Category Archives: Critters

Stories and photos of encounters with various animals, wild and domestic

Bees, Homesteading

Package Bees-May 2016

May 1, 2016

Spring has been cold and slow this year, so the package bees are running late, as is everything else.  They should now arrive from Georgia tomorrow, on May 2nd. A whole pallet load is being picked up and driven immediately up here to Eversweet Apiary in Kearneysville, WV and I will be there bright and early to get my two packages. Then it is home to install the poor things in their new home with some already drawn comb from last year, to help them along. Mixing up sugar syrup today with 1 and 1/2 gallons( = 12 pounds)  hot water to 12 pounds of granulated sugar) to pour into their top feeders and thawing some pollen patties to feed them as well.

I  will have five hives this year, which means there should be enough brood to share between the hives if needed. I painted them all a pretty spring green so they blend in better with the landscape.

Spring Green Hives
Spring Green Hives

The lowest box holds ten frames, some of which has already drawn comb and one with a little honey on it. The second box is initially to surround the opened package so they can calmly walk out and move into their new home on the frames below. The queen will hang in her tiny cage between the frames until they chew their way in to her and let her out in a day or two. Meanwhile they can get used to her pheromone smell and hopefully accept her. They will kill her if she doesn’t smell right.

The third box up is the sugar syrup feeder which has a round screened light vent cut into it to keep them from building comb up there. They prefer to build in the dark and I do not want comb all over the place. I want them organized on the hanging frames and easily workable.

May 2

I picked up the bees, brought them home and had a problem right away. The queen in box one arrived dead. she was wedged up in the sugar with her head close to the screen and the bees probably stung her to death. So I had to drive back and get a new queen, which cost me an unexpected $37.  This time I got a Carniolian Queen  instead of the Italian that was shipped. They are supposed to do better here and not eat so much in the winter.

Got the Queens hung on the frames and packages opened and turned on their side in the empty box above. Installed a half pound slab of pollen patty across the top of the frames as well, to supply protein to enable brood rearing. Then I poured a gallon of syrup in each feeder for carbohydrates that enable them to build comb.

Bees hovering around the feeder screen
Bees hovering around the feeder screen

I was not sure where to install the inner cover, above or below the feeder,  so I put it on top of the feeder and then the roof on top of that.  I missed the first class where they discussed this and I can’t find an answer on line or in my books.

May 3rd

I called Ed Forney at Geezer Ridge this morning and asked him what to do with the inner cover and he told me not to use it when a top feeder is in place because there is a notch in it that will allow the bees in to the very top and they will drown in the syrup. Sure enough. I went back out right away and took them off but had already lost about 60 bees to drowning. With things put together right the bees access the syrup from underneath and climb out on the wire mesh.  It could have been worse.

Mann Lake Top Feeder Tray
Mann Lake Top Feeder Tray

While I was out in the bee yard, I removed the now vacated packages and the hive boxes around them. I also checked the queen cages but they had not been released yet so I left them alone. I will check them again in a couple more days. The international marking color for queens this year is black, which is useless. They need to erase that one from the list. There is no way to see it when there is so much black on the bees. Normally, painting them with the annual color could be helpful in spotting them. Glad I did not pay extra for it.

The eleagnus, or Autumn Olive, is blooming right now as are the ranunculus or Buttercups. Also the invasive garlic mustard and the yellow mustard, dandelions and phlox divaricata, or Woodland phlox, are all in bloom, so there are a few things for the bees out there. It has been really cold, damp, dreary and rainy lately, which is not good for bees to fly in. As soon as there is sun  they will be out doing double time.

Phlox divaricata and Taraxacum, or Dandelion
Phlox divaricata and Taraxacum, or Dandelion

Adding the links to these plants has informed me of the toxicity of the ranunculus to horses and cattle. Great. I opened up the small paddock covered in them just yesterday. Now I will be going back out and closing it off, although apparently horses don’t usually eat it unless they are starving, which she is definitely not. It is all mixed in with  orchard grass and clover, which I hate to have to kill. Sometimes I feel as though I cannot win. I will keep trying though.

Mara in the Buttercups
Mara in the Buttercups

-Wendy lee,  writing at Edgewisewoods

 

 

 

 

Bees, Homesteading

Bees 2016

2 Comments

Bees- The Saga

There is so much to learn about keeping bees. Up until recently, I have not known enough to be able to keep mine alive. I have been a very bad bee mamma. I had a hive in the 70’s, which a bear got, and another in the 80’s, which was really mean, but now I am trying again. I did manage to catch a swarm a few years ago when a friend had his bee hive here  but I do not have much experience other than that. Bee keeping is, surprisingly, one of those things that some people get all hyped up about, almost like religion or politics. It is hard to sift through all the conflicting information and make good decisions. I have had bee people get mad at me for not blindly following their methods, but I don’t blindly follow anybody, so they will just have to get over it. I need good reasons for doing things. Reasons that make sense both scientifically and rationally. Some people  blame farmers using neo-nicotinoids or genetically modified crops for killing all the bees,  I think I may have finally found some bee folks whose opinions I can respect and who can give me intelligent, well reasoned answers. Unfortunately, I have already lost two hives, two years in a row.

First Attempt

In Spring 2014 I purchased one package of Italian bees and one of Russian bees and installed them in two hives.  Neither one made it through to the spring.The Russians were stronger than the Italians during the summer and lasted about a month longer, into March, but I did not know enough to keep them going. I was reading books and getting occasional advice from a (militant- “You have to do it my way”) beekeeper in Pennsylvania, but it was not enough.

In the Spring of 2015 I replaced those first bees with one Italian package and one Carniolian nuc. A nuc (nucleus) is a small hive with about 4 frames of brood, pollen and honey. There are bees already working and a queen that they have accepted who is laying  eggs. A nuc is ready to go and I got it from a beekeeper close by who puts them together to sell. All I had to do initially was install them in a full size hive so they could expand. Packages, on the other hand, consist of about 3 pounds of assorted bees collected into a shoe box sized, screened in box with a separate tiny cage holding a queen they have just met. You don’t know how many workers or nurse bees are in a package, nor how old they might be. Bees only live about 45 days so old ones won’t be useful for long. The queen needs to start laying as soon as possible to keep them going but sometimes package bees don’t like the smell of their new queen and they will kill her off. If you open the hive and don’t see any eggs being laid, then you have to get another queen right away.

This package of bees  killed their queen before she was even out of her cage ( they can sting her right through the screen) and they also killed the replacement queen I bought. I was advised to join the two hives in an attempt to get one strong hive out of them. I put a layer of newspaper between the two hives and stacked them together. That seemed to go OK. I applied the HopGuard strips to control the Varroa mites in August but the hive never got very strong. They were dead by December, even though they still had honey stores and it had not gotten cold yet. There was no brood so the queen had either not survived or she up and left. It was depressing. Getting expensive too. Package bees cost about $100 and a nuc is $165, queens another $35.

Second Attempt

Desperate for information, in the winter of 2015,  I joined a local bee chapter and attended their monthly meetings assuming I would get good information. However, they had conflicting opinions about what the proper way to keep bees was and there were even arguments  during the monthly meetings. The last thing I needed was to sit through a meeting where folks got into arguing about who is right. I avoided going after that. They held classes for beginners and advanced beekeepers though and I attended those. I was supposed to get a mentor during the classes but I didn’t because how would I know if the mentor’s ideas were right or if they were just pushing opinions? Instead, I got into a lengthy conversation with one of the guys who had started keeping bees the year before. I decided I would read books, talk to people who kept bees, and see if I could  maybe come across someone who was willing to help me on my own. That did not work out so well because I did not find a mentor and was still not sure what I was looking at when I opened my hives. I could not tell what was normal and what was a problem when I had nothing to compare them with.

One thing I had been told in the classes that seemed to make sense  was that I needed to install screened bottom boards on my hives to help with cooling in summer and prevention of damp in the winter. There was a sliding tray to insert below the screen to catch any mites that fell off the bees to enable counting how many mites there were. So I installed a bottom screen. I still couldn’t tell how many mites there were. I have since learned that screened bottom boards cause the bees too much extra work because they have to bring in  more water as it evaporates too quickly. Then in the winter, they can’t keep the now drafty hive warm enough and will starve rather than break out of their warming cluster to go eat the honey a few frames over.  See what I mean about conflicting information?

By the end of November it was obvious that there was no longer a queen in the hive, no eggs or larvae, just a small group of workers left. There was still honey, which I have saved, and lots of empty comb, so I will use it to help out the bees I get next. I broke down and attended another bee chapter meeting in the hope of meeting someone useful, which I did. Cheryl and Ed Forney, of Geezer Ridge, told me not to give up, they would help me learn about keeping my bees alive. They are a very generous couple who work with Veterans in West Virginia, helping them get started in bees. They would be holding free classes towards the end of winter at their farm and I could come out and go through the hives with them when it warmed up, to learn by doing. Finally.

Third Attempt-Spring 2016

I am bound and determined to successfully raise my own bees. In January I ordered one box of Italian package bees and one Carniolian nuc for delivery in late April from a beekeeper close to me that I had dealt with before. Then, in early March,  I attended more bee classes, this time at Geezer Ridge, a very successful apiary about 45 minutes away. There, I learned about the life cycle of the Varroa mite and why my treatments had not worked to get rid of them. I learned that I would need at least three hives so that I would be able to borrow frames of brood from the stronger hives to help build up the weak ones. So I ordered two more nucs raised at Geezer Ridge, where I knew the bees would be healthy and ready to go, and one more package  to go with the first in case I needed to switch the queens. I also ordered 2 more double deep wooden hive bodies so I will have 5 altogether this year. Three nucs and two packages should ensure I have enough bees to help the weaker ones out. I missed the Facebook announcement for the first class but made the second, third and fourth, which was a field day.

In my first class, I learned that every hive in this area will have mites and there is very little that actually works to kill them off.  Some of the other diseases could be a problem but are not always, so we learned what to look for. I learned that Ed is all about following scientific reasoning and studies and he knows why something needs to be done as well as what. That was refreshing. The bees must have proper nutrition in the form of protein (pollen patties) and carbohydrates (sugar) to keep their immune systems up.  There are many environmental stressors around today that bees did not have to deal with in the past. Breeding queens for resistance to stress and disease is important. Bee colonies will be considerably weakened and lose most of their brood (into which the mites lay their own evil eggs) if the mites are not controlled in the fall and then again in the spring. It is not enough to kill the adult mites hanging on the outside of the bees (the ones that I should have found under the screened bottom board), I have to kill the other life stages as well. Some of the miticides that are sold harm the bees more than the mites and some only kill one life stage of mite.

In the second class Ed showed us how to install package bees and nucs, how to feed them, and how to manipulate the frames so the bees do not have to waste energy. He answered lots of questions from the class of about 50 people without making anyone feel stupid. He advised that we talk with our farmer neighbors and get them to let us know the night before they spray, so we can lock our bees up for a short time.

In the last class, we suited up and went through a bunch of different hives, looking at the eggs and larvae, counting the brood frames in each hive, seeing the pollen they were collecting (Maples), the honey stores they had left. We moved some of the frames around to make it easier for the bees to take care of, placing the honey to the outside, putting drawn empty comb near the brood so the queen could easily lay nearby. Basically centralizing their work for them and taking advantage of their natural inclination to move up. We learned how to feed them for the winter with pollen patties, and fondant, a fluffy icing sort of sugar, and then changing to the warm weather, sugar syrup top feeder. He kept going until we were all feeling comfortable around the bees and done with asking questions.

So this year I am going to follow the advice of these professional beekeepers, who manage to winter over all their colonies, and I will use the systemic miticide that they use. Unfortunately, I have to give up on raising my bees organically or I risk losing them again, which I am not willing to do.  I had  been trying to keep the Varroa mite population down by hanging Hop Guard strips in the hives, rather than using a harsher chemical miticide. The good news is that the hives are not treated when the honey supers are on so the honey for people, when I finally get some, should be fine. I feel much better knowing that I can call on Ed and Cheryl for advice, and I plan on spending time learning in their bee yard whenever I can.

Getting Ready for the Bees-March/April 2016

The two new double-deep (meaning two deep boxes as opposed to shallower mediums), ten frame hives I purchased needed to be painted so my five year old grand daughter and I set them up on boards in the backyard and first applied primer.Then, since I have learned that it is OK to paint them colors and not just boring bright white, we went to the store to get some paint. I picked a light green, so they would not be so glaringly obvious in the pasture. While in New Zealand this winter, I saw hives in all kinds of colors stacked by the sides of the roads. Some people paint them to match their house, some with Amish designs. The bees do not seem to care.

I also bought new top feeders for each of the five hives instead of the frame feeders I had been using. They hold more, are easier to fill and clean, and more bees can reach them at a time. Ed experimented with a hole in the feeder box and came up with the proper size to prevent the bees from building burr comb (wax comb that bees build out to fill any gaps larger than a certain size) between the two halves of the feeder. They like it dark where they build comb. Bees are very particular about the space between their combs. If you don’t space the frames correctly they will bridge them all together and make a mess.

I will be registering my bees so the state inspector can check them out if I need him to. This means that I am now aware of the best management practices for keeping bees in my state. There are limits on liability for beekeepers if they follow certain guidelines.  For instance, if you live on less than 1/2 acre you can have up to 4 colonies , and they need to be facing away from your neighbors or have a hedge or fence that forces them to move up above head height on their flight path. 8 Colonies are allowed on one acre and as long as you can place them no closer than 200 feet from developed land there is no limit. There are also rules about how best to manage your hives. I had no idea.

So now I have to set up more cement blocks and level them so I can put two inch boards across as bee hive shelves. I like the way Ed does it with cement doorway lintels but I will stick to the much lighter weight boards for now. Then I might paint the older white hives with this nice new green if i get the chance. I will set all the hives in place and be ready for when they arrive, which depending on the weather should be somewhere around the third week in April. I will post then with new pictures and the story of installation.

-Wendy lee writing at Edgewise Woods, Gardens and Critters

 

 

 

Critters, Homesteading, ShepherdstownWV-1993-2017

Snowstorm Jonas

Snowstorm Jonas

I love that we get names for winter storms now. Instead of having to talk about the “Big Snow of 96” we can say “Yeah, in 2016 Snowstorm Jonas hit Shepherdstown and we got the  biggest snowfall on the East Coast! 40.5 inches of snow in one storm! We rock!” Actually we rock around on the floor after shoveling all that snow, in an attempt to ease our aching backs. And then we hang upside down on an inversion table trying to get straightened back up.

The snow is beautiful,  but worrisome too. My barn has an awful lot of weight sitting on it and since I built it myself  I know I did not plan on dealing with 40 inches of snow back then. I should have used bigger supports, more bracing, etc. I had to lock Mara, my horse, up in the barn for two days during the storm because she was going to let herself get all snowy and cold outside. Then I didn’t sleep very well because I was afraid of the roof collapsing on her. So far it hasn’t but now the weather folks say it might rain tomorrow and that would make the snow REALLY heavy. Considering that it was 8 degrees F this morning it is hard to imagine rain happening, but I think I will still have to see if I can knock some of that snow off, just in case. I put a nice slippery metal roof on 3/4 of the barn roof last year so it should slide. Maybe if I started a fire underneath? Just kidding, not going there.

Barn with new plastic wind guard
Barn with new plastic wind guard

OK, just got back inside from shoveling off the part of the barn roof over the horse stalls. It did not slip off at all. I had to push and pull it with a rake and only removed about half but I feel better now.

My little mini greenhouse has not collapsed, which I am happy about, even though there is nothing in there right now. There have been reports of some big hoop houses nearby not making it.

Mini Greenhouse Out in the Garden
Mini Greenhouse Out in the Garden
Happy Chickens
Happy Chickens

I splurged and bought electric water buckets this year and I am really appreciating them and so are the horse, the chickens and the wild birds. I had to pull the pump from the water garden right before the storm because it got jammed with frogs (it was terrible, their legs were stuck in it) and I did not get it back in before it froze, so there is no open water for the deer and birds and other wild critters. I will put a pump sock around it before I re install it when the pond thaws. I thought that the skimmer box I installed last year was going to keep the frogs out but they found a way around the strainer basket.

I have been using my snowshoes (after adding some additional leather laces to them), that Jeff bought me a couple years ago from REI, to tramp down pathways, one to the road, one to the neighbors barn with the two donkeys , Emma and Elmo. My neighbor is not well enough to make it out there herself and nobody can drive to her house yet. The “Long Ears” were pretty sure I was a monster when I came clomping up to them yesterday and they wern’t much better today. They were snorting and carrying on. They now have a path to their heated water trough, and I gave them hay, so they are good. The guy with the plow is supposed to make it out maybe today or tomorrow and do our shared 600 foot driveway.

our driveway is two snowshoes wide
our driveway is two snowshoes wide

The paved road out front has one lane opened up by some very nice neighbors with tractors and plows. No highway department yet. They are working on the main roads first.  I walked up the road, which is a tunnel of pristine  white snow,  to help dig out  my husbands parents and on the way back some people in a 2 wheel drive car were out there  and got stuck, of course. A helpful guy in a pickup , who could have been plowing instead, had to help them get out  and I heard him say, “Now please go back where you started and park it. It is only one lane and we need the road clear for emergencies.”  Update: the roads department got to it Monday afternoon and now it is almost two lanes wide.  I am going to have to dig the mailbox out soon.

No mail for awhile yet...
No mail for awhile yet…

I have tons of good food put away in the freezer and we have not lost power at all, which is amazing. We rarely do lose it here, although the next house down the road is on a different substation and they lose it all the time. Their lines go through some large trees. We have been eating venison stew, pumpkin pie and our fresh eggs. The chickens have slowed down during this storm but there are plenty for us. I have ordered 50 new chicks  to arrive in the spring to replace our old laying hens, and another 25 chicks for eating.

I hear people complaining about being cooped up in the winter, but I love it. I love the excuse to stay inside and do all the things I won’t do when it is too nice outside. When I feel antsy, I go do something energetic outside, and then appreciate coming back in when I get cold. There is time to sit by the fire now and I can read, sew, cook, write. The animals give me a reason to get up and be outside a couple times a day and I am not working at the moment, so I don’t have to go anywhere. It is all good.

-Wendy lee, writing at   edgewisewoods and gardens

 

 

Critters, Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Goats and Crawdads

Goats do not like to get their feet wet. They don’t like dirty water. They don’t like their barn messy. Considering that, you would think they would do a better job of being neat and clean, wouldn’t you? But no. They drop nanny berries into their water bucket, spill their grain in the dirt, and climb all over the clean hay. When it rains they huddle in their little barn and look down their Roman noses at the terrible wetness out there and refuse to come out. If you drag them out for milking they pussy foot around, dancing on their tip toes (er,hooves, I know) in an attempt to keep their dainty feet dry. It is pretty comical to watch.

We had Nubian milk goats, the kind with the long, floppy ears. They are seriously cute, especially when they are kids. They can be a real pain when it comes to keeping them out of things, though. Like the garden. Or the fruit trees. Or the house.

Kasha on our bed
Kasha on our bed
Kasha was the flightiest, quick-stepping, udder swinging, raindrop dodging goat we had. She bleated like a stuck pig whenever she didn’t get her way. She could sail over the woven wire fence around the garden, do a little twist in mid air, and bleat like a screaming banshee at the same time. Lolipop was more sedate and a whole lot bigger and came from a commercial dairy.
Lollipop on the Milking stand
Lollipop on the Milking stand
She could knock over a grown man if she wanted to, which luckily, she never did. Lolipop once defended the herd from a Newfoundland/ Great Pyrenees, by rearing up and timing her powerful head-butt to coincide exactly with the arrival of the dogs head at the fence. The huge black dog was boring down on her at full speed. Knocked the dog senseless. It was impressive, plus it gave us time to get a rope on him before he tried again. She must have weighed over a hundred pounds and when she reared up she was as tall as I am. The poor dog didn’t know any better. Cherokee lived his first two years chained up in a yard in D.C. and had never seen a goat before. A friend of ours had found him in a “good home wanted” ad in the latest issue of “The Mother Earth News”. For some reason he thought bringing him out to our place was a good idea. The next day Cherokee broke his rope and tried to get the neighbors milk calf that was grazing on their lawn. They almost shot him for a bear. We had to ask him to leave and train him somewhere else. He eventually turned into a good dog.

The spring of 1975 was super wet in Northwest Central West Virginia. Seriously. They called it that on the radio. Ritchie County had at least a little rain every day for a month that June. The creek came up, it went down, it came up again. It overflowed the banks. Mud was everywhere. We could not work the garden and plant. There was a rice paddy right by it. The barnyard was a mucky mess and the goats were very unhappy about it. The chickens looked scraggly in soggy feathers. The water got so high that even inside the barn was getting soggy. We were digging ditches with the mattock all over the place, trying to drain the water away. The goats were huddled in the barn peering out as we worked.

Standing there in my mud boots, scraping away at a ditch, I thought I heard a bathtub draining. You know the sound. Kind of a sucking, swirling glug, glug sound. It was loud and somewhere close by. Except here was no bathtub, not even in the house. Plus, we were standing in the middle of the barnyard.

“Where in the world is that sound coming from? Can you see anything?”

We finally looked down and found a swirling water tornado-lookin-thingy about 10 feet out from the barn wall in a low spot.
“Wow. Check this out. A Crawdad has drilled us our own barnyard drain hole. How handy is that? Little West Virginia ground lobsters helping us out.”

There was a small hill of tiny, round, mud balls mounded up and water was pouring over the top into a hole about an inch or two across. The water was pouring through pretty fast, just like going down a drain.

Crawdads are the same thing as Crayfish and some people eat them, mostly further down South though. They move backwards when they swim and forwards on land, eating insects. We had come across some huge ones on our place that measured about eight inches long when we were digging the well hole. Didn’t know they could be so useful though.

Wendy lee, writing at edgewisewoods.com

Want More Crawdad info? www.nps.gov/laro/learn/…/Crayfish-facts.docx