The New Bees

The New Bees

Sunday I picked up two packages of bees from Warm Colors Apiary in South Deerfield, Mass. Each “package” consists of a few thousand bees in a wire cage, with the queen in her own special cage, suspended within it, and a can of sugar syrup, at which they’ve sipped for the past few days on their journey from Georgia to Massachusetts.

Although a few bees clung to the outside of the packages as I put them in the back of the car, they didn’t bother the five human passengers, they were so intent on the bees within the cage, or perhaps the queen.

I had the choice of Italian bees, which I’ve always had, and Russian. I chose one package of each.

This will be interesting. Russians are reputed to swarm more easily, but they survive cold weather better. They even need fewer bees to cluster up and keep the queen warm. They may not be as gentle natured as Italians, either. But after the Amazons, my semi-wild hive, they seem pretty tame.

We drove home, and my son’s girlfriend, the good sport, read me the directions as I quickly hived the bees from their cages.

Lacking a mister to spray them down with pacifying sugar water, I poured sugar water on them through the mesh. Then I pried off the lid, and gently pulled out the queen cage. There she was, pacing within it, attended by her Workers In Waiting. Her cage was covered in bees already getting whiffs of her pheromones. I carefully prized out the cork that covered the wad of candy in her doorway, and lowered the queen cage into the hive, hanging it between two frames. Over the next few days, she will be eating the candy from her side, and her soon-to-be-devoted hive mates will eat the candy from the other side. If everything works out, and the workers accept her as their own, she will eventually be freed to roam around the hive laying eggs. The next step required a deep breath-- I just shook the soccer ball sized mass of bees onto the frames after her. They were so intent on getting near the queen and setting up house, they didn’t even mind, let alone try to sting me.

That will undoubtedly change, when they get to know their territory. Not everyone left the wire box, so I just laid in on the ground next to the hive, put on the inner cover, positioned the sugar water feeder over the hole in its top and went on to the other hive.

I’m supposed to leave the hives alone for a few days so the bees will bond with their respective queens, free them and begin the business of the season: laying eggs, rearing young, gathering nectar to cure into honey, thereby pollinating my garden.

Although this spring I’ve noticed a marked uptick in non-honeybee pollinators--there are, for instance, loads of bumblebees around-- I’ve still missed my girls. The farm seemed sort of empty without them. On Monday morning, when I went out to the back porch to water some hanging plants, I saw a honeybee cruising around looking for nectar sources. I was overjoyed.

Images: The bee package (3 times, I don't know why), the hive with the bees happily scampering about, and an empty queen cage, which is what I hope to see when I next look!

The Marshmallow Gene

My mother loved marshmallows. Whether they were Sta-Puffed or those nearly florescent little chickens you find at Easter, she adored them all. She also considered herself a private person, but she loved kid parties. I don’t know why; it was not a trait you’d expect in an exacting editor who relished crosswords and murder mysteries.

But I think her enthusiasm was real. She often encouraged me to have friends over to make things. Out would come cigar boxes, macaroni, flour paste and gold spray paint. Two messy, busy hours later, my friends and I had produced hideously garish jewelry boxes to present to our mothers. Or it would be earrings, dollhouses, or Barbie ensembles.

This was more than just child energy containment policy. The projects often invited chaos. Group baking from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls was in itself a recipe for a mess, even if it resulted in jelly rolls, cookies, half sunken cakes, and more to the point, batter. She was un-phased by any of it, despite the fact she worked at home.

Moreover, I was allowed to have sleepovers with friends quite regularly, and at least twice in junior high, for my birthday, a crowd of girls slept over with me in our barn. At that point in the year, it was usually about half full of baled and loose hay. These sleepovers included an astounding amount of food, 3 AM volleyball games, jumping in hay and hardly any sleep. My parents made it through the night by each taking a sleeping pill. They slept soundly as we laughed, ate, played and of course, screamed. My parents’ sainthood didn’t really shine until the next morning when they drove a carload of overtired, queasy girls full of clam dip, potato chips and donuts down winding country roads to their homes.

On one later occasion, when I was out of high school and was having some friends over, Mother escaped whatever editing work she had to do and enthusiastically went tearing out for supplies. She came back, glowing, having purchased the makings for s’mores: two large bags of marshmallows, chocolate bars and graham crackers that could accommodate 30 half-starved people. I had invited five.

This was her recipe for welcome: you buy the most wonderful food you can think of, and lots of it. Kids were easy. If only adults could be entertained with volleyball, kittens and oreos.

The high school prom was this weekend. It entailed my usual parental nagging duties: Did you remember to get tickets? A corsage? Rent shoes with the tux (sequined covered Converse sneakers are cool, but the regular ones don’t make it with black tie)? Make dinner reservations? Include a photo opp for the parents?

Then the request was slid in there: could he have a few friends over afterwards?

“How many?” I asked, eyes narrowed.

“Oh, maybe seven.”

“Sure,” I said, preferring to have kids under my benevolent but watchful thumb. I knew it would be something of a hard sell for my husband, though. He’s a quiet guy, and predictably, groaned when I ran it by him. When he was in high school, he wasn’t attending proms, he was reading Schopenhauer. Why would anyone want to go to a prom?

These are not questions I can answer. What I can and did do was make a grocery list. I considered and ruled out s’mores, because we now have a wood stove, not an open fireplace. While its front opens, it is messy and dangerous. I pictured sleeping bags glued together with liquid marshmallow and ashes, or worse, igniting. I did buy soda, though without caffeine, tortilla chips and cheddar for nachos, I made molasses coconut cookies from Old Sturbridge Village (all right, because I wanted them), put out pretzels, and got two dozen eggs for breakfast the next morning. My son got some air in the car’s front tire and bought potato chips. I vacuumed and put stuff away.

While I did not put out bowls of candy or s’more makings, I also did not put out carrot and celery sticks. This gathering was supposed to be fun, after all.

His date arrived, looking stunning. Her mother and I took pictures. Two more people called and asked if they could come over after. I said sure. They left. We had a quiet dinner and went upstairs.

I didn’t hear the kids come in, but went downstairs later and found all of them scrunched up on our couch watching My Cousin Vinny, armed with my son’s special Mexican-inspired hot chocolate.

I don’t know how I measure up to my mother’s surprising sense of fun. But in double checking the tricky spelling of s’mores, on the internet, I did come across a recipe for S’more Brownies.

Mexico photos!

I don't know how to add photos to an existing post, so I thought I'd just post them here.

Beginning from the lower left, the first is that spectacular Olmec head from the Anthropology Museum. Then, also at the Anthropology Museum is the burial finery of Pakal The Great, Maya King buried at Palenque. Next is my favorite structure at Palenque, the Temple of the Foliated Cross. The altar is in a home in Zinacanton, a modern indigenous village outside San Cristobal, where the main industry is raising flowers. Finally, one of the courtyards of the Na Balom guest house in San Cristobal, founded by anthropologist Frans Blom and his photographer wife, Trudy.

Geothermal Heating

Over the weekend I went to a workshop on geothermal heating. Walking in, I was probably the most ignorant of the attendees, and so provided the leaders with a service of what it’s like to deal with absolute zero. But an enthusiastic AZ. IN Vermont, the biggest contributors to CO2 are driving cars and home heating with fossil fuel.

There were about 70 people in attendance, from all over southern Vermont; a third were contractors. The rest of us were home owners looking to get educated.

First, there is a distinction to be made from geothermal energy, which taps geothermal reservoirs, harvesting the steam generated therein for heat and electricity. Think of those lucky Icelanders swimming in outdoor thermal pools in mid-February. These reservoirs are generally near tectonic plates. There are some in the west, lots offshore along the east coasts of the Americas and west coasts of Europe and Africa. It’s expensive to tap.

Geothermal heat can be had from the relatively cool (but not frozen) ground as well. Even in New England, the technology has advanced enough to extract heat from either ground water at 50 degrees or from air at 0 degrees F, or with the newest variable speed pumps, even less.

Basically, (and I mean, really basic, here) in water-to-air transfers, you are sucking the heat out of water that is fifty degrees, by running it through a compressor like the one in your fridge (only in reverse, right?). This removes 10 degrees of heat per pound from the water. That heat is then pumped into your house, now toasty. My brain had to stretch around the idea of extracting heat from something that is, frankly, cool. But it can be done.

This on ground source heat pumps from good old Wikipedia:

Like a refrigerator or air conditioner, these systems use a heat pump to force the transfer of heat. Heat pumps can transfer heat from a cool space to a warm space, against the natural direction of flow, or they can enhance the natural flow of heat from a warm area to a cool one. The core of the heat pump is a loop of refrigerant pumped through a vapor-compression refrigeration cycle that moves heat. Heat pumps are always more efficient at heating than pure electric heaters, even when extracting heat from cold winter air. But unlike an air-source heat pump, which transfers heat to or from the outside air, a ground source heat pump exchanges heat with the ground. This is much more energy-efficient because underground temperatures are more stable than air temperatures through the year. Seasonal variations drop off with depth and disappear below seven meters due to thermal inertia.[2] Like a cave, the shallow ground temperature is warmer than the air above during the winter and cooler than the air in the summer. A ground source heat pump extracts ground heat in the winter (for heating) and transfers heat back into the ground in the summer (for cooling). Some systems are designed to operate in one mode only, heating or cooling, depending on climate.

The most important thing, Harold Rist, the presenter on water-to-air transfers, said, was to get a system designed for the north. Too many people don’t go deep enough and then resort to using hyper-poisonous dry gas to thaw out the slush running through their systems. That or they have to use bigger compressors that are more expensive to run.

Then there is air-to air transfer, which is particularly well suited to heating a few rooms. You basically have the air source heat pump, working much like that refrigerator, only backwards, to extract heat from cold air and pump it into your house. The unit is the size of a suitcase, can be set up right outside the rooms in question, as long as it’s a bit protected from ice-build-up so the fan can work properly. You have a fan unit on the inside that looks like a two foot baseboard heater, mounted on the wall.

Both of these technologies are highly environmentally friendly. They currently enjoy federal tax rebates, so you can install a system for (in the one instance we were given) around $7000.

The downside, in my view, is the reliance on electricity to run your pumps, an iffy proposition in my neighborhood. The power doesn’t tend to go out when it’s sunny and warm. So maybe a hybrid system, with a wood stove backup, is the answer.

The first thing I have to do is getting something blown into our walls, whose insulation has settled about six inches off the ground. No point in heating the great outdoors.

Now that you have eaten your spinach and you understand geothermal heating (sort of) I’ll try to upload the Frida and Na Balom pictures.

Getting Away

Getting Away

Travel is an exercise in controlled change. You research, plan and spring for tickets, get your shots, bleed your bank account and go. You choose, to the best of your ability, the settings, food, experiences, then rush off and enjoy them. Fiestas and new friends are welcome additions to the mix; mudslides and kidnappings are not. Travelers, of course, vary in their ability to tolerate novel experience. Some throw a fit if their soap isn’t wrapped; some don’t think they have really traveled unless they have lived with the natives. I fall somewhere between these poles.

I just had nine glorious days Mexico with my younger son. We spent most of our time in the state of Chiapas, visiting Maya ruins, many of them deserted 600 years ago; then we ended up in Mexico City, one of the largest (and reputedly among the the most polluted) cities in the world.

I worried about everything before we left. Would we get kidnapped in a taxi? Would we contract malaria, miss our connections, get lost? Would I lose our passports, tickets, and generally prove myself to be an incompetent duffer? How about all of the above?

Everywhere the people were gracious, courteous, relaxed, and amazingly patient with my Spanish. You catch someone’s eye on the street and he says buenos tardes, good afternoon, even in the city!

Here is what the Mexicans are great at:

1. Manners, see above.
2. Appreciating, guarding and showing off their amazing indigenous cultures. The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is beautifully done, with the ancient cultures each having a room on the ground floor and their descendants on the floor directly above.

2a. Palenque, too, was astonishing. Coming upon it, in the middle of the 90 degree jungle, is like stumbling upon the Acropolis. I was not prepared for its beauty. Yaxchilan and Bonampak were both lovely as well, outstanding for their stellae and brilliant murals, respectively.

1. The plants! Coming from the land of maples, rhubarb and lichen, it was amazing to arrive in mango season (also banana, guava, orange, lemon and lime trees were loaded down with fruit. Sitting under a huge tree in Yaxchilan, I looked up and saw bromeliads, giant philodendrons, and orchids hanging off its branches. In fact ,you could have filled a florist shop with all the stuff growing on that one tree.
2. The colors. Many of the houses we saw in Chiapas were simple cinderblock affairs, but they were painted wonderful, exuberant colors. Looking down the street in San Cristobal was a delight for the eye.
3. The food, of course was wonderful. Great breads, great moles, ultra fresh fruit and vegetables were all a treat. What Mexicans can do with caramel alone (cajeta!) is mind-bending.
4. Las Artesanias--I loved the native crafts, the embroidery everyone seemed to be doing, the crockery, the tinwork, leatherwork, weaving, and wooden masks were all terrific.
5. Bus travel-- Mexican bus stations are fun, colorful, clean and busy. This is he way Mexicans seem to travel. We took a six hour trip from Tuxtla Gutierrez to Palenque. The first class buses are very comfortable, have movies and people coming on board to sell drinks and snacks at many of the stops. The only downside on our trip was a terrible movie (in Spanish only-- maybe I missed some of the subtlety) called Hellboy featuring a lot of really ugly droids and a blonde nogoodnik brother and sister who were chasing after magical doodads. Endlessly.

I was really glad not to be driving those perilous switchbacks. Maybe that’s why they have movies, so you won’t be tempted to look down.

We had a blast. We came home to cool temps, buds barely inching along, and two members of the extended family having been in the hospital. None of these changes could I control.

Photos coming!

Bee Post-mortem

It starts with February Fretting. This is when I start worrying in earnest about the winter survival of my bees. I scan the weather predictions obsessively, check the thermometer for the magic number, 55 degrees, at which you can safely open the hive and not chill the bees. They need their pollen patties, which provide the hive with much needed protein to jumpstart the queen's laying.

On a balmy day in early March, I was looking around for the cordless drill. I planned to take off the screwed in lath that held the insulation on our beehives. Once that came off, I could take off the top hive body, which only held the syrup jars, and give the girls the pollen patties right on top of their frames.

I made my way gingerly through the pass we cut in the snow to the shop. I looked over at the garage that held the wood splitter and heard-- I was quite sure of this--a bee buzzing.

My heart leapt. It could be one of the hive bees. After almost five feet of snow in late February, they could be, against all odds, alive.

I found the drill, rushed out the the chain-link enclosure, dug open the door, tromped in and beheld two hive almost buried in snow. That's a bad sign, because usually, even if I haven’t shoveled around the hives, they are warm enough to have melted off some of the snow around them. Also, there were no bees in evidence crawling around the entrance. I knocked on each hive. Usually a few guard bees will come out in all but the worst weather to check out the visitor. Nothing.

Even when I went out yesterday to perform the bee post-mortem, I still harbored a tiny bit of hope that I’d been wrong, and would find a few bees doing their merry circle dance in front of their respective entrances. But the only living inhabitants were two portly mice, who waddled away when I opened up the Amazons’ hive.

What went wrong? I was afraid it was mites that had weakened and killed off the hive. There was a strange pollen like residue on some of the bees’ bodies. There also didn’t seem to be many bees.

There was a lot of honey left, which sadly, does not preclude the bees starving. It’s all a matter of how far they can move out of their cluster to feed.They have to maintain the queen at 90 degrees, so form a basketball sized cluster, which they keep warm by flexing their wings in a kind of shiver. Bees are constantly rotating from the warm inside of the cluster to the more frigid outside, and back again. Sometimes, though, with honey just inches beyond the bees’ reach, they die.

There were several small clusters of bees, heads thrust in cells, and a few bees on those bees’ backs-- for warmth? This is the saddest sight, that these charming, assiduous creatures starve/freeze so near to their stores.

A lot of people lost hives this year, many of them better, more experienced beekeepers than I. The only thing I can do is to keep trying, avail myself of the collective wisdom of bee associations, suit up and go stick my nose in bee business more often so that I can trouble shoot a little better. I’m going to a Q&A session Wednesday to see if I can find out what went wrong.

And back in December, I ordered two packages of bees, with queens, just in case.

Images: the top image with the red is where mice have eaten the wax and honey, and added little bits of leaves for a nest.

The one in the middle is a top-down view of a frames, onto which I had poured some sugar as a desperate hold-over for the bees. Then the one on right-- bees head-down in the cells, with mold, since they've been dead awhile. I've have prettier images next time!

Miniature Ponies

Miniature Ponies

We long for the “olden days” because they come with an answer sheet. The present is always a bit scary. You don’t know what’s going to work out and what will later be seen as a colossal mistake.

When someone hears we’ve moved to Vermont and are slowly rehabilitating a farm, there is often a look that comes into his eyes, a dreamy longing for a sweeter, simpler life that has very little to do with the reality of country life and farm rehab.

When I see that look, I know I’m in trouble. Because usually the logistics of this person’s life preclude him from having to milk goats, or dock lambs’ tails. If I got goats and milked them, he would have a wonderful vicarious experience, without having to haul water in blizzards, or extract a goat from wire fencing at 4 in the morning, or pay to have the goat-trampled hood of a guest’s car replaced. The downside of living someone’s else’s fantasy is that you probably won’t do it the way he’d do it, and that his hearing is selective. He’s invested in the fantasy.

For instance, we get more eager advice on country living from urban friends than we do from our local neighbors. I have a dear friend who lives in suburbia and wants us to get miniature ponies. I don’t know why, except she thinks they are cute. The pictures I see on the internet are of very woeful looking little animals (some wearing sneakers, for some reason) being treated like dogs, or worse, like hairy children. The idea of horses too small to trample or kick you into next week (I’d wager they can bite, though) must appeal, hugely. The people in these pictures are clearly besotted, cuddling these animals, walking them like dogs, and actually tucking them into bed. These are some disturbing images. Somehow, for some people, it must be more fun to have a horse you can pretend is a dog, than to just go down to the pound and get a regular (but very grateful) mutt.

You knew it was coming: the phenomenon of miniature ponies is not unlike the fantasy of living in Vermont. The fantasy is a predictable, controllable thing. Vermont is maple syrup, covered bridges, people saying “Ayup” all the time--country living without getting your teeth kicked in. Whatever problems appear are easily solved, or so the fantasists imagine. There could never be real suffering, let alone disaster, in a place as pretty as this.

As a state, I think we’re lucky to have more than a few civic minded realists on board, ready to engage with the real problems that confront us, thoughtfully and carefully. The closing and decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant often comes up in conversation. While most of us southerners want to see it closed, we are also aware that we will have to find other sources of electricity, pronto, and conserve it better than we are now.

Last year’s Summit on the Future of Vermont put on by the Vermont Council on Rural Development drew people from across the state to discuss energy, communication, education, transportation, employment, diversity, agriculture and other topics central to the progress of the state. It was a committed, energetic, earnest bunch, clearly enamored of Vermont, but mercifully realistic. It made my heart glow for the future of my little state.

*This week’s blog has no pictures. I direct you to the Miniature Pony site for a real shake-up.