Well, it’s not my first sting ever, but it’s my first since I got bees.  And, get this, after all the stupid, incompetent bee wrangling I’ve done– collecting the swarm, splitting the colony, generally being a huge klutz– she stung me as I was bringing out the dinner scraps for the chickens.

On the way back in, I stopped by Washington just to see how it was doing (we had CRAZY rain today, and I added a little corrugated roof cover)… I noticed that there were a couple of flies on the hive, and for absolutely no good reason at all, decided to step over and flick them off.  As I was standing there, one of the girls came out and flew around my leg.  I think she got caught between my shorts and my leg and HEY!  OW!

Flicked the little stinger off (scrape, not pull!) and thus far have not collapsed into anaphylactic shock.  To be honest, I barely got a bump– about what you’d get from a mosquito but with a definite pain enhancement factor.  It burns.

So, FYI, yes, if you have bees around, sooner or later, you are going to make them sting you.  And, what’s more, you’re probably not going to die.

How about this… according to some list I found that apparently originates with US National Safety Council, your lifetime chances of dying from a bee sting are something like 1 in 57,000, which is just a bit less than your chances of dying from “hot weather”… Oddly enough, that’s only slightly more likely than dying from “legal execution” at 1 in 62,000.

Really?  I have a one in 62,000 chance of being executed?

Holy crap.

Another great question on the Portland Backyard Farmers group.  Because I can’t answer anything without writing a book, I’m going to give my opinion here.

Disclaimer: I am dumb.

The question was basically this (paraphrased a bit):

“As a kid I my mom used Miracle Gro in her garden. Everything she had grew so well and HUGE! I want my plants to be safe for my kids and for the world, so is Miracle Gro good or bad?  I read the ingredients and didn’t see anything crazy in it.  I assume the problems with it are on the larger environmental scale.  Thoughts?”

Very interesting question, I think.  I put up a poll on the group early on to ask where people landed in the “organic->conventional” spectrum.  While we only got 18 responses, they were 2/3 totally organic, 1/3 mostly organic, and nothing else.

I’d, personally, fall into the “mostly organic” column.  I have some Miracle Gro in my greenhouse.  When I have a plant, usually a seedling, that’s not doing well or that I want to give a boost for whatever reason, I’ll foliar feed with some dilute MG.  It seems to be one of the fastest ways to get some quick nutrients in to the plant, and it’s very soluble, dissolves quickly, doesn’t gunk up spray bottles, etc.  I rarely, if ever, use it after the weather warms.  I’ll buy a small box every few years.  (Incidentally, I also have an I-don’t-know-how-old, still-unopened can of Sevin insecticide and a mostly full bottle of Round Up.  They’re sort of like that cigarette in a glass case for someone who quit smoking.)

Now, that said, MG is made from by-products of the petroleum/energy industry.  It’s pretty much the antithesis of the concept of “organic” in every way.  It’s made to feed the plant directly rather than the organic concept of feeding the soil.  The analogy in my mind is antibiotics.

Ideally, I’ll eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep to stay healthy and fend off disease.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, that doesn’t work, and I get sick.  I’m not going to suffer and die on principle when I can use readily available products in a responsible way to get me back on the right track.

I’m also not going to make prophylactic antibiotic use part of my diet.  Same goes for MG.  Firstly, if your garden’s healthy, you don’t really need it.  In my opinion, it’s TOO available.  Better to feed your soil with slow release organic sources that promote the soil’s flora and fauna– ultimately providing the whole range of necessary components and micronutrients your plant needs to thrive and produce healthy, delicious output.  Hitting it over the head with MG is, probably, going to give you large, leafy plants (I seem to recall that urea is the main ingredient– basically straight up nitrogen), but that’s an illusion of health.  Your soil is likely to go all out of whack and you, like the guy with antibiotic laced breakfast cereal, are going to be on a nasty spiral of dependency.

Use MG, soil gets out of balance, plants grow too vegetatively attracting pests and diseases, veggies don’t taste good for lack of micronutrients… The solution for many?  More Miracle Gro!

I won’t even touch on the political ramifications.  It’s a petroleum product (but I drive a car sometimes, too).  Runoff, carbon footprint, inefficient packaging, etc.  They’re all valid points of discussion but have a tendency to quickly devolve into a religious shouting match.

• “You’re a poseur buying insanely expensive designer fish emulsion!”
• “You’re a corporate sycophant who hates the earth mother!”
• “Farmers grow food for the world and they use chemical fertilizers!”
• “Farmers are oppressed by Monsanto and destroying the earth in a bid to survive economically!”
• “Hippie!”
• “Nazi!”

So, your original question, if I remember right after babbling this long, was sort of “what are the larger ramifications of using MG?”  To that, see the comments about petroleum products, etc.  However, I really think that the bigger issue (if only because of scale of impact– you’re not going to cause significant environmental anything using a little MG in your garden; they sell many tons of the stuff whether you use it or not) is one of defining “grows so well” and “safe for my kids”.  If you mean, plants get tall, leafy, and crazy green, MG is great for that (ignoring the pests that that will attract).  Likewise, if you mean it won’t directly poison your kids used properly, I’d agree that it’s safe (ignoring the pesticides that you’ll want to use).

However, if you mean that your plants grow strong, disease-resistant, and according to their environment (thereby helping you maintain a healthy soil for more resilient garden), or if you mean that the tomatoes that you pick have that whole, rich range of flavors that the micronutrient-rich soil provides, I’d recommend staying away from chemical ferts for the most part– unless it’s seen as a component of a much larger soil management plan (i.e., compost, minerals, flora and fauna).  It’s too direct for me, though.  You have to be really careful not to overdo it.  It’s pretty hard to screw up seed meal or compost.

If you mean “safe for your kids” in the sense that they are given access to fruits and vegetables the way nature intended– with all the flavor and nutrition that they can have– I’d go primarily organic.  It’s not just about inputs and outputs, either.  In my opinion, for your children to understand how nature works– the plants themselves, the pollinators, the pests, the soil cycle, etc.– teaching them that veggies come from this magic blue powder isn’t exactly “safe” in the larger sense.  And how many people explain “son, the blue powder comes from the combination of ammonia and carbon dioxide produced in the extraction of zombies from uranium” (that’s maybe not right; I really don’t know) when they dump this stuff on their plants?  I can tell my kids “this is chicken poop… it comes out the backside of a chicken… this is compost… it comes from over there (pointing)…”  Everyone gets it.

So, is Miracle Gro good or bad?  I’m sorry; I don’t think that’s a valid question.  Should you use it?  Only you can answer that, but I hope I’ve presented reasons you’d steer clear.  Unfortunately, for millions of people, the promise of just sticking something in the dirt, pouring magic water on it, and having giant fluorescent green plants pop up is much more attractive than the process required to establish and maintain an organic garden– analyzing and amending soils, learning about nutrients and deficiencies, allowing the soil and predator balance to develop and stabilize over time, etc.

However, there are “input substitution” approaches that, I think, split the difference with little extra effort or cost.  Instead of MG, use one of the readily-available, general purpose “natural” ferts– something like the Alaska brand fish ferts or Monty’s (not completely organic, but pretty close).  For the average home gardener, the difference in cost is not that significant and they’re likely to be a gateway drug into a more organic view.  The best part is that they’re not likely to cause any damage to the soil in the meantime while still allowing a fairly simple fertilization scheme.

Wow.  I am… ignorant.  Let’s just ignore the fact that Washington hive wanted nothing to do with that comb I left them.  You might recall that I reported on Adams hive cleaning out the chunks I left them.   What I didn’t have a chance to report was that I’d taken the big chunk from Washington and moved it to the top of the inner cover of Adams.  They seemed so much more enthusiastic, and I didn’t want to leave it sitting out for the neighborhood vermin.

This morning… as I went out to let the chickens out… I stopped to see this:

Hah! Attached! Ours!

You’ll see, if you look closely, that they have attached the comb to the front of the hive.  What’s more… they are going to town building it up.  These ladies have adopted the babies in the comb.  I neglected to freeze the comb to kill the brood (almost all drones).  Now, I’d freeze the little babies just to control mites (mites love drones), but my hives are so new, there’s not likely to be a significant number of mites yet.  So, I guess I just thought they’d dig them out and toss them while getting at the honey.

Nope.  They were proceeding to fix up the comb and make it part of their house.  One problem with that was that it covered the front entrance.  The other was… it was on the outside of the hive.  And they’re drones.  And… it’s just dumb.

Furthermore, they were doing the same thing with the piece that I put above the inner cover.  The thing was covered with bees all wanting desperately to raise some babies– drones or not.  Again… that would be OK if drones weren’t useless, and the comb wasn’t in the completely wrong place.  But they are.  And it was.

The punchline is that I had to move all the frames into a clean box, scrape off the comb again from both places, and put them in the freezer.  The bees were not stoked about my plan.  I’m getting a little tired of these awkward interactions.  Anyway, the state of the state is that my bees hate me now, but we’re going to work it out.  They’ll understand when they get a little older.

Still no eggs in Adams.  There are some supercedure cells going (by the by, still not sure what the internal differences are, but supercedure cells are up on the frame towards the top and swarm cells hang under the frames.)  I saw no swarm cells and at least two supercedure cells.  They’re capped… which leads me to believe that Her Highness should be popping out in the next coupla days.  And killing her sister.  Nice.

On a completely different topic… I managed to repair my irrigation system.  Most everything is on drip now.  I love that stuff.  No standing around with a hose sending half my water off into the atmosphere.  No splashing soil-borne diseases all over everything.  No forgetting to water something and discovering its dessicated corpse.  The programmable controller covers about 80% of the plants and the other stuff is on timers.

I’m still using a bit of soaker hose (since I had some new stuff here), but I’ll replace that with drip when it explodes, which it does, which I hate.  One of my neighbors referred to it as “hardening of the arteries”.

The other nice thing about drip is that it’s like tinker toys.  You can just goof plug anything you want to move, and there’s a whole bunch of drippers, bubblers, misters, and what-not to customize your coverage.  It’s a little bit of a pain to set up, since, with containers, you have to plumb each one, but once it’s set up… you’re golden.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Interesting day with the bees, so I thought I’d just do an update…

I am officially completely confused again.  I’ll get to the reason a bit later… but indeed, I started out by building some hive stands.  Firstly, my previous pallet stands looked stupid.  They barely kept the hive off the ground and were quickly overtaken by weeds.  Washington is up on some lovely white trash cinder blocks, and yet my delicate sense of aesthetics couldn’t handle it.

The parameters were:

• Must look somewhat less crappy that pallets, plastic sheet, and cinder blocks.
• Must not require a trip to the store.

That seemed like a good place to start.  Sturdiness was desirable, but not required.  It’s not how you feel, it’s how you look.

That meant scrounging for wood and coming up with a simple design that would allow for ventilation, hoist the hive up about a foot, and allow for some anti-ant measures (e.g., my favorite Tanglefoot on duct tape trick).  As it is, they just have too many paths up into the hive to control.

Long story short:

Adams On Its New Hive Stand

Regal, don’t you think?  By making the base the standard dimensions of the hive bodies, the bottom board rests right on top of it.  The pressure treated 2×4s in the front and 2×6s in the back are perpendicularly oriented for greater stability.  A full hive can be several hundred pounds.  The frame itself is just 1×6 since it supports the weight vertically.  The whole thing is screwed together with 2″ deck screws.  It feels like you could support an elephant on it.

Now, note the snazzy color on the stand frame.  Note also that the Adams hive body is bare naked.  That’s because I was panicking, and what does panic do?  It KILLS!  By now, I’ve calmed down, and I thought, what the heck, I’m painting anyway, I’ll just paint all my new boxes, too.  So I dug out some leftover paint, and voila!

Scandinavian Design Hive

Oh yeah… we’ve got your orangey brown leftover paint color and your creamy yellow leftover paint color.  They actually go quite nicely together and with the PT legs, which are darkish rust brown.  Right?  I’m right, right?

So, after all the assembly and painting was done, I wanted to accomplish two more things… get Adams off the ground, and remove some nasty burr comb that I saw when I was in Washington yesterday.  What’s burr comb?  I’m glad you asked.

Burr Comb And Drone Brood To Boot

That is burr comb.  It’s comb that they draw out where there’s too much room (more than the 3/8″ ‘bee space’).  See those bumps?  Those are drone brood cells.  Drones are useless, piggy males that just make a big mess and get in the way.  Since the girls know this, they tend to keep them out on the periphery.  This burr comb was stuck to the inner wall of one of Washington’s brood boxes.  You’ll also see a little finger sticking out on the lower right… let’s zoom in!

Is That A Swarm Cell Or Are You Just Happy To See Me

That little stalagtite/peanut lookin thing is a swarm cell… or a supercedure cell… I don’t know the difference, frankly.  In any case, it’s a new queen waiting to happen.  Given that it’s capped, she’s probably not too far from coming out– except that I squished her.  We already have a queen, thanks.  There was actually several on here.  I mentioned that I hadn’t seen any in Washington; that was because I couldn’t see the bottom of this burr comb well.

Hillbilly Hive with Swapped Out Brood Box

I moved the frames from that box, one at a time, into one of the newly painted boxes and closed it back up.  Then, I scraped all that comb off the wall of the old box (and painted it).  There was quite a chunk, and it was loaded with honey.  I took a big piece and put it in front of Washington:

Honey Laden Comb? No, Thank You.

And a smaller piece in front of Adams:

Honey Laden Comb? You Betcha!

Here’s where I get a little confused.  In a couple of minutes, that piece in front of Adams was absolutely covered in bees and starting to look mighty cleaned out.  The comb in front of Washington just sat there.  There was maybe a dozen or two bees on it… seemingly just walking around.  Why is that?    I left it there for some hours, and they never got worked up about it.  I ended up adding some to Adams, and they covered that, too.  Adams is queenless.  Maybe that has something to do with it.  Maybe Washington is getting ready to swarm again and isn’t hungry because they’re all full already.  I don’t think so, though.  The queen is laying and they show little indication of getting ready that I can see.

Any theories, anyone?

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

**NOTE: I’m going to add some pictures to this one… but I wanted to get it published because a lot of people seem to be following the swarm saga.

**NOTE 2: Changed my mind.  I’ll just make a new post for the pictures.

OK, the most exciting thing here lately has been The Swarm so we’ll start there.

If you’ll recall in our last episode, our hero had just gone willy-nilly into his hive and yanked out a few frames for a new hive in the hope that he’d move the queen over to the new hive and convince the little buggers that they’d already swarmed and just forgotten… sometimes called a “shaken swarm”.  Sadly, his mission was complicated by a severely agitated hive getting “all up in his business”.  And he’s fairly ignorant– this being his first year at this.

We join our hero today… not willing to go back to the nursery again today for more irrigation parts… spontaneously deciding to don his suit and go hive diving.

There I was… again with my silly white suit on… again facing the possibility that I’ll crack open the hive to find another mob scene, a post-swarm apocalyptic wasteland, or, most likely, a bunch of stuff I don’t understand… again… gooey, waxy, bee scuz.

But, no, today was different.  I have been forged in the fires of impulsive stumbling forward.  I can almost feel my ignorance dissipating a bit.  First, I get bees without knowing a queen from a more masculine homosexual.  Then, I randomly pile on boxes, excluders, and supers without following any particular plan– just my feeling about the state of things I saw in my clodhopper hive inspections in which nothing really happened other than that I was happy to not have been stung.  And surprise!  The most likely thing to go wrong… went wrong!

Anyway, see part 1 and part 2 to get caught up…  I’ll wait…

Go ahead.

Great.  So today… I opened up the hive (hive one, currently referred to as the Washington hive)… and they didn’t get very worked up.  In fact, it was almost like the old days… they pretty much just went about their business while I did mine.  So, I started picking through… the honey super… mostly empty… took that off and removed the queen excluder* as had been suggested until they start loading up the super.

*The queen excluder is a classic example of the seemingly arbitrary, completely conflicting, and religiously followed Dark Ages-era beekeeping technique.  It’s basically a screen that the queen can’t fit through.  You place it between the brood and honey boxes to keep her from laying eggs in the honey– for obvious reasons.  It is seen by 50% of beekeepers as a de rigeur piece of gear and 50% refer to it as the “honey excluder” and insist that just keeping the queen in the lower brood box will suffice.  You are either responsible or a moron for using it.  Absolutely.  This also goes for things like slatted bottom racks, top entrances, 9 frame spacing, and plastic “woodware”.  For what it’s worth, I am currently of the opinion that queen excluders reduce honey production and contribute to swarming.  I’ve removed mine.

First frame I pull is one of the new ones… and they’ve been drawing out the comb, but it’s mostly empty.  The next one is one of the originals… it’s got… open comb… but mostly looks like nectar.  That’s not good.  It’s apparently a classic sign of a terminally queenless colony.  Anyway, I worked through the first box and saw no eggs, a little brood, and a fair amount of comb drawing out but not much else.  Plenty of bees.

However, in the bottom box, things are clearly different.  Firstly, it’s pretty well full of bees.  I start pulling frames, and what I notice, aside from oodles of burr comb* is… eggs– quite a few.  Before too long, I’m face to face with her royal highness herself.  She appears completely normal in all respects.  She’s relatively fat and calmly wandering around doing her thing.  Nowhere do I see any swarm cells.  It seems that they have torn them down.

It seems that a) you can never, ever replace a colony swarm back into its hive unless b) you can.  See notes on queen excluder advice.

A little more looking around, and I don’t see anything foul broodish, chalky, or otherwise honey bee pestilent and so I move on to the new hive (heretofore, until I change my mind, referred to as the Adams hive).  That one just takes a minute, but also shows some interesting stuff.  First, there are bees in it.  That’s kinda weird given that I didn’t actually get the queen in there.  What I do see is swarm cells (or supercedure cells, I’ll be damned if I know what the difference is supposed to be and whether it matters).  No eggs.  Plenty of capped brood and honey.  I.e., everything looks cool– albeit queenless.

In a nutshell, everything is pretty much back to normal.  Washington seems to be back in normal business.  Adams looks like it was probably an unnecessary split but on its way to establishing itself.  I’ll keep an eye on things, but it seems like disaster may have been averted despite my best efforts.  I certainly learned a lot.

I wanted to mention that there ARE other things going on in the garden besides this bee stuff.  Most notably lately is the outbreak of a nasty case of botrytis on my strawberries.  If you’re not familiar, botrytis basically causes your strawbs (and grapes and other things) to rot.  When you see a bunch of them with gray mold on them… that’s probably what’s up.  Botrytis is super common and mostly controlled through cultural means… i.e., it’s sort of self-induced when you neglect to clean up yer fields or water in such a way that it splashes up from the soil.  I did both.

It seems that I don’t believe that your bees will swarm or your strawberries will rot until I’ve retrieved my bees from the neighbor’s tree and thrown away all my disgusting, moldy strawberries.  Experiential Learning Pedagogy Reliant Disorder (or ELPRD).

Basically, I left a lot of leaves on the strawb plants, and before I got my irrigation in that area fixed this spring, I was just overhead watering.  I did mulch, but I like to use actual straw, and I think that may have contributed to the problem (by providing warm, damp areas for the fungus to thrive.)

I’m going to treat them as best I can.  I’m checking out a product called “Serenade” that is a strain of bacillus subtilis bacteria, which has shown promise in controlling the disease (once it’s already established).  Just to be safe, I’m also using my old friend neem, too.  I may throw in some baking soda to boot.  I know, it’s not scientific.  So sue me.

Elsewhere, it seems my edamame seeds have just rotted in the soil.  Maybe we’ll try that again, but start them in the greenhouse and transplant.  I’ve got quite a few green tomatoes.  The kids split the first snap pea yesterday (the middle of June… eesh…)  Everything’s growing pretty well, but so far, it’s been mostly lots of  potential harvest.  We did clear out a bed of daikon and turnips because I was getting sick of watching them and the daikon were starting to bolt.  We tried a couple new pickling recipes on those with moderate success.

I’ve replanted that bed with okra.  Lots and lots of it.  I am not at all sure why I planted so much okra, other than that I failed with it before, and I wanted to see if I could actually grow it if I made it prominent enough that I had to pay attention.

OK, off to build hive stands since I noticed this morning that ants seem to be establishing a nest in Washington.  Sure, why not?