Pollinator Party

They say that once you have honeybees, you look at flowers differently.  You wonder if a flower is a good source of nectar, of pollen, or both.  You wonder if the pollen is good nutrition for the bees, or junk food like pine pollen.  You might wonder if a flower has been sprayed with a pesticide of some sort.  At the very least, you become more aware of what's blooming at any given time of year and wonder if your bees are hitting it up to make you some honey. 

If you also happen to be a huge bug nerd amateur entomologist, you might notice that some times of the year there is only one kind of flower blooming in a given area.  And as a result, that patch of flowers becomes a veritable smorgasbord of pollinators.  We noticed it last summer on our hawthorn tree.  A few weeks ago, we also noticed it on a blackberry patch while visiting family in Wisconsin. (For what it's worth, blackberries make junk food-like pollen, but may be a good source of nectar.)  

Shrugging off the puzzled and slightly concerned glances of our relatives, we grabbed the camera and started snapping photos...let's see what we found!

There were plenty of hover flies hanging out (including this Syrphus ribesii), but they weren't very cooperative as far as landing on flowers with good lighting.

A fancy blue metallic bee was slightly more accommodating.  We're pretty sure it's a blue mason bee (Osmia lignaria), but the midsection looks kind of thin and the abdomen looks not very hairy compared to other photos online.

This paper wasp was our best customer, as it was willing to be in focus and was visiting only the most attractive flowers.  We think it's a Polistes rubiginosus, or Polistes carolina but it's hard to be sure.  They're very similar, and neither one is normally found as far north as Wisconsin.

An aptly-named bumble bee was also buzzing drunkenly from flower to flower.   Looks like it's probably a Brown-belted Bumble Bee,  Bombus griseocollis., but possibly a Common Eastern Bumble Bee, Bombus impatiens.

Even a butterfly (we think it's a Small Pearl-Bordered Fritillary, Boloria selene) was getting in on the action!

There were probably half a dozen other species that wouldn't hold still long enough to get their picture taken, but we'll have to check out this blackberry patch again next year!  Not sure if we'll be back in time this year to enjoy the fruits of these pollinators' labor, but hopefully our relatives will remember this post and have a greater appreciation for these fine fellows while they're munching on delicious blackberries later this summer.

Where are the pollinator parties in your neck of the woods?

Bee Reset: Honey, Mead, and Sterilizing the Hive Bodies

While our capers with shook swarming and wax rendering have been great, one other main benefit in pressing the reset button on our bees is the edible part.  We humans aren't going to catch the foulbrood, so if the bees can't eat their honey, we might as well!  We just need to extract it.  Fortunately, this post will be a lot shorter than the others.  Heck, we can even throw in the sterilization of the hive bodies for good measure, and wrap this story up!

As a reminder, here's the overall process we're working with.

We did the honey by a whatchagot version of the crush and strain method, since we were working mainly with brood frames, which meant honey around the outside, brood in the middle.  That is, we didn't want to extract whole frames, just select chunks of comb.  Our setup is two buckets; the top one has holes in the bottom.  A t-shirt goes between the buckets to strain out chunks of comb, etc., and the comb gets mashed with our hands and goes in the top bucket.  In this particular case, the bottom bucket also had holes, so the whole setup is in a cookie sheet for secondary containment.

Once the comb is crushed up, the honey will eventually drain out.  It took several days, but it's a low-tech, low-effort system!  Of course, some honey will end up stuck to the comb (probably more than if we had a centrifugal extractor).  We washed the comb through with water, to recover any residual honey for making mead.  Some of the YouTube videos we saw in the research phase of this post showed people washing their wax before extracting it and just throwing out the water--so this is similar, but we keep the water for something tasty!

The water won't be concentrated enough to make a very strong mead as-is, so we added sugar to boost the final alcohol content (hence the name quasi-mead, since this stuff isn't made purely from honey).  Also, the wine yeast need more nutrients than just the (diluted) honey and the sugar can provide, and the mead will need some tannins to keep it from tasting like vodka or cough syrup (depending on how much residual sugar there is), so we added some very strong rose petal-and-raisin-tea.  We might forego the rose petals next time, since they didn't seem to be a very good source of tannins.  Hopefully we'll have a post soon on our approach to making fermented beverages.

Our final yield was about 4.5 quarts of honey, or about 14 lbs. (There is a quart jar-and-a-half missing from this photo because Katie is part pooh bear.)  Note that if you are extracting uncapped honey (as you may be doing during a bee reset), check the refractive index of it to make sure it has a low enough moisture content that it won't ferment in the jar.  Below 20% is normally the standard, but other sources say 17-18% is a better target.  Those other sources also say that if it's a little higher moisture content than that, keeping it below 50 °F can also prevent spoilage.

Finally, sterilizing the boxes.  Some say to heat everything, especially the corners and other nooks and crannies, until the wood is a uniform deep coffee brown color.  The bacteria that causes EFB (Melissococcus plutonius, although it was originally called Bacillus pluton) is inactivated above 65 °C, which isn't enough to turn the wood brown.  But heating until the wood is a little charred is an easy visual to make sure we're in the safe zone for killing EFB (and any other diseases that might be hanging around).  Sort of like roasting a giant wooden square marshmallow, but from the inside (the paint on the outside doesn't need to change color).  By far, the easiest and fastest way to do this would be with a propane blow torch.  But if you don't like the thought of all those difficult-to-recyclable propane canisters, you can get a similar effect with a little alcohol-fired camp stove.  Definitely not the OSHA-recommended protocol, but it works!

Once all the parts the bees have touched are uniformly charred (minus the extra-resinous parts, which saw the same heat, but didn't turn color), we should be good to re-use the box.

 How do you extract your honey and sterilize your hive boxes?

Bee Reset: Wax Rendering v2.0 (and 3.0)

We wrote a couple weeks ago that we used the shook swarm method to put our bees on fresh comb and hopefully help them shake their case of EFB.  So the bees got some new digs, but what happened to the rest of the hive--the honey, combs, frames, and hive bodies that were contaminated? The whole process would make for a very long blog post, so we'll break it up into a couple posts.  But to whet your appetite, here's the overall schematic:

This whole ordeal is a zero-waste process, which is nice.  On tap for today: frames and comb, in particular, wax rendering.

We're continually adapting our wax rendering process.  Version 1.0 we wrote about before, and was more of a treatise on how not to render wax.  Version 2.0 is a solar melter frankensteined together from parts of our cold frame.  The back is a piece from the brooder box, and the places they don't fit perfectly together are plugged with fence panels.

Inside is a regular Langstroth box with a couple 9" x 13"-ish aluminum pans, each with about an inch of water in the bottom (to keep the wax from sticking to the pans).  On top is our winter-time bee feeder...

...which is lined with an old t-shirt and has another Langstroth box stacked on top.

The combs to be melted get piled on the t-shirt, and the melter is covered by the windows from the cold frame, which are stacked to make a double-glazed top.  The windows should be washed to maximize the amount of sunlight that gets through (ours weren't), and every crack and crevice should be sealed tight because when it starts to heat up, every honeybee within smelling distance will be drawn like a magnet. 

We set the whole thing up on the garage roof since it gets intense sun for most of the day.

A few days later, the combs are mostly melted down...

...but the yield of wax is a little disappointing.  A couple things probably decreased our yield.  First, the t-shirt filter held up a lot of the wax itself.  Other folks have had better luck with a paper towel.  Second, the temperature should have been higher.  We added some reflective insulation around the walls, which helped, but not enough.  More insulation and a more airtight construction would have been better.  We could have washed the windows, which would have helped even more.  As it was, we got readings up to ~155 °F inside the box when the glass was on.  Good enough to melt the wax, which happens at ~145 °, but hotter would be better.

Also, when we tried a deep Langstroth box full of frames, we only got minimal melting

Plus, during the time spent with all our rejiggering, we found out that bees aren't the only bugs interested in the wax.  Ants and earwigs love it, too.  But at least there's a silver lining: if you want bespeckled wax, the sprinkles are free!  The final takeaways from version 2.0?  There are some kinks to work out, but there's good potential.  Significant improvements wouldn't be too difficult if we could find the time to properly build a solar oven (which is on the to-do list anyway), but that will have to wait until a future date.  Also, some folks have noted that from some old combs, solar melting, even in a well-designed system, doesn't cut it.  Those combs need steam to release the wax.

Enter version 3.0.  It's inspired by a few other designs we've seen and Keith's comment on our original wax melting post.  The core is a big pot with some water in the bottom, and an aluminum pie pan boat.

That goes on top of the rebuilt Dakota Rocket Silo, which is burning the contaminated frames (and other wood).

A t-shirt filter is secured to the top of the pot.  The combs go in the filter.  The idea is that the steam rises up and condenses on the combs to melt the wax.  The wax is supposed to drip off the lowest point on the t-shirt into the pan below.

The first part of that works well.  The wax melts in half an hour to an hour if the fire is really roaring.

Unfortunately, it also runs down the side of the pot, so in addition to the nice wax cake we get in the pie pan, there's also a layer in the outer pot.  (This picture is from the following morning, after everything had cooled down.)  What we really need is some kind of impermeable insert in the top of the pot that prevents the t-shirt from contacting the pot directly, but that has a hole in the middle to direct the wax to the pie pan.  Probably could be done with aluminum foil. 

Also, we should point out that the wax accumulating on the water in the big pot can be a little dangerous because when a full layer of wax forms, it prevents the water from evaporating normally.  The result is that the water gets super-heated and instead of boiling steadily, it bumps violently, and then does nothing for a few minutes, before bumping violently again.  (The same thing can happen in your microwave if the water is very still while heating.)  When the bumping was happening in our setup, it was actually able to move the pot around, and if we hadn't been watching, it could have tipped over into the fire.  Since the wax is flammable, that would have gotten exciting quickly!

In any case, the melted wax and water can be poured into a pan to cool down.

The wax will form a cake on top, which can be easily removed.  We had a lot of comb to melt, so we ended up with several of these cakes.

To make them more compact, we built a makeshift mold, lined it with aluminum foil, and stacked pieces of the cakes inside.

When the summer heat had broken, we melted it in the oven at ~150 °F.

On cooling down, it solidified, at which point the foil and wax can be removed from the box.  The foil should readily peel away from the resulting block, leaving a nice chunk of purified beeswax to play with.

The stuff that got filtered out (slumgum) can be composted, used to start fires, or used to make swarm traps more attractive.  Since we started this whole ordeal to get rid of EFB, we won't be using it in our swarm traps.  We tried a few different ways of making slumgum fire starters, including packing it into paper egg cartons, wrapping golf ball-sized portions of it in old phone book pages, and packing a thin layer of it between layers of paper grocery bags.  In our experience, it's the residual wax that actually starts burning, and the rest of the slumgum burns, but does more to inhibit the wax burning than to really support combustion.  So, adding additional dry, combustible material like paper, sawdust, or wood chips helps a lot.  Also, getting that extra combustible material to wick up and/or be coated in the wax helps it work under wet conditions.  Once we had everything packed in like we wanted it, we put it in a 200 °F oven for an hour or two to melt the residual wax and get it to soak into the paper. The egg cartons are easily divided, but the slabs with the grocery bags we cut into 1"-2" squares.

The t-shirts themselves can also be cut up to be fire starters, or saved for future use.  Since we don't want to transfer EFB to any future batches of wax, we're going with option #1 for the t-shirts this time.

We did a quick trial run of all four of our different kinds of fire starters (clockwise from top: t-shirt, egg carton, phone book, and grocery bag), and we noticed that the phone book page-wrapped slumgum balls were hard to light and keep lit, the wax-soaked t-shirt lit the fastest and burned up the fastest, and the egg carton-slumgum and paper grocery bag-slumgum fire starters had good longevity but could still be easily lit by a match.

Finally, a quick note on cleaning up the wax.  Many folks caution that it's nigh-on-impossible to clean up cookware items that have been contacted by the beeswax, but we've not found that to be entirely true.  First, the thin coating that forms on pots and pans will eventually wear off in continued use, and beeswax is inert in the human digestive tract, so one approach is to ignore it; no harm, no foul.  Second, we've found that mixing beeswax with some kind of vegetable oil (olive oil, canola oil, soybean oil, etc.) when both are above the beeswax melting temperature (~145 °F), makes a blend that can be cleaned up with soap and water, even when cooled back down to a touch-safe temperature.  And third, a scouring powder, in particular Bon Ami, which doesn't have anything in it that we would be worried about contacting food, cleans things up pretty well.

There you have it!  Our current procedure for processing contaminated wax and frames, waste free.  How to you render and clean up wax?

EFB? ACK!

Earlier this summer, we noticed our new package of bees wasn't building up as quickly as it should, and the brood pattern wasn't full and solid like it would be in a healthy colony.  We started looking closer at the combs, and noticed a few things.  Most of the uncapped cells all had eggs or larvae in them, so the queen was laying fine.  But many of the uncapped larvae didn't look quite right--some were sort of discolored and laying at the back of the cells; others started to extend out toward the front of the cells, but were slightly twisted, as if they had a stomach ache. In short, a lot of our brood frames looked like these and these.  Sounds like trouble.  Not trusting our limited beekeeping experience to officially diagnose the problem, we decided to send a comb sample to the USDA bee lab, where they test it for free and tell you what disease your bees have (if any).  A few weeks later, the results came back: our bees had European Foulbrood (EFB).  Oh no!

Here's the old brood comb, with the sample we cut out to send to the Bee Lab.  Although they only ask for a 2" x 2" square, we cut out a section to fit a small USPS box instead.  Don't want them to wish they had more to test!

So what are our options for treatment?  While EFB is no walk in the park to get rid of, it's not quite as bad as its evil sibling American Foulbrood (AFB) in that it doesn't form spores.  For AFB, the only treatment is to kill the bees and burn them along with the frames and comb (hive boxes and other equipment the bees have come into contact with can sometimes be sterilized by high heat or bleach).  For EFB, there are a few more options (and here):

1. Do nothing, since in a strong hive, symptoms will often clear up when the nectar flow is strong.
2. Treat with the antibiotic Oxytetracycline (trade name Terramycin).
3. Re-queen, since a disruption in the brood cycle will often clear up symptoms.
4. Use the "shook swarm" method to restart the colony on uninfected combs in a new hive (this also disrupts the brood cycle).
5. Kill the bees and burn or sterilize everything, same as for treating AFB.

Of these options, we had already been trying #1 for a while, and it clearly wasn't clearing up.  We're trying to minimize chemical treatments of our bees, so #2 wasn't a great option, either.  #3 would be ok, but it seems like we could get the same effect by #4, which was preferable to us since our queen seemed to be laying well and we already had everything we needed.  #5 is obviously a last resort, and we weren't there yet!

So, shook swarm it is!

The general operation is simple, and shown here: we're just taking all the bees from the old hive and shaking them into the new hive.  A few tricks that aren't shown in the video: the new hive should have a queen excluder on the bottom (actually functioning as a queen includer) so that she doesn't have the opportunity to decide she doesn't like the new digs. Also, the chances are good that she'll end up in the new hive if we're efficient in our shaking operation, but we can increase the odds by spraying the frames down with sugar water to reduce flying bees before shaking them, or if we wanted to be really sure, we could find the queen and catch her, and then install her in the new hive once the rest of the bees are in there.

Also, in our case, since we're trying to clear up EFB, the new hive should just have foundation and not already-drawn comb so that the bees have a chance to sort of purge their system before they have to feed new brood. Some sources recommend holding off on feeding them for a few days for the same reason.

After a couple weeks in the new hive, they've started drawing out comb and generally looking healthier.  Can you find the queen in this picture?  Her name is Waldo.

If we blow a little smoke on them to clear the bees away, we can see that the brood pattern looks a lot more full than it did in the old hive.  Time will tell if they can build up enough to make it through the winter, but they've got a better chance now than they did before!

Stay tuned to find out what happened to all the old frames, comb, and the honey they had stored.

Have you dealt with EFB before?  Have you done the shook swarm method with your bees?  How did it go?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Homestead Happiness, April Week 4

Plenty of bee-related news has us kind of giddy this week.

Our new bee package arrived on Saturday.  The local distributor sold more than 1,500 packages, which meant it was a total zoo for picking them up, and that our bees will have some competition for the neighborhood flowers.  Still, it's nice to see such an interest in beekeeping, and they'll definitely have first dibs on the dandelions in our yard!

The new bees are already taking full advantage of the pollen in our dandy-filled yard.  Keep up the good work, ladies!

As a side note, in preparing the hive for the new package, we ended up finding the old queen.  Turns out she didn't die in the great yellow jacket war of 2014, and we can rule out that they absconded last fall.  That leaves either CCD, or too heavy of losses from the yellow jackets to make it through the winter.  Should we start a portrait collection of our queens for future colonies to look back on and remember their storied history?  This was Elizabeth I.  Right now we have Elizabeth II.

The bees came just in time, too, because our strawberries are starting to bloom!  We've got the squirrel cage set...now if we can just get all the mice trapped out of the adjacent shed before the berries ripen, we might actually get some to eat this year!  Also, to the fruit trees waiting to flower: ready, go!

We also realized that swarm season and hunting season are complementary.  So, if we put a ladder stand in one of our trees now as a support for a swarm trap, we can turn it back into a hunting stand later when we either catch a swarm, or when swarm season is over in July.  Either way, it will be ready in time for deer season! (Although we probably won't be able to hunt deer from the stand in its current location.)

What made your homestead happy this week?

Colony Post-Mortem

We found out the other weekend that our bees didn't survive the last cold snap.  Actually, on opening up the hive, it looked like they had been gone for a while.  The bees we saw going in and out a couple weeks ago were probably robbers.  Not sure why a few dead bees kept showing up on the landing strip, though.  Anyway, we wanted to post an autopsy here since we like to think of this not so much as a dead-out, but as a learning experience!

Here's the story of this hive (most of this from memory, so some details may be lost in the rendering):

We got it in early May last year: a 3-lb package with a real cutie of a varroa-sensitive queen (aka VSH for varroa-sensitive hygiene).  The timing was unfortunately on the downhill side of the spring fruit tree blooms, and then we got a freeze a week later. So, we fed them 1:1 sugar syrup from the start, and they kept taking it, so we actually had the feeder on there for most of the summer and through the fall (switching to 2:1 sugar water in late August).  They eventually filled most of two 10-frame deep boxes with brood, pollen, and honey, with most of the honey in the top deep box and most of the brood and pollen in the bottom deep box. We had an entrance reducer on for the first couple weeks, then opened up the entire landing strip to allow for major summer traffic.

In late September, we noticed a few yellow jackets hanging out on the landing strip, but they weren't going inside the hive.  The next weekend, the yellow jackets were still there, so we put the entrance reducer back on, but didn't open up the hive, other than to replace the feeder.  In early October, we did an inspection on a warm day, only to find that most of the bottom box was empty, both of brood and honey.  The top box was still full of pollen and (mostly) honey.  This was the first inspection during which we didn't see any eggs (although we didn't check every frame), and the population seemed to be lower than expected (probably 6-7 frames-worth covered in bees).  It was also the first time we saw varroa mites on a few of the bees and on the removable debris board.  The bees didn't seem overly agitated, so we figured the queen must have been slowing down on her egg-laying for the fall and hanging out on frames we didn't pull.  The bees continued to take the syrup until late October, when the temperature was mostly under 50 °F.  At that point, we took off the feeder and added a moisture quilt.  Through mid December, there were bees near the top of the top box.  The cluster seemed small, but present.  In mid-January, we added a candy board, and there were still bees near the top middle of the top box (although the ones we could see may have been dead already at this point).  We didn't notice much activity through early March, other than a few dead bees showing up on the landing strip and a few bees going in and out.  Given how small the cluster looked in December, we were kind of surprised that they would have lasted this long.  Last weekend, after another cold snap, we figured we better decide whether there were live bees in there or not, and discovered that there were not.  Time for an autopsy:

Starting with the screened bottom board: lots of debris and a few hundred dead bees.  Some chewed comb, a couple mouse turds, a few rows of cappings from the honey.  Many half-bees, probably victims of the yellow jackets.

In the bottom box, the frames close to the middle looked like this: missing comb close to the entrance, and the comb near that edge filled with a hard substance--almost propolis-like, but lighter in color. 

Here's the whole frame.  Just a little bit of honey in the upper left.  Otherwise, completely empty.  Frames to the outside looked similarly empty, but without the missing/propolized comb part.

In the top box, the middle two frames had the most bees and the least honey.  The rest of the frames are still full; the top box weighs probably 60 pounds.

Zooming in on the bees that were left shows several of them head-down in the comb, which usually means starvation.  (However, there's honey, like, six inches away.)  The rest are just kind of frozen in place.

A few frames showed a trail of chewed comb like this, which from what we can tell, means mouse damage.  We don't think the mouse killed the bees or chased them away.  It probably just got into the hive because there weren't enough bees to keep it out, and left because there weren't enough bees to keep it warm.  Or maybe it ate too much honey and got a tooth ache.  Or maybe it wasn't a varroa-sensitive mouse.

So, what ultimately befell our poor hive?  We think we didn't do enough to protect it at the end of the summer, and the yellow jackets and robber bees cleaned out the bottom box, in the process killing the queen.  When we put the entrance reducer back in, the remaining bees were able to hold off the attackers for a few days, then it turned cold.  That put a stop to the attacking and robbing, but with no new bees forthcoming, the numbers would eventually dwindle to the point that they couldn't stay warm enough to move to new honey.  That's our hypothesis.  What are the other possibilities?  From reading a number of articles and blogs, there seem to be three candidates:

The hive absconded due to pressure from yellow jackets, robbers, or mice:  It would be hard to rule this one out conclusively, especially since we never found the queen.  But normally before a hive absconds, it cleans out all the honey and finishes raising the brood; we still had a ton of honey left.  Plus, there were enough bees left to form some semblance of a cluster through at least mid-December.  But other than those two things, this one fits, too.

Colony Collapse Disorder: It's hard to conclusively rule this out, too, since there was a box full of honey and very few bees to defend it for (apparently) most of the winter.  So by some accounts, it should have been robbed out if it hadn't failed from CCD.  But usually a CCD hive is left with a small number of bees, including the queen, and plenty of brood.  We only had one small section of one frame with brood (maybe a dozen cells), and no queen.

Varroa mites decreased numbers in the hive, which meant not enough bees to stay warm: We think this is unlikely since we collected a number of the dead bees off the bottom board and did an alcohol wash (á la Randy Oliver), and got zero mites per hundred bees.  We also saw no deformed wing virus, which is transmitted by varroa, and goes hand-in-hand with the mites.  There were a few mites on the debris board, but following Anna's mite counting protocol, we ended up with ~145 total mites.  We scraped the debris board clean in late September, so those mites were collected over at least two months.  During that time, the colony's numbers were probably dropping, but since a typical lower limit for mite treatment is 50 mites per day, all of those mites could have collected in three days time and we would still be ok without treating.  We paid a little extra for the VSH, so looks like we didn't get swindled!

If there's a silver lining to this ordeal, it's that we found out we were what the French call 'sans bees' early enough to order another package for this year, and the incoming package will have plenty of honey for a good head start on their stores.  But it would be nice if we could take a hive through the winter at some point!  So, what can we do better next year?  Mainly play better defense, we think:

1. Take better notes so that if we have to do an autopsy again, we'll have a more precise timeline!
2. Trap yellow jacket queens when they first emerge in the spring so they don't put so much pressure on our bees in the fall. Although we have to admit, we're a little ambivalent about trying to decrease the population of an otherwise beneficial insect.
3. Put the entrance reducer back in earlier.  Like early July, probably, as soon as the main nectar flow is over.
4. If we notice robbing/yellow jacket activity even with the reduced entrance, put on a robber screen.
5. If we discover the colony is queenless in September, but still has a lot of bees, order another mated queen asap and hope she can get 'em through the winter.
6. Do the alcohol wash multiple times throughout the year to establish a baseline for the varroa count.  Then we can deal with it in the fall if necessary.

What do you think happened to our bees?  If you have another theory, let us know if the comments section below!  How did your bees do this winter?  Let us know that, too!

Homestead Happiness and Progress (HAP) This Week

We've noticed in past years that we start to develop some symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), of a sort.  The weird thing is, it seems to be out of phase with the time of year that it's supposed to crop up, that being the winter doldrums when sunshine is in short supply.  For us, and we wonder if also for many other part-time homesteaders, the winter isn't so bad because there's not a ton of stuff to do homesteading-wise (except dream and plan), so our off-farm responsibilities don't really get in the way of anything.

But then,  the air starts to get warmer, the ground starts to dry out, and the days start to get longer, but are still short enough that daylight hours are in precious short supply.  That's when it hits us--when we want to get out in the yard and do stuff, but it's already dark (or nearly so) when we get home from work.  So, to combat the worst effects of our out-of-phase SAD, we're starting a new (hopefully weekly) series featuring simple things that 'made our day' around the homestead. It'll remind us that even if we can't spend as much time on homesteady stuff as we'd like, there's still plenty to be happy about and progress is still being made.  That is, we're going to combat SAD with HAP.

This is a schematic representation of our out-of-phase SAD.  For full-time homesteaders, we imagine a flat line right at the top.  Another way to interpret the graph is to imagine the red line as homestead responsibilities and the blue line as how caught up with them we are.

Happy thing #1: The bees are still alive!  Even after adding a big ol' candy board, we hadn't seen the cluster for a few weeks and couldn't hear much buzzing in the hive.  But on warm days, there's plenty of activity and usually a few dead bees pushed out the bottom entrance (which is good because it means there are still housekeeping activities going on inside).

The Meyer lemon tree finally has flowers again!  It had struggled through several years, and not even put out flowers the last couple, so hopefully we'll actually get some lemons this year!  Maybe we should put it out by the bees and hope they pollinate it!

Rapidly growing avocado tree.  It's now taller than an avocado!  If we can keep it alive, we might even start to see fruit in a mere 5-13+ years.

The Swiss chard is still alive and starting to pick up again.  We didn't have much insulation on it, just a closed in row cover, and hit -10 °F multiple times.  But the chard is a real trooper!

A new bag-drying configuration.  We finally figured out what to do with that kitchen window opening, those two eyelet hooks, and that piece of string we didn't want to throw out!  [Katie rolls her eyes.]  They dry way faster here than standing inverted on the counter or in the dishwasher Murphy-style drying rack.

Right now they drip dry into a couple plant pots...water conservation at it's finest!  In the future we'll put in a planter there that looks like it actually fits there.  With the bags hung symmetrically, and the light coming through the window just right, this setup looks almost...decorative. [Katie rolls her eyes again.]

What made you happy on your homestead this week?