By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Soon after we introduced Queen bee Aurora to her new box and empty frames of foundation, I got an email from Tina and Thomas Keller, our advisers in the Aurora project. They were worried that the bees wouldn’t be able to draw out comb fast enough to keep Aurora fully occupied in her egg-laying business. Bees don’t draw out comb so fast at the end of the summer.

Tina and Thomas own a honey extractor, a contraption that spins the honey from the comb and leaves behind empty cells that the bees can refill as they see fit. Tina emailed that they were going to be extracting honey from some deep frames.

“We could bring you some of the extracted deep frames for Aurora and exchange them for some of the new frames you guys have there.  That would help a lot in not slowing down the growth of this hive.”

Thanks to Tina and Thomas, we were able to swap out 5 empty frames for 5 sticky frames that had lovely comb built out on both sides of the foundation.

A week later, when we checked her, we could see that Aurora had been very busy, and had filled all of those frames with:

Nice pearly white eggs (see those little blurry white lines inside the cells?)

And pretty little larvae floating in royal jelly.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

My tomato vines are all but dead, but I somehow managed to salvage a few gorgeous fruit from them, along with a mess of other produce for our One Block lunch next Monday. A lot more will be harvested on the day of, so this is just a teaser:

By Margo True, Food Editor

You shouldn’t miss the EatReal festival this weekend in Oakland’s Jack London Square. Starting Friday, some of the best street food in all Northern California will be yours for the noshing. What makes this event so cool, from our One-Block perspective, is its full-throttle celebration of handmade and hand-raised food: backyard chicken-keeping, goat-milking, cheesemaking, winemaking, and home beer-brewing are all on display as part of the fest’s daily “Urban Homesteading Demonstration Zone.” If you like, you can absorb words of wisdom about seed saving, permaculture, roasting your own coffee, and curing your own bacon. Or take a hands-on workshop and learn to make tamales, sourdough, sausages, or kombucha. You can even sign up to watch backyard chicken culling (it’s free if you watch; if you bring a chicken for culling, it’s $50.) And on the EatReal LitFest stage, you can listen to writers (me included) tell our best stories about food we’ve made, grown, and foraged.  

Thrilled? Breathless? Curious? Hungry? This is just a fraction of all that’s about to unfold at this DIY expo. Check it out and plan to stay a while. 

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Hi One-Blockers. 

I've sort of been cheating on you and writing a bunch of gardening stuff on our other garden blog: Fresh Dirt.

I did a big experiment with potato towers, and I want to give you a few links so you can read up:

Here is the online slide show that explains it all.

Here is the a blog post about the harvest (we haven't put it in the slide show just yet).

And some videos, if you just can't get enough.

Take a peak!

Since we didn’t need to combine this new colony with Flora after all, we decided to start another hive. Tina Keller (AKA Tina K., Friend of Nugget) and her husband, Thomas, came over to Sunset to help us set up this hive.

When Doug cut this hive from the garage, he strapped comb filled with eggs, larvae, and brood into empty frames and stuffed them into our brood box. He used big rubberbands to hold the comb in place. Bees don’t like rubberbands, and they immediately began chewing them apart, as you can see in the photo below.

“You don’t want to leave the bees in that box,” Tina told us. “The bees will glue everything together and make a real mess.” The trick was to convince Queen Aurora to go into a brood box filled with empty foundation where she could start a new home. We’d keep her out of the original box with a queen excluder.

Working with Tina and Thomas was wonderful. They’ve been keeping bees for 7 years, and have 6 hives and 3 nuc hives in their urban backyard. They explained what they were doing at every step of the operation, and I soon realized that I still have a lot to learn about bees.

Thomas started pulling the frames of rubberbanded comb from the box, and about halfway through, there she was: Aurora!

“See the circle of bees around her?” Thomas said. “It’s big. This is very good.”

It means they love their new queen.

And while we watched, Aurora luxuriated in the workers’ attention. She stood still as they licked her, she raised her royal head to be fed, and then, amazingly, she rolled over on her side and the bees cleaned her tummy. Wow. Wish I had a photo of that to show you.

Then she began walking across the face of the comb, acting confused in the bright daylight. Thomas used the hive tool to herd her towards the waiting empty brood box, and when she saw the darkness below, she actually scampered into the box.

Long live Aurora!

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

I have to admit, I was disappointed when we realized there wasn’t going to be a morel harvest this year. But since then, I’ve decided there’s an even bigger benefit to growing morels than getting to eat them. (Yes, I’m feeling very grown-up this afternoon.)

The real benefit is the excuse to take five minutes once or twice a week to hang in the garden. It’s magical to walk the same path and check on the progress of all the plants.

Here’s some alstromeria that’s flowering today.

I also passed the little redwood grove in honor of Mel and Bill Lane, who owned Sunset for many years. Bill passed away recently. They were great guys, and I feel lucky to have known them.

And here’s what our patch looks like this week. We still have no idea what those weeds are. Is our mycelium growing this well underground?

I’ll be back again soon to check. And if anybody’s looking for me, just tell them I’m out watering the morels.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

We started spraying our trees with the GF-120 a few weeks ago as a way to control our olive fly problem. Now we’ve started a second method to the hunt — traps.

The types of traps we’re using are the olipe traps. We’ve made our own using plastic water bottles and spray-painted them yellow (cheaper than buying the actual traps). Then we drilled some holes around the top of the bottles and hung a thick wire through a hole we made in the caps. 

We made a solution of Torula yeast diluted in water and filled the bottles 3/4 full. With the help of Rick, our trusty gardener, we hung 4 bottles in each of the trees that Rick is also spaying on a weekly basis.

With any luck, the flies should be attracted to the yellow on the outside of the bottle, crawl into the holes to eat the yeast, and then drown in the liquid.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

A: Two -- one to chase and one to film.

Wa-a-ay back in June we introduced the new queen Flora. We were so proud and happy.

And then, a month later, our hopes were dashed. We opened Flora, expecting a booming hive and found nothing. No sign at all that we had a mated queen. Sure, there were bees working away, but where were all the eggs, larvae, and capped brood? All we could find were cells half full of honey.

Our mentors all suggested finding a queen-right swarm (a swarm of bees with their queen) and combining them with our now queenless hive.

About two weeks after our discovery, Doug Smith, beekeeper with the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild (check out their blog here), let us know he was was cutting out a hive that had been living in a garage wall for the last six months. Did we want it?

Indeed we did! Doug graciously put those garage bees into one of our empty bee boxes, along with their garage queen and some comb filled with larvae and brood. Then in the evening, when all of the foragers had finally come home for the night, one of our favorite blog readers, Tina K. (Rescuer of Nugget) wrapped the whole package up nice and neat so we could take it back to Sunset that night.

The next day we opened up Flora so that we could combine new hive and old hive, and what did we find?

The hive was bursting with brood! Queen Flora had laid eggs out to the edges of the frames, even taking over territory usually reserved for a ring of honey (that's why Kimberley is smiling in the photo at the top of this post). Now the hive is full of bees, and every afternoon at 2, a cloud of young bees hovers at the entrance as they take their orientation flights.

Unfortunately, our old friends, the varroa mites, seem to be multiplying (see the little red bumps on the backs of the bees in the red circles?).

But as you can see, except for the mites, the Lang hives are doing well, with Fauna stacked taller than we stand. She's filling those three supers with honey.

And we have this completely unrelated box full of swarm bees that we are adopting (that's the new hive, on top of the blue box that houses Flora. We have to make an ant-proof stand for her). 

We'll need a name for the new hive. Readers, any suggestions?

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

I was out watering our morel patch recently (it’s, ahem, been awhile since we posted, but Team Mushroom has nevertheless been on the job each week--honest), and did a double-take. 

Was this strange, dried up item with a promising honeycomb surface our only mushroom of the season? Did we miss the long-awaited morel harvest?
 

I got in close, picked it up, and inhaled.

Smells like a leaf.

Back to keeping the patch damp until the rains come in the fall and keeping our fingers crossed for next spring.

Check out this photo of 'Tiger Baby' watermelon that I captured on my iPhone. I am obsessed with the Hipstamatic camera app. 

This little puppy isn't ready just yet. We've posted before about how to tell when your melons are ready, so I won't repeat that information.

Speaking of repeating, let's hope this doesn't happen again.

Ok, back outside I go....

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

It's been for-eh-ver. Sorry to have left you hanging for so long. The picture I want to show you makes me realize just how long it's been.

Remember this?

Well, look at it now:

It's filled with basil, melons, peppers, tomatoes, corn, an artichoke, pots with herbs, volunteer poppies, volunteer mullein, and volunteer flowering tobacco. Everything is doing smashingly -- just waiting for the tomatoes to ripen already!!!

How are your gardens growing, dear readers? Are you swimming in tomatoes yet? 

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We'd like to introduce our newest queen, Flora.

Today we inspected that hive and found a beautiful mated queen, surrounded by a circle of bees jostling each other to become part of her retinue. That's her in the photo above.

We did not find any brood or eggs, but that makes sense, as Queen Flora probably has only just started laying eggs. We only found lots of honey. So we robbed a frame of brood from Fauna, our other Langstroth hive, so Flora would have some new bees to tide her over until the new queen gets up to speed in the egg laying department.

If you've been following this blog, you'll remember the virgin queen we found in one of our hives 2 weeks ago. That's her in the photo below.  That virgin queen might have left the hive in a swarm, taking half the bees along with her. If she did that, then the bees that remained would have had a new queen that hatched from one of the swarm cells we found in that hive. Since we don't really know, we're imagining that we saw Flora before she was a mom.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Remember Adelaide, the adorable Jersey cow we found for milking--and then couldn't, because of her infection?

Ever since, Team Cow has been on a mission to find another cow.  We contacted the city of Menlo Park to see whether we could have one here at Sunset, just for kicks.

The surprising answer: Yes, as long as we have enough space and the dedication to keep the pen clean. The reality: We don't have the expertise, let alone the time, to take care of a cow. Milking twice a day is the least of it. Cow ownership means you have to arrange to get your cow pregnant roughly once a year so she lactates--and then you must deliver her calf, perhaps in the middle of the night with odd complications (if you've ever read James Herriot, you can imagine)--and then you have to deal with said calf (es)  once born. This is a bit more than we feel we can handle, what with our day jobs and all.

So sharing seemed the right way to go, preferably with a wise and experienced cow-person. We tried 4-H clubs, educational farms, and individual backyard cow-owners. Nada... In part because the cows we did find were in prolonged dry spells (must be like vacation). And dairies disappeared from the San Francisco peninsula long ago.

Finally, just last week, we tried the farm where Adelaide was born: Claravale, south of Hollister. For a milking expedition, it's really far from Menlo Park (a two-hour drive one way), but dang it, this is our closest dairy. We no longer live among our farms.

Claravale's owner, Ron Garthwaite, liked the sound of our one-block project and our wish to get to know a cow. He immediately said Sure. "Come on down and pick her out."

More to come, but here's a little preview:

A three-day-old calf at Claravale Farm.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Yesterday I was surprised by a swarm of bees in my front yard! They clouded the lawn then settled on a young tree, pretty as you please. 

I tried to figure out what I would do with another hive of bees, but couldn't. We can't have pets at our duplex, and we don't need any more bees at work. At any rate, I've only ever caught one swarm, so I wasn't quite sure how to go about it. (I should have watched these videos over at Mistress Beek).

I rang up a beekeeper on the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild website.

Bruce Wright, who learned beekeeping when he was a kid, came over that evening. "I usually like to catch them at night, because then all the foragers and scouts are back," he said. But this was the time he had, and bees, like time and tide, wait for no man.

 

It was amazingly fast. He held a 5-gallon bucket up to the tree, gave the tree a fast jerk, and –whump!– the cluster of bees landed in the bucket. He put a screened lid on the bucket, and soon there were bees on the screen fanning like crazy, which is bee language for "Hey girls, the queen's in here!"

This morning there was a fist-sized clump of bees on the tree, huddled together, no doubt wondering where everyone had gone. I hope they can find a local hive to take them in.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We knew something was amiss the last time we were in the hives.

 On May 4 Hive Veronica was incubating at least 17 swarm and supercedure cells, each one housing a little larvae swimming in royal jelly.  The hive was full of bees, brood, and larvae, but no eggs. Queen Veronica was nowhere to be seen.

 It’s no secret that at over 2 years old, Veronica was growing a little long in the mandible and short on the eggs. She was slowing down; for some time her egg-laying pattern has been as patchy as the hair on the head of a nonagenarian.

But today we couldn’t find anything in the top three boxes but honey. Lots of honey, and, oh yes, three empty swarm cells and one supercedure cell, the tops chewed off in perfect round circles. But no brood. No babies. No Veronica. No queen of any sort.

 Disheartened, we went through the bottom box and found three capped swarm queen cells, each one under a pile of bees. A smattering of capped brood cells. But still no eggs, no larvae, nothing, nada, bubkes.

 The bees, who up until now had been as docile as little lambs during the inspection, were starting to snarl.

 In despair, we started putting the boxes back together. Those three open swarm cells—did they mean the hive had swarmed? Was there a laying worker who had killed the baby queens? Were we going to lose another hive?

 And then, we spotted her. Right there on the inner cover was a virgin queen!

Top center, our new Queen named Flora?

She was running around, over, and under the other bees. A few followed her, but she didn’t have the usual retinue. However, when we put her in the brood box, all the workers began fanning and following her scent down into the box.

 According to the Hive and the Honey Bee, after emerging, a virgin queen will mate within six to 13 days, on a calm, warm afternoon. Trouble is, the weather is windy and chilly right now.

 We don’t know if this new queen will make her nuptial flight in time to become the hefty egg producer we need in that hive. All we can do is wait and hope the bees know what they’re doing.

They’re bugs, right? We’ve got to trust them.

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

(Still) waiting for that morel spring...

It’s been 4 months since we planted our morels. We turned in fresh compostables every week for two months, including charred wood and pizza oven ash. We’ve been out there watering when the weather is dry.

But as of today, all we have to show for our efforts is one slug, a tall patch of thriving weeds (?), and one small, mysterious sprout. (The chard sprout we posted on earlier withered away.)

Kathy Brenzel, our garden editor, thinks the weedy things could be Gloriosa daisies.

Here’s today’s mysterious sprout, right in the middle.

 We were hoping it was a mushroom, but it has a dubious-looking green stem. Sigh.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

 

Ruby scarfing parsley today.

A month ago, Ruby, the feisty runt of the flock, was not doing so well. She’d developed one of those strange problems known only to birds—egg yolk peritonitis—and nearly checked out.

After a visit to Adobe Animal Hospital, a quick abdominal drain, and some antibiotics, she’s strutting around, cackling, and gobbling up vegetables with her usual glee.

I hope she keeps it up. Going to the vet with your chickens is not a good routine to develop...I can just hear my older relatives—the ones who've had farm experience—saying, "For goodness sake, it's a chicken."

It's true. On the other hand, she's one great little chicken. Sigh.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset Recipe Editor

As I posted earlier, we haven’t been able to harvest the olives from our 21 olive trees because of a serious olive fruit fly infestation. We looked into different ways to eradicate the problem without using chemicals or possibly harming our beloved bee colonies.

A few different sources recommended we use an organic insect control called spinosad, specifically GF-120 mixed primarily for olive fruit fly control. It’s made up of 2 parts; 99.98% is a sugar-based, molasses mixture and the remaining 0.02% is the actual combo of spinosad A and D. The sugar part is used to attract the insect while the spinosad does the dirty work once they’re there. The mixture is ingested by the insects and then causes muscle contractions and paralysis, resulting in death within one to two days.

Apparently, the stuff works like a charm, but the main drawback is the price. It costs $130 dollars per gallon, which is then diluted again with water into 4 sprays (that's us measuring the proportions), or about a months worth. 

While we were told that we only needed to spray a 2 foot square of the tree, we went a little further than that on the first application since our trees are gargantuan compared to the typical olive tree and because we know we’ve got major infestation we’re dealing with. However, we’ve concluded that using it the recommended weekly application at this amount would make us broke before the middle of summer. That amount is based on spraying 4 trees, only a fraction of what we have. We’re crossing our fingers that this is the miracle cure while also looking for a less expensive option.

Sunset head gardener, Rick LaFrentz, is seen here spraying one of our trees. The directions we got were to just spray one area of the under canopy of the tree. But since our trees are so large compared to the average olive tree, and our infestation has gone unchecked for so long, he felt it best to do a thorough soaking of the entire underside on the first time.

Now we wait. 

by Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

If you were to find these two (although dead) lovely ladies side by side outside your hive, would you notice a difference?

Randy Oliver would, and did.  Of course he did; he's well-known in the beekeeping world as an expert.  But had I not taken his Intermediate Beekeeping class through the Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo County last weekend, I admit I would not have noticed.

What is the difference, you ask?  The bottom bee is a virgin queen, a recently emerged queen who was unmated, and likely killed and kicked out of the hive after a swarm.  You can see her abdomen is slightly larger, and there are no pollen sacs on her hind legs.

Small but important differences. I'm learning to pay close attention to details at the hive I once would have missed. If you just pay attention, the bees will let you know what's going on inside their world.