Getting Everyone Ready for Winter

While the winter season has taken an unusually long time to settle upon the urban farm, it is finally here and with it come preparations for the cold season. It struck us how, yet again, keeping chickens indoors sure makes life easier not only for the girls but for us too. This fact is especially apparent when you contrast how we got the bees ready for winter versus the chickens. 

John, our amazing bee mentor, came over to help wrap the hive in felt paper to insulate, check for proper ventilation, balance the hive in such a way that the condensation will drip forward, and helped install a mouse guard over the front in order to prevent those pesky creatures from making a home in my warm, food filled hive. After he left, I ordered a special feeder that slides in with bees which I filled with sugar water, and then I made a candy board. A candy board is made of twenty-five pounds of sugar (yes the cashier gave us a weird look at the grocery store) and three cups of water and a half a cup of vinegar (to prevent molding). The mixture is pressed into a shallow hive box with a queen extruder (plastic screen that only worker bees can fit through) on to bottom to hold everything in. The sugar dries and makes the biggest lollypop you can imagine. The hive box goes on top the rest of the hive with more newspaper above it for insulation and this creates an additional food source for the winter. At this point, all I can do to wait and hope my girls survive to spring. 

As for what we did for getting the chickens ready for winter- nothing at all. 

We chuckle to one another as we read about the latest ideas for keeping chickens' water thawed over winter or how to prevent frostbite on combs. We have noticed that over the past few days the girls seem a little agitated; we wonder if this might have something to do with the furnace turning on more in the basement. Perhaps Jeff and I should take the girls for a drive in the country to introduce them to barn chickens!

The Chicken's First Coop Guests!

One of the best things about urban farming (other than the amazing food!) is the cool, passionate people you get to meet. Today one of our blog readers, who happened to live on the other side of town, came by to visit the girls. Their baby chicks are coming Tuesday, and we hope that we were able to help them out with some of the lessons we had to learn the hard way!

I have also been very fortunate to find a "bee mentor" who has been invaluable help for the first year of the hive. We meet John at a local gallery's showing of a bee documentary. He has come over to the hive several times to show us how to work the bees and has introduced us to the local bee club. I don't know how we would have gotten the bees through the summer without him.

As so many of us are trying to get back to craft of yesterday within the constraints of our modern, urban setting, it is really awesome when we can all help each other learn something new. 

Bees: Part II

The night of getting the bees home from the post office, I had to install them into the hive I had built the night before. The basic steps of bee installation are as follows.
1. Wait until dusk so the bees are less likely to fly away since it is "sleepy time"
2. Spray the bees down with sugar water so they are all "drunk" and less likely to sting
3. Gently tamp the cage on the ground so all the bees fall to one area then pry open the top
4. Pull the queen cage out. (The queen bee is in a tiny box with a few attendants during shipping.) Find the end with the cork on it, remove that to expose the candy block (The candy keeps the queen in for a few days before she can eat her way out so that the rest of the bees don't abandon the hive.)
5. Rubber band the queen box to one of the sides of the hive. (Again so the bees don't abandon the hive.)
6. "Pour" the rest of the bees into the hive and then cover the hive

Like most of the things we try for the first time, I ran into problems. However when you are literally in a swarm of pissed off bees this not the best place to experiment!

Problem #1 The sugar water clogged my spray bottle so the bees were only half sugared making them less docile.

Problem #2 I dropped the queen cage back into the rest of the bees which meant I had to put aside my fear and put my hand into a box with 1,500 bees and get the tiny box out. Yikes!!!

Problem #3 The cork got stuck in the queen box and Jeff had to run to get me a screw to wedge it out.

Even with all of this, the entire operation went very well. I only got stung once (of course it was after I had finished and was walking away.) And in the end all the bees stayed in their new home and Jeff got a great show of watching me (from a distance) deal with this. I had to laugh though when I looked over at him and in one hand he had the digital camera and the other the broom. When it was all said and done, I asked him what the broom was for... he said he wasn't sure but it just seemed like a good idea.... I couldn't' have agreed more.

Yes, I covered the ends of my pants and sleeves in tape just in case!

A New Addition

Like we have said before, our home is an ongoing experiment, and we have yet again decided to try our hand at a new craft- beekeeping! Last Christmas, Jeff got me a book on backyard beekeeping. I have read that and everything else I could find on the internet and finally ordered my three pound package of Russian bees, which are, believe it or not, known to have a sunnier disposition than Italian honey bees, which are the other commonly raised honey bees. I ordered the bees from the most wonderful apiary in Ohio which meant they had to be mailed. (Yes, I tried to find a local source but they never returned my calls.) The woman who runs the apiary informed me that I needed to call my local post office and make them aware the bees were coming and once they arrived, the post office would call me to pick them up. I timidly called the post office. They didn't so much as flinch- you would have thought I was the hundredth person that day with bees being mailed! The day they came, I got woken up at 5:45 in the morning with a call from the post office. I threw the first thing I could find on and dashed to the post office. The front door was locked since it was well before they opened but the cleaning lady let me in. I walked up to the desk and after a few "hellos", the gentleman who had just woken me came out with the box of bees.

I was surprised by how small the box was and by how quiet they were. On the ride home, I put them on the car floor in the front seat and headed back to the homestead. Of course, only when I am driving around with three pound of bees in my car, would I get cut off in traffic. I slammed on the brakes and the box slid forward and fell back. My heart stopped. I prayed that the screen on the side of the box was secure. The funny thing is, I barely heard buzzing. They must be the nicest hive on the planet, and I am the luckiest idiot urban farmer also. I got home and sprayed them down the sugar water so they would have additional food to the can of sugar water in their box, and then I dashed off to the office. That night I would have to install the bees into the bee hive but for right then I was just glad the bees came before I had to go to work. It would be very awkward to explain to my boss why I had to leave a meeting to pick up a bee hive...

The hive on their ride home in my car!