I love blogs, seriously awesome information can be found on blogs! I found a recipe for chive blossom vinegar. It goes like this: acquire vinegar (I used white wine) and fight some bees for chive blossoms. I don't mind saying I stole some from the side of a neighbors yard... come on they were infested with weeds and grass and looked like crap! I got some chive blossoms willingly from Neighbor Kara and Mom.
Next, wash chive blossoms and then get them as dry as possible (excess water will cloud the vinegar). They can be run through a salad spinner, I windmilled mine in a towel and then left them outside to dry out for about an hour.
Now stuff them in a jar and cover with acquired vinegar. I placed a plastic lid and a cup on top of the chives so they would stay under the vinegar. This jar didn't have a lid so I made a make shift one with a plastic top a cloth towel and rubber band.
In about two weeks or when you like the smell and taste of the vinegar ( I suppose you could go up to 4 weeks) strain the blossoms out through a fine mesh to get every last scrap.
The vinegar will be a vibrant pink/red color and smell of garlicky chives! I've used it on salads this spring with awesome dressing results.
I promised a long post and this one is sure going to be. Thursday of last week Jake and I drove 6 hours (round trip) to pick up some bees. We decided on 3 nuc's which are small pre-started hives for example:
A nuc (pronounced nuke) looks like this: Sometimes wood, though the ones we got were a waxed cardboard container with 5 frames of bees, brood, honey, pollen and a queen. A mini, already started, ready to go hive.
A box of bees looks like this: Roughly 3 pounds of bees and a queen. No babies, honey or any pre-started frames. (Below picture is from our bee install spring 2010)
So 3 nuc's, which means we'll now have 3 hives instead of just the one. Last year we had ordered 2 boxes of bee's but only one stayed, the other swarmed. But I digress...
The weather was lovely, much nicer than the weather we left back in Cheney. On our way we drove as close as I've ever come to commercial wind towers. Often they are quite a way's away on top of some distant hill top but instead we drove right by them.
The directions from Google were wrong but we only got lost once, and thankfully got it all figured out. The drive down was uneventful but coming back was nerve wracking. Our car has no trunk, so the girls were right there in the car with us. Trying to think ahead I brought a giant green rubermaid tub with us in which to place the nucs. Only one fit.
The others were wrapped in 2 garbage sack's and a large blanket respectively. Well of course some got out! How else would the adventure with 60,000+ bees in the back of an open car go!? Jacob spent about half of the trip with his bee jacket on. It's especially scary since I've never been stung and don't have any idea if I am allergic. Being in the middle of freaking nowhere with that many stinging creatures makes for lots of adrenaline. We only had to stop once just to adjust the blankets and tubs, and thankfully neither of us got stung.
We got home around 2:30pm jacked up and ready to get these girls out of the car. The install went smooth because it was mostly a matter of taking the frames out of the nuc and placing them into the hive.
All of the hives had a good population, we saw capped brood and lots of pollen. The only downside to buying bee's this way is the frames. The frames have a plastic foundation that dictates what size the bee's can make the cells, all our frames from last year are foundationless meaning we let the bee's draw out the comb as nature intended. We get smaller bee's but overall they are healthier.
This frame in the middle left side or upper right shows the foundation it's a yellow color. We intend to slowly faze these out, our girls go au naturel.
Our master beekeeper has a lab where he tests your bees from trachea mites to nosema, so we took samples. He needs 100 bees to test to get an average, collecting 100 writhing bees in a mason jar is no easy task. So Jim (master beekeeper) came up with the measurement, 1 inch of bees in the bottom of a mason jar roughly translates to 100 bees. So our 3 hives 100 test subjects are with Jim now and we should know something by early next week. Hopefully we'll get a clean bill of health.
We moved our bee yard to the back of the garden so that the hives will get more year round sun. It used to rest on the west side of the house which goes into shade around 2 pm. In the new location they'll get sun until roughly 6-7 pm. A considerable difference we hope helps in the long run. Jacob also redesigned and built some long Langstroth hive's, essentially all 20 frames of a traditional hive rest horizontally instead of rising vertically by stacking extra boxes on top. Similar to a top bar style hive, only with frames not just a top bar.
I went outside this afternoon and saw a major orientation flight in session. Orientation flights help the newly hatched or inside bee's figure out where there hive is in space and in relation to the sun. It's quiet impressive to watch.
See how they are all facing the hive, might need to make it bigger to tell. But regardless they are checking out the new digs. We also give our hives an address to help them locate the correct hive, so we've got "dots" and "stripes" hives. I know it doesn't look it in the picture but they face opposite directions. Dots faces east and stripes faces west. It's best if the hive faces east toward sunrise, but we didn't have the room to place them side by side.
Here's a video I took of orientation flights, it's only 40 seconds long.
I promise I'll do a bee update but with tons of pictures and videos it's a long story. However the girls are safely transported and enjoying their new digs.
Mom and I ordered a half-a-hog from Rocky Ridge Ranch. In a quest to use more of the hog than most people I asked for all the organ meat and all the fat to process into lard. I know Lard, right? Ewww! Ok, but as fat's go it is the most like our own and so easily processed by our bodies. I have been thinking about trying to get the least processed and most gas efficient fats as possible. Turning fat into lard is really easy it turns out.
I got two of these bags of fat weighing roughly 4.5 lb.
I cubed it and put the fat into a stock pot along with 1/2 c. of water. The water will evaporate and helps the fat not burn and stick to the bottom of the pot.
Left side hasn't been heated yet, the right side is about 15 minutes into melting.
Close up uncooked.
Close up 25 minutes into cooking. See how it just melts.
Almost done. The floaties are called crackles you can eat them, they are like crunchy skin and fat. At this stage they make a crackling sound, hence the name. A word of warning, don't leave the pot because it needs to be stirred frequently. I thought they tasted similar to bacon but they are really greasy (go figure). I think they might be better with some salt? But I am not desperate for fats so maybe I'll give them to the dog....
I don't have a picture of the straining process since I was by myself, but I lined a wire mesh strainer with several layers of cheese cloth and poured the whole pot through it. Then ended up with jars that looked like this.
I did have a fiasco with one jar breaking and spilling hot melted lard all over the counter and the floor, after much cursing I got it cleaned up. Ugh!
After about 4-5 hours of cooling it looks like this.
One of the pots I under cooked so the the crackles were a very light brown. The other I cooked until the crackles were a golden brown. The two different pots yielded different smelling lard. The undercooked crackles smells cleaner less like bacon and just like fat or butter. The other smells of bacon or meat maybe, in any case it has a smell. The bacon one I'll use for cooking everyday things, the clean smelling one I'll use in pie's and such (not that I make many pies, but still).
From the one bag of 4.5 lbs of fat I got roughly 3.5 pints of lard. I left expansion space because I wasn't sure if it needed it ( better to be safe than sorry) then I stuck them in the freezer. It should keep for a year+ in there.
I also intend to use the lard for soap making if I can get access to more of it.
Our little band of stragglers may get some sisters and a new monarch. I've found a comercial beekeeper who still has some nuc's left (nuc = bees, queen, and 5 frames of brood/honey, not a box of bee's like last time). However, he is outside of Walla Walla which is around a 3 hour drive one way for us. But. Worth. It.
We're thinking of expanding to 3 hives (provided he has that many), one on this farm and the other 2 on some friends property, just outside of Cheney. Our scheduled pickup date is next Thursday the 9th. I won't believe it or start celebrating until those girls are in the car!
Not entirely but they are as good as dead. This weekend was the first time we had nice enough weather to do a hive check. Upon opening the hive it was clear we had a problem, not many bees. When we installed our hive package it's roughly 3 lb. of bees or the size of a women's basket ball, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 bee's. Now only about an orange/grapefruit size cluster remained, in numbers of maybe 800-1,000.
Our queen is dead. If we had known she was dead sooner we could have replaced her. But with so few bees in the hive they wouldn't live long enough for the next hatching if we did decide to get a new queen. At this point all we can do is watch the girls keep working while their numbers dwindle to nothing. We're not sure when the monarch died but obviously it was sudden and the girls didn't have time to make a replacement. Had we known back in April we could have prevented this, but the weather was to cold, wet or windy to open up and take a look.
The time to order a package of bees is February- mid-March. Package bee's are delivered April 18th roughly. No bee's for us this year.
Unless we can get a swarm which we are hopeful for, we put an ad on Craig*sList and with luck someone will call.
