Bees and Trees

Although you have to look hard at the picture to see it - right in the middle of the picture there is a dark mass. Sort of a triangle on the bottom.  There - see it?  Ok - what you are looking at is a swarm of honeybees.  I had better pictures which I put on this blog about this time last year.  Today however these guys have a more happy ending.  

I just got back from my 10 day trip to Sweden/Denmark, visiting my homeland and a good friend and have been working to get my lawn tamed again after 2 weeks of rain and now hot weather.   I am having my house painted as well.  The guy painting the house is really nice and just started and he likes to talk so when he came to where I was mowing I didn't think much of it.  He looked very concerned though and I shut the mower down and listened to his story.  He was pounding with a hammer on the house and he heard buzzing - he thought he disturbed a hive of bees living in the siding.

We walked over to where he had been working and saw a cloud of bees in the air.  I knew these were my bees and they were looking for a new home.  They slowly disappeared and we thought they were gone.  We walked around and he was going to start working when I spotted the swarm in the tree.  This time it was much closer to the ground.  I raced to get my bee suit on and a box.  I had read about this, but never had done it.  I took the box under the triangle you see and shook the branch really hard and all the bees fell into the box.  It sounds almost too simple but for the most part they all just fell in!  I then closed the box and walked over to the hive that I knew was the weakest of my three, took the top off and dumped them in.  That didn't go quite as well, but the bees clung to the outside of the hive and after about about 15 minutes they were all inside again.  Pretty slick.

If I wasn't at home and if my painter hadn't been so afraid of a few thousand crazy bees I probably wouldn't have been able to save them, it was quite a rush.  When bees swarm they are leaving a crowed hive and looking for a new home, giving them a place to go usually makes them much happier.  I wish I could have taken more pictures, but from the shake off the branch to the end only took about 30 seconds and I didn't want to stop and fumble with the camera.

The trees part of my title (unless you count that the bees were swarming in a tree) doesn't have anything to do with the above but with something my dad said earlier.  He told me that almost all of my grandpa's apple and fruit trees were dying or being blown down in the wind.  It started about a year before he died - one of his peach trees died.  After he died the other peach tree died within weeks.  This summer will be the 2nd year after he died and out of his 15 or so fruit trees all but two of them are actually alive.  One giant one that was probably 50 years or more old blew down in a storm last week.  Three more died over the winter.  Really strange since my dad has been the one who has been really taking care of them for the last 5 years, pruning, spraying for bugs and doing a lot of the picking.

What got my attention when he was telling me this is something similar I read a while ago about bees.  They wrote that bees usually don't do well or completely fail when their keeper dies.  That made some sense to me at the time, since they are used to being cared for in a certain way.  Why trees though - especially since my dad was the one doing things after my grandpa was no longer able to trim them and pick any fruit higher than he could reach?  

The whole idea of plants being attached to their keepers is something I find fascinating, I don't think people today fully understand the concept of a "green thumb".  For example if I water a plant or you water a plant it still gets water, it's the same either way.  It has to do with the thoughts going through the persons head who is doing the watering, weeding or other thing.  My plants have to be tough or they won't survive.  That's the way I think and they usually respond accordingly.   I don't know if any of that makes sense to anyone looking on with a purely scientific background, but that's the way it is.

Windy Spring

As the farm continues to green up and look more and more like summer is upon us, I have had two trees go down, well half of two trees go down.  It's sort of a reminder of the balance in nature - in order for crops and other plants to grow on the prairie they have to be able to deal with the violent weather changes.  About two weeks ago the wind just blew - no rain or anything along with it, but apparently some gusts up and over 50 mph and a tree that was actually quite protected fell.  When I first moved out the farm another part of that tree fell over that spring as well so it's not got the best of luck going for it.

Last Tuesday though I had half of one of my giant crab apple trees go down in a nasty thunderstorm.  Didn't seem to bother anything else though.  That same storm went on to do a lot of damage south and east of here and some field were completely destroyed.

I haven't decided on whether or not to save the half tree that was left standing.  It seems to have started to lean a little more and it looks like the next gust of wind could just knock it down.  I think I'll try to prop it up and hope that it puts down some new roots and it may look like like a whole tree in a few years.

The good news out of all of this is that I am working on trying to sell the wood from the tree to someone who would use it to smoke meat.  Apparently it is not the easiest or cheapest wood to come by and really gives smoked meat a good flavor.  I then plan on putting the money towards some new trees to replace it.

I would have put some pictures up here to show all of this, but I dropped my camera last week and it is in the shop right now I guess.  It's funny I take a few pictures every week and don't think much about it, but once it is gone it is really noticed.  

There is supposed to be a pretty good chance of heavy rain and possibly strong storms in a few days.  I don't think I am really too worried about things yet, but it might mean more work for my trusty little electric chainsaw.

Plants and change

(I noticed that some of the pictures are a little off after posting them, just click on them to view them full size)

As promised I said I would take some pics of some new plants coming up, I'm sort of curious myself to follow them weekly and watch the changes a little more closely than I have in past years.  What is truly amazing is how they go from little packets of seeds to beautiful plants.  The infinite amount of changes that come from being a dry old seed, to a seedling, to a full grown plant that goes on to flower, produce fruit and then turn ultimately produce seeds that will live on after it.  The first picture I have is of a pumpkin, not sure what kind this one is, but pretty typical pumpkin that's been out of the ground for a few days.

The next pic is of some onions - here I sort of cheat - I plant either live onion plants or just get those little onions that have been started from seed then allowed to dry up for future use.  These are the latter and tend to produce early onions - most often by the end of July (earlier if you don't mind small onions).

Green beans are next - these guys are a little dirty due to the rain we had the night before.  The part of the garden I planted these in the soil tends to get a hard crust on it if it doesn't rain once in a while and had it not rained when it did they would have died in the ground.  They were just starting to push through the day before and we had a nice storm that got them out of the ground quick.

Tonight there was another beautiful sunset - the clouds in the picture are actually back in South Dakota (about 90 miles west of here).  It was also terribly windy today - gust over 50 mph!  I had half of a tree go down right behind my house sometime during supper.  That tree always hit me in the face mowing so I really don't feel too bad about it and the other half of it will stay up.  All that aside the wind was whipping dust in the air which made for a nice red sunset.

The last picture is something I thought would turn out better than it did.  I have more dandelions growning in my lawn than actual grass, but my bees seem to benefit from this, so I just let them be.  While I was starting to mow I had this thought that the dandelions were all super huge and grown up and as big as trees and dwarfed everything around us.  It made me laugh for a while, but I decided I would try to create my own little silly picture of a dandelion forest.  I didn't take any other pictures of my lawn, but if you can imagine such a thing, Krista, the boys and I had a dandelion fight earlier this evening.  It mostly consisted of picking handfuls of the stems and throwing them at each other and rolling around on the grass, but it was fun and it was something that very few people in this world will probably ever do again.

Tomorrow all of these used up flowers will disappear, as much as I really don't care about lawn care, it looks like our farm is partly deserted and that I don't really like.  The clovers in the lawn start blooming next, nothing like the dandelions, more subtle and fragrant.

This time of year there is a vast amount of change here on my little slice of this world, 60 days ago we had 2 feet of snow on the ground and today everyone that came into work was complaining about the heat!  Watching my little seedlings do what they do with only the help of putting them in a favorable place to grow I think helps me understand change better.  If you know my life's story change hasn't been my strong suit in the first 30 years of it.  The last 4 though I have begun to watch all the changes around me with ever increasing interest - the seasons change, plants spring to life from seeds that look dry and dead, plants burst forth flowers, they dry up and product more seeds.

Looking at these changes - none of them are good or bad they just are a flower bursts, dries up and then seeds are produced.  There is no difference when compared with any other species.  What I think people in this day and age have the most trouble with is the seed part of life.  I think they forget that with every end there is a new beginning.  Every where in nature this is true, death is the end of something, but it is the start of something else.  The changes that take place from sprout to the flower are immense, much like our own lives.  

Change in plants and people is inevitable - I understand that now better and in different ways than I did 4 years ago.  It makes my life easier knowing that there is change coming and that I can either accept it when it does happen or be miserable and live in denial.  Somewhere in all of this I am getting to the point I wanted to make, I wish I knew how to make changes in myself have nothing to do with any outside influence.  The way I think for example - how do I stop the little guy in my head that makes the comments about others that inflate my ego, how do I stop my long standing habit of chewing tobacco, how do I make changes in my diet?  The list goes on and on.  

I feel like the answer lies somewhere close and that I am looking right at it,  but I'll be monkey's uncle if I know what that is right now.  

Planting time

I guess with the bee excitement of last week I have neglected to keep everyone up to date on the rest of the farm.  A week ago last Saturday I started planting more than my small "garden."  I planted two kinds of indian corn, sweet corn and giant sunflowers.  Last Thursday I planted three kinds of popcorn and a short little kind of sunflower called baby bear.

Then on Saturday I planted beets, carrots, spinach, green beans, broccoli and a couple kinds of peppers and tomatoes.

All I have left is the vine crops, pumpkins, watermelon, gourds, cantaloupe, and cucumbers.  I guess I would put pictures up, but pictures of dirt and seeds are tough to make interesting.  If I get my act together next week I'll try to take pictures of different things sprouting, that would make for more interesting photos.

I also planted two trees which reminds me that I should get some pictures up of my other project.  I am making a run down old hog barn more useful.  It was a open ended shed 120 feet long and 20 feet wide.  In front of this barn was a series of pens about 32 feet long and 16 feet wide.  I am tearing down half of the barn and reusing the wood and tin to make a new kennel for our dog Pumpkin.  This last spring her kennel was flooded severely and she ended up itching a lot which we blamed on her fur being wet all the time.

After I get that done I'm going to build a play house for the boys with the leftover lumber and tin.  So I get rid of an eyesore and make two more useful buildings.  Just a good all around feeling here on the Berkner farm this spring - plants growing recycling of an old building.  New life growing out of the old.