Posted by: By Sunset, November 28, 2008 in Team Bee
By Margaret Sloan, production coordinator and Kimberley Burch, imaging specialist
In folk medicine, beeswax is used for many things—emollient, antiseptic, and ointment. We think it makes great lip balm, and our homemade lip balm makes great gifts.
Supplies Double boiler (we made our own from an old saucepan and 4-cup plastic measuring cup) Beeswax Sweet almond oil Jojoba oil Flavor oil of your choice Plastic transfer pipettes Kitchen scale (We recommend using a digital scale with a tare, or zero function) Plastic Tom Lip Balm Tubes
Basic lip balm recipe 2 parts beeswax 1 part sweet almond oil 1 part jojoba oil
It took about an hour for each batch and we suggest you make a small batch first, and adjust the recipe to your liking. More oil makes the balm softer, and less oil makes the balm harder. Kimberley pointed out the the harder balm stayed on her lips for a longer time, even through brushing her teeth.
Directions
1. In the saucepan we put enough water (about 1.5 cups) to float the plastic measuring cup, and brought the water to a boil.
2. We weighed the measuring cup and used that weight to zero out the scale. We broke up the wax into small pieces—the smaller the peices, the faster the wax will melt—and weighed it in the measuring cup, then added the oils by weight. To make the math easy, we re-zeroed the scale after every addition. For approximately 50 .15 oz (4.25 gram) tubes, we used 128 grams of beeswax, and 64 grams each of jojoba oil and sweet almond oil.
3. Once the water in the saucepan boiled, we reduced it to a simmer and put the measuring cup full of wax and oil in the boiling water, stirring occasionally as the wax melted.
4. While the wax was melting we put the lip balm tubes on the Plastic Tom.
5. When the wax was completely melted and mixed with the oil, we
removed the measuring cup from the boiling water and wiped any water
from the outside of the cup.
6. Using a plastic pipette to measure and dispense the flavor oil
(we used a honey flavor oil for this batch), we quickly stirred it into
the melted balm mixture. The amount of flavor oil needed varies,
depending on the type of oil used. Follow directions.
7. When the balm had cooled a bit but could still be poured
(Majestic Mountain Sage recommends pouring when the mixture has a haze
over the surface, as seen in this Lip balm tutorial), we carefully
poured the melted wax and oil mixture into the Plastic Tom. Over
filling the tubes isn’t a worry—we simply scraped off the excess balm
with a spatula and remelted it.
8. After the balm cooled and hardened, we pulled the tubes from the Plastic Tom, capped them, and labeled them.
A year of waiting and worrying and almost kind-of nearly losing an eye has passed, and it’s time to roll out those barrels (ok, carboys) and flashback to 325 A.D. Yep, we’re doing it all by hand—with a little help from my mouth, as I’ve somehow become a confident siphon-starter (this wasn’t always so).
No automated assembly line of motorized fillers and pneumatic cork compressors for Team Wine. Just a bunch of friends ready and willing to work for a few sips of Chardonnay along the way. Here’s part 1 of how it all went down (next week, I’ll tell you how to stick a cork in it—no offense, of course).
We picked a finally cool fall day for bottling our Chard, to be easy on our wine and on ourselves, as we had three 5-gallon carboys of Chardonnay to transfer into 78 Burgundy-style bottles, a half-day of what would have been super-sweaty work in this year’s long-lingering Indian summer.
Fellow cellar rat Sara Jamison and I headed for our parking lot “work area,” as it’s paved and has a drain and a hose-rigged spigot for easy cleaning and clean-up. We dragged out a hefty work table (sturdy enough to hold up a heavy glass carboy); nonreactive (so not aluminum) stainless steel bowls for sterilizing our siphon tubing, bottle filler, and corks and for mixing up bottle wash*; two bottle rinsers (aka Vinators); and our Charlie Brown–esque “bottle tree” drying rack—check it out in the video below. *Whip up your own batch of bottle wash (potassium metabisulfite dissolved in water) and get a complete list of materials you’ll need by downloading our free PDF. We've updated it with full bottling details.
And then we dragged out 6 1/2 cases of empty bottles. Home winemaker and retired chemist Dan Brenzel, our major benefactor and advice giver (and hubby of Sunset garden editor Kathy Brenzel), had run them through the dishwasher sans detergent (we didn’t want any chemical remnants leeching into our wine). But then they sat in boxes for months.
So to make sure they were wine-ready, we gave each one a rinse with bottle wash: Two pumps on one spring-loaded bottle rinser to wash away any dust, then two pumps on our second rinser to complete the sterilization (some home winemakers—like Dan—dump SO2 into their wine before bottling to really keep the bugs out, but Team Wine likes to keep interventions to a minimum). Then onto the tree for 10 to 15 minutes of drying.
We got a good rhythm going, and before we knew it, the tree was full of clean bottles, ready to fulfill their destiny. At this point, the rest of Team Wine had broken away from their desk jobs to join us. And since I’ve now had a bunch of practice starting (and failing) siphons, I was easily convinced to unstopper a carboy and fill our first bottle.
Starting a siphon is all about sucking it up: You stick one end of plastic tubing way down into a carboy (as close to the tiny amount of remaining sediment as you dare), then put the other end in your mouth. Pretend like you’ve got a giant flexy straw in your mouth (mmm, remember those mondo Pixy Stix?), and start sipping. The wine will quickly start flowing, so keep a hand near your mouth to quickly and firmly pinch the tubing before wine tumbles into your mouth (this is not a beer helmet, people).
Holding up the tubing end that was just in your mouth, grab your bottle filler (a plastic or metal rod with a spring-loaded tip that controls the flow of wine; I like the clear-plastic one I'm using in the above video). Gently but firmly slide the rod onto the tubing, and you’re set. As long as you keep the rod end lower than the carboy that’s up on the table, your siphon is ready whenever you are. And in the meantime, no runs, drips, or errors—this ingenious invention is liberating! (At least it is for someone who had trouble racking, as I did.)
When you’re ready, take a bottle off the tree and place it at your feet. Then squat down and poke the bottle-filling rod into the bottle. As soon as you depress its tiny tip, the rod will allow wine to pass into the bottle. Fill the bottle till it’s approaching full, pausing to let the wine foam as needed (this is normal—it’s just the SO2 bubbling off), then gently lift up and remove the rod when the wine crests the top of the bottle neck (a quality rod neatly displaces the perfect amount of headspace for your cork). You have just filled a bottle of wine—almost as easily as you’ll drain it when you’re ready to share it.
This is when having a couple of friends over will come in handy: Ask them to start a bottle brigade. One of them can be in charge of placing an empty bottle at your feet and taking a full bottle to the person working the floor corker. (Dan likes to fill a whole case of bottles at once and heft it over to the corker, but we found this to be far messier, spill-inducing, and disaster-tempting than we were comfortable flexing our muscles for.) At the end of each carboy, rotate jobs to see what they’re all like.
Curious about corking? Tune in next week for video of the beloved but rickety floor corker that sealed our Chardonnay’s fate.
There's nothing we can do about it this year, though. That's because we decided —out of deference to Team Bee—not to treat the trees last spring for olive fruit-fly maggots (the spray may have killed the bees), so once again they're radically infested. It's a good thing our chickens snap them up like candy.
Any ideas about how to spray olive trees in a bee-safe way? It looks as though Spinosad is the most effective organic spray (we don't use pesticides), but we're not quite sure how to apply it so it doesn't doom Betty and Veronica. And we would really, really like to press our own olives next year.
The least we could do was figure out our other problem: How to harvest our giant trees. Most commercial growers top off their trees at around 9 feet to keep them easy to pick. Ours are probably 40 feet tall and surrounded by bushes, walls, and other lovely and totally inconvenient landscaping elements.
With no actual picking to do this year, we decided to at least learn something for next season. So, on Monday, I went as Team Olive's emissary off to UC Davis.
There, Dan Flynn, director of the Olive Center, heads a team of pickers that harvest the university's giant old trees. Every year, they turn what had been a liability--bikers skidding on slippery fallen olives--into really great UC Davis olive oil.
I met up with Dan in one of the groves.
Left: Two of UC Davis's 2,000 olive trees. (These are Rubra, a Spanish variety.) Right: Dan talking to the crew.
With giant tarps spread beneath the trees to catch the falling olives, his crew was using 3 methods to pick: pneumatic rakes (which look sort of like Venus flytraps, and chew off the olives faster than the eye can see); regular garden rakes; and their hands.
Pneumatic rake.
This thing is just too heavy and expensive, I decided, to be useful to us. Then Dan showed me the regular rake method. "Just whack. You'll get about 30 olives off at once."
My technique left a lot to be desired, but some olives were coming off, anyway. Unfortunately, this rakeing business doesn't work so well when you're standing on a ladder. You feel like you're about to topple backwards.
So, in the end, I think the best route for us will be hand-picking, just like we did last year at Valencia Creek. This means we won't need tarps--just a couple of ladders, a few buckets, and our team, ready to pick. It's cheap, it's easy, and with a few of us working together, we ought to be able to get a few hundred pounds from the lower limbs of our trees.
Summer is a wonderful time of year...unless you’re a bottle of olive oil.
As we discussed earlier, heat and light are bad for oil, so we've had to move our bottles to a cooler spot where they wouldn't be affected by long days of hot sunshine. Lucky for us, we have a wine cellar. A few members of team olive borrowed (read: hijacked) the mail cart and moved the boxes of filled bottles to the new, more temperate, location.
The holidays are upon us, and with tough economic times, books are still a great value gift. Here's our list of bee books that we recommend for anyone interested in bees, but not yet ready to commit to keeping them.
Patricia Polacco writes and illustrates kid's books that often veer towards the serious, but in this hilarious book, a little girl and her grandfather go on a bee hunt, along with half the town. It's not really about bees. It's about the little girl learning to love reading. But the bee hunt is wonderful, crazy fun.
Part of the Magic School Bus series by Scholastic, this is a fun book for kids and grownups as Ms. Frizzle's class takes a field trip through a bee hive. Lots of great illustrations.
This is a scary book. Not good bedtime reading, but you'll learn about the problems facing bees, beekeepers, and ultimately, the world. As dismal as it seems, he does end on a happy note as he talks about raising his own bees.
A book of essays about bees. You'll get a good course in bee behavior and biology along with a dose of philosophy. Don't worry, the philosophy is sweet because Longgood always returns to the subject of bees.
Ok, I have to admit, I haven't read these last two books. They're in my "to read" pile, but I haven't gotten to them yet.
Posted by: By Sunset, November 21, 2008 in Team Bee
By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator
Some people view a swarm of bees settling on their property as a blessing. Last week a friend sent me link to a link to a very sad tale of a swarm of bees that settled on a barbecue in Australia (it's spring there-swarming season). The barbecue owner, dubbed the barbecue beehive bomber, didn't view the hive as a good thing, and so exterminated the bees with a can of bugkiller strapped to a rake. Sunset's Team Bee wept at the carnage.
Please, please, please! If you are visited by a swarm of bees, call a local beekeeper organization. They will be able to point you to a beekeeper who would love to take away the swarm. It's awful to kill so many bees if they can be saved.
And more importantly, removing a swarm of bees yourself could also endanger you and your family. In 2000, a swarm of bees attacked a family and killed their dog after they had tried to remove the hive themselves. So much damage could be averted with a little knowledge. The California Beekeeper Association website has a great page about beeswarms. Your local beekeeper organization will certainly be able to point you to people who would love to take your visiting bees.
It's not swarm season in the Northern Hemisphere right now, but it will soon be in many parts of the western United States. Wherever you live, make friends with a few beekeepers and let them know if a swarm of bees decides to grace you with buzzing. And perhaps you'll be graced with a jar of honey after the beekeeper has settled the bees in a new home.
It's started raining here in Northern California. Finally, two months after the calendar officially declared it autumn, it's feeling truly autumnal. Cloudy mornings, early sunsets.
We've overhauled the Test Garden somewhat in the past few months, pulling out some underperforming roses and planting a new flower bed from seed.
Only problem, of course, is that what's mostly taken root are volunteers—plants that in other circumstances would be welcome, but in the middle of my seeded bed are nothing but pests. Below, nasturtiums (on the left) and borage, whose cucumber-scented sprouts vigorously colonize any damp, well-composted piece of soil.
The other thing we have a lot of are olives, falling from a giant, decades-old tree that stretches over our chicken coop and part of the garden. Its fruit is raining down on us at this time of year, plump and black.
Don't they look beautiful? Yeah, that's an illusion. The reason that they're "ripening" on the tree so quickly is that we have olive fly, which our own oil-makers Team Olive discovered last year. Our infested fruit—a beautiful blue-black, with a lovely powdery blush—falls all over that half of the garden.
Luckily, the world provides, and our chickens eat. They are mad for the nasturtium sprouts—can't get enough of the borage—and they even love the maggot-infested olives. Check it out.
Last year, I was worried about them eating whole olive pits, but since then I've learned some things about the intricacies of chicken digestive systems. In short: Chickens have two stomachs, the glandular one called the proventriculus and the mechanical one, the gizzard. Sometimes people call all animal entrails "the gizzards," but it's a real organ with a specific meaning. It's where the grit and small stones that chickens eat end up; they help grind up the hard seeds and other fibrous foods that are part of a healthy chicken's diet.
The garden gives, the chickens take. It's got a nice circle-of-life quality to it.
Team Wine watched crush come and go this year, dipping in nary a toe (a far cry from last year). With the economy seemingly suffering from a stuck fermentation, we didn’t dare try to squeak hundreds of pounds of grapes into the company budget. So we’re contenting ourselves with bottling our wine (video coming soon—really!) and peeking at what other home winemakers are doing.
It was in googling around that we discovered our new favorite blog: NYTimes.com’s The Crush. This fall, NY-based wine writer Alice Feiring has been in California’s Sonoma County, furthering her passion for wine by making it for the first time.
In working with the little-known Italian red varietal Sagrantino with Kevin Hamel of Pellegrini Family Vineyards, Feiring’s initial experience very much mirrors our own: She picks the grapes herself, then jumps in feet first to stomp and crush them.
But that’s where our paths diverge: The girl’s going wild!
We got our ICV-D80 yeast from Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella, trusting his judgment instead of doing much research (and our wines are fantastic, so thank you, Michael!). But Feiring is sticking to completely natural yeast—whatever was on the grapes as they were harvested, and whatever gets into the fermenter.
And wow how it works. Here’s how Feiring describes the wine’s initial ferment: “A spongy collection of grape skins and pulp had pushed to the top. Underneath by a good 14 inches lurked the foamy, vibrant, magenta fermenting juice. Those yeast were stuffing themselves silly on the sugar, like a teenage boy on Thanksgiving turkey.”
At the core of this vin naturel approach is Feiring’s belief in organic, sustainable, biodynamic farming, a philosophy we at Sunset share.
And she likes her wines pure, with little or no interventions. We totally remember the worries along the way and the tough choices about sulfur and oak, but we were never faced with adding water to wine. This approach to lowering super-high alcohol levels and unsticking a potentially stuck fermentation lit up The Crush’s comments section.
If you don’t have anything in a barrel—or glass carboy—this fall, live vicariously through wine bloggers like Feiring. You might pick up a few tricks along the way. (In one post, Feiring professes to have been “a terrible chemistry student,” then handily tackles Brix, clearly defining it and readily dabbling in it.)
Have a food, wine, or local-eating blog you tune into? Please post those links by clicking "comments" below.
The good news: My first try at curing olives is finished.
The bad news: I think I made botulism.
I let the olives soak in the brine liquid (1 gallon water to 1 cup salt) for 10 days. Then I rinsed.
Then I decreased the salt by half and waited another 10 days. Then I rinsed.
I waited for months and all the clues that I was watching for occurred: The olives turned an ugly brown color. They developed a black, thick, rubber-like skin on the surface (something that’s supposed to add flavor, I was told). But they still tasted too harsh to be ready. So I let them sit a little more. After waiting patiently for months, I did what any busy person with a short attention span would do. I forgot about them completely.
Now those olives that I put so much energy into are so ugly, I highly doubt their mother would love them. Puffed, mushy fruit, with skin that resembles a painful blister from a pair of new shoes.
I did take a bite of one of them. Okay, not a bite, but I cut one open and touched my tongue to it. It tasted like an olive, but the idea of having to get my stomach pumped if I ate more was reason enough to toss the lot.
If anyone is looking for me, I'll be at the farmer's market trying to score more fresh olives for round two.
For weeks now, we've been having nothing but brown eggs. That's because our two Ameraucanas, Ophelia and Alana (producers of blue and green eggs, respectively) have been vigorously molting. This annual cycle of feather-shedding and -regrowing is supposed to last somewhere around 6 weeks, and is perfectly normal.
Today, at last, Ophelia laid her first post-molt egg. An exceptionally smooth, small egg, too. It's as if her body has snapped back to an adolescent-hen state.
From what I've read, chickens lay better-tasting and better-formed eggs after they molt. We'll see.
In the meantime, it's just nice have her blue egg in the carton.
Bees are contrary creatures. They’ve evidently never read the multitude of beekeeping books about how they are supposed to act.
And with all the contrariness of bees, Hive Veronica is building comb in November. There are a lot of bees in that hive, and they’re filling the top of the spacer box with comb and nectar. It's a mess in there with a big fuzzy pile of bees and gloopy, nectar-filled free-form natural comb all over the tops of the frames.
The thing is, it's nearly winter. Bees are supposed to cluster together in the center of their box, keeping queen and brood warm and fed during these days when the sunlight shortens. They're not supposed to build comb and fill it with nectar.
"Don't worry," he told us. "They're bugs." They know what to do.
Perhaps they are simply trying to fill in the 2.5 inches of empty space above the frames to keep that space warm. Or perhaps, as Kimberley suspects, Veronica is a hoarder, and the 13 full frames of honey she already has isn’t enough.
And this is the San Francisco Bay Area, and it is different here from the rest of the country. There's the weather, for one thing. Chilly days of rain alternate with short, warm, sunny days. There are plenty of flowers blooming. The brugmansia in our test garden is blowing gigantic yellow trumpet-like flowers, the Mexican sage is still unfurling fuzzy blue curls. The bees are dizzy with delight over this late season boon. And I just noticed the sweet scent of a citrus tree wafting over a neighbor's fence.
November, and already we, the bees and I, are looking forward to spring.
As Team Beer’s brew guru and Sunset’s head gardener, Rick LaFrentz is a great guy to know—especially at this time of year.
Yesterday afternoon, chatting about a seasonal beer from one of the
West’s many “local” breweries (more on this in a minute), he told me
about his latest concoction: a Trappist wheat that he’ll use to check
off his Christmas list.
“I’ll make sure you get one,” he said as my eyes lit up. Score!
Rick brewed and bottled his homemade gifts a few weeks ago, but if you, ahem, hop on it this weekend, there’s still time for you to squeak one out: an ale takes about five weeks, from kettle to bottle.
Just download (for free!) a PDF of Sunset’sGuide to Making Beer. You'll get Rick's handy checklist of equipment and his recommendation for where to buy reliably tasty kits. No growing or malting required—as Team Beer is learning, this takes approximately forever (malting Sunset’s own barley for a wheat ale is how Rick plans to spend Thanksgiving weekend).
What to make? Rick and I both gravitate toward “winter warmers” when the leaves change—their malty and often spicy goodness is a welcome treat for any beer fan. They're served chilled, of course, but they're still "warming" because of their higher-than-a-lighter-beer alcohol content.
Speaking of warmers, I just got my hands on an Imperial stout called Ten Fidy; that's what’s delighting Rick’s nose in this photo: “I always like to sniff beer,” Rick said when I laughed at his connoisseur approach. “It's got a lot going on.”
This seasonal offering from Oskar Blues (“the little brewery that cans” in Lyons, Colorado) is a delight for dark-beer fiends. Hoppy yet not bitter, this chocolate factory has a decadent Champagne feel that would make those Imperial Russian czars proud. Yum. SoCal readers, you can share in Colorado’s joy: Ten Fidy is now available near you.
If you don’t have time to brew up a winter warmer of your own (really? this Imperial stout kit looks mighty good), you could always pick one up on your way to a holiday open house.
In terms of hostess gifts, I love Team Wine, but defecting to Team Beer clearly would have some benefits (hello, shorter fermentation times!).
Have you ever had Spanish Roja garlic? It's a beauty, with big fat juicy red-skinned cloves. We grew it for our one-block feast this summer.
Our plot yielded dozens of chubby heads of garlic. We've been working it into regular recipes, but it seemed a shame not to pay homage to it with a pickle. A pickle that would be all about the garlic--loads and loads of whole cloves, nothing else except spices--and be a good memory of the pungent, fresh garlic we pulled up from the warm soil.
So I decided to make my mom's pickled garlic. It's just a footnote to a bread-and-butter cucumber pickle recipe, written on an index card in her flowing script. She's had it for ages and isn't sure where it came from. Maybe she invented it; maybe it's from a friend or a magazine long ago. Anyway, it's delicious. The cloves get all buttery soft but are still tangy. They're great spooned to the side of roasted beef or pork...or fish...or pasta...or even with a wedge of good Cheddar cheese. You can eat a lot of garlic this way.
Sally True's Pickled Garlic
Peeling this much garlic is a wee bit tiresome, I must admit, so put on some good music and know that once you've finished the prep work, you're basically done: The cloves only cook for 3 minutes.
Makes: About 2 pints Time: about 1 hour
1/4 cup sugar 1 cup cider vinegar 2 tsp. salt 1 bay leaf 1/4 tsp. mixed peppercorns (green, red, black, white; just one color is okay too) 1 1/2 tsp. yellow mustard seeds 1/2 tsp. celery seeds 8 heads fat-cloved garlic, peeled
Special equipment: 2 pint canning jars, sterilized*
Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Boil 3 minutes and pour into hot, sterilized jars. With tongs, set inner lid on top of jar rim, then the outer ring. Using potholders, screw the top on tight and let cool. Then chill it for at least a day before eating, to let the flavors develop.
The pickles keep in the fridge for up to a year unopened. (To test the
seal, press
the center of the lid; if it yields and makes a little popping sound,
it's not sealed, and you should eat the pickle within a month.) You
could probably keep it, sealed, at room temperature, but the pickle
isn't heat-processed right in the jar after you fill it (most pickles
are), so better be safe than sorry and keep it chilled.
* To sterilize jars: Fill them with hot water and put them in a deep pot. Drop the lids in alongside. Fill the pot with water and bring to a boil. Boil jars and lids for 10 minutes; then empty and fill right away, while still hot (use tongs to move them around).
I’m giving you fair warning. If you’re the kind of person who gets queasy easily, better skip this blog. I’m going to talk about icky stuff.
Here it is: I never thought that my job at Sunset would include analyzing bee poo with my co-worker, Kimberley Burch. But it does.
Hey, it’s not that gross. After all, bees only eat honey and pollen. And it’s the kind of thing you have to pay attention to if you’re going to manage livestock. Our One-block diet has turned us into urban farmers here at Sunset.
Here’s what happened. We checked the girls during some rainy weather earlier this week. There were still bees flying, even in the rain, but not many. Then, on Wednesday, after the rains had stopped, we noticed several spatters of yellow bee poo on the cement pad and one spatter on Hive Betty.
What now?! Bees are terrifically clean house keepers. If at all possible, they won’t soil their hive, or the surrounding area. In winter while they are trapped inside the hive by inclement weather, they “hold it” until better weather and they are able to make a cleansing flight and get far away from the homestead (or hivestead).
We’re worried by these spatters so close to the hives. It could be bee dysentery. It could be signs of a bee virus calledNosema apis, which is a little like bee flu. Some think this nasty virus, and its close relation, Nosema ceranae, could be one of the causes of colony collapse disorder. (For another theory about the cause of colony collapse, see Sharon Cohoon's blog on nicotine-based pesticides in our Fresh Dirt blog.)
Today is warm and sunny and the girls are out in force. I see no new tell-tale yellow spots. Perhaps what we saw was simply a the results from a few bees who couldn’t get away fast enough.
We’re trying not to worry, but it’s awfully hard not to get emotional about bees.
Yet another worrisome sign. Bees on the ground, unable to fly. Could be Nosema. Could be a sign of tracheal mites. Or could just be cold bees.
While inspecting the hives
last week, we found that Veronica and Betty both had built great big cells. Big, sticking-out cells. They looked suspiciously like queen cells—the type of cells bees build to hold the larvae of a new queen. You can see the cell on the upper left of the photo at left.
We quickly sent a photo to Tom Vercoutere, President of the Beekeepers Guild Of San Mateo County. He emailed back, saying “What you are looking at is a queen cup. Bees commonly build and destroy these so it doesn’t necessarily mean there is a supersedure (queen replacement) or a swarm eminent. If Betty is “less than great”, the hive may be trying to supersede her. Let them do it.”
Was there a seccessionist movement in their hives? Was a group of bees getting ready to fly off and start a new colony somewhere else? It’s autumn, so it’s not swarm season, but it can happen.
Or were they going to replace their old queen with a new queen? Frankly, Betty’s not a very good queen—she’s been making spotty brood, the hive’s not very clean, and her daughters are sickly. She could stand to be replaced. But Veronica’s been pretty successful. We’d be sad to lose her.
But who knows with bees? It’s like farming a wild animal, something that I think of everytime I open the hives. They’ll do what they want to do, and all we can do is stand by patiently and try not to get stung.
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