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.

Bees!!! Part Two

The day has finally come - time to get my new fuzzy little friends.  I had to drive all the way almost to Wisconsin, to Stillwater to get them.  Seeing the familiar sign of Nature's Nectar always makes me smile, every year I have picked up bees this simple sign guides you in and tells you there is someone with a pretty good sense of humor running the show.

You can see in the shed there are stacks and stacks of crates of bees waiting to be picked up.  I figured it out one time - how many packages and then ultimately how many bees are on a truck, etc, but I have since forgotten this useless piece of information.  What I've always wondered is if all the bees flew in the air at the same time how much lighter the truck would become, but I'm going to leave that one to someone smarter than me.

So here are my two little packages, you can't really see from this picture, but in the center is a silver circle which is a can of syrup to feed the bees during their cross country voyage.  Also there is a little metal tab that holds a small wooden box with the queen inside.  All the bees huddle around her and the can of syrup to eat and keep her warm.  They constantly rotate around so they all get to eat and take turns being cold on the outside.  Before I put them in the hive I sprayed them with syrup and water to make them super mellow and happy - mainly so they don't fly all over the place.

This next picture is the two hives I am going to be putting the bees into.  I've taken 4 of the frames out to allow room to dump the bees and have everything all ready to go.  So when I'm ready I'll pry up the syrup can and then pound the cage on the ground so all of them fall down.  Then I slip out the queen...

Here is a picture of the queen in her little cage.  What happened next did not go according to the master plan.

What I was supposed to do was put this right in my pocket, dump the bees in the hive, pull her out of my pocket, put a little piece of marshmallow in place of the cork holding her in and the put her in the hive with the rest of her buddies.

What I did was put a piece of salt water taffy in place of the cork first (I forgot to buy marshmallows and didn't have time to go to the store).  Then put her in my pocket and then dump the bees in the box.  When I went to grab the cage - she was missing.  I said a few four letter words (like golf and Iowa) and looked around for her.  I gave up on that pretty quick and put the cover on and moved on to the other hive.

The other hive I did quite well and they seemed to be doing fine when I left for work.  I sent a few emails and after a call to one of my old pharmacy professors (who happens to keep bees and is a SD state bee inspector - yes there is such a thing).  He told me that I could simply take a frame with fresh eggs out of my strong hive from last year and put it into this new hive.  If there are eggs less than 3 days old they will feed the eggs royal jelly and raise a couple of queens which will then mate and presto-chango I have a hive with a queen in it again. The only difference between a queen and a worker is the food they are fed and the amount of time they take to hatch.  Workers actually take longer to hatch than queens - mainly because of the difference in the food they are fed.

The alternative to do nothing is not a good one though.  If I just let all those workers and drones in the hive go on with out some sort of intervention, a few of the workers (who are all female) will start laying eggs of their own.  This is not a good thing, since they have not mated all their eggs are unfertilized and they will only lay drones.  They will keep doing this until either all the bees die or they decide to move on.  If I let them do this and then try to give them a new queen later they will kill the new queen.

So I will hopefully be able to salvage a situation brought on by my own bonehead blunder.  If this works and they make a queen that goes out and mates I should be able to salvage the package and although it will not likely make any extra honey this year I will have saved them and they will hopefully be strong enough to make it through the winter.

So hopefully I can get my lazy butt out of bed in the morning and do some rearranging.  To be continued...

Bees!!!

I think I need to take a break from the political stuff and the healthcare problems that I have been dealing with lately.   This is supposed to be "Farmer" Dan's blog anyway so as we near the exciting time of spring I will change over to more agricultural related posts for a while.

Two weeks from now I am going to get some more bees!  I ended up losing one hive this winter - not from the dreaded CCD (colony collapse disorder) that has made headlines - but mainly because of a good old fashioned MN winter.  Both hives got buried two times in snowstorms and that didn't help matters.  So on April 21st I am going to Stillwater to pick up two packages of bees.  Above is what a package of bees looks like.  The bee supplier I use gets his bees from California.  All of this starts back in February when the Almond trees bloom in California.  This is such an intense and big bloom that the bees really increase in numbers.  After the bloom is over the beekeepers there begin to divide hives, this involves brushing extra worker bees into a large container and then they get dumped into a box like the above picture.

Then the bees are put into a mini hive or nuc - at the same time larvae are put into incubators in queen cups and then placed into the nucs.  The bees see this and begin to raise this queen as their own.  The only difference between the queens and the workers is that the queens are kept in the cells for a shorter amount of time (you would think longer) and fed a richer food called royal jelly.  After the queens hatch they spend about one week in the hive and then fly out and mate with the drones of other hives.  They mate anywhere from 2-10 times and receive all the sperm they will need to lay thousands and thousands of more bees during these mating flights.  Tragically the drones die after mating, I'm just glad humans don't operate the same way although I have known of a few females who try to operate in the same way.

I don't have any of my own pictures of the above process, but imagine a large area with about 100 of these small mini hives all in rows and millions of bees flying around and you won't be that far off.

After the queens have been mated the beekeepers go back through the nucs, find the queens and put them into little tiny cages, pack them back into a box like above and then more bees are dumped back into the box with them.  They then have a can of sugar syrup put in the top and off they go!

When I get them they have been in the cages for 3 or more days and are pretty hungry so before I put them into their new home I will spray them with a mixture of corn syrup and water.  This also calms them down a little.  The next step is to pound the cage on the ground to knock all the bees down to the bottom of the box, then I will take the can of sugar and the queen box out.  Before the bees realize what has happened they can be essentially poured into their hive.  The queen still in her box gets wedged in between the frames for now.  After a few days I will go back and check on the hive to make sure they haven't gone looking for a new home and at that time I take out the cork keeping the queen in her little cage and change it for a marshmallow.  The bees will take this out in a few minutes and let her out and then she goes to work laying more eggs for the coming summer.

Just for those of you who may be wondering a pound of bees has about 5500 bees in it and when they get dumped into the box the box rests on a scale and for a few seconds before they start flying the boxes are weighed and will either contain 2 or 3 lbs of bees.  A fully functioning hive in the middle of a good nectar flow in the middle of summer can have up to 80,000 bees.

So now I hoped to explain how much work goes into just getting the bees that I keep here in MN.  There are a number of different breeds of the honeybee, what is interesting is that the main bee used in CA is the Italian bee, the bees that do the best in MN are called carnolian.  All of the bees that come in the package are Italian, but the queen is Carnolian so as she lays eggs the bees that she lays are of a different breed and will eventually outnumber the original Italian bees. 

It is just amazing how much effort and time goes into raising bees, I hope I made it somewhat more clear to someone who has little knowledge of bees to understand just how complicated one part of keeping bees is.  It makes me really appreciate my little fuzzy friends and to really cherish their sweet delicious product that they work so hard to make.