Oh Mother Nature... What a harsh mistress.

So the weather was very warm here last week. I decided to take a look at the hives I have along my driveway to the North of my house.  I was already a little apprehensive as I had discovered that my three "mother" hives had died off in late 2016.

Much to my disappointment all of my hives except one were dead outs. What a shock. I had spent all kinds of time and faced a lot of adversity in 2016 to make sure the bees were strong.

Analysis of the hives indicated that in some cases they had eaten themselves into the upper corner of the hive and could not break the cluster to move to new honey.

Other hives never recovered from the honey harvest in August. The frames were not filled and the foundation was not built up.

Even the hives with new queens inserted into them were dead.  What a disaster. I have to start all over again.

I sat back and reflected on my predicament. Do I throw in the towel and quit or do I try to find a better way?  I had always been striving to work with no treatments and no supplemental sugar feeding. I wanted strong, healthy bees.  It was/is starting to look harder than ever to make a go of it without succumbing to the modern methods.  They do work. After all look around. Successful apiaries are dutifully following the Provincial guides for spring, summer and fall treatments. They are harvesting honey and in some cases, making a profit.

I always have my feet in two camps. My heart wants to believe permaculture/organic or whatever label you want to give it is better. I hear the results. I listen to the reports about damage to our environment. I see the effects our modern system is having on the bodies of people around me. But another more logical part of me always says, yeah but why does the modern way exist at all if the gentler, more natural ways are effective?

I believe that rampant capitalism is at the bottom of most of the issues.  People are in a desperate race to be the cheapest, make the most money, push the boundaries of production, look for the quickest way to get ahead. They have bought into the systems that constantly require more inputs to get increased outputs.  We are essentially "Eating Oil" (Title of a book in 1978 - this is not a new concept). Up to half of the inputs into potatoes and winter wheat in the UK are fertilizers and pesticides.  Not only are we slaves to the easy way out of spraying, we are also employing energy slaves in the home. We live like Kings of old - lights, food, heat all at the wave of a hand. On a planet that is finite in size, this is a problem. We cannot allow everyone to profit and still keep a livable earth.

This is usually the point where my thinking takes me to where I think that's stupid.  Capitalism won the battle over Socialism and that is that.  We cannot share our way to prosperity when you have to share that which others have earned. We have the best system - don't we?

The Amish, or Mennonite cultures have recently settled in our area.  I see them working as they have for hundreds of years and wonder why anyone would ever put themselves through that kind of deprivation. I do apologize here as I am paraphrasing.  I am reminded of a story about why the Amish (and this is where I forget which culture I heard about) use steel wheels in their vehicles.  If you have ever ridden in a wagon or a vehicle with steel wheels - let me reassure you - it is not comfortable. So the story goes that they use steel wheels because it forces them to go slower, going slower is easier on the vehicle and forces you to look and drive carefully.  Driving carefully makes you see more things. The more things you see, the more you know about the quality of your fields. The more you know about your fields, the better decisions you make. Better decisions mean more benefit you. Going slower is better.

The bees were dead.  Quit?  Nope I love the job and want to work toward a ne co-existence with them.

Continue with the systems that are recommended by the Provincial Apiarist?  Hard to do as it runs counter to my strong belief that nature works best when it works the way it wants to work. So I reflected and remembered that I had purchased a book by a Russian Gentleman named Fedor Lazutin. His book (translated into English by Leo Sharashkin) Keeping Bees with a Smile was very revealing.

He advocates for modelling a moveable frame top bar hive that closely mimics a tree hollow.  I will be posting more about my adventures as I go.  I will be building swarm traps first, then four or so hives and finally purchasing some nucs so that I make sure that I have bees to work with next summer.

Cheers! and Bee Stoic.

2017 is Going to Be Awesome!

Why?

Snowmobile is working in fine form!

Pond is getting ready for some hockey

New varieties of Hazelnuts have survived the drought

Maple Syrup shack is finally being created

Goat shed is almost done.

Successful propagation of Hazelnut plants from along the walkway (source plants were Golden Bough).

I am going to build swarm traps for bees this spring.  New plans and ideas have helped me flesh out this valuable resource.

Water and electricity at the barn.

Winter Solstice and the Birth of a New Year

Sunrise at Yellow Door Farm - Winter Solstice 2016

This is one of the most exciting times of the year for me.  The sun is coming back.  I even made a t-shirt logo - ripped from various web pages of course - to celebrate the day:

What an awesome day. I was energized by the beautiful bright sunshine and the crisp but not too cold day. Life is coming back.  Summer will be here before we know it. The winter break gives me time to sit back and contemplate new goals for the upcoming season and start all over again. It WILL be a better year.

Welcome sun, welcome new year, welcome life!

Items Available

We currently have many items available for sale:

Raw Honey - 500ml reusable bottles $8
Raw Honey - 1kg plastic tub $10
Poultry: Whole Chicken $3.00 lb, Whole Turkey $3.50 lb


Items that will be available:
Apple Seedlings (Fall 2017)
Black Walnut Seedlings (Fall 2017)


Sorry the following items are sold out:
Maple Syrup
Chestnuts
Black Walnuts
Hazelnuts
Hazelnut seedlings
Chestnut Seedlings
Maple Seedlings

Goodbye and Good Riddance to 2016!

source: http://cdn.xl.thumbs.canstockphoto.com/canstock30546904.jpg

What a year to say goodbye to.  I have been saying this a lot lately.  It seems that at the end of each year, we say "Thank god that one is over. Next year has got to be better!

Allow me to elaborate on why it is wonderful to say good bye:

Red squirrels ate all of my nut tree seedlings that I was hardening off in my greenhouse in the spring.


My daughter had appendicitis and had to have her appendix removed

We had an electrical fire in the house;

A weasel ate all of my first batch of meat birds and all of my laying hens for this year (60 in total)

Record drought and heat waves caused the well to almost run dry;

source: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/by-the-numbers-southern-ontarios-dry-summer/71061

I was hospitalized with "Beaver Fever" - Campylobacter virus

David Bowie and George Michael passed away, along with Fidel Castro and many other interesting people of note.

My daughter got tossed off her horse and badly hurt her tailbone;

My tractor's steering fell apart

Bears attacked my bee hives - a few times!

All tucked in for Winter

Bee hives at Yellow Door Farm

Winter came with a wonderful snowfall this year.  Luckily I had prepared the hives for winter.  Bitter cold followed the snow and so I hope they are all ready.

I experiment with different types of winter wraps each year. I am trying black tar paper this year. It is fairly cheap, easy to work with and black so it absorbs heat. These are some of the properties that make it useful. You need to apply it early in the Fall as it becomes brittle as the weather gets colder.

Notice the electric fence to the right. It goes all around the hives as we have had some bear attacks lately.  I think we also had a deer walk into the wire late in the summer. The hives were not really disturbed but the wire had been snapped off a pole at one end and the wire appeared to be wrapped around a large animal's leg. The animal bolted, and knocked over another hive.  Eventually the wire was released and the animal took off. If it was a bear, it would have come back and started to eat the larva and honey that was in the hive.  Oh boy the challenges never end!

Swagging

I'm thinking about swaggin again. Don't tell my wife!

Swagging is a term plumbers use to stretch out a pipe to allow another to slide and and then be soldered together. I am always kicking around the idea of running a solar water heater along my roof over my deck.  My wife does not approve of the ugly ideas that I want to have projecting from any surface of the house. 

We use a lot of hot water - it is currently heated using a oil fired water heater. I want to get as far away from oil as possible. A few years ago we had an oil spill in the basement. It was awful. You could not sleep in the house due to the fumes. Also oil is the only going to become harder to get, more regulated (oil inspections, carbon tax etc) and it is terrible for the planet. 

My elegant solution has incorporated a stealthy sneaky solar panel that is mounted along the west facing deck of my house. It receives punishing heat and light late in the afternoon. I am going to run some copper pipe along the lower edge of the deck and cover it with glass or plexiglass and circulate the heat through a large cistern in the basement. The cistern will also connect to my water heater with a copper heat exchanger.  I want to have the water moving constantly as long as the heat inside the solar collector is greater than the heat in the tank. For that, I need to run sensors to the cistern and to the hot water panel.

Another aspect to the installation is the use of our wood stove in the living room. It basically runs all winter and is a main source of heat for the house. The hot water heat collection system will be turned off of the outdoor solar in the winter, and routed along the back of the wood stove during the colder months.

Ahh to dream. I think I spend more time thinking about ways to save money from energy than it is worth. But, it is my hobby. Some people have expensive cars, trips or toys, for me I get a real kick out of getting energy - whether it is a plant, hot water, maple syrup, honey or whatever.

I hope I can piece together this system over the year. I have been planning and working on it since 2014.

New Year's resolution for 2017?  We will see.