By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

Bees pretty much scare the bee-jebus out of me. And I can deal with that, but I don't want to pass this phobia on to my daughter.

One of my earliest memories is of my mom being stung while gardening. From preschool picnic tables on, I was wary. But I didn’t start stuffing an EpiPen in my purse till I was in my mid-20s, after a bee turned a family rafting trip into a trip to the ER in our swimsuits: On our way back to the river after a picnic lunch, a yellow-jacketed insect of some stinging variety landed on my brother’s hand. He yelped and cursed, then started turning blue and breathing erratically—he was in anaphylactic shock.

As we panicked and plunged his arm into the cold river to try to slow the venom’s spread, a clear-headed rafting guide grabbed a first aid kit with a syringe of epinephrine. The shot of adrenaline slowed the anaphylaxis, an ambulance soon whisked him away, and an ER doc administered an IV of epinephrine to stop his body’s severe allergic reaction (to heal him completely, the therapy had to continue for days).

I haven’t been stung, and I don’t know if I’d have the same reaction, but I keep my EpiPen nearby to be safe. And I try not to spaz out and shriek when I hear buzzing, but I recently realized that I do flinch and flail just a bit: A few weeks ago, a fly hitched a ride in our car, and my 2-year-old daughter nearly started crying as she contorted her arms under the seatbelt and attempted to stuff them safely under her shirt. “A bee, a bee!” she yelled out. “Mommy, help!”

I opened the window wide and encouraged her to flick the insect away: “Shoo, fly, don’t bother me!” we sang, wiggling our arms. She quickly recovered, but I realized that I had some work to do if she was going to respect bees and their place in nature.

At a book-sale fundraiser for my daughter’s preschool, I spotted The Beeman, Laurie Krebs's rhyming tale of a grandpa beekeeper and his adoring grandson. It's packed with bee details (Krebs's husband is a beekeeper) and sweetly illustrated by Valeria Cis.

My daughter is head over heels for her grandparents, so I thought she might get hooked on the concept of a grandpa story. I usually have a price threshold for kids’ books, but I figured that $17 now might save me hundreds in therapy bills later. So the other evening, after carving pumpkins (Happy Halloween, everyone!), we sat down for a snuggly read.

I pointed to the cover: Do you know what that is? "Yeah, it's a bug." What kind of bug? "One that flies." Yes, and one that helps trees produce sweet fruit. And they make yummy honey, I said, showing her a tiny jar of golden goodness from Sunset's own hives (thanks, Team Bee!).

Eyes wide, she opened the cover and I started reading. We buzzed quickly through each page, pausing to act out the bees' wiggly wings and admire the grandma's apple-honey muffins (the book includes a recipe).

When we got to the part about extracting honey from frames, I handed her the jar of Sunset honey. "Bees made this?" she asked, incredulous. Yes, I said. "This bee made the honey?" she asked again, pointing to the bee on the label.

Yes, lots of bees made it, including that one (an especially photogenic worker from a Sunset hive). Would you like to taste it? Vigorous head nodding, then an excited little "Yeah."

I put some on a spoon and she opened wide.

"Mmm, yummy, Mama."

I'm glad you like it ... now what do you say?

"Thank you, beeeez!"

  Yes, thank you, bees.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Admit it -- you babied your tomatoes plants all season long, handpicking every aphid, fretting over any curled leaves, and savoring each perfectly ripened fruit.

Now it’s time to give some attention to the soil.

Fall is a great time to plant a cover crop. It’s super easy and there are a million reasons to do it. Here are my top three reasons why it might be time to consider a cover crop in your veggie patch:

1. Fix nitrogen - Many vegetable crops are heavy feeders, meaning they use up a lot of nutrients in the soil. Leguminous cover crops, such as fava beans or hairy vetch, will replace the nitrogen and improve overall soil fertility.

2. Improve soil structure - Do you have compacted soil? Try planting fenugreek. It's deep taproot tolerates and even looses heavy soil. Is too much sand your problem? A cover crop such as buckwheat will add much needed organic matter.

3. Prevent erosion - An organic gardener will shudder at the site of bare soil. Protect your soil by keeping it cover cropped while not in production. This makes your precious top soil less vulnerable to runoff or erosion. Clover, oats, and rye are all excellent choices for erosion control.

My favorite selection of seeds is from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. Download the Cover Crop Solutions Chart to pinpoint which combination is best for your land.

I chose fava beans and crimson clover for the test garden this year. Both fix nitrogen and are easy to till into the ground in the spring. Additionally, crimson clover has a stunning bloom. Anything in the name of beauty! Here's how they look today:

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

San Francisco's City Hall,
with the Victory Garden in foreground.

Another way to lead the country: A garden on the White House Lawn? It could happen, if the next president decides to listen to writer Michael Pollan. Just in case you missed it, here is Pollan's terrific open letter to the man who will be not just the head of the country but our Farmer in Chief, reluctantly or not. For a small reality check, read this update from San Francisco on the security costs of protecting just such a garden--planted by Slow Food nation in front of City Hall. It's beautiful, but it has a price. Maybe it could be considered a test run.

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

It's been a week plus a few days since I clamped down the lid on the Nepalese lemon pickles, and they're coming along nicely. When I opened them up today, there was some fizzing action, which tells me they're fermenting, like old-fashioned dill pickles. You can see they've gotten really juicy, too.

I can tell they still need a little time, though. The liquidy stuff is tasting good—spicy and salty—but the peel on the lemons is still hard and chewy. Once they've finishing pickling, that should soften up.

A Sunset reader asks a good question: can you make these with regular (Eureka) lemons. No reason why it shouldn't work. Let me know if you try it.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

The gentle art of beekeeping has been turned into a new art medium by these two artists. I’d love to try making a sculpture like these, but as Kimberley pointed out, the artists  have to sacrifice a lot of brood to accomplish their very interesting work.

New York magazine has a cool slideshow of artist Hilary Berseth’s hive-built sculptures  and how he builds them.
Aganetha Dyck is a Canadian artist who is making sculpture with the bees’ help by putting objects in the hive and allowing the bees to build comb on them.

Of course, I have a piece of comb on my desk that the bees generated without any prompting from us. The beauty, delicacy, and superb engineering never ceases to amaze and surprise me.

On the home front

To help fight our battle against ants and small hive beetles (SHB), we’ve built our own little defensive Green Zone: a cement patio for the hives. SHB larvae can’t burrow into the soil to pupate, and we can easily spot ants crawling and hopefully control them. Tony Soria (Sunset facility supervisor), Dan Strack (building maintenance), and Rick LaFrenze (landscape supervisor and Team Beer member) have been the champions for Team Bee. In two days they moved the hives, poured the cement and moved the hives again.

Tony Soria smooths cement next to Veronica and Betty

Even though we moved the hives less than 6 feet to their new patio, there were some mighty confused bees hovering in two hive shaped clouds precisely where their hives had been. I imagine most of them were foragers who had flown out at dawn, only to return home to find the rest of the girls had packed up and moved away without telling them. Bees, creatures of habit, locate their home hive visually; they don’t expect it to move while they’re out gathering groceries. The poor things flew around all afternoon looking for their missing homes, but fortunately by the next morning, bees were zipping in and out of their hives without a hitch.

We shall see how this patio works. Keep your fingers crossed.

by Stephanie Dean, Sunset test kitchen coordinator

It’s official. Team Beer has been the most been delinquent of the One-Block teams, but we’re finally beginning to make some progress after some serious procrastination.

In the time since we last posted, we have all done our fair share of (ahem) field research, of course. I conducted mine in Germany over the summer (Dunkelweizen is officially my new favorite type of beer; If you happen to find yourself in Germany anytime soon, memorize this key phrase: Bier bitte, translation: beer please).

You might be asking yourself why we have been so remiss. Well, that’s because we are attempting to do the near-impossible: Make beer out of actual grain instead of pre-malted barley which is what every brewery in the country does. Check out the photo below for a glimpse as to what we had to do to prepare our grain:

We kept trying to brainstorm ways to make the process less tedious, but nothing really seemed to help. Alan came up with a method for threshing the stalks, crushing the remaining grain and spikelets, and then blowing on it to separate grain. My main tactic was deception, which involved introducing barley threshing as a new hip party game and some minor child labor. Rick tried many different methods, including an attempt to float the grain in water to separate the spikelets from the grain. Alan put it best when he said that he now understands why we have industrial farming.

Now that we have our grain, we are going to try malting a small batch of our wheat so that we can figure out the kinks (malting method TBD). Then it is on to the barley. Wish us luck!

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

With cooler weather and longer nights, our birds' bodies have decided that it's time to surrender their feathers and grow new ones. Molting.

Most chickens molt once a year, usually during the fall or winter. That means that they redirect their energies from making eggs to making feathers. The Ameracaunas were the first to start losing their feathers.

Luckily, I'd read the blog of the wonderful garden writer Amy Stewart from a couple of years ago, when her chicken Dolley started losing her feathers, so I knew what to expect.

Below, Ophelia with her new coat of downy feathers.

Charlotte too is starting to lose the feathers on her chest, making her look slight.

The chickens, when molting, are skittish. More shy than usual. They don't want to be touched, although they do eat at their regular voracious clip. (They need nutrition to replace all those feathers.) And they don't do the egg squat when you pet them.

Alana was our first chicken to start to lose her feathers. She's almost all re-grown now. Luckily, the feathers on her neck, which were plucked out by the other chickens over the summer have regrown too. (See a photo of Ophelia's unappealing bare neck here. But it's nothing compared to Amy Stewart's Abigail: See her alarming-looking neck here.)

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Our girls are busy this beautiful October week of Indian summer. They’re working the wild blooming ivy hedge behind our nursery and Mexican bush sage in the test garden.

Today we set some frames outside to dry; they had honey left on them after our last harvest and we thought we had washed them pretty well. But within the hour bees had come to the frames and were slurping up the honey flavored water. They were so excited they were vibrating. Very fun to watch. The girl in this photo is really happy (click on the photo below  to make it a larger size.)

Photo by Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

We are excited about the new movie, The Secret Life of Bees. The beekeeping world seems all abuzz; in the October 2008 issue of the American Bee Journal, beekeeper Julian Wooten describes teaching the cast of the movie how to work with bees. He said Queen Latifah was nervous at first, but “came through with flying colors.”

Here is a cute clip of Dakota Fanning and Tristan Wilds learning to keep bees. I love it when Dakota says, "I think I want to be a beekeeper." Hopefully they’ll get the beekeeping part of the movie right, because a badly done movie metaphor just doesn’t fly.

Ulee’s Gold (1997) is a another movie about beekeeping. Well, it’s about a family of humans, really, but Henry Fonda plays a beekeeper, an occupation that informs his life. And the movie gets the beekeeping right.

I expect there will be a lot more interest in beekeeping after The Secret Life of Bees opens. If you’re curious about our project, you can Download OneBlock_Bee.pdf about how we got started beekeeping. There are also other pdfs about our One Block Diet Projects. And add a comment to our blog! We’ll do our best to find an answer your questions.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

At least it's local waste: Let's say you already subscribe to a CSA (community-sponsored agriculture program), but you keep getting too many vegetables than you can use in a week so you toss limp heads of kale at the end of each week. How bad is that? Does eating locally make up for throwing away food? Well, no, not really. (Slate)

Preservation inspiration: Still harvesting? What are you going to do with all your bounty? Before you jump to the idea that you'll pick up the art of home-canning, read this, which puts the process in perspective. A bonus is that it interviews folks from the totally amazing Institute for Urban Homesteading, which I'd never heard of before. It's like our One-Block Feast, only a little more hard-core.  (Oakland Tribune)

The other red meat: It's goat. Since rancher Bill Niman left his eponymous company, Niman Ranch, late last summer, he's taken up another kind of animal husbandry — the caprine kind. (We wrote about his and his wife's Christmas celebration in 2006.) Maybe goat is the new lamb? (New York Times)

A cautionary tale: How do you kill a perfectly nice farmers' market? Too many rules. (Washington Post)

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

Here in sunny California we have beautifully floral, thin-skinned Meyer lemons hanging on the trees year-round. But I know you folks in other areas can get Meyers in grocery stores, so I wanted to tell you about my experiment to make one of my favorite condiments, Indian-style lemon pickle.

It’s sour, salty, spicy, and incredibly tasty with basmati rice, lentils, chicken, and just about any dishes from that part of the world.

Actually, I first tried the recipe in Nepal. I had been trekking in the Himalayas for 10 days (just me, a cook, and two porters), and one afternoon we stopped in a village and the cook and a villager began some animated bargaining. Pretty soon, the feathered object of their negotiations was sequestered under a big overturned basket. (Sorry, Nugget and friends. Some chickens do not live the cushy life.)

Anyway, to cut to the chase, so to speak, before I knew it, the cook was serving up daal-bhaat on a little mat next to my tent. Daal-bhaat is kind-of the national dish of Nepal—rice, lentils, some simmered meat, and at least one type of chutney, or pickle as they call them.

Yes, I have made my way to the point here. The Meyer lemon pickle! So that’s when I first tried this mixture that I love so much. I got to thinking about how to make it, and figured it couldn’t be too different from making preserved lemons.

In fact, the technique is just the same (cut up Meyer lemons, add a bunch of salt, and let them sit for a couple of weeks), except I’ve added mustard seeds, a big jalapeño, a bunch of cayenne, and some oil. Here’s what it looks like.

So far, it tastes just the way I was hoping—salty, hot, sour, and earthy from the mustard seeds. I’ll check it again in a couple of weeks and let you know how it’s coming along. Anyone else make pickles/chutneys like these?

Nepalese lemon pickle

MAKES  3 ½ cups TIME 30 minutes, plus at least 2 weeks to chill

1 ½ tbsp. brown mustard seeds
1 lb. Meyer lemons (about 8 small), stem ends trimmed
1 ½ cups kosher salt
1 jalapeño chile, minced
2 tsp. cayenne
2 tbsp. canola oil

1. Toast mustard seeds in a small frying pan over medium heat, shaking occasionally, just until they begin to pop, 5 to 7 minutes.

2. Rinse lemons, quarter lengthwise, and discard obvious seeds. Put in a large bowl and stir in salt. Use a potato masher or wooden spoon to press lemons and extract some juice. Stir in mustard seeds, jalapeño, cayenne, and oil.

3. Transfer lemon mixture to a wide-mouthed jar (to hold at least 3 ½ cups). Press lemons to immerse in juice. Seal jar and chill at least 2 weeks and up to 6 months. In the first few days, press fruit down occasionally to submerge in liquid.

4. Use the pickle in small amounts to season your favorite foods from the sub-continent.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Paradise on earth, that is. Our scheme to get him out of the henhouse has been a total unexpected triumph.

It didn't look good initially, though. When we crept out to the henhouse after dark, Nugget had gone to sleep not on the floor of the henhouse as usual, but way up on a perch.

Drat! Now we'd have to knock him off the perch. Gently. It seemed impossible. Surely we would wake up every chicken in the place and cause a feather tornado.

Somehow, it worked. Chickens really do become comatose when they sleep. We used a long stick to kind of topple Nugget off. He landed with a fat thump on the chicken-wire floor and then staggered over to the exit, where we poked him till he pflumphed into the box held tight over the door. He was sort of sweet, like a sleepy toddler. We immediately taped up the box and then put some bricks on it. Maybe overkill--he's not exactly a raging gorilla--but we didn't want to get pecked.

Then we hauled the box (surprisingly light, actually) into a back room inside so that Nugget wouldn't wake up hearing the hens and be frantic to get out. We wrote his name on the box. Then we left.

*********************

Early the next morning, Pat McCarty arrived to hear Nugget cockadoodling briskly from inside the box. Here he is in the back of her car:

In San Jose, she handed him over to Tina. Boxed Nugget joined several other rescued roosters on their way down to San Juan Bautista.

Tina with her cargo.

It must have been lively in the back of that car.

Nugget arrived safely. Tina took some shots of his fellow boarders in SJB:

The hedgehog.

One of the three chinchillas.

Stunningly, Nugget behaved himself so beautifully that his new owner decided not to send him to the bachelor orchard but to keep him herself, with her own flock of docile hens! She actually used the word "tame." Caramba. "She has seen some mean and wild roosters, and Nugget is NOT one of them," reported Tina. "Lucky Nugget!! He'll have plenty of open (and protected space) and still have some of his own ladies."

Well, glory be. He gets to live and have a harem, too, in the country. He's in rooster paradise.

I leave you with Nugget, tamed.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Sometimes a bad thing makes me reconnect to what I love about beekeeping. 

We had to open the hives to put in the small hive beetle traps, but we decided not to smoke the bees, not wanting to disrupt them and cause a hive-wide panic attack and mass nectar robbing. The bees were peaceful, so we watched for a time. Every frame was full of bees; they’d come to the tops of the frames, look at us, then go back down into the chamber. No problems. No threats. No stinging. Only a low fuzzy buzzing and the smell of warm honey and bees.

Unfortunately, we spilled some mineral oil into Veronica when we put in the trap. They didn’t like that at all, and a small chorus of shrill bee voices complained from under the plastic container. The bees nearest to the spill clustered around, cleaning the top bars madly.

But the hive stayed calm. Only a couple bees were loudly griping. The rest were annoyed at the oil but remained very businesslike. As they cleaned, it seemed they were communicating—touching each other, licking each other, bumping together gently. I thought how marvelous is a working hive. It sounds sappy, but I fell in love with bees all over again.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m worried that the mineral oil might hurt them. I’m worried that the SHB is going to starve them, demoralize them, kill them. I worry about mites, ants, birds, virus. Bees are a lot of worry, a lot of work.

But the SHB gave us an excuse to open the hive. And just to be able to watch their inner world for a few moments as they go about their lives is the best part of the job. Even sweeter than the honey.

by Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

Team Bee gathered with our officemates yesterday to have a honey tasting.  We wanted to compare our two honey harvests with several others found throughout the West to really get a sense of how different honeys can be.
We sampled a total of TWELVE different varieties! Some bought from local specialty markets, some shipped from up and down the coast and a few we found here at home at our local Farmer’s Markets. Here is a list of the sweetness we tasted:

Moon Valley Honey in Raspberry, Blackberry, and Fireweed varietals
Forestville Blackberry and California Coastal Wildflower from Beekind
Small Bees Wildflower honey
Temecula Valley Honey Co. Local Orange Blossom and Local Avocado honey
Branches Black Button Sage
Big Sur Wild Honey from Bonny Doon Farm
Plus our own two Sunset honeys

We had a great time thinking of new vocabulary to describe each honey—since each honey deserved its own description! Some of the words thrown around the honey table: Cinnamon-y, spicy, nutty, fruity, tangy, woody, maple syrupy, smoky, buttery, caramel-y…

Everyone had different opinions on which was the best, except we did all agree that the Moon Valley Fireweed honey was very tasty (cinnamon-y, nutmeg-y, with a yummy spicy kick) and it came in a rustic jar with the top dipped in beeswax!

My personal favorite?  The Moon Valley Blackberry.  Light, fruity and mighty tasty on toasted bread.

Now I ask you, dear reader, where does your favorite honey come from?

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Just in time for Halloween! The newest uninvited guest (pest) in our hives is the small hive beetle (SHB), a nasty little beetle that eats brood, bees, and comb, and destroys the honey in the hive.

SHB is a relatively new—and serious—pest for the bees, and until recently not widely seen in California. Beetle populations can build up so fast that beekeepers don’t notice until it’s too late. Earlier last week when we opened Veronica, we saw over 30 beetles crawling on just one frame. The sticky board below poor Betty was literally crawling (scary movie kind of crawling) with larvae hoping to drop down to the ground and finish growing into beetles in the soil below the hives.

I'm not going to post a photo of a larvae here, because they are hideously gross. You can download a photo (Download SHBLarvae.jpg) if you're brave.

The bees do kill the beetles when they can catch them, but they can’t keep up with such a population explosion. They need our help.

We’re trying to avoid using harsh pesticides in our hives, so we decided to use a Sonny-Mel style SHB trap. It’s a plastic sandwich container filled with mineral oil and baited with a noxious glop made of rotten banana peel, cider vinegar, and sugar.

Supposedly, the beetles, hypnotically drawn by the glop, enter through small holes in the plastic container and drown in the mineral oil. (There’s a great how-to video at one of our favorite bee blogs, Linda’s Bees.)

We hope this works, but so far we haven’t trapped more than a couple. These beetles are disgusting.

Pools of nectar in fresh white honeycomb. Built by Hive Veronica. Photo by Kimberley Burch.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Last week we pulled our supers—small boxes filled with 10 half-size frames designed for easy harvest. As you can see above, not all the honey in the combs was capped, but even so, from 7 capped frames  we harvested 19 lb. 4 oz. of late summer honey.

Combined with our first surprise harvest, in her first year Veronica has given us 31 lb 14 oz.  How sweet it is!