by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

There's no way to make this into a surprise, so here it is, right here at the beginning of this post. Meet Nugget.

Probably four or five weeks old in this photo. Red feathers, blue-green eyes. Looks like a Rhode Island Red or some kind of Rhodie mutt.

The bombshell: Nugget lives in the Honeydome now!

This is how it went down: Team Cluck matriarch (and Sunset food editor) Margo True got an email from Pat McCarty, who works in Sunset's entertainment kitchen. (She helps cook for events and parties held at Sunset.) A few weeks ago, Pat was at her vet's office with her cat when she met a scraggly chicken who was living there temporarily.

The chicken-who-would-be-ours had been brought in by one of the vet's clients after following the family home from McDonalds. She was so sweet and small, they couldn't bear to leave her there.

(It's home of the McNugget, people!)

The vet — who lacked a coop — was looking for a home for her new charge.

We stepped up.

(Right now, it's important that I say something: We're not in the chicken orphanage business. We can't possibly take any more chickens, no matter how improbably compelling their stories are. As it stands, we've got a full coop, and every time I think about the McDonalds story, it has bigger holes. What McDonalds, specifically? One I've ever been to? Who would drop their chicken off at a McDonalds? Did the family walk to the McDonalds? The questions, they remain. But the main point: We can't take any more chickens, so please don't ask.)

Of course, when we heard about the plight of the McNugget — I mean, Nugget — no one told us that she was a baby! Just barely feathered! Still cheeping and peeping!

We couldn't put her in with the ladies. They're vicious. Luckily, we had the Honeydome. The perfect chicken-isolation environment, right there in our coop's yard.

And that's how we got our seventh chicken.

She — or let's get this out in the open, maybe he — is a tiny chicken and can't mix with the others. That doesn't mean she doesn't want to: If we accidentally don't latch the door to her isolation pen, Nugget gamely hops out into the yard where she's pecked by that dastardly Carmelita. When she gets bigger (and hopefully doesn't develop a huge comb and a cock-a-doodle-doo), we'll figure out a way to integrate her into the flock.

Until now, she's a little baby to cuddle and coo over. Happy spring!

Monday: An unexpected epilogue to the Honey saga.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset Production Coordinator

In a state of near panic after finding ants attacking our bees, we applied Tanglefoot to the cinderblocks holding up the hives.

Bad idea. Very bad idea. Disastrously bad.

We were right in one respect: Ants won’t cross Tanglefoot because they get stuck in it.

The thing is, bees may be marvelous in many respects, but around Tanglefoot they’re as dumb as (forgive me, Team Chicken) a hen in a pen. Those poor bees bumbled into the sticky mess and struggled to free themselves, only to fall to the ground and die in a clot of Tanglefoot coated with dirt.

For some reason, lots of drones were trapped. What are they doing out of the hive? Is there bee mating going on? We feared for the queen’s safety should she decide to step out for a quick “turn around the block” and come home sleepy and satiated and plow into the goopy, deadly Tanglefoot.

We were shattered; in trying to protect our colonies, we’d inadvertently done them more harm. Lesson learned: Sometimes no action is better than unthinking action.

We threw dirt on the Tanglefoot so it wouldn’t be sticky any longer, then called Randy Oliver for advice.

He came up with these nifty PVC legs capped with jar lids that are coated with Vaseline (you can see the line of deadly Tanglfoot on the cinderblocks). The ants can’t cross the petroleum jelly, and the bees won’t stumble into it. We hope.

By Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Having to put out a magazine every month really interferes with your chicken-blogging.

In the midst of a whirlwind of deadlines finishing up the July issue, we were also dealing with change after change in the coop.

First: A building boom (left).

Our ever-resourceful building-maintenance staff members Tony Soria and Dan Strack built this masterful piece of chicken architecture to help our henpecked hen find some peace.The Honeydome, I like to call it.

(I know it's not a dome. But I like saying that. You should try it: Honeydome. Rolls off the tongue.)

At first, they built just a low fence separating it from the rest of the coop. We figured that poor Honey was so terrorized by the rest of her flock that she would want to stay in her little safe sanctuary.

We were wrong.

I mean, we kind of forgot that chickens can fly.

In our defense, they are not good flyers. And how could we have predicted that Honey would develop a crazy form of chicken Stockholm syndrome, in love with her oppressors?

See, every time we put her in the perfectly safe (and downright posh) Honeydome, she would immediately fly out, only to be pecked by the other chickens. And go back to being broody in the nest box.

Shortly after this photo was taken, Dan and Tony amended their design to add ceiling-high chicken wire to prevent flying the coop. Then, she would pathetically press her little golden body against the chicken wire. And that evil Ruby would peck her comb through the fence.

Alas.

Tomorrow: The Honeydome was not built in vain! A huge surprise. Really, you should tune in tomorrow too.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

The bees (honey-makers for our ultra-local feast) did finally make it home after our long day in Grass Valley. At 10 pm that night we settled the two hives on the cinder blocks and unplugged the hive entrance, expecting the bees to boil out. But all was quiet; there wasn’t even a low hum to indicate our hives were occupied, which led me to dream all night that the bees had died.

Relief abounded at 7:30 the next morning when we saw that the bees were already buzzing about, executing their crazy looking zig-zag flight patterns as they scoped out their new home. Some were already zooming up and over the trees lining the creek, and others were exploring the outside of the hive, paying close attention to the seams of the boxes.

Our office was all abuzz about the bees, and we made numerous trips to introduce the bees not  only to the rest of Team B, but everyone else too. It seems there is a lot of interest in bees.

Young colonies like ours have a lot of work to do; storing pollen and nectar, sealing all the cracks and seams in their new home, taking care of the queen and new brood. We are helping them adjust to their new homes easier by providing “nectar” in the form of sugar water. They get 1 part sugar dissolved into 1 part water. We used quart jars and feeder lids (regular jar lids with small holes in them) placed so they drip into the top of the hive.

We thought they’d settled in and we would just need to keep up a water and feeding schedule... And then the attack of the ants!

Ack! They are streaming across the top of the hive and into the sugar water, and we are worried that they will  steal the honey, eat the brood (the baby bees, helpless in their combs), and demoralize the hive. Kimberley saw several bees on the ground flipping somersaults as ants attacked them. Poor bees.

We’ve put out Terro Ant Stakes, but they won’t begin to control the problem (if they work at all) for a couple weeks. We have to build some sort of barrier that ants can’t crawl over, either a water moat, or spread over the concrete blocks a sticky stuff called Tanglefoot. Ants can’t cross the sticky morass. I’ve used this on the trunks of fruit trees to keep ants out of the foliage; it’s messy but it works.

Dear readers, if you are beekeepers, how do you control ants?

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

A side note that's only mildly related to the One-Block Diet: While members of Team Bee were having their paradigms shifted, I was on vacation in Vancouver, B.C. In particular, I was swinging blissfully on a playground in Stanley Park, which you may remember as one of our top 10 city parks from our April issue.

It's quite lovely. Except for the fact that I got stung by a bee*. On the neck.

This is ironic for two reasons. The first is the aforementioned paradigm-shifting going on in Grass Valley.  The second is that I just finished writing a little piece for our June issue advocating bee-friendly gardening.

The nerve of that bee! I've taken a strong stand in support of bees! And this is how they repay me?!

Good news: I'm apparently not allergic to stings. Rather than the classic treatments (ice, ibuprofen), I treated the indignant sting with a trip to the Vancouver Aquarium. They have beluga whales!  And sea otters, which are so cute I wanted to take one home to live in my bathtub. (Not recommended.)

Here's a YouTube video (not mine) of sea otters. I recommend watching to soothe frustrations at work, bee stings, backaches, and other minor pains. (They're holding hands! I love them.)

*In retrospect, I may have not been stung by a bee. After discussing with Margaret Sloan of Team Bee, it may have been a yellowjacket, which is not a bee at all, but a wasp. Like other wasps, they are carnivorous and can be notoriously aggressive. The thing that buzzed my face, and then stung me (on the neck for pete's sake!) was definitely yellow and black. My husband said it was bee-like, but I didn't get a good look at it. Because it was stinging me.

Now that I think about it, this may be how bees got a bad reputation in the first place. Lookalike wasps.  Aggressive lookalike wasps.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Once your paradigm has been shifted by bees, can you ever recover?

If you’ve been stung, you may well be forever fearful. But once you’ve been into the hive, your fear will vanish, and you may well be forever hooked on the romance of the European honeybee.

That’s how I felt when, with 3 other members of Team Bee, I visited Randy Oliver’s bee yards in Grass Valley. As we puffed smoke into hive entrances, broke the propolis seal on hive covers, and pulled foundation frames out to examine each colony, I gradually lost my fear and fell in love with these little creatures.

It took us long enough to get there. It’s a three-hour drive, and although we left at 8 a.m., somewhere outside Fairfield, two of the tires on our rental truck suddenly went flat. We spent a long lunch hour waiting for repairs, and around 3 p.m. we finally rolled into Randy’s bee-filled yard.

The first thing I noticed in the yard was a faint scent of honey in the piney mountain air. Then I noticed there were bees everywhere, zipping through the air or hovering about their hives. And yes, I was nervous.

“Get suited up,” Randy told us, and we all pulled on white coveralls and donned little white plastic hats covered with mesh “veils” that zipped to the coveralls. Everyone, that is, except Kimberley, who is brave and wore only a tie-on veil with her regular clothes.

And then Randy, bare-handed and bare-headed, led us into the world of the European honeybee. Team Bee member Elaine Johnson said that’s when she felt her paradigm begin to shift, when she saw how relaxed he was, how relaxed his wife, Stephanie, was, how relaxed everyone in the yard was. The bees weren’t concerned with us. Much.

Randy showed us how to work with the bees, then took us out to the site where he kept his baby nucs (two of these were ours!), and introduced us to the colonies.

To calm the bees, we had to fire up the smoker, a tin can with a spout and bellows that’s full of smoldering grass. A little puff of cool smoke at the hive entrance and the bees retreat. Bees don’t like smoke. Makes them think their house is on fire and they rush to save the honey (wouldn’t you?), leaving you to do the work you need to do.

Bees seal their hive with propolis, a sticky substance made from the resin of trees, so we had to break through this seal with our hive tools to open the cover. Then we could gently break the propolis seal on the frames and lift them from the box to watch the bees as they went about their business.

“Keep the sun to your back,” Randy told us, “and you’ll be able to see inside the comb. You can tell what the queen’s been doing by the brood pattern.” We gently pushed the bees aside (yes, you can do that!). And sure enough, there were baby bees in various stages of development, glistening in their bath of royal jelly. “Look for the eggs,” he said, “like tiny grains of rice in the center of each cell.” But I was too entranced watching a bee emerge from her capped cell.

And then I spotted the queen, her big belly (okay, abdomen) giving her away as she moved languidly from cell to cell, inspecting them before she laid her eggs in them. As she passed through the cover of bees, they all turned to her, petting and licking her, then turning to their hive mates and petting them, who in turn petted the next bee, spreading scent and pheromones throughout the hive. It’s sort of like a royal proclamation that controls the hive. If the queen is gentle, the hive is gentle. “Be nice, girls,” you hope she says. “Go get some nectar.”

Randy works without gloves, and he recommends it. Gloves are clumsy, he says, and increases the danger of killing bees, or, worst of all, harming the queen.

Kimberley was the first to remove her gloves, and Randy dumped a bunch of bees in her hands. They did not sting her, they just crawled on her hands. “It was an amazing, warm, tickling vibration,” she said. “I wasn’t scared at all, just excited.”

Okay, so I never got to the point where I could hold a pile of bees with comfort (or without gloves), but I did love to watch the bees on their honeycombed frames.

And in one hive we found that the bees had drawn their own comb, and begun filling it with honey. Randy sliced the comb from the frame and invited us to have some. It was heavenly—the best honey I’ve ever had.

But eating honeycomb in the field is messy business. Team member Margo True got honey all over her hands. “Then a bee landed on my finger,” she said, “and began licking up the honey. When she was done, the bee just stepped off and flew away with such beauty and grace. I think that’s the moment my paradigm shifted.”

I know there will be days when the bees are cantankerous and cranky. They will probably sting us as we work with them. They may swarm and fly away. But I’ll never look at bees in quite the same way again after being in the hive.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We get our bees tomorrow! Randy Oliver, beekeeper and owner of Scientific Beekeeping in Grass Valley, is providing our nucs. 

A nuc is a colony of bees that’s already got a laying queen, several frames of brood (baby bees), and some stored food (bees eat pollen and nectar). We’re hoping this will give our bees a head start.

But first we have to get ready for the bees.

Our brood boxes (where the bee colony will care for the queen bee and the developing baby bees) came assembled from the beekeeping-supply company Dadant. We’ve found a quiet, protected place for them in an unused corner. We cleared the brush (lots of poison oak!), leveled the ground, and set the hives on cinderblocks to keep the wood from contacting the soil. We’ve got the feeders ready.

And we tried out the bee suit, as you can see from the photo of Kimberley Burch, our team leader.

Randy Oliver encourages us to work bees barehanded, without fear, as he does, and says he’ll show us how tomorrow when we go to pick up our bees. I’m a little nervous about this. I don’t know if I’m allergic, or if anyone else is either. So I, for one, am wearing a suit, and I have an epi pen, to be used in case of severe allergic shutdown. I’ve read that this is rare, so I’m hoping this is true.

Randy says he’s going to take us into the bee yard and shift our paradigms. I can always use a good paradigm shift. This should be fun.

By Stephanie Dean, Sunset Test Kitchen Coordinator

Yes, you actually have to reap what you sow, but why couldn’t the timing be better? Today, in the 90 plus heat, Team Beer harvested our barley.

We had to act now because most of the barley had dried out and was ready to harvest. Also, we were worried that our squirrel neighbor would gobble our barley for dinner. (We’ve been watching our wheat and barley like hawks after we came back to work one Monday to find more than half our wheat had been eaten by our squirrel friend over the weekend.)

Right now, the barley is spread out to dry on a tarp in an unused office. Our next step is figuring out how to the get the barley off the stalks, which will be shortly followed by malting.

In the meantime, we’ll be vigilantly guarding our wheat from the squirrel enemy. GAME ON!

by Johanna Silver, Sunset Test Garden Coordinator

With lettuce on the bolt and Honey's comb in need of a little TLC, I decided to build a portable coop so she could keep me company in the garden. This portable mini coop, also known as a chicken tractor, is a shining example of garden-animal integration.

Both birds and garden bed benefit. The gardener saves some back-bending and precious time because the birds do every action performed by a tractor — they till the soil with their feet (albeit in a very non-invasive way), drop fertilizer, and gladly clean up an old, bolting garden bed. The chickens get to nibble on fresh greens, weed seeds, bugs, and they get a chance to experience the great outdoors.

Our new tractor is about as simple as they come. I cut windows out of an old plastic bin, lined the inside with chicken wire, and fastened it all with nuts, bolts, and large washers. A door is secured with paper clips wrapped around bolts, and the whole thing is tethered to the ground with garden stakes. There is also a small dish of water near her at all times. This simple set-up works in our case — Honey goes home at the end of the day so I don't have to worry about predators digging under the coop.

Not everything went perfectly: It took some time to build the coop; Honey seemed a little spooked; and I will still have to fork the bed and pull up the rest of the old plants. So why bother? Mostly because it is an absolute blast to have a clucking chicken work next to me in the garden. I love the questions posed by people who pass by. And I'd like to think that there is a part of her small bird brain that is enjoying the new scenery and fresh chow.

Chicken tractors are used on both small and large scales and come in a plethora of creative designs. My favorite collection is here.

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

In our last post, we on Team Vinegar confessed to neglecting our project, to underfeeding the vinegar bacteria with fresh wine. We were pretty sure that two of our "mothers" had died from outright starvation.

Well, I'm happy to report that we tasted our vinegars a few days ago, and the jars with the seemingly expired mothers (the 1-gallon mason jars) actually yielded delicious vinegar. Very tart, strong, fruity, full of character. It was so much better than red-wine vinegar you buy at the store—just as our consultant, Paula Wolfert, had promised. And there actually were mothers in those jars—the barest shimmer on the surface.

Interestingly, the two wider (3-gallon) jars, which produced much thicker, visible mothers, made a vinegar that tasted good, but not as wildly fruity and tart as the Disappearing Mother jars. We pondered this, and realized that a) acetobacteria and their mothers (their cellulose "homes"), grow best with lots of oxygen, which of course the wider jar provides; and b) we should have fed the wider jars more often. The muted flavor is probably a result of overconsumption by bacteria.

We ended that day happy. Vinegar is one tough foodstuff, the rubber tree of the food world.

P.S.: We inadvertently broke one of the larger jars, so we threw out the contents, pouring them into a colander first to catch any chunks of glass from going down our garbage disposal. At the bottom of the jar were layers of spent mothers. They looked sort of like bologna. Or...well, you decide:

They're actually not bad to handle—just a little bit rubbery. Kind of like fruit rollups.Read More

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Sunset imaging specialist Kimberley Burch, water pistol in hand, guards Honey (center, with tiny, pecked comb).

We last visited the sorority from hell (aka the Sunset henhouse) about 3 weeks ago. Honey was getting mercilessly pecked by at least a couple of the other chickens, to the extent that she'd taken near-permanent refuge in the nest box and had to be picked up by hand and deposited in the chicken yard to eat and drink. At the suggestion of a helpful former chicken-raiser, we've recently tried two new tactics: applying a paste of Dr Bronner's Baby Mild Liquid Soap to Honey's chewed-up comb (in the hopes that its nasty taste would act as a repellent) and squirting the attacking chickens with a water gun. It seemed to work. At least they squawked in surprise and retreated.

Alas, maintaining a round-the-clock squirt detail isn't possible. And Honey seems too terrorized to risk a foray to food and water on her own without a human protector. The pecking looks like it's continuing, even with the soap. Meanwhile, Honey gets lighter and lighter... we'll have to think of something else fast, before she just collapses into a heap of feathers. Readers, any and all suggestions welcome!

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

There’s a certain amount of character that a wine can glean from resting on its lees, those exhausted (but undoubtedly happy) yeasty-beasties and other sediments that drop out of the wine as fermentation wraps up. But leave a wine on its lees too long, and those previously helpful yeast cells can turn on you, rotting and taking your wine with them.

If you’ve been keeping up with our One-Block Diet blog, you’ve likely heard the word “neglect” tossed around by other teams. To echo food editor Margo True’s recent Team Vinegar post, we have busy lives (and exciting spring and summer issues of Sunset to concoct—keep an eye on newsstands to see what we do in our desk jobs!).

We confess: We’ve been bad wine parents. It had been a month since we last rolled our Chardonnay or checked up on our Syrah. We got around to rolling the Chard this week, and it was okay for that wine to sit and wait for us—last month, we shut down its malolactic fermentation by adding SO2 (in the form of powdered potassium metabisulfite; about 2 teaspoons per 5-gallon carboy), protecting the wine against oxidation and vengeful microbial spoilage. The rolling is just to add some character and round out any sharp flavors.

But on our Syrah, we were pushing the limit on the lees, risking all of our hard work. High time for the next step: “racking” (transferring) the wine into clean carboys and leaving all that fermentation muck behind. Time to call in our local expert: home winemaker extraordinaire Dan Brenzel, a retired chemist, Sunset garden editor Kathleen Brenzel’s doting husband and home chef, and incredible ribber of yours truly (“Watch, everybody! Erika’s gonna booger it up!”). He’s provided us with all of our equipment—from the hefty and spendy crusher-destemmer and bladder press to the glass carboy fermenters and the chemicals to sterilize them with—and countless chemistry lessons. Dan reminds me of my chemist grandfather, just a bit more sassy and clearly much less of a teetotaler.

Before we got started, Team Wine had another big decision to make: oak or no oak? Dan is a firm believer in oaking wine, oaking it some more, oh, and oaking it again. Wine editor and Team Wine leader Sara Schneider has been thinking that our big, juicy Syrah could use some oak to round it out, but she diplomatically put it to a vote. The measure passed, and we weighed out 26 grams of toasted oak chips for each 5-gallon carboy.

Besides the kitchen scale and sack of oak chips, our racking setup included: a card table to elevate our full carboys of Syrah, two 6-foot lengths of plastic tubing to transfer the wine (we kept one sterilized at all times), and a bunch of empty 5-gallon carboys on the ground. Plus lots and lots of potassium metabisulfite (SO2), to clean our equipment and to vaccinate the Syrah in its new carboys.

We also needed a garden hose with a jet sprayer, so we pulled everything out into a Sunset parking lot that gently slopes to a drain. (You may ask, “Is it safe to flush the SO2-tinged H20 down the drain?” Dan the chemist thought it was fine, and we’ll be drinking the tiny amount of sulfite in both of our wines.)

We didn’t use an auto siphon or racking-tube holders (check out this video to see them in action), but it looks like they would have made racking easier. Or maybe I just should have paid more attention to Dan’s instructions.

I was too excited to get started and didn’t see exactly how Dan got the siphon going. I understood the general concept, so I simply paced while waiting for my turn, completely missing that he’d slipped his finger over the bottom end of the tubing to control the flow and ease it into a fresh carboy.

Dan handed me some sterilized tubing and, before I could get my bearings, shone the spotlight on me with his aforementioned “Erika’s gonna booger it up” prediction. Lack of focus and total self-consciousness paralyzed me; I was doomed. Plus, before we’d started racking, I’d admonished everyone to be careful not to spill our wine, and suddenly I knew I’d be the first one in the splash zone.

So I rushed ahead, not pausing to think about the mechanics, sucking the air as you’re supposed to do to start a siphon, then nearly gulping down the Syrah as it came streaming toward me, much faster than I’d expected (people do this to steal gas? ugh!). I yanked the tubing out of my mouth and wildly tried to stuff it in a clean carboy, gravity-fed wine splattering it, the blacktop, and me.

Yes, I boogered it up.

And then Dan turned up the heat: hand-eye coordination. I had to watch the end of the tubing in the top carboy (to keep it from dipping into the mucky lees we were racking the wine away from), watch the rapidly filling fresh carboy that I was topping off, and keep my hands on both ends of the tubing to make sure that the top end didn’t dip too low and that neither end squirted up and out the top of its carboy.

Nervous, I messily stopped the siphon with two slippery fingertips (I should have used my thumb) and transferred it from the topped-off carboy to another empty one, of course dribbling more wine down the glass exterior. (Always thinking, Dan brought sponges, undoubtedly with this klutz in mind.) Still jittery, and with the wine level dropping ever closer to the muck, I jerked up the tubing a few seconds too early, wasting a couple sips of wine because I couldn’t restart the siphon with so little liquid left. More ribbing, of course.

Thankfully, Ben Marks, editor of Sunset’s California Wine Country, emerged from our Books division to check on us, cup in hand. He claimed this cup was just because he was drinking some water, not because he was looking for a handout, but we gave him a sip.

“Not bad, huh?” nudged wine captain Sara Schneider, fishing but always modest, and perpetually wary that our Syrah might have turned.

A big grin lit up Ben’s always-friendly face: “It’s better than ‘not bad.’ It’s lovely!”

Gleeful toasting all around, then quickly back to racking. Because as Dan soon proved when he was siphoning from a sky-high 12-gallon carboy into a ground-dwelling 5-gallon carboy with just 6 feet of tubing, it’s easy to lose focus when you’re chatting.

I didn’t tease him, just dove to reinsert the lower tube end, licking my wine-stained fingers because I really didn’t want to lose more Syrah!

Team Wine members were all feeling pretty sensitive about our seemingly dwindling Syrah supply after food editor Margo True showed up to represent Team Vinegar, requesting 5 gallons of our labor of love to feed to her mother. (Have you seen these things? Very Little Shop of Horrors meets The Blob.)

We grudgingly set some wine aside for her. It’s going to make a lovely vinegar.