Happy Labor Day! Still catching up...

Fiber Fun Day! 

Our third annual Fiber Fun Day happened on the Sunday after I came back from California. For the last three years a few good art friends get together and we do a lot of tie-dying and all kinds of things. It is a day to experiment, have fun, gossip, eat, and have some nice cocktails. I found a new pattern on ravelry.com for weightless produce bags: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/weightless-produce-bag They are fun to knit because they are so quick and they are perfect for purchasing produce. There will be a lot of people getting some of these for Christmas! I knitted four while I was in California for the express purpose of using them for Fiber Fun Day. I'm pretty happy with the result. 

Erin needed new pillow covers. 

Using Popsicle sticks, she folded the fabric for the above pillows. They look fabulous on her new futon!

I also bought some onesies for my niece that I wanted to dye. This was good planning because 1. She had already had a poop explosion on one and it was now, according to my sister, unwearable -  2. My sister was very unhappy because she loved these onesies, and 3. Jesmyn is outgrowing said onsies! 

I love these onesies too! So I had no problem making more. We used RIT clothing dye for most of our projects. Its reliable and easy to use. This year I found a lot of new colors at Joann's. It was super fun to experiment. 

The color on this one isn't showing well, it's a much more subtle gradient. A really gorgeous sunset. 

                         

The really fun onesie was this one. I wish I had made it for my nephew when he was little. It looked like a funny dinosaur when I was done unwinding all the ginko nuts. It still wasn't quite girly enough for me so I added the iron-on bees. Not sure it worked. 

                      

                    

But speaking of bees...

I found some amazing images at work. The Burpee Seed catalogue from 1885 is a treasure! The bee is from a different catalogue, but works quite well here I think. 

I picked up some white Tshirts for my nephew and dyed them to match the image. 

The giant bee: 

The American Grown Prizetaker Onion:

Peas:

The Small Sugar Pumpkin


The iron-on before:


Other iron-ons cut and ready.

I'm so thrilled with the results of all of these! My niece and nephew are going to be the coolest kids in school! 

Bees at last!

Yes! 

Finally - my bees have arrived. What a saga. 

Between my not putting a stamp on the envelope with my order, to all of the bees dying of heat when the first batch was brought up, I thought I'd never have bees again.

But this Saturday, all went smoothly. 

I picked up my two packages in Blue Bell (a 45 minute drive with no traffic from Philadelphia). On the way home I kept feeling that something was crawling around in my blouse. Thinking I was just imagining creepy-crawlies I kept driving. But then I put my elbow on the window sill of the car and a bee flew out! Thank goodness I didn't get stung.

Installing them into the hives went well and last night I let the queens out - again, no problems. Nobody stung me. yay! I still have to put honey supers on, but I'm going to wait a bit. Give the queen some time to adjust and let everyone know they are okay. 

I had another nice garden surprise; apparently, I have a wisteria vine in the garden.  

I had suspected as much for a few years as I spied a few remnants of blooms that hadn't quite met their maturity. But this year there was no mistake when I came home one day to find the above. 

Unfortunately they are intertwined with Mr. El's bundle of chain link fence he has been threatening to install for the last four years. sigh.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out how to get the vine out of the chain link coil to save it. I'd really like more of these!

Book for Exhibit

Just under the wire, I finished my book for an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Library. There is a show there of a very prominent Book Artist, Keith Smith. I have several of his books and use them often for instruction and inspiration. The Delaware Valley Chapter of the Guild of Bookworkers members made works based on Smith's non-adhesive bindings and they will be shown in conjunction with the exhibition. Cool! 

I've been doing a lot of research on bees in eager anticipation of mine (which I still don't have and am not sure I will get this weekend after all) and I stumbled across this book on google books: Langstroth's Hive and the Honey-Bee  Google books is a great resource to find rare and out of print books. If they are in the public domain they are often digitized in their entirety. You can download a pdf. From there it's not difficult to turn the pdf into jpegs and set everything imposition in InDesign. Print it out and Voilá! Book on Demand. I didn't use the entire text because it's nearly 600 pages, so I just chose about 60 of the pages I was interested in, the hive design, flowers the bees were interested in, and recipes. 

In his book 1, 2, & 3 Section bindings, Smith has instructions for a hexagon sewing. I took that and modified it to turn it into honey comb. 

Designing the pattern was a major challenge. I have several sewing cards where I tried doing all kinds of crazy things. I finally got what I thought would work and so I decided to make a little mock up. 

That's a lot of holes. 

Sorry for the blurry - but you get the idea. Things went fairly well until I got to the other side. The paper was just too perforated and I started tearing holes through them. 

I figured I had the hang of the binding anyway and could start working on the materials for the real book. 

The orange is a nice departure from all of my blue books. I picked up two pieces of Cave Paper at the College Book Arts conference and that came in handy. That's the inner cover. 

I couldn't find the right paper for the outside. I would have loved to use a sheet of the Walnut Cave Paper, but I don't have any of that. Luckily I remembered all of the gorgeous paper I bought in Korea! The beautiful Hanji papers were exactly what I wanted. 

I had forgotten how beautiful they all are. I'm glad I've saved them and not squandered them of silly projects. This is the one they were meant for. 

I chose the brown papers, and dipped two different shades in melted bees wax. The pages become slightly translucent so that orange Cave Paper shows through nicely.

It took over 9 hours to sew the seven signatures. 

Final touch,

a little gold bee for the front cover. 

I am really satisfied with this binding. So much so, I'm looking at the other two sheets of wax-dipped paper and thinking - I could make two more. Why not? 

I'm extra proud of myself because my mock crab-apple bloomed on Saturday. Boy howdy are my allergies kicking up. 

The tree is incredible this year. I've seen so many people stop and take pictures of it, reach up to touch the petals, and even a few people picking some branches. I don't mind. I always want to do that when I pass the cherry trees that are so spectacular. And if I could, I'd have a big vase of the blooms on my kitchen table. 

No bees - but bottled Metheglin!

 So sad. No bees after all this weekend. No one's fault except Mother Nature or - Global Climate Change - take your pick of philosophies.

My Bee Guy drives down to Georgia to get our bee packages. It's a long and complicated story but anyway... then he drives them back up to Pennsylvania. Normally this is no problem, but this particular weekend (as opposed to last weekend when we were "supposed" to have a blizzard), this weekend it was about a bazillion degrees on the east coast. By the time they reached home, most of the bees where dead due to the heat. :( It was really sad. There was a notice on the website about trouble. I went up anyway. Unfortunately, while there were worker bees, the queens had been compromised. I have assurances that as soon as there are new queens I can come back up and pick up the ordered packages. I feel so bad for my Bee Guy. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was already a week late delivering bees, the weather forecast wasn't accurate (let's face it - it was super warm here on Saturday), and he clearly wanted to get us our bees!


I am prepared at any rate. I spent a good deal of time on Friday cleaning out the hive boxes. Both had not made it and I'm pretty sure I know why. When I cleaned out the dead bees, I found varroa mites all over them - including still live mites! Uch, I was so upset. Especially since I treated the bees at the end of the season with the correct acid. Clearly, it didn't work. However, I am ready for this year's bees. This also gives me a bit more time to prepare the frames that go into the boxes.

In other news:
I continued to edition Luminary:

Three more, half done. 

I also finished a pair of socks for a good friend. SY moved to Buffalo with her family a little over a year ago and she is freezing. There is nothing better for freezing than very warm socks. 

I am really happy with these and I hope she likes them. 

And I bottled the Metheglin!

A few days ago it stopped furiously fizzing. I knew it was time to bottle it, but still had to plan that somehow.

On Saturday I stopped at the Philly Homebrew Outlet because they also have beekeeping supplies. I spied some things I might need to bottle the metheglin, and this morning I thought, what the heck, I'll go get some things. 

Of course, the bottles I'm going to use will be the cobalt. 

 I also invested in a siphon. This is a nifty piece of equipment that makes transferring liquid a piece of cake. Basically you create a vacuum and let gravity work it's magic. As long as the bottle that is receiving the liquid is lower that the original, the liquid will continue to flow.

This was a relatively easy process except I should have put the bottles into a bowl! That way, when I wasn't quick enough to pinch the tube to shut off the flow, the extra liquid would overflow into that and not onto the floor. It was all good though - it inspired a fit of long overdue cleaning to mop up the floor. 

I also added the rest of the ingredients: raisins, cinnamon, and lemon. I used Persian raisins (12 per bottle), real cinnamon, the flaky kind, and the rind of a lemon. Not much of that though, kind of a 1cm wide sliver, the pith removed. 

 As I mentioned before, I plan on letting these sit for a while. The first opportunity to sample will be when former tenants come back to town for graduation. One will earn his PhD. I think that will be the perfect time to uncork one of these and see how it turned out.

Drama Queenbees

Oh there has been quite the drama with the queens this year let me tell you.

But first let me catch you up on the prep. Most of these photos were taken mid April. Thus the very sparse growth in the background. I will have to post an image from a month and a half ago along side one from today. You wouldn't recognize it! 

Anyway - as I was saying - catch up.

When keeping bees, it is always recommended to start with two hives. That way if something goes wrong with one of the hives you might - might! - be able to help it from the strong hive. I decided this year I should follow this advice. Two hives. 

Apparently the boxes and beehives from previous years have been abandoned to me. I haven't heard from the person who left them in more than a year so now, I've claimed them. They are mine. I also decided to collect the abandoned equipment from a friend. This is a huge savings for me because purchasing the bees, while isn't cheap, isn't that expensive either. The equipment is $$$. 

I have plenty of room for the both of them.

 But I am tired of the ugly green and the stupid geckos.

 

Time to change that. All the boxes were stacked in the garden on a sunny day with no threat of rain.

Paint was chosen from the basement: left over paint from my bedroom. A cheerful yellow.

 

Much better!

You'll notice in the above image that there are different sized boxes. The larger ones are called deeps. I'm using two deeps for my brood chambers. The brood chambers are where the queen runs around laying eggs. The mediums (the narrower ones) are the ones to put on top for honey.  

Then there are a few extras, spacers and bases and stuff. Well, those had to be painted chartreuse of course.

 Finished! And don't' they look lovely? I thought about putting a little extra decoration around them, but by the time I had my bees it was too late. Maybe next year. Ya gotta be careful. Bees don't like paint fumes.

This year I decided to take the beekeeping class from Worcester Honey Farms and it has been excellent! I've learned so much about them and they are so interesting. It is quite a system they have worked out to survive. There is one queen. She is the mother to all the bees in the hive. At peak season that can be up to 100,000 bees.  Mostly she makes daughters. These are the worker bees. They live for six weeks and have different jobs at different stages from the moment they hatch. The drones are the boys. There are not as many of them, and they do absolutely nothing except mate with other queens. At a certain point the workers kill them all to be done with them. The queen makes new ones in the spring.
For one of our classes we had to practice picking bees up with our bare fingers. 
I was not thrilled because that lesson came when i was feeling particularly awful from allergies/upper respiratory infection mentioned in the previous post. But I'm rather proud of myself because I did master the art of picking up bees. First we picked up drones. They don't have stingers so you can pick them up by the thorax. They sure buzz a lot but you can keep a pretty good grip on them. We practiced marking them as if they were queens with paint pens. I have found the value in having a marked queen. She is much easier to spot. Even though she is significantly bigger than the workers, she is still hard to find on a frame covered with stripey bees. After marking the drones we had to pick up workers bees. This was the part I was really not interested in. When I get stung I swell up badly. Last summer I had to be on a steroid to get the swelling down. It was not fun. And I needed to be able to use my right hand on Monday! But I have to say, bee people are the nicest people you could ever meet. I was late to class (on account of feeling awful) and everyone had already mastered grabbing little workers by their wings and picking them up. I had to do it with a full audience. But everyone was kind and helpful and encouraging. They helped me find the ones with their wings in just the right position to be picked up. It sure made the job easier. I managed to pick up three bees without getting stung. I wasn't able to shove them into queen cages though. But at this point I'm still proud of my accomplishment. It came in handy later too.

So the drama of the queens this year! Good grief!
My teacher also sells the bee packages way out in in Blue Bell, PA. It is a 45 minute trip with no traffic. Which on the Schuylkill Expressway is a fluke. There is always traffic. I made it home with both packages. The queen was still alive in the first one so I installed it - no problem. The second hive the queen was dead. Called my teacher and made arrangement to drive back out on Sunday to pick up new Queen. Queens are bread separately from the Package of 9000 bees you purchase. They are housed in queen cages with a few attendants until the package gets used to her pheromones and accepts her.
Tuesday came and it was time to let the queen from the first package out of her cage.
She was dead.
I checked the other hive and the new queen was thankfully still alive.
Wednesday I had to head back out to my teacher to pick up another queen. You can't have a hive without a queen. She is the only one who is fertile. When I arrived he said, "you know, you should check to see if there isn't a rogue queen in the package. If there is, they'll never accept this one and they'll just kill her." Well. Okay then. I couldn't install her until Thursday morning and while I looked very carefully at the package and thought I saw someone extra large, I couldn't be sure.
I took the opportunity of being suited up to release the other queen but she had already escaped her queen cage and was contentedly wandering around on a frame. Yipee!

That Sunday was class and I thought I should look one more time to see if I could find a rogue queen. If I did, I could take the other queen back to my teacher. Again - a fleeting glimpse of one that might have been the queen but she was too quick. At class we picked up bees and had a very informative question answer session before we were rained out. I told my teacher what was going on and he said to let him know because he'd be checking on his hives at UPenn and could stop by and pick her up is she was indeed unneeded. By the time I got home the weather had cleared and so I looked one more time and this time I spied her! There was a rogue queen! I double and triple checked to be sure and then emailed my teacher. 

Tuesday morning when he was to stop by I retrieved the queen from the hive and there one one little worker bee who would not let go of the cage. She clung on through smoke, and shaking and brushing aside. Finally, I decided to put my newly acquired bee-picking-up skills to work. I deftly plucked her up by her wings and flung her back in the direction of the hive. Boy, if that doesn't give you a sense of empowerment I don't know what does.

And now... I can't find the rogue queen again. 

And I don't think she is there. No idea why. Did she leave? Did she die? Did I accidentally squish her? Evidence that she is no longer there: 

1. This is not a happy hive. They are extremely agitated when I open the hive. 

2. There are no eggs.

3. There were significantly less bees than the other hive.

4. There are four queen cells on the bottom of a frame.

 

The long peanut looking things are the queen cells. The other flat orange disks are capped brood. There is a pupating larvae in those (worker larvae).  The fact that the queen cells are on the bottom of the frame indicates that they might be wanting to swarm. Maybe the queen already left!? I just don't know. What absolutely cannot happen is that the workers start laying eggs. They aren't fertilized so they will just be drones. The drone larvae are bigger and will destroy the comb. (The queen lays the appropriate egg for the size of the cell. Smallest are worker bees, larger are drones, and the workers make the queen cells. They decide when they want a new queen.)

So here is a frame from that hive of a circle of capped brood. I am hoping that the empty circle in the middle is because they all hatched and they are still working on these other ladies hatching. But there are no eggs in there :(.

I've emailed my teacher and so we'll see what wisdom he shares with me. If there is one thing I've learned from this experience is that this profession takes a lot of experience to master. There are just so many variables and so many different things that can go wrong.

Summertime...

 

Whatever happened this winter was certainly good for the hollyhocks. These white ones have bloomed for the first time next to the shed. And they are gorgeous. I also have pink, lavender, magenta, and very dark purple/black. Lovely.   

The dahlias went from being planted to blooming in the blink of an eye. 

Those in the pots are happiest.  Wonder why? 

I managed to propagate the Chinese lanterns to other corners of the garden.

 

And they are also "blooming." I don't know if they are blooming or fruiting? I guess they are probably fruiting because there is a little berry inside there.  

And speaking of berries:

 

My raspberries are not letting me down. They are better than ever.  

Last weekend it was also time to add another box to the hive. I hope I didn't wait too long. We have a wonderful new retailer in my neighborhood,  Philly Homebrew Outlet which also sells bee-keeping supplies!!! So I went and picked up my very own box and frames. It was quite an experience. When I arrived they were just finishing a class on mead making. The guys working there were very nice, very helpful, even if they they were little toasted. How could you not be? Three hours, tasting different meads, on a broiling hot day in Philadelphia? Shoot, I'd be toasted too. 

The box needed to be painted. Left over paint from my bedroom came in quite handy.  

 

I also had to put the wax in the frames. I am suspicious about my success here. 

Someone at the Homebrew place said, Oh yeah, just slide them in - done! Weeeelllll... I don't think so. I think I need to use some wire to string them into place. They are sagging in the frames. 

 Once everything was dry I put the new box on the hive.

And what did I get for my troubles? A whopper of a bee sting. Oh man, she got me good. 

And I don't know what she was so mad about? I was bringing food and more living space! Hmph.  Actually there were two of them, one of them stung me and the other one chased me and then got all tangled in my dress. (It was so hot - no way was I putting any more on that the bee hat.) I did manage to extract her without getting a second sting. Thank goodness.

I know that doesn't look like much, but by morning my entire arm was so swollen I was a little worried. All of the joints hurt and I could not bend my arm. I went to the doctor and she prescribed an anti-biotic and a steroid. I knew it would go away because I had been stung two weeks before (totally my fault, I whacked the poor bee with the hive tool and hard - she got me back) and while it got very swollen as well, it wasn't this bad and it was on my thigh. My right arm is a different story. I ended up taking a little bit of the steroid which I hate. I've had to take it before and it makes me. absolutely. stupid. I can't remember if I just asked someone a question. 

When I had added the new box the jar of sugar water had been completely empty. It is totally possible that the bees were cranky because they were overcrowded and hungry. Since I was worried about them, I decided to check on the food situation on Tuesday evening. How much had they eaten? All I did was pop the lid, look inside, and assess the situation. A bee went flying into the box, and rather than trap her in there I let her fly back out and before you could say how-dee-do - she zoomed over to my hand and stung me on my finger. I couldn't believe it. But I was a little more prepared this time - I got the stinger out as fast as possible (faster than my arm), iced it immediately, dug around in there with pin to be sure that there was not stinger left, and promptly took two benedril. In the morning, even though my had was swollen, it was no where near as bad as my arm had been. I was also taking that steroid too - that probably helped. What actually helped the most, believe it or not, was shifting an entire collection of huge bank ledgers at work. 671 volumes of ledgers that weight 30-40lbs each. Maybe all the movement just forced the fluids out? Who knows. 

Conclusion: when I checked on the bees this weekend, I wore full regalia in spite of the heat. Socks, shoes, jeans, long sleeved T-shirt, fleece, headgear, gloves, and I made sure the smoker was working top notch.