It's the little things (bees, bricks)
This morning I decided to treat myself – I've been being so good all week! – to a decaf mocha from the drive-through coffee place. I love these cool fall mornings and was looking forward to settling in at work with my cozy green cashmere shawl and a stack of mail to answer and my warm sweet drink (with whipped cream and everything) ... However, fate had other plans and the first sip revealed (too late!) that I had been handed the wrong cup. It's a latte, not a mocha. Whether it's a decaf I have no way of knowing, so just to be safe I will be dumping the whole thing and reverting to my standard morning fare, a humble, minty cup of Female Toner. Or actually, I guess today I should go with the PMS Tea, since I'm most definitely PMSing and every little thing that happens is making me feel like bursting into tears, throwing myself down a well, or cutting someone down with an axe à la Raskolnikov the student (I just saw Match Point, finally, and it inspired me to re-read Crime and Punishment, which I am about halfway through now). Luckily I know this part of the cycle never lasts more than a couple of days, so I try to use it as a way to build awarenness and compassion (leading to action) for people who are always feeling stressed out, overwhelmed and at the end of their rope. Making a negative into a positive. Or something.
I still hate it, though. I would love to have been able to take the day off today. I don't feel much like being around other people. Especially my new co-worker, who's the sweetest person in the world but who sounds exactly like Fran Drescher and keeps a running commentary going all day long, remarking on every single thing she is doing every second of the day. Or maybe it just seems that way to me, because I'm feeling so grouchy and irritable today.
Anyhoo. Not much news, though life does continue to delight and amaze me (PMS notwithstanding) on a fairly regular basis. We did our final honey extraction last weekend – a very small harvest for us, with most of the honey left in the hive in hopes that we won't need to feed the bees over the winter. I'll be filtering it this weekend and then storing it in the bucket until we re-open the Saturday market next spring. No need to bottle it right away, and anyway if it crystalizes in the bottle then the labels will get ruined when we put them in the water bath to melt it out before selling.
The hive inspection went well, too. Only one person from the beekeeping class showed up – it was his very first time getting inside a hive, and I enjoyed being able to help him have a good experience with it. I lent my heavy canvas beekeeping jacket to a friend who had forgotten to wear long sleeves and ended up getting stung on the shoulder right through the lightweight linen shirt I was wearing. It hurt, but not nearly as badly as the one on my toe last summer. After a couple of minutes I didn't feel it at all anymore unless I actually touched it. There were also two bees that got in under my veil somehow and got tangled up in my hair. I could hear them buzzing around and feel them
struggling to free themselves, and had to walk away from the hives, take off the veil, take my hair down, and comb through it with my fingers to get them out. So now I have two new things to add to my beekeeping supplies list: a couple of heavy thrift store "loaner" shirts to keep in the barn, and a wide-tooth comb to keep in my pocket. I need to get my own veil, too – the kind with a zipper. Or maybe a stylish one-piece! (No, this is not me.)
As for the hive itself, it looks fine. We reversed one hive (moving the brood nest from the top to the bottom, so they have space to grow into over the winter – bees are upwardly mobile) and moved a super full of honey from the stronger hive to the weaker one. We also gave them the wet frames to clean. These are the individual flat frames from which we've removed all the honey we can, though there's still honey stuck to the insides of the cells. We hung them in an empty super on top of the hive, and all week the bees have been licking up every last particle of honey and moving it down into the hive body as part of their winter store. Tomorrow morning I'll be checking in on them, scratching open any remaining sealed cells so they can get at that honey, and giving them the wax cappings from last week, which are also covered with honey. They'll clean those, too, and when they're done I'll have about a quart or so of pure beeswax to melt down and filter.
I don't know what we're going to do with the wax; since there's not a lot of it, my preference would be to use it in salves. We have our own lavender essential oil that we distilled last year, and we don't have our own olive oil but there are plenty of local organic small growers we could use for that. I want to learn how to do essential oils from citrus, too – I have no idea if that's even something we could do, and this isn't a big citrus-growing region, but the oils are so nice! I did some lavender-grapefruit salves a couple of years ago and people loved them.
I know I'm just rambling now but – well, why not?
My other project for the weekend involves moving a pile of 600 weathered red bricks from one side of the valley to the other. Someone was giving them away in the paper, and I happened to be the person to score the entire load. Lucky! They'll make a nice patio, or a path, or edging for raised beds, or a fire pit. Bricks are not cheap and these ones are very nice – no mortar and no broken ones. The only tricky part will be getting them home. Not even tricky, really, just tedious, and a lot of hard work. But, brick by brick, we will get it done.
I still hate it, though. I would love to have been able to take the day off today. I don't feel much like being around other people. Especially my new co-worker, who's the sweetest person in the world but who sounds exactly like Fran Drescher and keeps a running commentary going all day long, remarking on every single thing she is doing every second of the day. Or maybe it just seems that way to me, because I'm feeling so grouchy and irritable today.
Anyhoo. Not much news, though life does continue to delight and amaze me (PMS notwithstanding) on a fairly regular basis. We did our final honey extraction last weekend – a very small harvest for us, with most of the honey left in the hive in hopes that we won't need to feed the bees over the winter. I'll be filtering it this weekend and then storing it in the bucket until we re-open the Saturday market next spring. No need to bottle it right away, and anyway if it crystalizes in the bottle then the labels will get ruined when we put them in the water bath to melt it out before selling.
The hive inspection went well, too. Only one person from the beekeeping class showed up – it was his very first time getting inside a hive, and I enjoyed being able to help him have a good experience with it. I lent my heavy canvas beekeeping jacket to a friend who had forgotten to wear long sleeves and ended up getting stung on the shoulder right through the lightweight linen shirt I was wearing. It hurt, but not nearly as badly as the one on my toe last summer. After a couple of minutes I didn't feel it at all anymore unless I actually touched it. There were also two bees that got in under my veil somehow and got tangled up in my hair. I could hear them buzzing around and feel them
struggling to free themselves, and had to walk away from the hives, take off the veil, take my hair down, and comb through it with my fingers to get them out. So now I have two new things to add to my beekeeping supplies list: a couple of heavy thrift store "loaner" shirts to keep in the barn, and a wide-tooth comb to keep in my pocket. I need to get my own veil, too – the kind with a zipper. Or maybe a stylish one-piece! (No, this is not me.)As for the hive itself, it looks fine. We reversed one hive (moving the brood nest from the top to the bottom, so they have space to grow into over the winter – bees are upwardly mobile) and moved a super full of honey from the stronger hive to the weaker one. We also gave them the wet frames to clean. These are the individual flat frames from which we've removed all the honey we can, though there's still honey stuck to the insides of the cells. We hung them in an empty super on top of the hive, and all week the bees have been licking up every last particle of honey and moving it down into the hive body as part of their winter store. Tomorrow morning I'll be checking in on them, scratching open any remaining sealed cells so they can get at that honey, and giving them the wax cappings from last week, which are also covered with honey. They'll clean those, too, and when they're done I'll have about a quart or so of pure beeswax to melt down and filter.
I don't know what we're going to do with the wax; since there's not a lot of it, my preference would be to use it in salves. We have our own lavender essential oil that we distilled last year, and we don't have our own olive oil but there are plenty of local organic small growers we could use for that. I want to learn how to do essential oils from citrus, too – I have no idea if that's even something we could do, and this isn't a big citrus-growing region, but the oils are so nice! I did some lavender-grapefruit salves a couple of years ago and people loved them.
I know I'm just rambling now but – well, why not?
My other project for the weekend involves moving a pile of 600 weathered red bricks from one side of the valley to the other. Someone was giving them away in the paper, and I happened to be the person to score the entire load. Lucky! They'll make a nice patio, or a path, or edging for raised beds, or a fire pit. Bricks are not cheap and these ones are very nice – no mortar and no broken ones. The only tricky part will be getting them home. Not even tricky, really, just tedious, and a lot of hard work. But, brick by brick, we will get it done.
1 Comments:
Lucky you to get those bricks. Weathered bricks are THE BEST!!!!!!
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