly say that introducing beekeeping in certain areas of the world can help the local populations stave off starvation.

Andrew, who has about 200 hives and harvests honey by the ton, even went to Iraq in 2005 and help start colonies in several areas. What he said about beekeeping in Iraq is particularly interesting.

Before the 1991 Gulf War, there were an estimated half a million hives in Iraq. After all those oil field fires and smoke, and this current war, there are about 20,000. Mobility is extremely limited, and beekeepers can’t get colonies to the citrus groves where they’re needed, or to the lush areas in Kurdistan.

Read the entire article:

Gerri Hirshey, Sharing a Taste of Honey, on an International Scale, New York Times, Nov. 28, 2008.

Sheep on the farm (not my farm)

2008-11-24T11:03:00.004-05:00

Nick, a friend who lives down the road from the farm, told me the other night that he is thinking seriously of putting sheep on his farm. Nick is fully retired and has lots more acreage than we do, and his place can probably handle it.

I had been thinking about sheep -- but certainly not tempted to do what Nick is doing -- when I ran across this article, Shear Delight, in the Tennessee Farm Bureau's Tennessee Home and Farm magazine.

The article describes Beth Collier and Steve Shafer, a couple near Charlotte, Tenn., who raise sheep, selling the lambs and shearing the basic herd, on their 56-acre farm. They say there is a ready market for raw wool.

Shafer and Collier (the couple in question) shear the sheep together each spring, worm them, trim their feet and assist with lambing when necessary. The couple processes much of the wool by hand – washing, combing and carding it into a soft, fluffy texture. To help lighten their load, they’ve recently started shipping hundreds of pounds to a processing mill in Oklahoma.

Collier and Shafer sell roving (wool that has been washed, combed and carded) and fleece (a year’s worth of unprocessed wool from one sheep) at festivals and from a small shop on their farm.

“Our primary market is other spinners,” Collier says. “Most spinners cannot also raise their own sheep, and they may not have any interest in it.”

In addition, Collier and Shafer raise flowers that are used to dye the wool.

Shafer and Collier grow their own herbs in a greenhouse, and they harvest wildflowers and raise traditional dye plants – including chicory, woad, amaranth, marigold, zinnia and black-oil sunflower – to create their own natural dyes.

“It’s a good excuse to raise flowers,” Collier says. “I love gardening, and when your flowers can also dye your wool and yarn, it combines two of your loves into one. It’s kind of a macho thing to be able to say, ‘I raised the sheep, I sheared the sheep, I washed the wool, I spun the wool, I dyed it with flowers I picked – and I crocheted a sweater or shawl.’”

They have quite an operation, and I wish them the best. As they say -- and I certainly believe -- it's a lot of work.

Chuck Warnock review of American Earth by Bill McKibben

2008-11-21T06:51:00.008-05:00

My old friend Chuck Warnock (right) has a review of Bill McKibben's American Earth on Chuck's blog, Confessions of a Small Church Pastor. For those of us who are vitally interested the earth, the environment and what is happening to it, the book and the review are both worth reading.

Chuck writes:

This one volume provides a rich orientation to the world of environmental writing which McKibben contends is “America’s single most distinctive contribution to the world’s literature.” If Walden is the book everyone claims to revere but few have actually read, American Earth offers an accessible door into not only Walden, but 100 more works of significance in the annals of environmentalism. McKibben, himself the groundbreaking author of The End of Nature, the first account of global warming’s consequences, selects each author with the care of a conductor assembling a fine orchestra.

The book is packed full of chapters and articles of people who have written about the environment, whether or not they are thought of as environmentalists. These range from Rachel Carson to John Steinbeck.

You will not agree with all the pieces included. Lynn White’s essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” lays the blame (in 1967) for the environmental problems of the US on the Christian worldview. Or, at least the popular Christian worldview that saw the world as man’s plaything, to use or use up as he chose. White concludes his essay with the life of St. Francis of Assisi, and nominates Francis as patron saint of environmentalists because of Francis’ teaching on humility and his love for all of God’s creation.

So be it. It's past time for an intelligent, informed conversation on what we should be doing about what we have done. McKibben's book sounds like the place to start.

Barack Obama, president-elect

2008-11-04T22:29:00.003-05:00

Congratulations, Barack Obama.

President-elect.

Truly remarkable. Truly.

And congratulations to Senator John McCain for your unquestioned patriotism and courage and your service to your country.

World Series begins tonight

2008-10-22T06:50:00.006-04:00

The World Series begins tonight. Let's hope for the best.

The World Series:

two vaunted teams with rich baseball histories,
a couple of well-known and wiley managers,
big stars on both sides set to make each inning a drama-filled delight,
a bit of controversy or personal animus thrown in just to spice things up.

Well, maybe next year.

The Tampa Bay Rays host the Philadelphia Phillies in the first game of the World Series tonight in what could very well be an excellent seven-game set of baseball dramas.

That's the hope.

The Phillies have Ryan Howard, a young who slugger hasn't done much yet in the postseason. They also boast of several other better-than-average players who have had good years.

The Rays have David Price, a huge left-handed pitcher on the mound tonight, to match fastballs and wits with these guys. The Rays have a pretty good manager and a team of young potentials who put together an amazing year after a truly awful year in 2007.

But the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies?

Neither team has a history worthy of baseball's last act of the year.

The Tampa Bay Rays were once known as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But that was a long time ago -- like, last year. So much for tradition.

The Philadelphia Phillies have been around for quite a while, but who knew? For a good part of their history, they were the second team in Philadelphia, always second fiddle to Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. The Phillies have never shown up much in post-season play, and you don't need one hand full of fingers to count their World Series appearances, much less championships.

I was in Philadelphia several years ago when the Phillies were playing in the old Veterans Stadium. It wasn't a great trip. It included an encounter with an usher who thought he was Idi Amin and who looked like he would eat me if I didn't follow his unreasonable commands.

The game was less than compelling so I wandered around the interior of the stadium and came upon a plaque that named the All-Time Phillies team, or something of that nature.

This should be good, I told myself, and it was.

Mike Schmidt, of course, was listed as the third baseman, and Robin Roberts headed the Phillies pitching history. Both legit stars, Hall of Famers.

But at shortstop, there was Larry Bowa. Larry Bowa? The Phillies have been around for a century or so, and the best they could do at that position was Larry Bowa? To me, that spoke volumes about the Phillies.

But, I should stop my unfair riffs agains the Phillies and enjoy the games, right? Right.

So who will win? (Now starts the riff against sports journalists.)

I think one of the silliest things in sports journalism is for writers to make predictions. They don't know what's going to happen. Neither do I. Neither do the players.

That, as they say, is why they play the games.

Baseball playoffs - where's the drama?

2008-10-16T06:41:00.005-04:00

The final question of the baseball season: Which team will collapse in the World Series?

The biggest disappointment of the fall season has been the lack of drama in the Major League Baseball playoffs.

The Cubs bit the dust after only three games (surprise, surprise), and the Angels, White Sox and Brewers were gone from the division series after four.

Now we have the league championship series, and despite a few heroics from Manny Ramirez, the Dodgers collapsed in front of the Philadelphia Phillies. Now it looks like the same fate awaits the Boston Red Sox tonight, even though they will be playing in Fenway and throwing Dice K at the Tampa Bay Rays.

Since none of my favorite teams (the Cards and, well, . . . the Cards) are involved, I'm not caught up too much in who actually wins any of these games. What I do look forward to, however, is great baseball, lots of back and forth inning by inning, and some fireworks here and there. Unfortunately, there has been too much of what we saw last night with the Dodgers not only losing but kicking the ball around the field as they did it. I understand there was more excitement and more sharp exchanges between Barak Obama and John McCain last night than there were good curveballs from the Bums' pitching staff.

And the outlook isn't good.

The Red Sox don't look like they're in the mood for a comeback, and the Rays don't look like they're in the mood to let them.

The only real question ahead for us -- and I hope I'm wrong about this -- is "Which team will collapse in the Series?"

(Illustration above: Left-handed batters, First Inning Artworks.)

Chanticleer

2008-10-13T04:47:00.004-04:00

We don't go to concerts much -- at least not as much as we should.

But we did get to take in Chanticleer last night at the Church of the Ascension in Knoxville.

Those guys can sing! Here's the Knoxnews review.

If you get the chance, you should catch their show and be prepared to be amazed at what these fellows can do with their voices, both individually and together.

(Photo: Chanticleer.org)

The Writing Wright: now available on Amazon

2008-09-27T05:34:00.000-04:00

Tom Clancy, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Satchel Paige -- they were all writers (of sorts). And they have all made it into this first volume of The Writing Wright.

The Writing Wright is now available on Amazon.

If you are fascinated by writers and writing, The Writing Wright offers a box of chocolates you can’t refuse. The book sprinkled quotations and stories from many writers along with my own insight, instruction and commentary. Here you’ll find:

• Mark Twain’s critique of the writing for James Fenimore Cooper

• Ernest Hemingway’s attitude toward punctuation

• How expensive a misspelling can be

• Down-to-earth instruction on the glue of writing

• When Tom Clancy learned about submarines

• What Satchel Paige said about braggin’

• What H.L. Mencken thought about being a reporter

And much more.

The book contains many of my own illustrations. My hope for The Writing Wright is that it will draw you in and teach you something about writing – lessons you can learn over and over.

The price is $10.

Excellent photos of a beekeeper

2008-09-25T15:05:00.006-04:00

The photos were not taken by me. They are photos of me.

Still, they are excellent.

I was honored to host a couple of University of Tennessee students out at the farm last week: Demetric Banahene and Evan Wilson. They came out to shoot some pictures for an article about my beekeeping activities in Scoop magazine, a publication produced each semester by journalism students at UT.

Demetric and Evan said they had never seen the inside of a beehive before (as I hadn't before I started keeping bees), and they didn't really know what to expect.

I explained that bees generally aren't out to sting or attack. They have a job to do and that is to make honey and keep the hive alive. If they feel threatened or unduly interrupted in their work, they will take offense. But for most of the time, they just try to go about their business.

One of the things that helps them stay calm is smoke. Exactly why this is the case is the object of a number of theories, but it does seem to work. I was glad that I was able to get the smoker going when the guys came out, and it will puffing fully when we walked out to the hives.

Demetric and Evan wore no protection at all, while I was suited up fully.

Once I opened up the hive and put a little smoke on the bees, the guys eased up toward the apiary and began shooting.

I spent a good bit of time going through a couple of the hives. I wanted to show them what the comb on a frame looked like, and I was also curious to see how the bees were doing. I was able to find some capped and uncapped honey to show the photographers, as well as several frames that were covered with bees.

Demetric sent me a few pictures of the pictures they took (they said they had more than 100), and I am posting a few of them in the text here. All of the pictures he sent can be found in the slideshow below or at Picasaweb.

The Writing Wright's fan page on Facebook

2008-09-25T08:13:00.000-04:00

Just created a fan page for The Writing Wright on Facebook.

The Writing Wright is a book of essays, quotations and snippets about writing, the language, journalism and the writing life. The book is illustrated with the author's pen and ink drawings.

Doing the fan page once wasn't too hard. I'm sure when I do it again, it will be even simpler.

I loaded a few of the drawings that are in the book into the first photo album, and I'm going to take some screen shots of a few of the pages and put them in another album. I also wrote on the Wall and started a discussion thread.

Before long, I'll figure out how to invite folks to become a fan. Probably won't do that until ordering info comes through from Amazon.

Meanwhile, you can head over that way and see what's up.

Yankee Stadium: OK, NOW you can tear it down

2008-09-14T23:00:00.005-04:00

The House that Ruth Built will soon be dust and memories. We had to see it before that happened.

Jeff, my son, and I hopped a Metroliner in Washington, D.C., and traveled to New York City to see a game at Yankee Stadium. It was the first time to be there for both of us, and it will be the last. The stadium will be torn down at the end of the season.

Here are a few thoughts on the experience:

The day was sunny and extremely hot -- record-breaking even.

Within three weeks of this hot day, the last regular season game will be played in Yankee Stadium, and the 85-year run of this cathedral of baseball will end.

As a ballpark, today's Yankee Stadium is nothing special, although it certainly was when it was erected in 1923. Today, the fading structure is outclassed by a number of parks, the best in my experience being Camden Yards in Baltimore. The new Yankee Stadium, gleaming just a few yards from the old one, will undoubtedly measure up to modern standards. Its skyboxes are designed to rake in as much corporate cash as American companies are willing to spend. Not much has been written about how the new Yankee Stadium will benefit the individual fan. Maybe that part will be a surprise.

But while the old graystone lady is showing its age, the sacredness of its grounds to baseball history cannot be questioned. Consider:

the mighty blasts of the Babe;
the distinctive facade around the outfield;
the short porch in right field;
the silent grace of Joltin' Joe (where have you gone?);
the raw talent of Mickey Mantle and the raw grit of Yogi and his many teammates;
the Larsen perfection;
Billy, Reggie (REG-GIE), Thurman, Ron, Don, Derek, Alex an a host of others with whom America was on a first name basis.

Yankee Stadium holds them all and more. Millions of memories.

That's why I had to go -- to see the place where all these things happened. And what's my memory. The unseasonable heat certainly.

But then there was that first inning grand slam by Alex Rodriguez.

So long, Yankee Stadium.

The most aggrevatin'-ist thing - part 2

2008-09-13T09:06:00.002-04:00

The re-queening is finished. Long live the new queens!

It was the most frustrating part of beekeeping that I have encountered since I started, and I cannot claim total success, but at least it's done.

ALERT: Technical beekeeping info (skip this if you're not interested)

The method of finding the old queen that Coley O'Dell described (and I referred to in the previous post) went something like this: Set up a hive box with a queen excluder covering the bottom. Shake (or brush) the bees off the frame and into the box. Apply smoke. The worker bees will fly out of the box while the queen, heavy with eggs, is likely to stay there. Then she will be easier to spot.

I did that, and it worked with one box and didn't with another. It didn't work, I think, because I am not adept at spotting a queen yet. She could have been in there, and I just didn't see her. With the other box, I had to cover the top with a queen excluder and let the bees filter themselves out over night. They did, and the next day I spotted the queen and killed her.

End ALERT.

So, I have new queens in all of the hives, and they still have a good bit of the fall foraging season left. One of the hives (Hive 3) is so strong that it has already begun to cap some honey. With any luck, all of the hives will be in good shape to go into the winter,

The most aggrevatin'-ist thing

2008-09-06T14:28:00.003-04:00

• Re-queening a beehive is the hardest, most tedious task in beekeeping.

"It's the hardest, most aggrevatin'-ist thing you can do when you keep bees."

My anonymous friend was talking about re-queening a hive.

I second that emotion.

I ordered new queens for all five hives this year, being told that good bee management says you should re-queen your hives at least once every two years. Some people re-queen every year, which is even better bee management. A hive with a young queen will produce more bees and is likely to stay healthier and ultimately produce more honey.

The problem is getting the queen into the hive. Actually, the real problem is finding the old queen and killing her so the new queen will be accepted. A queen is somewhat longer than worker bees and thinner than a drone. She has pretty much the same markings as the worker bees, although her wing shape is a little different.

Since there is only one queen per hive, you have to find this one slightly different critter among as many as 30,000 or 40,000 other critters. It's a real life needle-in-a-haystack problem.

So, here's the score. My friend Jim Brown has been helping me, mainly because I'm not experienced enough to recognize a queen by my self. On our first go at it, we determined that two of the hives (Hives 4 and 5) had lost their queens -- which made it pretty easy to get the new queens in. Jim found the queen in a third hive (Hive 2). We could not find the queen in Hives 1 and 3. Jim has been back once to look, and I have been in the hives three times for a total of around five hours looking for the queens.

No luck.

So far, new queens 3 - old queens 2.

I saw Coley O'Dell at the farmer's market this morning, and as usual, Coley had good advice. He described the method that he uses to find a queen that otherwise won't be found. I am going to give it a try this evening or something tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Concentrating on honey

2008-07-08T10:00:00.007-04:00

I spent a good part of Sunday concentrating on honey.

I got together with Jim and Delores Brown on Sunday afternoon to help them extract their more than 400 pounds of honey. Jim has about 10 hives that have been amazingly productive this year, and I needed to participate in the process before trying to do it on my own.

Once you get the honey off the hives (and make the bees as mad as they can be), you store the frames in a plastic bag for a few days. Then it's a three-part process: decapping, extracting and filtering. Decapping is done with a heated knife. You run the knife along the side of the frame, taking the wax cappings off the cells. With the honey beginning to run out of the frame, you set the frame into the extractor. We used a four-frame, manual extractor. You turn the extractor handle for about a minute to a minute-and-a-half, and then turn the frames over and repeat the process. When you draw the frames out of the extractor, they will feel noticeably lighter. Their honey is not at the bottom of the extractor bin.

Filtering can be done with just about any sheer-like material or cheesecloth. And that's it. You are ready to put the honey into clear, clean jars.

And speaking of that -- the other part of the day was spent designing a label for our jars of honey. We have decided to call it Frog's Farm honey, honoring my late father-in-law whose land we are fortunate enough to occupy. I have included a picture of the basic design for the front label and something I cooked up for the back label. We'll see if that works.

We'll also see if I get any honey -- next week. Jim Brown and I are scheduled to get into the hives on Monday and see what's there.

Potatoes on the Fourth

2008-07-06T11:38:00.007-04:00

We harvested our first crop of potatoes on July 4. It seemed like an appropriately American thing to do, and it turned out to be more exciting than a fireworks show.

I have loved potatoes since I was a small child and have secretly harbored a desire to grow them for a long time. That desire was renewed a couple of years ago when we lived in Virginia and visited the Abingdon farmers market regularly. Later in the season, a fellow would show up with a potato I had never seen before -- a small, longish white potato called a French fingerling. We roasted them as he suggested and got hooked.

The guy who sold us the potatoes told me he had ordered the seed potatoes from Colorado, but they obviously took to the local climate, and I told myself then, "If you ever get the chance, those are the kind you are going to grow."

Of course, there are many kinds of potatoes, and to limit yourself to one kind is as unwise as limiting yourself to one kind of ice cream. So, early this year when I started planning the garden, I found Ronniger's in Colorado as a source for seed potatoes. I started through their web site and got dazzled by the many kinds and varieties they had available. They did have French fingerlings, and that was where I started.

Now, I should state at this point that I knew nothing -- NOTHING -- about preparing, planting or digging potatoes. My ignorance was absolute. (Had someone told me that potatoes grew on potato trees, I probably would have believed them.) But I was determined. I read what I could find about the process. I tried to ask questions in a way that wouldn't reveal ignorance or stupidity. I ordered the potatoes I wanted -- French fingerlings, Burbank russets and Russian bananas (some kind of cousin to the fingerling, I think) -- from Ronniger's. One pound of each. No use taking simple failure to outright disaster, I reasoned. I found a couple of other varieties (Yukon gold and Kennebec reds) locally. All told, I had about six pounds of potatoes.

I put them in the ground about mid-March.

I watched and waited. After a couple of weeks, nothing was happening, so I asked a friend who knew something about this. Be patient, he said. They'll show up before long.

He was right. They started poking their heads through the soil after about three weeks. Then they grew and grew. By the end of April they were full and healthy, and by the late of May, they were nearly chest high. Their few blossoms were beautiful (see the picture below). I mounded the soil around them as I was instructed by my reading. I mulched and composted -- not too much, but enough to keep them going. (The only slow ones were the Yukon golds, for reasons I have not discerned. They may be slow, or they may not have been good seeds to begin with.)

All this was great. But there was a lingering question: Were there any potatoes under the big, bold, beautiful plants?

As June approached, I would not resist the temptation. I dug gingerly around one of the mounds, and VOILA! Potatoes! Beautiful, wonderful potatoes.

I have been digging and poking around for a month now, but we decided that the full harvest must be done soon. I had been reading about the possibility of a fall crop, so I wanted to get this first crop finished. I designated July the Fourth as the appropriate and memorable day for the Great Potato Dig on Frog's Farm.

And so it was.

We (Sally, Jane, Frank and Owen) spent an hour of the early evening pulling up potato vines and tossing potatoes into the buckets and wheelbarrow. My six pounds of seed potatoes produced well more than 50 pounds of potatoes (maybe as much as 60 pounds considering all the robbing I had been doing in June.) I had spent the last week constructing a potato shelf that we could set in the basement and use for storage. I had no idea how big it should be, so I just guessed and used the wood that I had on hand. As it turned out, the shelf was just right, and it holds all of the potatoes with a little room to spare.

So, the potatoes are in.

Now it's on to the second crop. I have ordered five pounds of Canelas, two pounds of German butterballs, and one pound of Golden Sunburst (don't you just love those names), and I plan to get them into the ground this week. Then we can look forward to September potatoes.

Update: I put in the new crop of potatoes yesterday (Monday, July 7). All of row 15 was taken up by the Canelas, and the German butterballs and Golden Sunburst share row 14. Many of the pieces had begun to sprout small shoots, so I am anxious to see how they do when they are in the ground. We need rain very badly.

Cucumbers are cool

2008-07-01T15:54:00.005-04:00

One of the big surprises of the garden this spring have been the cucumbers. They are about played out now, but they have had a glorious heyday during the past couple of weeks.

I planted the cucumber seeds along with all the other vegetables in April -- okra, tomatoes, peppers, etc. -- and didn't pay any special attention to them. I had just scattered the seed in a row, and within a couple of weeks, they popped up out of the ground. All of them.

They were so strong and abundant as they grew that I transplanted some of them to another row just to see how they would do. They continued to grow. As they grew bigger, I noticed that the vines were beginning to spread out from the rows, and I did a bit of reading and found that they like to have something to climb on. I had a few bean frames in the tool shed, and I put them on top of the plants just to see what would happen.

What happened was that the cumbers covered the ground and started to climb. They produce huge leaves that give shade to the vines and the yellow blooms. I still wasn't paying too much attention to them except to note that they were big plants, very healthy and were continuing to grow.

Then one evening, Sally and I were looking around in the garden, and I happened to stoop down and move on the leaves. In doing so, I uncovered an enormous cucumber. I looked further and found them in all sizes and shapes. We have been gathering buckets full of them ever since.

The bees love the cucumbers. The vines produce a small yellow bloom, and at just about any time during the day, you can walk by the cucumber patch and hear the loud buzzing of hundreds of bees working away. The bees, of course, are one of the reasons why the crop has been so abundant.

The earliest cucumbers are the best-tasting ones, and once they get to be any size at all, they should be picked. If they get big and round and fat (and begin to yellow), they are probably not as good to hear. Sally found a recipe for no-cook spicy dill pickles from Epicurious.com and has put up several jars of those. She and Jane are also making some festive red cinnamon pickles that we will be giving away at Christmas time.

Note: Things in the garden have been pretty busy lately, and I have fallen behind on the planned posts. I will try to catch up on the next couple of weeks.

Buzzing the Web: BeeMaster.com forum

2008-06-01T06:26:00.002-04:00

The BeeMaster.com forum is one of the top places on the web to meet fellow beekeepers from all over the world.

Let’s say it’s another two weeks until the next beekeepers association meeting, and you’re feeling the need to talk bees. Your family of non-beekeepers isn’t interested. Your best bee buddy is out of town. The crowd at Cracker Barrel looks like a bunch of syrup-soppers rather than honey-loves.

What to do?

There’s a site on the web that’s perfect. It’s the forum on the BeeMaster.com site. The BeeMaster forum bills itself as the number one beekeepers forum in the world, and they’re probably right on that. Post a question, pose a problem, or just tell your latest bee story, and you will get an almost instant response. And the response will come from all over the world.

The forum is well-organized, so it is easy to find your way around. In fact, there are a number of sub-forums that are devoted to specific topics like the growth of the beeyard, pests and treatments, raising new queens and the like. One of these forums, called the Trading Post, is just what it says – a place where you can buy and sell equipment. There’s a forum for people who have their own web sites and blogs, and there’s even a forum called The Coffee House, where you talk about non bee-related things to others interested in beekeeping.

And, since many of us are also gardeners as well as beekeepers, there’s a gardener’s forum.

One of the nice things about all of this is that the forum is tightly monitored and moderated, which makes sure that one gets uncivil or abuses their privileges.

You have to register to participate in the forum, and you have to post several entries before you get full privileges to post links or upload pictures. That’s a bit irritating, but you can go online to ask questions and make comments immediately, and that’s a good thing.

I have posted several things on the BeeMaster forum, and I have always gotten friendly, well-meaning responses from people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. It’s kind of like the Blount County Beekeepers Association meeting all day and night and all over the world.

This is a wonderful site, and if you want to extend your circle of bee buddies, I highly recommend it.

State of the Hives: Mid-May

2008-05-18T19:21:00.002-04:00

My vow of waiting for two weeks before I opened the hives again fell a day short yesterday (Saturday) morning. I just couldn't wait to see what was happening. I had observed so much activity outside the hives now that things are coming into full bloom, I had to get the inside scoop.

I had two boxes of frames with foundation ready to put on any hive that might need the room, and I was hopeful that I might need to use both of them somewhere.

So, here's the rundown:

Hive 1: I had taken the queen excluder off this hive so the bees would have a better chance of migrating up into the third box. It looks like that's exactly what they are doing. There is honey in that third box, but they still have a long way to go before they will need a fourth. The population seems to be strong, and things look good.

Hive 2: As with Hive 1, I took the queen excluder off a couple of weeks ago, and there is some evidence that the bees have discovered the top (fourth) box, but they are still drawing out comb and haven't stored any honey there yet. That was disappointing but not too surprising given that this hive was probably the source of the big swarm I had in late April. Still, there are plenty of bees in this hive, and we're only in mid-May, so hope lives that this hive will be productive.

Hive 3: This first swarm hive is still drawing comb and trying to increase its population. It seems to have the smallest number of bees of any hive, undoubtedly because it was built with a fairly small swarm to begin with. The bees are staying in the top box of this two-box hive., and they have done almost nothing with the bottom box. There won't be any honey from these guys this year, and the best we can hope for is that they increase their numbers throughout the summer. I am keeping the feeders on them with the hope that they will stay in the hive, draw comb and make baby bees.

Hive 4: This hive is the nuc that I bought from Coley O'Dell with the deep brood box at the bottom and a medium super on top of that. This hive has increased its population, but there is still a lot for them to do in the brood box, and unlike Hive 3, they show no inclination just yet of going upstairs into the second box. So, no need for another box of frames for these guys just yet. I will keep feeding them, too, and hopeing for a population explosion soon.

Hive 5: This hive came from the second swarm (which was much larger than the first), and these guys have been busy from the first day. I found that both boxes have been well drawn out with comb, and they are putting honey (fully capped) into some of the frames on the second box. In other words, they're doing great. Unfortunately, the honey is sugar-water honey because I had been feeding them heavily, even though they have show great inclination to leave the hive. Given all of this, I had a decision: I placed a third box of frames on the hive and took off the feeds. Any honey they put in that third box will be real, honest-to-goodness honey. They look like they're ready. We'll give them another couple of weeks.

So, it was not what I had hoped for in terms of production but not really very surprising considering where the bees have come from. If it keeps raining and the flowers keep blooming, the bees should have a very productive month. I looked at the hives again this afternoon and noticed, particularly in Hive 1, a lot of bees flying into the hive loaded with honey.

We'll see how long I can stay away from them this time. Meanwhile, I need to put some foundation in some frames and paint a couple of more boxes.

A trip to Monterey - in Loudon County

2008-05-07T19:25:00.011-04:00

Monterey Mushrooms - one of East Tennessee's hidden gems, and a great place for the gardener.

East Tennessee is full of discoveries waiting to be discovered, and wife Sally and I found one on Tuesday -- the Monterey Mushroom Company in Loudon County.

And why go to the Monterey Mushroom Company? Not for the mushrooms. You can buy those at the local grocery story.

If not mushrooms, then what? Compost.

Monterey Mushroom has compost, mountains and mountains of compost. And the friendly folks there will sell you a truckload for $25. All you need is a truck with a good set of springs, and the ability to stand strong odors. The place wreaks.
View Larger Map

Our friend Jim Brown of Honey Rock Herb Farm in Louisville told us about the place a few weeks ago, and we had been meaning to drive down there ever since. Tuesday we got our chance. We made our way over to Highway 11 and then down through Lenoir City and five miles after that the town of Loudon. A couple of miles past the center of Loudon, Highway 72 intersects Highway 11, and you make a right back toward Interstate 75. Just after you cross over the Interstate, you see a big Honda plant on the right, and the next thing on the right is Monterey Mushrooms.

The guy at the gate directed us around to the back, and as we were driving back there Sally rolled up the windows and turned on the AC. Too late. We just had to live with the smell. In the back, a very friendly guy took our order for year-old compost (this stuff is ready to spread onto your garden) and told us to drive further up the hill -- which must be what compost heaven looks like.

When we got to the designated spot, we waited for a few minutes along with a couple of other folks. A guy with a front-loader made his way up the hill and proceeded to dig into one of several mountains of compost (some had to be 30 or 40 feet high) and load us up with all that we could carry.

The compost is thick, a bit moist and pretty heavy, so you have to be careful not to overload the truck. We paid at the gate, and it was somewhat slow-going back to Maryville, but we made it. We spent yesterday and today spreading the stuff throughout the garden.

Twenty-five bucks for the compost, a few bucks for the gas, a pleasant drive and a healthier garden. Not bad for a Tuesday morning in May.

And speaking of the garden . . .

We have put in some tomato and pepper plants and are growing lettuce, peas, cucumbers, and okra from seeds. The cucumber seeds I planted have been abundant in sprouting, so this evening I dug up a few and transplanted them to a different row just to see if they would make it. I will have to thin them out anyway, so it won't be a great loss.

At the top of the garden are three healthy rows of candy corn and three rows of beans.

But the pride of the garden so far is at the bottom where a row of potatoes reside. They were ordered from Colorado and include some fingerlings. Everything has come up and is big and green and leafy. A sight to behold.

Pictures soon.(see below)

Note: We did a little research on Monterey Mushrooms before we ventured into deepest Loudon County and found that it is one of the major companies in the county with more than 500 employees. Many of the workers are Mexican, and you can note the Hispanic presence in the area by the many signs in Spanish that you see along the way. If our country ever decides to get sensible about an immigration policy -- and stop cowering behind the idea of a "fence" -- it might look to Loudon County to see how our neighbors south of the border are making our lives, and theirs, a little better.

Update: Pictures from this morning (Thursday, May 8). The white blossoms are the blackberry vines. The blackberries should be ready in about six weeks.

State of the Hives: May 5, 2008

2008-05-05T07:31:00.004-04:00

I opened all five hives yesterday to get an idea about what is happening in each and to see if there were any obvious problems. In general, I found a lot of bees doing what bee should do at this time of year. Hives 3 and 5, the ones built from recent swarms, are drawing comb like crazy. Hive 3 is two weeks old, and there is some beautifully capped brood cells on some of the frames. I have a couple of front feeders, but these still seem to want to get out and work the flowers.

Hive 4, my nuc hive, has been with me for about three weeks and sees to be expanding nicely. I had put a couple of interior jars of juice on them, but I found so much brood cell that I decided to put a second box of frames and just feed them from the front.

Hives 1 and 2, my hives from last year, are thriving with lots of bees and lots of activity. (I suspect that these two hives are the sources of the two swarms I've had.) Hive 2 is a four-box hive with a queen excluder between the top box and the other three. Hive 1 is a three-box hive with a queen excluder under the top box also. While there is a bit of honey in the top box of Hive 1, there is none in the top box of Hive 2. Nor were there very many bees in the top box of either hive. This was disappointing and disturbing.

So, I made a decision. I removed the queen excluders.

Did I do the right thing?

I'm going to pose this question on the forum and BeeMaster and see what the opinion is.

My plan is to look inside those hives in a couple of weeks and see what is happening.

Same swarm - second verse

2008-05-01T20:23:00.004-04:00

The continuing saga of the second swarm, in which the bees are deprived of clustering opportunities above and have nowhere to go but into the hive.

The swarm that we posted about yesterday offered us some additional excitement today.

I went over to the farm early this morning to make sure everything was okay, and I noticed that a fistful of bees was still hovering in the limbs just above the hive. Inside the hive was a massive number of bees, so I decided not to worry about those in the tree too much, figuring they would eventually make their way into the hive.

Instead, the opposite happened.

As the day continued into the afternoon, the number of bees in the tree increase. They were still nowhere near the number of the original swarm, but it was worrisome. I opened the hive and shook the limb, which dropped a few bees into the hive and quite a few onto the ground -- many of which crawled into the hive. Still, almost immediately, a significant number gathered back in the tree.

When I got back to the house later in the afternoon, I talked with my friend and master beekeeper Coley O'Dell. He knew exactly what was happening. The bees were clustering around the scent left by the queen on the limb. I could take care of that by shaking the bees off the limb and cutting the limb and dragging it away.

Sounded right to me, but easier said than done. The limb they were clustering around was about 15 feet off the ground, and I didn't have a good ladder to get me there. I bought an extended limb cutter from the coop, suited up in my bee gear and went to work. Every time I would cut a limb where the bees were clustering, they would cluster around another limb. Apparently, the queen had left her sent on a variety of limbs.

It took a while, but I managed to cut all of the limbs where the bees were clustering. Since they had no place to go, they eventually landed on the ground next to the hive and started clustering around the Boardman feeder that I had place on the front of the hive. Then, as if they were a military unit, they started marching into the hive.

That was a beautiful sight. And, I hope, to the end of the Saga of the Second Swarm.

Additional note:

During our conversation this afternoon, Coley reminded me of something very valuable. In gathering swarms, you always worry about where the queen is, and generally you don't know if she's inside the hive or out. Coley said that when you have a swan, the hive will empty out within 20 minutes if the queen isn't there. Good to keep that in mind.

Swarm season

2008-04-30T21:44:00.008-04:00

The rules.
The second swarm of the season formed on a tree limb down on the farm this afternoon; this time we had a camera.

Swarm season is upon us. The bees get restless and want to leave the hive. First the rules:

If you see a swarm, don't panic. A swarm is generally a good thing.
DO NOT use insecticide to try to kill a swarm. Bees are way to valuable for that kind of treatment.
Swarms are fairly benign and unlikely to sting.
Call your local police or fire department and ask for their list of beekeepers. Or call a beekeeping friend. Any beekeeper will love you for it.
If you simply do nothing, the swarm is likely to go away, usually within 24 hours.

We had our second swarm down on the farm on Wednesday afternoon. We had one a couple of weeks ago, detailed here. This one gathered around a couple of limbs in a maple tree near the garden. Sally discovered it when she was mowing part of the lawn.

The swarm was about 15 feet off the ground, but we were able to reach the limbs and consequently did not need a ladder.

This seemed to be a larger swarm than the first one. By the time we saw it and gathered up the gear, it stretched along the limb for several feet and looked pretty fierce. The most difficult part of this swarm was placing the new hive box correctly under the swarm so it would drop into the box. I was never totally successful at that. Still, enough of the bees dropped into the box when I shook the box so that they got the idea that this was their new home.

The bees that were left gathered around the limb again, and after a few minutes, I shook the limb again, and more fell into the box. Even more bees fell to the ground around the box, and I could see them start to migrate into the box. I decided to leave them alone at that point, and eventually, the number around the limb began to dissipate.

Check out the slideshow from Picasaweb:

Long live the queen

2008-04-28T10:56:00.004-04:00

A couple of inspections this weekend turned up a missing queen.

I probably spent too much time in the hives this weekend. If the bees could blog, they would probably agree. Early Saturday morning, I opened all of the hives to see what I could see. Since I'm not all that experienced, I didn't know what I was looking at a lot of the time, but it was fascinating to watch.

Hive 4: This is the nuc hive, the one I just got from friend and master beekeeper Coley O'Dell. It seems to be doing fine. The bees are multiplying, they're taking their food, and they are spreading out to the other frames from the central three where they started. I will probably need to put a new box of frames on them before long.
Hive 3: The swarm hive is doing exactly what a swarm hive should do: drawing comb like crazy. I have given them two boxes of frames to work on, but they're only interested in the top box so far. They are spreading out and drawing comb, and they are taking the feed like they should. It will be interesting to see what happens with these little guys.
Hive 2: The tall hive is full of bees, and they are mighty busy. Any time you look at the hives from the outside, this is where you see the most activity. Their front porch is like LaGuardia with constant take-offs and landings. Inside, the frames are covered with bees, thousands and thousands of bees. They haven't started putting up any honey in the box above the queen excluder yet, but I have high hopes for this colony.
Hive 1: This is the hive that we re-queened earlier this month. About a week after we put the queen cage in, I checked the hive, and she was still in the cage. The bees didn't seem particularly interested in eating through the sugar in the cage, so I dug out the cork on the other side so she could get out. She left the cage, but at the time, I couldn't see what had happened to her. When I checked again on Saturday morning, the hive was full of bees but not as much evidence of brood cells as I was expecting to see. I was beginning to worry that something had happened to her. Sally and I went back last night, opened that hive and looked carefully at many of the frames. And, by chance, we found the queen. She looked healthy and active, so I decided to close the hive and declare that all was well -- at least for the moment.

So, for now, the hives are closed, and the bees are at work. We have had a couple of days of desperately needed rain in this part of east Tennessee, which should help garden and bees alike. The next move in the apiary will be to put a box of frames on Hive 4.

Watching the garden grow

2008-04-27T06:19:00.005-04:00

The expression "like watching the grass grow" describes something that is slow and boring.

So why do we get so excited at watching our garden grow -- literally. The corn and beans that we set out a little more than a week ago have started to pop up and are making a distinct row. The potatoes that we first put in -- the ones we ordered from Colorado -- are nice leafy plants, and the lettuce is beginning to look like lettuce, albeit very small. We even saw some evidence of my red onions coming through the grown.

And this is exciting?

You bet it is. It's the miracle of growth -- something we take for granted most of the time.

But in our garden, we're partially responsible for it. And that makes the heart beat just a bit faster.

Meanwhile, yesterday we put our a couple of additional things, so now the lineup looks like this:

Row 1: potatoes -- bananas, Red Russet, French fingerling (March 31)
Row 2: peas (March 31; replanted April 22); potatoes -- Yukon gold (April 7)
Row 3: lettuce; red onions (April 7)
Row 4: Cherokee Purple tomatoes (western third, April 22); cucumbers (middle third, April 26); potatoes -- Kenebec (April 12)(eastern third)
Row 5: Pepper plant (western end, April 26); okra (seed, eastern third, April 26)
Row 6: Red and yellow peppers (seed, eastern third, April 26)
Row 7: Tomato plants (western end, April 26)
Row 13: Beans, half-runners (April 18)
Row 14: Peanut beans (ordered); peanut beans (horticulture) (April 18)
Row 15: Peanut beans (local) (April 18)
Row 16: Candy corn (April 18)
Row 17: Candy corn (April 18)
Row 18: Candy corn (April 18)

The plan (as if we had one): Rows 10-12 will be white corn, to be planted well have the yellow corn is up and going to prevent cross pollination. The eastern have of rows 7-9 will be pumpkins to be planted in May or sometime. We'll fill in with other things as we find them.

The garden grows -- and so does the apiary

2008-04-22T19:42:00.002-04:00

Corn in the top rows of the garden again -- we'll see how it does this year. We had to plan twice last year. The first planting didn't come up. Maybe we'll have more luck this year.

Sally, Jane and I put out candy corn last Friday (April 18) in the top three rows of the garden. Then we put beans in the next three rows.

This evening (April 22) we put in some tomato seeds in the western third of row 4 -- Cherokee Purple and --. The middle of that row is unplanted. Sally also replanted her peas in row 2; the first seeds seem to have stalled out.

So, the lineup in the garden looks like this so far:

• Row 1: potatoes -- bananas, Red Russet, French fingerling (March 31)
• Row 2: peas (March 31; replanted April 22); potatoes -- Yukon gold (April 7)
• Row 3: lettuce; red onions (April 7)
• Row 4: Cherokee Purple tomatoes (western third, April 22); potatoes -- Kenebec (April 12)(eastern third)
• Row 13: Beans, half-runners (April 18)
• Row 14: Peanut beans (ordered); peanut beans (horticulture) (April 18)
• Row 15: Peanut beans (local) (April 18)
• Row 16: Candy corn (April 18)
• Row 17: Candy corn (April 18)
• Row 18: Candy corn (April 18)

We still have more tomatoes, pumpkins, cantelopes, sunflowers, okra and maybe some other things to go.

In Row 1, the potatoes are springing up, and Row 3's lettuce is beginning to appear.

And there are more bees.

Coley O'Dell told me on Sunday that the nuc I ordered from him was ready, so I went to get it just as darkness was descending. I had no problem carrying it in the truck or getting it onto the hive stand. I looked inside the next morning because Coley advised putting a jar of fee in the hive rather than on the outside, and the bees had covered the inner three frames of the deep box. They sounded like they didn't want to be disturbed, too.

I checked all the hives this morning. The nuc hive is beginning to draw comb nicely. So is the swarm hive after hovering around the corners of the top box for a couple of days. The tall hive, my strongest one, seems to be doing everything it should be doing. They are drawing comb in the top box, and I hope to see honey there before long. And the re-queened hive is already putting honey in its top box.

We're getting close to the time when the beekeeper can just sit back and watch the show.

My first swarm

2008-04-19T09:55:00.001-04:00

A red-letter day in the life of a beekeeper -- the first swarm.

That happened to me on Thursday (April 17). Sally called in the middle of the day saying there was a pineapple-sized cluster of bees on the limb of an old tree about 30 or 40 feet from where the hives are located.

I got there as soon as I could get away, on my way trying to remember all the things I had read about gathering swarms and what had been mentioned at the last beekeepers association meeting about them.

Swarms are clusters of bees that have raised a new queen and left the hive. They are looking for a new home, and chances are they will gather initially some place very close to the hive they left. Beekeepers try to prevent their hives from breaking into swarms, but when they do, they realize that they have a new colony, and they have to deal with it. That's why its a good idea to have extra hive equipment -- boxes, frames, etc. -- on hand.

At least I had done that.

A swarm isn't that hard to capture. The bees are clustered and surprisingly benign. They are unlikely to sting. They're looking for a new home and not interested in protecting anything. If you can reach it, a swarm can be gathered by hand. You just have to have a box ready to put the bees in and a way to close the top so they won't fly out again. Then you need to have hive boxes ready, so the bees can be dumped into their new home. If the queen is in the hive box, the rest of the bees will follow.

That last point -- get the queen and the rest will follow -- was the principal one that I remembered. The swarm I had on Thursday gathered around a tree branch about eye level, so it was easy to reach once I had taken out a few blackberry vines. I gathered them into my hands and put them directly into the hive box. I probably got the queen on that first gathering, but I couldn't be sure. Sally found a cardboard box for me, and I gathered the bees that were left as they kept clustering around the branch. This went on for about an hour until there were few bees left, and I was pretty sure the queen was in the hive box.

Then I closed the box and waited. By that evening, none of the bees were left outside, so I was sure I had gotten the queen and most of the bees.

As I said before, beekeepers love to get swarms. They are easy and free way to start a new colony. (A box of bees would cost about $70.) Once inside a new hive, the bees have a natural tendency to draw comb, and any beekeeper will tell you that drawn comb is "pure gold."

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me when the swarm occurred, so I don't have any pictures. The pictures I do have are of the third hive that contains the new colony. I set that hive up on its stand yesterday, put a jar of food for the bees on it, put a new box of frames on top of the one they already had, and now they are doing their thing. If the rain stops today, I may get a chance to look inside and see what's happening.

Here are links to a couple of good articles about swarms in Beemaster and Essortment in case you're interested in knowing more about swarms.

A new queen for Hive 1

2008-04-12T17:54:00.002-04:00

Hive 1 got a new queen yesterday. Jim Brown and I opened the hive a couple of weeks ago and decided that the evidence was there was either no queen or that she was slowing down so much, she simply wasn't producing. I called Coley O'Dell, master beekeeper, and ordered one. He suggested that when she showed up and we were able to install her, we should take a frame of brood cells from Hive 2 and put it in Hive 1 to give it a bit of a boost.

The new queens that Coley had ordered showed up this week, and Jim and I did what Coley suggested last night. We looked through Hive 1 and could not find the queen or any evidence that she was around -- no brood cell. When we were confident she wasn't there, we opened Hive 2 and found a frame that had a lot of brood. We took a frame from Hive 1 and exchanged it. Then we put a spacer between the first box and second box of the hive and placed the queen -- still in her protective box, of course -- in between the two boxes.

All this was done during the late afternoon and some fairly stiff winds. Bees dislike wind and tend to get very ill if exposed to it too much. I must say, however, that the bees did very well last night and were generally cooperative with what we had to do.

Jim and I will take a look inside the hive in a few days to make sure the queen is out of her box and has been accepted by the hive.

Meanwhile, after some rain and a bit of wind, today (Saturday, April 12) was spectacular on the farm. The sky was blue with lots of high clouds, the temperatures stayed in the 60s, and the wind whipped around all day. Sally and I did a lot of yard work -- mowing, cleaning, trimming, raking, etc. I also did some tilling and evened out the garden to some extent.

The forecast for early next week is cold, nearly freezing weather, so that precluded putting much stuff in the garden. Still, I couldn't resist stopping by the farmer's coop this morning and getting another variety of potatoes -- Kennebec red. Here's what the Washington State University web site has to say about Kenebecs:

Kennebec - Tubers are "elliptical to oblong, medium thick; smooth creamy buff skin; shallow eyes; white flesh.... High yielding fast growing variety, widely adapted. Requires close planting (15 to 20 cm between plants) and vine killing to avoid producing oversized and rough tubers. Excellent storage quality. Long dormancy period. High total solids." Primary uses: boiling, baking, chipping, and frying.

I bought a couple of pounds, which took up only about a third of Row 4. So this is how the garden lines up to date:
• Row 1: potatoes -- bananas, Red Russet, French fingerling (March 31)
• Row 2: peas (March 31); potatoes -- Yukon gold (April 7)
• Row 3: lettuce; red onions (April 7)
• Row 4: potatoes -- Kenebec (April 12)(eastern third)
These rows are pictured to the left (looking east), and it's apparent that not much is happening above ground right now. I hope the right things are going on below the surface.

Now that it is mid-April, some of the more beautiful blooms are appearing. The dogwoods are out and about to peak. We have a lilac bush in the back yard, and that is blooming now for the third year in a row after years of being dormant. I have seen the first bachelor buttons and buttercups in the pasture. It's a wonderful, colorful time of the year, and a clear day like today makes you appreciate it even more.

And to add to the joy, baseball season is in full swing, and the Cardinals, surprisingly, are winning.

Later in the afternoon, after I had finished with the work, I walked around some with the camera. There is always something to take a picture of, so I tried to include a lot of what I had just talked around. Everything is in the slideshow below.

Enjoy.

Planting - first report

2008-04-06T19:25:00.005-04:00

As the grass, bushes and trees turn the new, clean green that only spring can offer, it's time to start putting things into the ground. We started last Monday (March 31) with a row of potatoes and a half a row of peas. In a separate patch, we put in some daylilies at the same time.

The potatoes were bananas, French fingerlings and Russets that I had ordered from Romingers in Colorado. I particularly wanted the French fingerlings. We started buying those from a farmer at the Abingdon, VA, farmer's market several years ago, and they are one of the best things I have ever put in my mouth. I have wondered since then if I would ever be able to grow anything like that. Our potatoes didn't come up last year because we planted them too late, and they were done in by the drought. We shall see this year.

That was all that we were able to do this week because of an exceptionally busy schedule at the University and because it has rained just about every day since then. We are not having a drought so far this year, although the predictions for later this summer are that it's going to be hotter and drier than normal. That doesn't sound good. But up to this point, we have had lots of rain, and we are enjoying that. A couple of days of dry weather wouldn't hurt because we have some other things to get into the group.

Some of the daylilies we set out came from the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC. We toured the place in March with our friends the Rables, and we bought some of the bulbs from the garden shop. We purchased some other locally and set out about 15. Daylilies are supposed to be practically maintenance-free. The ones we had in Tuscaloosa certainly were. We have created a separate patch for them in the garden. They've already popped their heads out of the ground, and I am anxious to see how they do. (The picture at the right was taken in one of the greenhouses of the Biltmore House.)

We drove the truck to the back of the farm this afternoon and dug up some iris that had grown there for several years. We're going to put those in the daylily patch and see if they bloom and spread as they should. We haven't gotten those into the ground yet because despite a beautifully clear day today, it's still too muddy to get into the garden.

On another front, I completed a painting of the Gorgas House on the University of Alabama campus this year to donate to a student organization's auction. You can see it here.

Update, Monday, April 7: The garden continues to grow. After a couple of dry days, the mud has been chased below the surface, and we were able to get a few more things in the ground. So, this is how things are shaping up so far:

Row 1: potatoes -- bananas, Red Russet, French fingerling (March 31)
Row 2: peas (March 31); potatoes -- Yukon gold (April 7)
Row 3: lettuce; red onions (April 7)

We also put in some of the iris that we dug up on Sunday. We placed those in the daylily patch along with some freesia.

State of the hives (Easter), and other matters

2008-03-24T07:37:00.005-04:00

The bees are flying, anxious for the blooms to open. My friend Jim Brown and I opened the hives yesterday (Sunday, March 23) and found some problems and some good news.

The problems were in the small hive where there were almost no brood cells. That means there is no queen or that she has stopped laying, and that means she has to be replaced. The good news is that there are still a fair number of bees in the hive, and if I can get a new queen in soon, the hive has a chance of being productive this year. I called Coley O'Dell, a premier Blount County beekeeper, and ordered a queen last night. He said he hoped the queens he was ordering would be available April 5.

The good news is that the other hive is strong and ready to go. We found plenty of brood cells in the bottom three boxes of that hive, and the bees were feisty and full of life. They are ready to get to work. With any luck at all, they should be fairly productive this year. The only thing that will slow them down is that they will have to draw out some comb in order to store the honey, which takes extra time and energy away from their honey production. Beekeepers refer to drawn comb as "pure gold," and this is why. Still, there are plenty of bees in the hive, so we should be getting some honey by midsummer.

The farm. Easter cam extraordinarily early this year (the earliest in nearly 100 years, I'm told), and the farm is not yet in full bloom. The day yesterday was a bit chilly and windy, but by noon the air was crisp and the sky clear. All in all, a beautiful day, as the pictures above will validate.

I had the tiller out yesterday, and after we had finished with the bees, I couldn't resist breaking the group. I had marked off a 10 x 25-foot plot just east of the hives where Sally and I will put some day lilies. Those flowers thrive on full sun and neglect, and in that spot they are likely to get both. We bought some lilies during our visit to the Biltmore in Asheville last week, and I picked up some more at a local shop this weekend. We'll see what happens.

Our friend Sam Love promised to show up this week with his plow to give the garden a going over. I have plotted out a space more than twice the size of what we did last year, so the plans are ambitious. But spring is here, and all things are possible.

Opening day. And speaking of spring and all things possible -- life begins again this Sunday, less than one week and counting. My calendar and body clock tell me that the official start of the baseball season is upon us. The beloved Cardinals made changes during the off-season that are exciting and unsettling, and that will be fun to watch. The Yankees have a new manager, and the Red Sox have essentially the same strong team. The Mets are everybody's favorites, as they usually are this time of year, and it will be fun to watch them fail, or not.

My friend George Rable is a Reds fan and as such refuses to speculate or get his hopes up. He is rational and wise.

Eliot Spitzer as a fictional character

2008-03-16T08:01:00.001-04:00

What if you wrote a novel about Eliot Spitzer? What would it look like?

That's the question that novelist Richard Russo considers in an interesting column today (March 16) in the Washington Post.

The news media, Russo says, have reduced the Spitzer story to a one-dimensional tale of hypocrisy outed, and while Russo didn't say this, they have thrown around the word "tragedy" a little freely. The real story of Spitzer is certainly as sad as it is surprising, but we would have to know more to bring it to the level of tragedy.

But what if we did know more? And what if, like a good novelist, we could make it up? That's what Russo does to some extent. First he considers the character of Spitzer himself.

But I don't mean to jigger the facts; fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught. And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent. For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly. He will swerve at the last moment. The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him.

Even worse, though he knows that the world doesn't work this way, he convinces himself that if he's caught, people will treat him fairly. Sure, he has shamed himself, but he's done a lot of good things, too, and people will remember that. He has always employed a kind of moral arithmetic, and he'll expect that same math to be applied to him -- all his virtues set up on one side of the ledger, his one weakness on the other. People will understand that he's mostly good. By the time my Eliot realizes that he's wrong about all this, it's too late. The damage is done. He has betrayed his wife, his children, his best self, and it's all his fault.

Russo goes on to talk about Spitzer's wife and family.

First, Eliot's wife -- and here I sense a mystery even deeper than the mystery of Eliot himself. Why does she stand there beside him at the podium when he confesses? Why do they all? I feel uniquely unqualified to look inside her heart, to ferret out her motives. I make a list of what I know (not much) and what I suspect (not much more) and wonder whether imagination will fill in all those blanks. I'm relatively certain of one thing: It's not this woman's fault. I won't portray her as frigid or otherwise complicit in what has transpired. She hasn't driven Eliot to any of this. I don't believe in perfection, but I've decided for the time being that she's been a good wife, a good mother.

Russo makes some interesting observations about how the story might play out. He gives Spitzer a sidekick who can inject a little humor into this tale. This would be a good character, as Russo conceives him. He can give Spitzer a different look at the world, as opposed to the self-center take he always has. Russo takes a look at Spitzer's daughters to see what effect their father's actions might have on them.

How does the story end? Here is where I would part company with what Russo has written.

There's also a story in which Eliot isn't even the main character. Because how believable is it, really, that they came across him by chance on that wiretap? His many enemies are justly famous as the dirtiest of tricksters. Maybe I should be writing a thriller, but I dislike and distrust plot-driven narrative and have grown fond of my own messed-up, untidy Eliot, so American in both his ambition and the disgrace that seems to flow from it so naturally. I might not know precisely why he's done what he's done, but he connects to my long-held conviction that people (in fiction, in life) aren't meant to be saints, or to be treated like saints. That's the hard lesson Hawthorne's Reverend Dimmesdale learned from the pulpit.

I'm not sure why Russo distrusts "plot-driven narrative." I'm not even sure what that means.

In my take, a good plot comes first, characters second. I can see Spitzer brooding about his losses and his own stupidity, searching for some redemption. But he doesn't brood for long. He acts in character. One storyline is that he has been set up. Someone somewhere has taken advantage of his foibles to do him in. Maybe there is ample justification, something we don't know yet. Spitzer goes on a quest to discover what he doesn't know.

I think I'd like to go with him.

Writing a novel and podcasting about it

2008-02-24T07:22:00.001-05:00

My friend and novelist extraordinaire Cyn Mobley is writing another novel (she has about 45 under her karate black belt so far). But this time she is podcasting about the process.

The novel is titled THE CALLING. Cyn started in late January and promised to have the first draft done in a month. Since then, she has dealt with a new puppy and a touch of the flu. Still, she's makingreal progress, and she's telling us about it.

2007 - caught up

2008-02-19T12:29:00.009-05:00

Anybody who was watching this site knows that there was a long gap between posts from the end of May to the beginning of 2008. It's not that there was nothing to write about. Quite the opposite. There was too much.

So here I am, catching up. Just for the record.

Jordan. Two weeks after my last post in May, I found myself in Jordan. Our School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee has a training grant to help improve journalism education in Jordan, and I went to that Mideast country for a week to work with faculty and students at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan. They were seeking to put together a student newspaper, and I showed them a bit about the software and hardware to do that and talked with them some about the practices of journalism here in America.

Irbid is the second largest city in Jordan and at the northern tip of the country. One evening, one of the professors with whom we were working drove us to the most northern part of the country, and we stood on a mountain top where we could see a vast amount of land to the north and west. On our left was Israel. In the center was the Sea of Galilee. On the right was the Golan Heights. The place where we were standing was the site of the miracle of Jesus casting out the demons, which is referred to in all three Synoptic gospels. It was quite a feeling -- and one I never thought I would have.

I was in Amman on my last full day in Jordan, so I hired a car and driver and went south three hours to Petra. The place is stunning (see photo above). Shortly before the time of Christ, the residents of this area began carving facades of buildings into the soft stone of the mountains, making this stop on one of the world's busiest trading routes truly memorable for travelers. Today, the world traders are gone, but the tourists have returned, and what they see is an astounding collection of architectural-size art that is difficult to describe. I stayed several hours and took many pictures. You can check out the album at Picasaweb.

The garden and the blackberries. When I got back to the U.S., the garden that we had spent so much time on was coming up and needed a lot of tending. And the blackberries were overwhelming.

I love blackberries, and I don't mind picking them. For more than a couple of weeks, I got up just about every day and was out at first light. That would give me about two hours of picking time before it got too hot. We had blackberries in abundance this year. It seemed like they grew everywhere they could grow and then found new places to grow. It also seemed a shame to let them go unpicked. I had done nothing to cultivate them. They were simply a gift -- one I could not turn down. So I picked and picked. Sally joined me on several occasions. We even picked some late in the afternoon.

The previous summer, Sally learned to make blackberry jelly, and she perfected her technique this past summer. We found some small decorative canning jars and had a lot of fun giving the stuff away. We finally gave away the last of those jars just a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the garden grew. Everything we planted came up (except the potatoes, which we planted too late), and despite the drought, some things did very well. We had lots of cherry tomatoes, lots of small pumpkins, some beans and some corn. And the sunflowers were prolific, which the bees loved. In fact, the bees loved just about everything and would become a little irritated when our gardening got in the way of their foraging.

But there was also the drought. It turned out to be one of the driest summers on record, and eventually things in the garden went downhill. Our corn seemed to be the thing most affected by the drought, which was very disappointing. Sally's dad could grow row after row of yellow corn, and we had visions of the same thing.

Still, the garden was a wonderful experience. I have been thinking about it all fall and winter, and I am ready to try some more things this spring.

By the way, the blue flowers in the slideshow are commonly called Blue Sailors. They are spread throughout the pasture, open in the morning and close in the afternoon and evening. They make a glorious sight. They are chicory, and in theory, their roots could be harvested. In reality, try to pull one up and you'll be in bed for a week with back strain. Consequently, we decided not to harvest, just enjoy.

The bees. The bees acclimated themselves and had a good summer. We had one massive kill. Apparently, some of the bees flew into some insecticide and brought it back to the hive, resulting in several thousand deaths. By the time that happened, however, both hives had grown fairly strong and could take the loss.

Beekeepers will always tell you that if you get stung, chances are it's your fault. I can certainly attest to that. I decided to inspect the hives one morning and thought that I didn't need to use the smoker to calm them down. I had not gained much expertise in handling the frames, and I let a couple of them drop ungently back into the hives. The bees rose up in anger and let me know their feelings. In fact, a few of them got under my veil, and I had to take it off and try to out-walk them, which didn't work. I got stung on the face several times, and my face swelled up. I looked like I spent extended time in the dentist's chair for a couple of days. I learned a good lesson -- one that every beekeeper knows: Don't take the bees for granted.

The two hives developed very different personalities by the end of the summer. One was gentle and laid back. The other was somewhat ill-tempered and aggressive. In the fall, if I would approach the hives, I could hear the noise level of the aggressive hive go up, and some of the bees would venture out to see what was going on. The other hive would remain remarkably calm in my presence. Very interesting.

We took the advice of my friend and bee buddy Jim Brown and didn't try to harvest any honey this year. Instead, we started feeding the hives early in the fall and didn't quit all winter long. I was determined that whatever else happened to them, they weren't going to starve over the winter. They didn't. Now, on warm days I see them in abundance flying around outside the hives. On the next warm day, I am going to open the hives and see what kind of stores they have left. From now through April is a critical time for them to have plenty of food so they can start the honey season in good shape.

I am also planning of a third hive. This year I am going to buy a nuc from Coley O'Dell, a premier beekeeper in Blount County. I'll probably have that by the first of May. A nuc is a small hive that is ready to roll as soon as it is installed. We'll see if it produces.

Writing group. I fell in with a very nefarious group this year -- a bunch of writers who were all working on their first novel. The group was organized and led by Cyn Mobley, who had written about forty-five novels and knows how to tell others how to do it. For some reason, she decided to tell us.

As a result, I put down nearly 100,000 words during October and November and came up with a mystery novel titled KILL THE QUARTERBACK.

I'm going to tell you more about how that happened and what the consequences have been later. It's pretty exciting stuff.

So, that was my year. Lots of other things happened, and those may come up with subsequently posts. Suffice it to say now that 2007 saw me accomplish some things I always wanted to do: keep bees, plant a garden, write a novel. Not too bad.

Later.

Eden's Path

2008-02-19T07:33:00.003-05:00

My good friends in Virginia, Chuck and Debbie Warnock, are simplifying their lives. It's a longterm commitment, and they are showing the rest of us what changes you can make in your personal behavior. They've turned off their cable television, they've learned to make no-knead bread (good stuff), and Chuck has switched to the same kind of razor his dad (and mine) used.

They're recording their journey in a new blog called Eden's Path. Good stuff. Highly recommended.

Now, they need to start keeping bees.

First Day of 2008

2008-01-01T15:54:00.000-05:00

The first day of 2008 was spectacularly clear, crisp and windy. Below is how it looked on the farm.

State of the Hives: Memorial Day 2007

2007-05-28T12:40:00.001-04:00

The bees have been with us for nearly two months now, and with a requisite number of ups and downs, ins and outs, we seem to have reached something of even keel in their management. It wasn't easy, but it's been worth it so far.

On a post or two ago, we talked about burr comb and the fact that the bees in one hive seem to be producing a good bit of it. I couldn't figure that out until Sally pointed out that the East Hive -- where the burr comb was occurring in abundance -- had a lot more bees than the West Hive, which had been decimated in the early April cold snap.

Well, of course. The bees were making burr comb because they didn't have anywhere else to go. There were only two medium boxes of frames, so I added another box. That was several days ago.

Last night Jim Brown came over and brought Uncle Gerald -- a beekeeper of many years -- to look at my hives. When we opened things up, the East Hive bees were well into the third box of frames, drawing comb like crazy. I had stopped feeding them a few days ago, and they seem to be thriving.

Same with the West Hive bunch. Their numbers are far fewer, but they are finally up into the second box of frames, drawing comb in a nice neat wave. Jim found brood cells in both boxes, which means the queens are doing their thing, so all seems to be well. I am still feeding the West Hive because their numbers are still down, and I will probably keep doing that for most of the summer.

As for the East Hive, the honey that they put into the third box will be real honey -- not the sugar water honey based on the bee juice I have been feeding them up until now. It could be harvested in July or August, although we will see if there is enough there to make it worthwhile.

One final note about the weather: It has not rained substantially for several weeks. The temperatures have not been horrendous -- actually, they've been very pleasant -- but things are beginning to dry up now. That's going to affect the production of the bees. If it will start raining sometime soon, the honey will begin to flow again, and these bees might finally have a chance to do what bees are supposed to do.

Planning begins for a third and fourth hive.

BeeCare: a site for the novice beekeeper

2007-05-26T16:48:00.000-04:00

BeeCare.com is one of the richest site for information on beekeeping that you will find anywhere on the web. The site is set up to sell products associated with beekeeping, but it contains a vast amount of information about those products and how they are used. And it has pictures, which is extremely helpful to new beekeepers who are struggled with all the new terms they have to learn.

The site is produced by Mark Jones of Leander, TX, near Austin. In explaining why he started the site, Mark says, “As an individual beekeeper, I had been frustrated by the lack of emphasis on the specialized needs of the hobbyist and the lack of support I continued to encounter with other vendors. So at BeeCARE, we try to follow the directive ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ I strive to have this principle guide our customer support, product development and selection, and our daily business decisions.”

The site’s design could be improved. It’s not particularly easy to navigate, and there is always the feeling that you might be missing something the site has to offer. Still, the site is well worth the time, once you develop a feel for it. Just about every aspect of beekeeping is covered with well written and good-humored prose. And, as I said, there are pictures that are extremely informative and helpful. This is a site I would definitely recommend to all beekeepers, rookies and veterans.

The Farm in May

2007-05-22T05:18:00.001-04:00

I took a little time out yesterday after getting into the beehives once again to take a few pictures for the monthly compilation.

Spring has matured. The crops in the garden are growing, the blooms are off the blackberries and the berries themselves are turning red, and even the honeysuckle is fading. I found one stand of large daisies in the pasture and a few smaller stands here and there.

We've come a long way from March. Check out the video in this entry.

The large field next to ours has been mowed, but Jack Clemmer probably won't get around to mowing ours until next month.

All in all, yesterday was glorious -- sunny, not too hot, a bit of a breeze. Working in the garden yesterday was most comfortable. But, we need rain.

Burr comb

2007-05-21T07:12:00.000-04:00

My newer hive of bees (Hive East) has never shown great inclination to go down onto the frames and draw their comb out properly. The comb that bees draw off the frames is called "burr comb," and those bees have had plenty of opportunity to make this stuff. I had put a two-inch spacer at the top of the hive when the bees were first installed in order not to crush the bees, but I knew they would probably take advantage of that.

Boy, was I right.

After last week's beekeeper's meeting, several folks had said I needed to get into the hive and scrape that burr comb out. John Gee, another experienced and generous beekeeper that I've met at the association, suggested I put the comb on top of the inner cover, put the spacer on that and then cover it with the outer cover. That way, the bees could get at whatever they had stored in the burr comb but would probably go down onto the frames.

I decided to go into the hive and do just that -- after returning from a long trip to Ft. Walton Beach, FL, where I attended a wedding.

Turns out there was far more burr comb inside that two-inch spacer than I imagined -- and it was full of honey that the bees had made from all of the feed that I had given them. The pictures here show what I found when I opened up the hive.

I dutifully scraped out the comb from the underside of the inner cover and the tops of the frames. The bees were particularly happy about that, but they didn't protest as I thought they might. (This was the first time I had fired up the smoker, and I used it some, although I'm not sure I really needed it.)

I did as John had advised, putting some of the burr comb on top of the inner cover, but there was so much of it that I had doubts about putting it all back. Instead, I dumped it on the ground beside the hive, hoping the bees would feed on it down there. When I closed the hive, I noticed that the honey was running down the outside of the hive -- and also from the inside. It was a real mess, but the bees will need to work on cleaning it up. I am going to look inside the hive today to see how things have progressed.

Blackberry blossoms and wildflowers

2007-04-29T22:18:00.000-04:00

The farm is entering what I would call its "yellow spring." The pasture is full of yellow buttercups, complemented here and there with groups of white daisies with yellow centers. (The blue bachelor's buttons also add a nice touch.) All the greenery is still new enough to have a yellowish flavor.

The wild blackberry vines are also in bloom. Some of them, as you can see from the photos above, are fairly close to the beehives, and the bees have certainly taken notice. I have been picking the wild blackberries for the last two summers, and each year the crop seems to be more abundant. I have tried to leave area where I know there are vines alone -- not clearing them out or cutting them back. You'll be hearing more about the blackberries as we get into the summer. Right now the bees seem to be having a feast (right).

Sally, Jane and I put out three rows of corn (two yellow and one white) and four rows of beans (two Blue Ribbon and two October) in the garden on Saturday morning. We still plan some pumpkins, tomatoes and one or two other things. We'll see what pops up.

The hives had a busy weekend. Lots of bees were going in and out constantly. They have also taken a couple of jars of feed. I opened both hives last night and found that on the left one (the newer one) the bees still have a tendency to gather under the top cover. They are drawing a good bit of comb up there rather than on the foundations. I'm not sure what to do about that, so I'll have to consult Jim Brown. The other hive is still working away, although there has been more activity in the top box than the lower one. I switched the positions of the boxes, making the top one the lower one, to see if that makes any difference at this point.

NEBees.com

2007-04-29T14:35:00.000-04:00

At the April meeting of the Blount County Beekeepers Assocation, we caught a glimpse of NEBees.com, but unfortunately that evening the Internet connections were too slow to play the videos. I took a look at the site later and was very impressed. It is produced by Rick Reault and Ron Lagasse. The site is set up to sell beekeeping products, but the short videos (currently on installing bees in a hive, lighting a smoker, the parts of a hive kit, and beekeeper clothing) can be a great help to the beginning beekeeper. Rick and Ron seem to have the video thing down pretty good, and the hope is that they will keep putting them on the site.

The site itself is very neat and easy to navigate. Unfortunately, they don’t have all of their pages populated yet. For instance, they promise a newsletter, which should be good, but it isn’t on the site yet. This site, however, seems to be one worth watching as it grows.

PBS: Tales from the Hive

2007-04-24T09:10:00.000-04:00

You won't learn a lot about beekeeping, but you'll get a bee's eye view of the world if you visit the web site for the Public Broadcasting System show, "Tales from the Hive."

This show was produced in 2001 and gives the viewer a lot of information about the biology and behavior of bees. For instance, the site goes inside the hive to examine the role that each type of bee plays in maintaining the hive's existence. The many ways in which bees defend their hives from external and internal threats gets a lot of attention. The picture on the right, taken from the site, shows a bee taking on an invading wasp.

One of the most interesting parts of the site is a discussion of how the show was made. The producers wanted to get as close to the bees as possible -- even when they are in flight -- and they went to some extraordinary lengths to achieve this.

With the renewed general interest in bees these days -- fully justified -- let's hope PBS puts together another show like this one.

Inside the hives

2007-04-23T19:32:00.000-04:00

Now that both hives seem to be thriving, I decided to conduct an inspection this evening to see how they are doing. While both hives are in generally good shape, I did encounter some difficulties that needed some attention.

In the hive that I installed on Saturday, I had left the queen box on top of the frames, and an empty medium hive box on the top as a spacer. When I opened the top of that hive, fully half the bees had congregated on top of the frames, and they had started building a couple of combs from the top of the inner cover. I knocked those combs off and brushed the bees down onto the top of the frames.

The queen box had been entered, and I didn't see her inside, so my assumption is that she is free inside the hive. Even so, I stuck the box in between two of the frames, hoping that would encourage the bees to go down into the frames. I also replaced the medium box with a two-inch spacer so the bees would not have some much room to gather at the top.

I was encouraged by the fact that the bees that flew out of the top of the hive had made their way back to the front of the hive by the time I had finished.

After closing that hive, I opened the other one to search for the queen. These bees are working away as they should. The outside frames did not have much comb on them, but the inside frames are getting pretty heavy. I looked through all of the frames in the top box, but by the time I had finished, the bees seemed to be getting restless, and I did not have the confidence to continue. I will do that in a couple of days.

Besides, during that inspection, I "suffered" my first bee sting. One of them got me through the sock, so now I have a big red welt on my leg just above my foot. Something to be proud of.

Newsflash: Bees are still alive

2007-04-22T21:31:00.000-04:00

The bees are buzzing, flying in and out of the hives, and generally seem to be having a good time.

The new colony, in the hive on the right, has now survived for 24 hours, and they seem to be thriving. The night was a bit chilly last night, but that hasn't seemed to bother them. Today's temperatures had them pretty lively by this afternoon.

I had planned to search for the queen in the hive on the left this afternoon, but I've decided to put that off for the day. I'm told that searching for a queen when you are inexperienced, as I am, can be a tedious and drawn-out affair. The queen is the largest bee in the hive and marked a bit differently, but she's not that much larger. And the hive is likely to have 10,000 to 20,000 bees, so it may take a while.

Sally planted some flowers in a couple of beds around the house, and I marked off some more rows in the garden. Sally and Jane planted corn in the first two rows on Saturday, and they will be putting some more stuff in this week.

Otherwise, the day was mild, full of cool breezes, green grass, yellow wildflowers and just about perfect.

More bees

2007-04-21T20:10:00.000-04:00

Another box of bees showed up today. Jim Brown had offered to let me have one of the extras boxes that he ordered, but we didn't expect them until next week. But they arrived from Dadant today.

The box was full of bees -- probably about 10,000 -- and I got them into the hive as quickly as I could. This time, I pulled the cork out of the correct end of the queen cage, and everything seemed to go well. The temperatures were well into the 70s today, and while it is cooling off a bit tonight, there should be anything like the cold snap we had three weeks ago.

I went back and check on the bees a couple of hours later, they seemed to be settling into the hive. Here's hoping.

A small experiment

2007-04-19T11:05:00.000-04:00

Over at FirstInningArtworks, I have conducted a small experiment with the video hosting services Motionbox, Brightcove, and YouTube. I put together a short video with music of some heads and faces that I have drawn and painted over the years just to see how they all worked. Motionbox was the winner on this day because it loaded the fastest, and there is very cool tagging feature that you can use to tag different parts of the video.

YouTube lags in quality, and Brightcove is a bit slow.

Update: bees, blueberries, etc.

2007-04-17T20:17:00.000-04:00

The last couple of weeks have been up and down on the farm. The weather has been generally cooler than usual, and that has caused some problems and delays. We also had a good bit of rain this weekend, which eventually will help everything but has slowed us down in getting some things done.

Bees: One hive survived, and one did not. That was confirmed this afternoon when Jim Brown and I looked into the hives for the first time. One of them (on the left) is full of bees, drawing comb and getting ready for the queen (whom we did not see) to lay some eggs. During the warm part of the days, these bees dart in and out and seem to be having a great time. Inside, there are thousands. (I'll try to get pictures this weekend.)

The other hive was not so fortunate. None of the bees survived, and there's no good explanation for it. Jim says the cold snap we had just after the bees were installed "didn't help them any." Getting used to a new home and dealing with sudden cold was more than these bees could stand.

Jim says he will be getting some more bees in next week (one of his new hives died, too), and that I can have a box of what he ordered. So, soon, we should be back with two hives.

Blueberries: The blueberry bushes had a hard time during the cold a couple of weeks ago. The frost got to the blooms and turned some of the leaves black. The bushes themselves survived, but the blooms are gone and we probably won't get any blueberries off them this summer. So it goes.

The garden: The cold has scared us off from planting for at least a week or so. We may try to put in some things this weekend when the temperatures are likely to get into the seventies.

So, we are past Easter and mid-April. No permanent damage (except to the bees), but it will take a while to get back on track.

Packaging the bees

2007-04-15T17:45:00.000-04:00

Getting a box of bees is an exciting -- and a bit scary -- event. Thousands of bees are clinging to the wire mesh sides of the box, emitting a low-level buzz that makes you glad they have been firmly secured.

If you have ever wondered how the bees got into the box, the folks at Brushy Mountain Bee Farm have put together a slide show on their visit to the Wilcox Apiaries in Georgia. The show takes the viewer through the entire process of packaging bees.

Wilcox operates 6,000 colonies of bees and has been in business for many years.

The photos in the slide show demonstrate they know exactly what they are doing in this fascinating process. The photo to the right shows one of the keepers putting the bees into a funnel that will get them into the box.

Our first spring mountain hike

2007-04-15T08:51:00.000-04:00

A visitor from Russia provided me with my first excuse to get into the mountains this spring. Ivan Zassoursky, a journalism prof at Moscow State University, wanted to see the mountains, and I was more than willing to oblige.

We carved out a few hours from his visit on Tuesday and motored up through Townsend and along the Little River.

We started our walk at The Sinks and traveled between one and two miles up the Meigs Creek Trail. The views in the mountains were still good because the trees had not fully leafed out yet.

The park was remarkably free of visitors. It was the middle of the week in early April, so that won't last long. Still, it's always nice to be in the mountains -- and even nicer to be there without a lot of other people around.

A few pictures of the trip can be found at my Picasa file.

Imus on our minds

2007-04-13T22:07:00.000-04:00

My friend Chuck Warnock over at Amicus Dei has written several good posts about the Don Imus affair this week. Chuck and I don't agree on all points. I think it's a free speech issue, and he has a completely different take. But his stuff is worth reading, and I recommend it.

On a rollercoaster with the bees

2007-04-13T19:25:00.000-04:00

The bees have had a tough week and a half, and so have I.

The weather turned very cold a couple of days after I installed the bees in their hives. That should not have killed the bees, but a lot of them died. In fact, there was one point during the weekend that I was convinced that they all had died, and I would have to start over.

Then, on Sunday evening after a reasonably warm afternoon, bees in both hives began to appear. There was hope.

I tried to leave them alone most of the week, peeking inside just once or twice. One hive is doing much better than the other. I still don't know what has happened and will need to get an experienced beekeeper to look at the hives with me, but as of now there are bees in both hives.

Saturday (tomorrow): The Blount County Beekeepers Association is having a workshop on examining hives and frames. I'll be there.

Apiaric regicide? Maybe not

2007-04-07T07:31:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: Pictures taken early Saturday morning on the farm, just as the sun was coming up and the snow was about to melt.

The bees seem to be alive and well, at least as of last night.

I did what Howard told me on Tuesday which was to make sure the bees had food and close up the hive for a couple of days and see what happened. I was worried about the queens, fearing that I had exposed them to mortal danger when installing the colony (see previous post).

I opened the hives yesterday morning (Friday) and found thousands of bees buzzing, hovering, waddling and huddling about. They looked like they were doing okay, but several interesting things were happening:

• The two hives were forming distinctively different patterns of behavior. The one on the left (standing behind the hives) had remained above the two boxes of frame and were gathering together on the sides of the spacer box and under the top of the inner cover. The group on the cover had even started drawing a comb.

• The hive on the left, by contrast, had for the most part dropped down into the frames and seemed to be doing what bees should do at this point: drawing comb onto the frame foundations.

• The two cans of feed that had come in the hive boxes were completely empty. I had put Boardman feeders on the outside of each hive, and the bees had begun drawing from them a bit.

The bundle of bees that you see when you open the hive is utterly fascinating. I know now why beekeepers do what they do. The bees are riveting. I also know why many tend to ignore what seems to be good advice: Leave the bees alone as much as possible; let them do their own thing. If you're curious as to what is going on inside the hive -- and every beekeeper is -- it's hard to leave them alone.

I closed the hives up and called Howard Kerr to tell him what I had seen. He said he thought the queens might be okay (Long live the Queens!) and that I should just make sure the bees had food and were as warm as possible. I went back to the hives, knocked down the comb that the bees on the left hive had built under the inner cover and brushed them off the top and side of the spacer box. I was hoping that they would figure out that they were supposed to be down in the the frames, doing their thing.

When I checked on them late yesterday afternoon, they hadn't made much progress in getting there.

I'll try to get pictures of the inside of the hives today.

Weather note: East Tennessee has decided to have its winter during the second week in April rather than January this year. We had a very cool day yesterday -- good for doing a lot of yard and garden work -- and this morning we awoke with a dusting of snow -- yes, SNOW -- on the ground. This is Tennessee, not Vermont. Good thing we covered up the blueberries last night.

Installing the bees, with a little drama

2007-04-03T20:20:00.000-04:00

The bees showed up today.

Howard Kerr, faithful to his word, traveled to southern Georgia over the weekend and brought back thousands of bees to Blount County. Two boxes, themselves containing several thousand bees, were mine.

Getting the bees into the hive is a multi-step process that I have read about in several sources. Howard showed me how to do it this afternoon, describing each part of the process as he went about his work in his massive beeyard. He couldn't have done it better.

Unfortunately, he didn't have a very good student. Thus, Howard is not responsible for what happened.

Sally and I traveled down to the farm after supper. Sally served as chief beefood mixer and star photographer. She took some excellent pictures, including the one at the right, until she was attacked by a few irritated bees. She retreated with a couple of stings to show for her trouble.

Still, all was going well reasonably well from my point of view, and I thought I was finished when I realized that I had probably opened the wrong end of the queen box. I opened the hives back up, and sure enough, I had done so.

When this happens, the bees -- who have not accepted the queen as yet -- are likely to kill her outright. I couldn't tell what had happened, so I shut the hive up, cursed as loudly as the bees would let me, and got over to Howard's place as quickly as I could -- ready, eager even, to confess my sins and receive some absolution.

Howard, much amused but trying not to show it, made me feel better by saying that sometimes the bees would not kill the queen in these circumstances. I should simply leave the hive alone for a couple days and see what happens. If the queens were dead, Howard said, he could supply me with a couple of others.

So, while the day wasn't a complete disaster, it wasn't because I hadn't tried.

Still, I do have bees and the asterisk I put next to my name at the beginning of this blog is gone. I'm at the bottom of the class, but I'm a beekeeper.

Tilling, lilacs and beehives

2007-04-01T17:22:00.000-04:00

A coolish, blustery day on the farm -- and lots to report.

We spent a good deal of time on the farm this weekend mowing and trimming and other beginning-of-spring chores. I started tilling last week, and the main garden is ready to go. My sister-in-law Jane, our Planter-in-Chief, says nothing should be planted until after Easter, so we still have a week to go. But it's all ready. Sally and Jane have already been to the co-op to buy seeds.

There's a lilac bush in the back yard that hasn't bloomed in 30 years. Last year, we made serious attempts at cutting back on the old wood to see what would happen. We weren't expecting much, but this week we noticed buds. And by this weekend, those buds had turned into blooms (right).

We will be doing more of whatever we did to the lilac this year. Sally says the blooms on the lilac are a good sign for our growing season. I remain skeptical.

Speaking of blooms, the blueberry bushes -- all five of them -- are alive and well. I tilled around them this weekend and remulched. They all have blooms, beautiful delicate little things. The smaller bushes, the three we planted in January, have the most blooms and the least height. The taller bushes, the two I planted last month, have fewer blooms but lots of leaves. All look healthy.

We have high hopes for these bushes. Both of us like blueberries a lot, and it would be thrilling if we could grow our own. Blueberries are a little hit-and-miss around here. Some folks don't have much luck with them, while others say they have more berries than they can pick. I need to get our soil tested because that may be the difference. Blueberries need a high ph, and I may need to do some adjusting.

The big activity of the weekend, however, was getting the beehives put together and getting the "beeyard" set up.

I first thought I would put the hives on a set of bricks, but I didn't like the stability of the bricks that I had stacked. So I took the bricks down and used some cinder blocks that I found around the barn and elsewhere. Then I placed a couple of planks across each stand. The blocks are old and chipped and a bit wobbly, but they're pretty stable now. I'm going to find some new blocks to buy, however.

The bees are due to show up on Tuesday afternoon. My friend Howard Kerr is going to get them on Monday and says they will be wanting a home on Tuesday. I hope that Howard has the time to help me get them installed in the hives since this is a multi-step procedure that I don't really want to try alone.

But, as of Tuesday, I can take the asterisk off my name on the right.

Here's a slideshow of how things looked this afternoon on the farm.

Goodbye to winter

2007-03-19T20:48:00.000-04:00

After a day and a half of rain and clouds, which turned the air to a late-winter cool, Saturday was a clear, bright and breezy day on the farm. Spring's greens are overtaking the grays and browns of winter; the winter colors never seemed to get much of a grip on things through the season anyway. Now their time has passed.

So, to spring.

I fired up the mower after sticking my finger into the mower and "fixing" a gas leak that had occurred at last use sometime in October, I think. Surprisingly, the thing came alive (after I had fed it a little gas) and actually lurched forward and even cut some of the grass when I lowered the blade.

I decided to push my luck and take off, blade lowered and cutting, into some of the grass on the border between the pasture and the back yard. Cut grass kept spewing out from under the mower as I headed up toward the garden area.

"If this keeps up," I thought, "I could do some real damage today."

And that's just what happened. The mower hummed along, happily cutting all of the grass in its path until it sputtered to a stop, starved for gas. I fed it again, and it started again -- happy like the rest of the garden tools to be working again.

And so was I. Happy to be working again.

I mowed over the entire garden area and bee yard. I call them that with some trepidation but a lot of optimism because there is no garden, and there are no bees. Still, my mowing is the first step toward giving the garden and the bees a chance to exist.

I then tackled the who back yard, which was beginning to look a little rough with the inconsistent growth of early, early spring. By the time I finished, order had been brought to the the grasslands of the back yard and garden.

Sally -- always a sucker for freshly mowed lawn -- even paid compliments.

It was good to be working again.

* * *

After I was done, I wandered around the farm, taking a few pictures of the early spring greenery and blossoms. The PhotoBucket slideshow to the right will give you an idea of what things looked like on Saturday. You can see all of the at the album on PicasaWeb.

* * *

And, in case you're interested, there's a new landscape on First Inning Artworks. I started this one about three or four weeks ago, but I didn't finish it until this weekend. Not sure why it took so long, but it turned out fairly satisfactorily.

Memphis: From the Lorraine to Sun Studio to Graceland

2007-03-15T15:47:00.000-04:00

Sally and I spent Monday and Tuesday in Memphis with our good friends George and Kay Rable from Tuscaloosa, taking in as much as we could of the city in a day and a half of touring. The major reason/excuse for this excursion -- besides just meeting our friends -- was a pilgrimage to Graceland, home of the King, Elvis Presley. But that was properly at the end of our trip, on Tuesday morning, and Monday was filled with discovering what else Memphis had to offer.

Turns out, it was a lot.

This isn't everything, but it will give an idea.

The Lorraine Motel

Memphis has many great sites and places to visit, so with limited time, you have to choose. Our major Monday morning stop was the Lorraine Motel and the National Civil Rights Museum.

The Lorraine Motel is where Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 (a date that I remember well). King was standing on the second floor walkway of the motel outside room 306 when he was shot by a sniper from the back bathroom of a boarding house on the next block.

The museum is an extension of the motel, and that leaves the front of the motel pretty much as it was in 1968. There are even a couple of vintage cars parked out front to give it the feel of the time when King died.

The museum itself is loaded with information and exhibits about the history of the Civil Rights movement. Too much information, in fact. There are pictures, videos, audios, exhibits, explanations and other material that would take a week to listen, view and read. The introductory video is poorly produced and misleading, paying more attention to Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy than the real white hero of civil rights, Lyndon Johnson.

With the way the museum is built, you have to endure all of this stuff before you can get to the real reason the museum exists to begin with -- the murder of Martin Luther King. That comes as you get to the second floor of the motel and can go into the adjoining rooms that King and his entourage occupied during those final days. The room is filled with the voices of some of those who were there that day, and that is well worth seeing.

Our advice is to walk through the other stuff (after skipping the opening video) as quickly as possible to get to this point. That's when things got good.

Then they got better.

When you leave the motel room, you exit the building and walk across the street to the boarding house where James Earl Ray was staying when King died. On the second floor, you can see the room Ray occupied and the bathroom at the end of the hallway where King's killer fired the fatal shot. Ray was eventually captured, convicted and sentenced to prison for King's killing, but theories and rumors persist that he did not act alone or even that he was set up and had nothing to do with the killing. All of this is dealt with in an extraordinary exhibit on the same floor of the boarding house. There is even a section on theories that the Memphis police were involved in the conspiracy.

All this -- not the first exhibits -- is worth the price of admission.

Sun Studio

Late Monday afternoon had us driving down Union Avenue in search of Sun Studio. To call this the birthplace of rock 'n roll is not an exaggeration. Sam Phillips, a white man who got interested in the sound coming from the blues singers on Beale Street, set up a recording studio in this modest building. He recorded singers, such as B.B. King, who later defined the modern blues sound.

But in the early 1950s, the white world wasn't ready for black music from black artists. So Phillips kept recording and kept looking. He wanted something different.

That's what he got when a kid named Elvis Presley recorded a song called "That's All Right, Mama" in 1954. Presley had been hanging around Sun Studios for about a year, listening to what he heard from others, taking it in and making it his own. That song was what Phillips was looking for -- blues blended with country, powered by a driving beat. Phillips took the recording to a local wild man DJ and asked him to play it one night. By the end of the night, the station had played it 14 times because of the many phone requests it provoked. Phillips was onto something, and rock music had been defined.

The building has been well preserved, offers tours and still serves as a recording studio to the very famous.

Graceland

This was the reason for the trip.

We arrived fairly early on Tuesday morning and made our way into the Graceland visitors center to pick up our tickets for the tour of the house. It was truly All Elvis All the Time, as they themselves say.

Graceland was built in the 1930s by a Memphis physician and sits on 13 acres facing Highway 51, Elvis Presley Boulevard, not far from the Tennessee-Mississippi border. Presley bought it in 1957 for $100,000. He was 22 years old.

Graceland served as headquarters for the King and his family and entourage until his death from heart failure there in 1976.

The house is stately but fairly small by today's standard of upper middle class houses, but everything inside is purely Elvis and purely 1970s, down to the carpeted ceilings and shag carpets on many of the floors. Tourists are not allowed in the upstairs of the house but can get a close look at everything on the first floor and in the basement. There are also several other buildings on the grounds that tell stories about various parts of Elvis' life, personality and music.

Graceland is interesting and well worth the visit, even if you're not a particular fan of Elvis. He was a huge cultural phenomenon, but he led a rather sad existence, and you come away from Graceland understanding both of those things.

More pictures of our Memphis trip can be found here at PicasaWeb, Google's photo site.

A new piece at First Inning Artworks

2007-03-10T05:41:00.000-05:00

I have posted a new piece of First Inning Artworks. It's a bit retrograde for this time of year. I did it around Super Bowl time and just never got it up. So here it is.

My son Jeff has put himself in charge of taking First Inning Artworks to its own domain and marketing it the wider world. That will happen shortly. Meanwhile, his girlfriend has started a new blog -- dc365 -- about things to do, particularly places to eat, around the D.C. area. Very entertaining, especially when she refers to Jeff in the abstracted third person as "the boyfriend."

From building hives to blueberry bushes

2007-03-09T19:20:00.000-05:00

For us university folk, the beginning of spring break is one of the most wonderful times of the year. Students' yearnings for a break doesn't begin to match that of the faculty and staff, and the beginning of spring break is better than Christmas morning for a four-year-old.

Today was that day.

I fled campus as quickly as I could (shortly after noon), determined to enjoy the clear day, soft breezes and 60 degree temps. I was not disappointed.

A few days ago, I had spotted some blueberry bushes on sale at the local Home Depot. They were about three times as tall as the once that I had set out in January, so I picked up a couple of them on the way down to the farm.

The store had two varieties -- Tiftblue (or Tifblue) and Climax -- and I got one of each. I had set out a Tiftblue, Climax and Woodward in January, so I was glad to get a couple of taller versions of the same variety.

I am putting the bushes at the western end of Paw's garden. Paw (otherwise known by his Blount County nickname "Frog") was my father-in-law and had a garden that stretched from the eastern end of his property to nearly the side of his house. The land has not been tilled in about 10 years, so we are going to start our planting on a small portion of this land. Blueberries are the first thing we have put in, but there will be more.

I have lined these bushes up in a north-south line with the two latest (and tallest) bushes on the northern side. The bushes are about eight feet apart, giving them room (I hope) to flourish.

Paw (Ray McMillan, who died after about seven years in a nursing home last November) never fooled with fruit very much. He was a vegetable and tomato man. And he would plant anything his daughters Sally and Jane asked for. And it was inevitably good. So maybe a little of Paw's magic is still in the ground, waiting for someone to turn it over. If that's all it takes, I am willing to do my part.

Building beehives

The last nails went into the frames and boxes of the six hive boxes that I have been building to start my beekeeping venture in April. The hives are not yet complete. They still need bottom boards, inner covers and tops -- in addition to some kind of hive stands to get them off the ground.

I will be spending a good part of spring break working on all that.

I am planning on locating the hives a few feet east of the pear tree (see picture above) so they will get the afternoon shade from the pear tree and other objects to the west. But more on that later.

The hive-building project has been a good one. As I noted previously, building a hive takes a bit of carpentry work, but a good hive box and frame -- one that is closely milled -- will fit together well enough to make you feel like an expert.

I had completed many of the hive boxes and frames by the time the Blount County Beekeepers Association's woodworking workshop rolled around last Saturday at the Masonic Hall in Alcoa. I was determined to attend but did so with some trepidation, wondering what I would do if I discovered that all I had done to that point was wrong.

Fortunately, it wasn't.

The workshop was conducted by Dennis Barry (on the left in the top picture), Terry Best and Bob Landers, who have many years of beekeeping under their belts. As with everything else having to do with beekeeping, there are many ways to build a hive and many opinions about it. But taken together, these guys gave us a lot of good advice not just about building hives but beekeeping itself.

I figured that would be the case, so that's why I went.

Terry Best, who keeps 20 to 30 hives each year, told us that his general philosophy was to leave the bees alone as much as possible and let them do their work. He said he tried to look into his hives only about four times a year. I like that approach and am going to try to emulate it.

One of the most valuable hands-on things I learned on Saturday was how to lay in a foundation into a frame. A foundation is a wax sheet reinforced by wires that fits into the center of a frame. The bees use this foundation to begin "drawing the comb," or building the part of the hive in which the queen lays eggs and they store honey. Laying the foundation sheets is not difficult but a bit delicate, and it was good to have expert hands to direct us.

Many thanks, guys.

Dolly

It has been two weeks today since anyone saw Dolly, the cat. Our neighbor has spotted coyotes this winter (we saw one or two last summer) and told us that one had killed one of his small dogs a few weeks earlier. It pains me to think that Dolly may have met her end that way, but that's likely what happened.

Dolly is the second cat we have lost in the last year. Squeaks, our beautiful, black long-haired cat, had to be put to sleep last Aug. 1. Squeaks was with us for 10 years in Tuscaloosa, Emory and Maryville, and for reasons known only to her, she considered me her Number One Compadre. Squeaks could be irritating at times and was always high maintenance, but she proved herself to be a true friend a few times when I just needed her to be there. I still miss her.

So the cats come and go in our lives. They give us a lot of joy when they are here and leave a real empty spot when they depart.

More bees in our Times

2007-03-03T06:01:00.000-05:00

Two days after landing on the front page of the New York Times (see previous post), the intrepid honeybee has flown to the Times' op-ed page.

In an excellent and well-timed article, May R. Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois and author of Buzzwords: A Scientist Muses on Sex, Bugs and Rock ’n’ Roll, says what everyone should know about bees:

A decline in the numbers of Apis melllifera, the world’s most widely distributed semi-domesticated insect, doesn’t just mean a shortage of honey for toast and tea. In fact, the economic value of honey, wax and other bee products is trivial in comparison with the honeybee’s services as a pollinator. More than 90 crops in North America rely on honeybees to transport pollen from flower to flower, effecting fertilization and allowing production of fruit and seed. The amazing versatility of the species is worth an estimated $14 billion a year to the United States economy.

Berenbaum calls for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to step up to the plate and at least start counting bees accurately, giving the same attention the department gives to pigs and unhatched eggs.

USDA is probably going to have to do a whole lot more than that if bees -- and our food supply -- are to survive.

Disappearing bees land on Times front page

2007-02-27T19:00:00.000-05:00

Honeybees accomplished today what would make celebrities and politicians envious.

They landed on the front page of the New York Times.

Stories began appearing in the news a couple of weeks ago about bees disappearing from hives. Today, it was the New York Times' turn.
(Registration required.)

The story was centered in California and talked about a professional beekeeper who had lost half of his 4,200 hives -- and what that might mean for many of California's farmers.

The story was accompanied by a chart that showed how important bees are to pollination of certain crops. Bees, for instance, pollinate 100 percent of the almond crop, 90 percent of apples and blueberries, and they are the single most important pollinators of many other crops.

The story also contained an audio slide show.

That was truly coincidental because I had planned to talk to my web journalism class today about audio slide shows and how to produce them. I couldn't pass the bee story slide show up, and I showed it to my class. And they, clever rascals, began asking me a lot of questions about bees and relatively few about audio slide show production. They know how to get me off topic.

Wait til baseball season begins.

A beautiful, sad day on the farm

2007-02-25T17:01:00.000-05:00

Winter's grip -- weak as it was in the first place -- is slipping away on the farm. This last Sunday in February emerged from an overnight storm as bright and clear as any you would want. Temperatures had migrated to the 60s. (Talk about illegal immigration; it's still February!)

The wind blew constantly, hard at times. but that just made the air even more clear, the sky bluer and the contrasts of lights and shadows stronger.

So, of course, I took pictures (right).

You can see the whole album here.

I worked some more on building beehives. I dropped by Howard Kerr's yesterday and got some more material to assemble, and I put together another hive box and 10 frames. The weather was warm enough that I got to work outside on the back deck rather than in the kitchen. With four of the six hive boxes and frames built, I am two-thirds of the way toward having my two hives.

The sad part of the day comes with thinking about Dolly, the blind cat on the farm that was referred to a couple of postings ago. We haven't seen Dolly since Friday morning when my sister-in-law Jane came over to feed her. It is quite unlike Dolly to be gone this long, and we are convinced that something has happened to her and that we are unlikely to see her again.

I admired Dolly because of her ability to get around the farm and in and out of the house without the benefit of sight. Dolly would always accompany me on my blackberry forages in July, weaving herself in and out of the undergrowth just as if she could see as well as any cat. Despite losing her sight, Dolly had met life as it came to her. She adapted to difficult situations like a champ. I had looked forward to having her around this summer, and I will miss her greatly.

Spring training

2007-02-20T18:56:00.000-05:00

Things have slowed on the beekeeping front for a few days until I can get some more hive parts to assemble, so thoughts turn to spring training. Ah, spring. Ah, spring training.

Winter hasn't blown especially harsh around here this year. In fact, it was so mild in January that we were actually complaining about it.

But now just past mid-February, it seems like it has been a long winter. The length of the winter is measured not by the weather but by how much we want the Season to start and how long it feels that we have been without baseball.

It's getting closer. Pitchers and catchers for almost all of the teams have reported to their spring training sites, and the other players will begin to show up in another couple of weeks. The games will begin in March. (College baseball has already started, and that will be some comfort.)

I'm not sure why the longing for baseball has been so intense this winter. Plenty of other things have been around to distract me -- including the beekeeping preparations. Duties at work have been plentiful and pleasurable, particularly seeing the TennesseeJournalist.com develop into an excellent student-run news web site. Still, the sooner baseball gets here, the happier I'll be.

Part of it may have to do with the fact that the St. Louis Cardinals (my team) won the World Series last year, the first series championship in 24 years. The Cards need to get back out onto the field and let Albert hit and Scott field and Jimmy E. dive for a few balls in centerfield. They need to answer some questions, too, especially about the pitching.

And we need to note the passing of Lew Burdette (among several other greats taken from us over the winter). Burdette pitched the Milwaukee Braves into the World Series in 1957, and then about as single-handedly as anyone has ever done it, he won the World Series from the vaunted Yankees. He pitched the Braves to victory in three of their four wins, and you just could not be any better than he was in that series.

But there were some oddities about Burdette's career that are fun to note:

He was the opposing and winning pitcher of the game when Pirate pitcher Harvey Haddix pitched 12 perfect innings against the Braves. Haddix lost in the 13th when he gave up a home run to Joe Adcock. Burdette scattered 12 hits over 13 innings that night and won the game -- coming out ahead at one of baseball's most ironic moments.
Burdette hit a dozen homers in his career, including two off of Sandy Kofax.
Burdette was a fidgety sort on the mound, so much so that Braves manager Fred Haney said, "Burdette would make coffee nervous."

Unlike his pitching buddy Warren Spahn (whom we lost a few years ago), Burdette wasn't good enough for long enough to make the Hall of Fame.

But when he was good, it was awfully thrilling for a young kid like me to know he was pitching.

Note: The illustration above is a watercolor on Bristol board. More of that can be found at First Inning Artworks.

Back to the hives

2007-02-19T04:56:00.000-05:00

After a couple of days in Tuscaloosa -- where Sally and I lived for a long time and where we still have many good friends -- I was able to get back to hive assembly yesterday. The result: three complete hive boxes with 30 frames. In other words, one hive put together, one to go.

After last week's beekeepers workshop, I realized that my carpentry was not as bad as I had thought and that I could use a couple of the frames I thought I had messed up.

I also got a little more confident about putting together several frames at a time. Howard Kerr had let me borrow a jig that would allow for this, so things went much more efficiently yesterday. Still, it was a lot of work, and I was pretty worn out when I was done.

And, I'm sure Dolly was glad to see me leave.

Dolly is the cat who lives down at the farm. She is a sweet cat, but she's used to being by herself most of the time. I was assembling the hives in the kitchen (it's too nippy these days to work outside), and I am sure she did not appreciate the banging that interrupted her afternoon nap.

Dolly is an interesting cat -- actually a bit amazing. She is totally blind. Yet, she roams in and out of the house and all over the 13 acres of the farm without much of a problem.

One thing about Dolly is that she is very careful. She doesn't mind going places, but she takes her time, sniffs a lot and remembers where she has been. Dolly followed me out to the ends of the property last year when I was picking blackberries, and she always made her way back on her own.

You'll be hearing more about Dolly in the coming days. I wonder how she'll feel about an invasion of bees.

Weather note: We woke up with less than an inch of snow on the ground yesterday morning. It was the first significant snow of the season, and it wasn't all that significant. Most of it had melted by noon.

"Don't stand in front of the beehive."

2007-02-13T22:04:00.000-05:00

Lots of good advice flew around the room at the second night of the annual beekeepers workshop sponsored by the Blount County Beekeepers Association.

"Get a small hammer." (For putting the frames together.)

"Stock up on sugar." (For feeding the bees, particularly during the winter.)

"Get a Bee Buddy." (Someone who can help you out.)

"Get a marked queen." (So you can tell where she is.)

"Don't use your $50 Case knife to clean the frames. Get a cheap pocket knife." (Or get several cheap pocket knives.)

"Wear a white shirt and light pants -- and a veil." (Bees go after things that are dark.)

"Use a frame grabber." (It saves you from a lot of stings.)

"Don't stand in front of the beehive."

You'll probably get stung. Approach the hive from the side or the back. The bees go in and out the front. Let them have their way.

The association does a great job with this workshop. I'm glad I went. I can't wait to get back to building the hives. That won't be for a few days, however. I'm off to Alabama on Thursday.

Beekeepers workshop

2007-02-12T21:45:00.000-05:00

A fair number (maybe 75?) of Blount Countians showed up tonight for the first night of the annual beekeepers workshop, sponsored by the Blount County Beekeeper's Association. Lots of good information from lots of friendly folks.

One of the best presentations was from a young couple who had just completed their first year as beekeepers. This presentation is an standard item at the workshop. The couple have an organic farm in Rockford, which they have just begun, and they oultine some of the things they went through to get their hives going. One of the main problems, they said, was not being ready with their equipment assembled when the bees showed up.

Otherwise, they said, they accomplished pretty much what they had set out to do the first year -- keep their bees alive. They didn't harvest any honey, which is fairly standard for the first year of an operation. The bees need most of the honey they make to get themselves through the next winter. (I talked with a guy after the meeting ended, however, who said he had just completed his first year and he DID get some honey -- not much, but still . . .)

Joe Tarwater, a friendly guy with a thick white beard who seemed like he had been keeping bees since Moses came down off the mountain, showed us a variety of hive parts -- boxes, frames, tops, bottom boards, etc. There are three sizes of boxes: deep, medium and shallow. His advice to those of us just starting out:

"Pick one size and stick with it."

I had heard that before. Jim Brown had told me that if he was just starting out, he would buy nothing but medium (or Illinois) boxes. The reason for that is that each size takes a different size of frame, and switching the boxes in and out and get complicated.

I had already decided to go with Joe's and Jim's advice. I am using just medium boxes for my hives.

The workshop continues tomorrow night.

Assembling a hive

2007-02-12T07:58:00.000-05:00

My carpentry skills are mediocre at best. There have been times in my life when I pretended to myself and others that they were better than that, but those times are faded memories. Whatever my skills, however, I had to gather them up on Sunday and start the assembling the hives I had purchased on Saturday from Howard (see previous post).

Fortunately, things didn't turn out badly.

At least, it wasn't a disaster.

What staved off utter ruin was the good instructions that Howard had given me on Saturday about assembling frames. If he hadn't done that, I would have messed up far more than the two I did. (These two frames are not completely unusable; they're just not showpieces.)

The other thing that helped is that the millwork on the parts is precision stuff. They fit together tighter than O.J.'s glove, and the glue and nails are almost an afterthought. Once you have done a hive box (top picture) and a few frames (middle), you get into a routine where it takes about 10 minutes per frame. That's not too bad, but then you consider I have to do 30 frames. And that's just for one hive. There are 10 frames per box; the lower picture shows how they fit into the box.

All this has to be done by the first of April, because they bees will arrive shortly thereafter. They will will expect accommodations.

Tonight begins the Blount County Beekeepers' two-night workshop at the library. Looking forward to that.

Beginning the hive

2007-02-10T21:56:00.000-05:00

Howard Kerr and I got together, finally, today. Howard gave me a two-hour seminar on beekeeping while he was selling me the first parts of the two hives that I plan to have this year. I bought the parts for three hive boxes and 30 frames, which is only half the boxes and frames I will need for two hives. But that will get me started.

I'm planning on putting some of them together tomorrow. Stay tuned. Maybe there will be pictures.

Howard has been keeping bees for 35 years. He is self described as "very opinionated" about a lot of things having to do with beekeeping. But he says what everyone else has said about the "right" way to keep bees: "Every beekeeper will tell you something different."

I suspect that if there was a single, "right" way to do this, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

Speaking of the farm . . .

2007-02-10T18:36:00.000-05:00

Here's a slide show of pictures of the farm I put together last month:

Enter the rank amateur

2007-02-10T18:21:00.000-05:00

Bees have been buzzing around my head, figuratively, for a couple of years now.

Before long, I hope, they will be buzzing -- literally -- around my head (but not too closely).

I am about to enter the world of beekeeping. I have been reading a lot about it. I have been attending meetings of the Blount County, Tenn., Beekeepers Association. My friend Jim Brown, married to my wife's cousin, has showed me his operation and promised help. His friend, Howard Kerr, has promised to sell me all of the initial equipment that I will need.

The beekeepers association is having its annual two-night beekeeping workshop next week, and I will be attending that.

Martha Steward is to blame.

I was watching a show of hers a couple of years ago in which she featured her bees. Mostly, she showed the honey extraction process, but I was fascinated and thought that if I ever got the opportunity, I would do it.

Now, the time seems to be right. We have moved to east Tennessee and have access to the 13-acre farm where my wife Sally grew up. It's a beautiful place with a big barn and lots of pasture. Last summer I harvested a bumper crop of wild blackberries, and I am looking forward to doing the same this next July.

And I have a spot picked out for a couple of beehives.

So here goes. I'll keep you posted.