So I cooked up some onion and garlic with turmeric, salt and pepper, and then added all the spinach, mustard greens and braising mix. (The collards and kale are for the rabbit and I'm not sure what to do with all the arugula, it's overwhelming.) Once everything was cooked down, I stirred in plain yogurt and added coriander seed, dried lemon salt, and sumac to taste. It's a good way to get more greens in my diet. Yum!
I checked the bees today as it's 20 degrees cooler than it was yesterday and my bee suit is very hot. Even with it only being in the 70's, I'm still roasting!
What I found were two hopefully promising things. One is that I found sporadic larvae, suggesting I have a new queen. I did not see the queen but I didn't want to disturb things too much and I had already taken everything apart so I could examine the lowest box so I didn't take out all the frames. I did not see any capped brood of any kind, suggesting that the worker bees didn't try to lay eggs in the meantime. Hopefully my assumptions are correct here. I've emailed my bee mentor to see what he thinks.
The other thing was that there was nectar in one of my flow frames. Hopefully that means the bees are starting to consider them as viable frames and will start to build in them. It is clear that this is going to be a multi-year process to get them to the point that they build them out completely. But if they have successfully requeened and I can get them through another winter it just might work.
The farm share started up again this week and yesterday I picked up the share. As is typical for the first share of the year, it was rather small. Split between my friend and me, I ended up with 4 radishes, some arugula and mustard greens, and a bunch of lemon balm.
Actually, we were given the option of one bunch of herbs in total, with the options being lavender and sage, mint, Chinese chives, and lemon balm. After a quick mental stock of my canning inventory I opted for the lemon balm, thinking that maybe I could make jelly from it. Of course, the internet came to my rescue as it always does for these things, and I found several similar recipes for lemon balm jelly.
Essentially, you make a tea with lemon balm leaves and hot water and should end up with 3.5 cups of tea. Add half a cup of lemon juice, 1 box of pectin and 4 cups of sugar and you have a lemony jelly. It tastes like lemon marmalade, but without all the challenging bits of peel. (I believe I've mentioned before that I'm not a huge fan of marmalade.)
I've added three small jars of this to my gift stash which now has 18 jars in it. I'm starting early this year.
The bees are continuing to be confusing. Today I really got into the hive and found a couple of things. (1) They still haven't started drawing comb on the flow frames, so I rubbed beeswax all over them in the hopes of enticing them to start. (2) There were more queen cells, including a few emergency queen cells. (3) Close inspection of every single frame showed me there were no larvae anywhere. Which means there is a problem with the queen.
So I left the queen cells I found, and closed it all up again, and emailed my bee mentor. Hopefully he has some ideas. They definitely haven't swarmed, and they definitely have room in there, so fingers crossed this is the right decision.
It's been a week since I moved combs around in the hive in an effort to get the bees up into the Flow hive and prevent them from swarming. Today I went to check on them and they are definitely up there now, but not laying wax down on the flow frames just yet. They do seem to be getting ready to build comb on the last regular frame up there. They appear healthy and appropriately active.
While still feeling weird about it, I destroyed another 4-5 queen cells that I had missed last week. It seems like the correct way to manage a potential swarm. I am still hopeful that they'll figure out they have a whole other box of frames and move in for good. If they still haven't made much progress by next week I'll bring some beeswax to rub on the frames as extra enticement.
Meanwhile, the backyard is full of nesting birds: cardinals, robins, even an oriole made an appearance but I'm not sure he stayed. Also, two baby bunnies have been sighted amongst the other small mammals. We have the ubiquitous squirrels and chipmunks, several adult bunnies, and a vole.
It's a nice sunny but cool day and I have been meaning to check on the hive. I got the smoker really going today and took a look around. First of all, the bees haven't started drawing comb in the flow hive, which apparently isn't unusual. But, because they think they don't have enough space, they are preparing to swarm. I found several queen cells and lots of brood, and lots of honey filled comb in the middle box. I did not look into the bottom box.
After a little thinking, what I decided to do was move the comb that just had honey and no brood up to the flow hive. The four flow frames are in the center and there are four regular frames on the sides. Since I found three frames in the middle box with honey and no brood, I moved those into the flow hive and brought empty frames down in their place. I also destroyed most of the queen cells I could find, about which I felt badly, but I need to try to keep a swarm from happening as best as I can. I do think that Alcibee is doing fine given the large amount of worker brood I'm seeing and the fanning behavior the bees were doing while I was in there.
The other thing I found were several scouting ants, the large kind like we find in the house in the spring. I hope the bees are dealing appropriately with them.
I'd hoped to snag some garlic mustard to make a risotto to go with dinner, but I'm a little late; the garlic mustard has already flowered and would likely be [more] bitter. But I did see nettles just starting to come up, right when they are at their best.
Despite my lack of gloves, I picked the tips off about a cup's worth of nettles, tossed in a few violet flowers, and brought them home. My fingers definitely got stung, and they tingled quite a bit for the rest of the day. Worth it -
