My family and friends have been very patient with me in my eccentricities. When I first brought up my interest in beekeeping, they were cautiously encouraging, not sure their required level of participation. As I’ve delved deeper and deeper into the art of apiculture, they have become more encouraging and enthusiastic, and I suspect this is because they saw “sweet things” on the horizon.

I got my first beehive 3 years ago, on July 1st. I knew I’d have to wait at least until the second year before I’d get any honey from her. But she had a rough first year. Not only because of my inexperience, but also because of the problems with her location. She was in the shade, she was bought late in the year, she didn’t have a lot of natural food. It was rather rubbish for her really. So I was just happy she survived her first Winter.

Finally on her third Summer, I opened up the top super to have a peak and found it was wall-to-wall honey! Well, the box weighs at least 55 lbs, I cannot lift it, especially with my protruding tummy. (Go Baby!) So my Honey helped me and got suited up and lifted the super for me, and found the next super down was also 10 frames of beautifully capped honey. Yeepee!

This is my first official extraction. Last year I tried to extract 6-8 frames but I made the mistake of leaving them where the bees could find them, hoping they would clear off. What? Abandon their honey? Never! Yeah, they took it all back and all I was left with were such chewed up empty frames.

There is a story about a beekeeper, he took his honey supers off his hives, took them to his basement. He spent all day extracting the honey from the frames, and went upstairs in the evening to take a break and watch a film. Meanwhile his well-meaning wife came home and went to the basement. She found it very stuffy and humid. Unknowingly, she opened a window to air out the basement. That night, the bees found all the honey that had been stolen from them and stole it back! All of the beekeeper’s hard work was for naught. He woke up in the morning to find not a drop of honey left in his basement. So the story goes…

Well folks, I’ve seen it happen and was much disappointed last year too.

Anyway, this year, I was more careful. It’s amazing how fast we learn when our sweets are stolen!

This fancy cylinder is an extractor. You can put two frames in and then you spin the basket inside and using centrifugal force, it flings the honey to the sides of the cylinder and drips out the bottom spigot.

The honey is capped with wax, and that’s how we know it’s done. Honey has a “water activity of 0.6.” This basically means that there is not enough moisture in honey to allow fermentation. So honey cannot go bad. If we take honey that is not capped from the hive, it may not be evaporated enough. Thus you could have honey that ferments in the jar. You may notice that if you have honey in a jar for a really long time, it crystalizes. This is not your honey going bad, it just needs to be microwaved. Or you can stick the jar in hot water and the honey will melt again and become liquid. Most micro-organisms cannot grow in honey if you extract it when it’s capped. The “cappings” -wax- on honey is also pure white and makes excellent candles.

Anyway, you have to uncap the honey prior to extracting it.

It’s a sticky process. It’s best to have a bucket to do this in.

Then you put it into the extractor, spin it, then you let it drain into a container with a filter. We used a cheese cloth as a filter to get out unwanted beeswax, bee legs, pollen etc.

This picture shows really clearly how the honey is sometimes different colours depending on the flowers that the bees take from. We found that we had some really light honey and quite dark honey in this extraction.

The next time is either to pasturize it (heating it up) or you can bottle it straight from here.

We have yet to pick up our jars so in the bucket it stays for now.

And now you have learned more than you ever wanted to know about the process of honey extraction. Of course on a commercial scale, it’s a little different but the principles are the same.

In other news, we’ve been planting our Winter garden here this weekend. Peas, beans, cabbage, kale, and leeks among other things. We’re getting ready to harvest our garlic. The curly scapes are straightening up, letting us know they are just about ready to be plucked from the Earth. Since planting them in October, it seems like a wait well worth it.

I just have to mention this, I L-o-v-e gardening in a dress!

And sunhats….

Go on, call me a “Fashionista.” I can take it…..

The saying goes:

“A Swarm in May is worth a load of hay
A Swarm in June is worth a silver spoon
A Swarm in July ain’t worth a fly.”

Well, guess what month it is? It ain’t worth a fly! That’s what month! And we are having swarms upon swarms. In fact, Marc just called me less than 2 minutes ago and said “Guess what?” and I said “NO!”

-Yup, another swarm! I’m running out of equipment! I picked up $1800 worth of used equipment in the Spring and I’m down to my second to last bottom board, and my last outer cover. Just to clarify,

You have a bottom board, a super (at least one, perhaps several) with 10 frames each, then an inner cover and an outer cover.

Alright, so the bees and I are going to have a little pep talk. Bees, it’s time to settle into your homes and enjoy. You have plenty of room, you have food. You are happy, I promise! With all this swarming, you are going to make your keeper go out of business buying sugar, off her rocker trying to assemble new equipment until well after her bedtime! Besides that, you’re going to break the bank buying all this equipment to house you!

The reason they say that a Swarm in July ain’t worth a fly is because the hive has to have enough food and enough bees to get them through the Winter. You need -they say- 100 lbs of honey in the hive so that the bees survive the Winter. Now that’s a lot of honey. Anything in excess of that is mine as the Greedy Beekeeper!

To be honest, we had such a mild Winter last Winter, and our weather is not as extreme that I am not as worried about a swarm’s survival here as I would be in oh, say, Saskatchewan. I mean, heck, my bees were flying all through January and February last year which is a bit ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous, we have been trying very hard this year to grow cabbages. We planted the seedlings when it says on the package (March 1st), we tried to provide them with a warm environment and lots of water and they are seriously 1 inch tall. Perhaps it wasn’t warm enough.

But then we have this cabbage bit of root that we pulled off our old cabbages from last year’s garden. It was forgotten about in a bucket of weeds all Winter. It had no love, no nurturing, I did not once sing over this cabbage to encourage growth.

And we were told it won’t make a cabbage ball this year, they do not form “fruit” two years in a row. But it was sprouting leaves so I stuck ‘er in the ground and thought we could collect seeds off of it or something.

This is the cabbage that could not be. The unlikely cabbage, the inadvertent cabbage. The miracle cabbage. I think it’ll make a fine cole-slaw, don’t you?

Alright bees, wave good bye to the dear readers!

… now if you’d just behave, I’m sure we’d all get along beautifully… this means no more stinging me in the back of the head….

1. Put an inch of sugar syrup in a bucket and put it out for the bees thinking that they will clean it Right Up! (and find them dead and coated in sugar a few days later- an instant dessert and delicacy in some parts of the world…)

2. Put a water dish out for the bees without rocks or sticks so that they drown.

3. Squish them as you put the lid down and hear the crunch.

4. Do not treat them for mites and other diseases hoping that they will miraculously find a cure on their own.

5. Leaving the gate open so that the sneaky deer get in and eat all your lovely blooming radishes and arugula that the bees were enjoying so much!

And Other Unfortunate Adventures:

-Forgetting about an acorn squash you worked so hard to grow for months, and leaving it on the dryer which then the kittens (ahem) roll behind the dryer, thinking it’s a game.

-Letting your radishes get tall and mighty, go to seed and forget the juicy roots that you could have harvested for a nip in your salad.

-Plant lettuce while it is hot and watch it bolt right before your eyes, with ne’er a taste of it’s sweet leaf.

-Plant carrots 4 times in different places around the garden only to watch the ever-present kittens dig new potties for themselves on the freshly disturbed soil.

*sigh* often I found that farming and beekeeping is one step forward and several steps back as the learning curve is steeeeep!

Tonight I harvested more garlic scapes with a passing fancy of trying to make some pesto. Also, I found a couple of black currant bushes and picked them clean, only to realize that these were the foul tasting black currant bushes that tricked me last year too into eating them right off the bush. (very sour face followed.) So I have bested them this year and am turning them into sauce.

*and then got distracted blogging, which Marc is finishing- (ahem) perfecting the sauce for me.* (what a man!)

Some days I’m a better insurance agent than a gardener or beekeeper… I think it may be about time management…

Ice Cream and black currant sauce anyone?

We’ve picked our first handful of strawberries, hot from the tardy June sun. We’ve picked our first bowl full of peas, and our first meal of scapes. This feels like bounty after not planting a proper Winter garden and buying our produce from the store for many months.

But this is not overwhelming though I feel overwhelmed by the bounty my life is giving me right now. I’m so appreciative of this moment. I can look back and how I got where I am.  I’m living on 160 acres of beautiful farmland, keeping bees, growing veggies, expecting my first child, I can look back and take credit for some of the decision-making that brought us here. But a lot of it was very good timing and a faith that everything would work out.

Moving to a Gulf Island was a fancy of mine for a while. I loved the slower pace of life here, the lean towards artistic visions, the small-island community. I was thrilled with Marc agreed to moving to Pender. (It wasn’t a hard sell.) By picking up and moving away from the city, the conveniences, we moved a step in the right direction, but it was a small step. We dreamed of growing our own food, we dreamed of a slower and simpler life. Our first year on Pender, we lived in a house that made no provisions for the frequent power outages. So when the lights were taken away, so was our heat, our means of cooking, making our little house an ice box. There was no sun there and I kept a hive of bees in the shady flowerless backyard, hoping for a better place. We and the bees  survived but we did not thrive. When we had the opportunity to caretake such a large and beautiful chunk of land, we jumped on it with one swift “YES!” We knew we would never be able to afford buying such a huge amount of land so it was like aiming for the stars and then finding one within reach, lassooing it and holding on!

Despite all of this sentimentality, things are not always perfect here, but they are pretty close. I remember a month after moving to Pender Island, I realized the cramps in my stomach were gone. These cramps from a job I hated, the stress of city life, the demand to have more stuff, to earn more, to spend more. When I was living in the city, I didn’t even notice the cramps because I thought they were part of daily life. It was a miracle to realize life without this!

I look back on some of the photos of our first couple years here and I am in awe of the beauty here, of our little lives. We’ve done a lot, yes, but we’ve been given more. I am very grateful.

I was sitting one morning, patting my growing belly, and I was thinking about the next stage of this pregnancy. When will I feel the baby kick, I have an ultrasound coming up. Then I stopped myself. I knew right then, that I needed to appreciate every fleeting moment, because it will be so soon when my child is ready for kingergarden, then high school, then graduation. This is my very first baby, at 17 weeks old. I will never be here again. So I stopped, I breathed and I sent my thanks upwards. These are incredible moments and I am here, now. Thank you.

The blackberries are starting to hold out their flowers like presents and the bees are gulping it up. They are on the blackberry bushes on the entire walk to work, just over 1 km. It’s like having friends to walk home with.

We ate our first small handful of strawberries from our own garden yesterday. Our garden is in shambles this year. The upper garden, right in front of our house, is green and growing with inadvertent things. Potatoes that we did not get out last year in time. They are over-running the celeriac, the peas, the strawberries, the spinach and the beets. We have another fragrant invasion. The oregano. What I thought were weeds, and I was pulling up with fury, then wondering why I kept thinking of spaghetti. I put it down to a weird pregnancy craving, until I realized the little fuzzy stems were babies of our oregano monster.

Our lower garden needs constant love and weeding or the horse-tail takes over. We’ve tried mulching (which helps a little) weeding, though not as often as required. And we’ve got strawberries, asparagus, beans and garlic down there. The garlic is growing tasty scapes which we harvested for dinner last night.

Scapes are the Dr Seuss looking curls atop the plant that are where the garlic makes it’s flowers. Garlic has been sterile for many years and can only make clones of itself. There is research into putting the umph! back into garlic’s genetic pool but what we’ve got right now are clones of different varieties.

If you ever see garlic scapes at a farmer’s market or in the grocery store, snatch ‘em up! They are such a treat. They can be eaten raw but they have quite the bite to them. If you toss them in olive oil and put them right on the barbecue, sear them a little on both sides, it takes the sharpness out of the taste and you get such a tasty treat. They made the perfect compliment to our kale and potatoes last night.

They are also great for freezing and putting into soup, stock or stews in the Winter.

Have you discovered any amazing foods lately? I’ve been really interested in using more beans in our diet. Does anyone have good recipes for different kinds of legumes?

And since it’s strawberry season, don’t forget to pop a few of these drops of sunshine in your mouth!