Our neighbor's bees have been busy stealing honey from our two hive boxes, so we decided it's time to build a 5 gallon bucket honey strainer.

The food grade buckets are more expensive, but worth it for a project like this.

Stay tuned for a full report on how this method works for straining out the wax.

So what does Michael Bush's apiary look like?  In some ways it's quite traditional --- he mostly uses Langstroth hives and equipment from mainstream beekeeping companies.  However, he has made a few changes:

• His boxes are all 8 frame mediums.  Since the frames are all the same size, he can move honey and brood around if necessary and can allow an unlimited brood nest.  In addition, the smaller boxes are about half the weight of a 10 frame deep, which makes his life much easier.  The only downside is cost --- getting started requires nearly twice as much capital with Bush's method.
• He uses foundationless frames.  As I've said over and over, foundationless frames help reduce varroa mite problems.  In addition, you don't have the cost of buying foundation, the time drain of installing it, and the problematic chemicals that get carried into your hive from someone else's.  Although we had a collapse after extracting honey from deep foundationless frames, you won't have problems if you stick to mediums or if you cut and crush.
• He uses top entrances only.  Bush has plugged up his bottom entrances so that his bees go in and out entrances in the top of the hive.  Top entrances means he doesn't need to worry about mowing around hives or about snow covering the entrance in the winter.  Mice are much less prone to sneak in a top entrance, and he sees fewer problems from skunks and other pests too.  Finally, top entrances provide good ventilation and, when combined with a layer of styrofoam on top of the hive, lead to little winter condensation.
  
• He doesn't treat hives.  Except in rare cases, Bush doesn't add any chemicals to the hive.  Even "organic" treatments like thymol aren't generally on his agenda since these chemicals will kill beneficial microorganisms in the hive.
  
• He breeds locally adapted queens.  Rather than buying new queens, Bush raises his own.  But even with these queens on hand, he doesn't requeen a hive unless absolutely necessary --- for example, if the hive is failing while others are thriving, or if the bees turn mean.  Generally, his queens live to be about three years old and then are naturally replaced by supersedure.
  
• He feeds only honey (usually.)  In general, Bush tries to ensure that his bees have enough of their own honey to make it through the winter.  If he has to feed, he usually feeds honey, but will sometimes feed dry sugar in a pinch.
  
• He doesn't scrape anything out of the hive.  Bush believes that the burr comb that is sometimes built between boxes is good because it lets you check for mites on drone pupae as you pull it apart, and the intact burr comb gives bees a ladder to climb from box to box.  He doesn't cut out swarm cells, instead doing his best to prevent swarms naturally, then splitting hives to raise new queens if he misses the boat and swarm cells do materialize.  He also doesn't scrape off propolis, since he believes this processed bee sap kills pathogenic bacteria and viruses in the hive.

Michael Bush's goal is two-pronged --- he wants to raise bees that don't need chemicals to stay alive, and he wants his apiary to be as little work as possible.  Those sound like laudable permaculture ambitions to me.

One of the best things about leaves as mulch is that they're totally free.  If you live in town and pay attention, you can probably snag bags of leaves off the curb on trash day during the fall.  But if you're a rural dweller like me, you'll want to head into the woods to find your mulch.

One of the primary purposes of mulch in the garden is to prevent weeds from growing, so it's essential that you rake leaves from weed-free areas.  Mature forests (or yard trees over manicured lawns) are your best bet --- our younger forest areas are home to the invasive Japanese stilt grass, which I don't want to introduce into my garden.

Look for dips in the landscape and areas without a lot of understory growth for easiest leaf harvests.  The old logging road shown here tends to accumulate leaves drifting down the hill, making it easy for me to scoop them up.

If you're able to drive right to your leaf-gathering location, you'll probably choose to use a leaf rake and some sort of bin to gather leaves.  But if you're walking off the beaten path, I've found it easiest to simply scoop leaves with my hands into large duffel bags, compacting the leaves frequently so you get the most leaves per trip.  To save your back, gather leaves during dry weather.  (Wet leaves are heavy.)









The partially decomposed duff beneath this year's leaves might be worth harvesting too, as long as you don't mind creating a slight erosion potential in the spot where you stole the leaves.  Duff is heavier than undecomposed leaves, which means it's less likely to blow away in the garden, and it is often full of beneficial mycorrhizae which will boost the growth of your garden plants.  However, if you delve into the duff, try to pay attention and don't harm the critters living there --- I moved this tiny salamander to the side with a handful of humus and covered him back over so he wouldn't dry out.

More in a later post about the best ways to use leaf mulch in the garden.  Meanwhile, what tips would you add about leaf harvest?

I forget where I read about running a chainsaw with the bar upside down.

The logic is that the bar will wear more evenly if you flip it every so often.

My system is to make the swap each time I install a new or machine sharpened chain.

PJ Chandler argued that the Langstroth hive is the root of many of the problems currently facing beekeepers.  Michael Bush agrees that honeybees are in trouble, but instead traces the ills to:

• Raising sickly bees.  Bush argues that the modern methods of pouring chemicals into the hive to keep pests at bay ends up selecting for resistant super-pests...and for wimpy bees that wouldn't be able to survive without chemicals.  In addition, since most honeybees now come from only a few beekeeping companies, we've restricted the gene pool so much that we're raising only a few inbred strains of bees, none or few of which have the ability to live in a chemical-free hive.  These bees have also been bred to use less propolis, which might make it easier for the beekeeper to pry the hive apart, but also makes allows viruses to thrive among the bees.
  
• Using foundation that makes bees sick.  I've written before that using foundation in your hive makes your bees create larger celled comb than they naturally would, which helps out varroa mites.  But did you know that the foundation you put in your hive is processed beeswax from someone else's hive...who almost certainly treated with lots of chemicals?  The wax is impregnated with pesticides, which causes drones raised on that foundation to be less fertile and queens who mate with those drones to fail nine times faster than a healthy queen would.
• Upsetting the natural ecology of the hive.  A healthy hive isn't just a couple of thousand bees; it also includes beneficial fungi, bacteria, yeasts, mites, and insects.  It's helpful to think of a bee hive as a bit like our stomachs --- the beneficial critters help "digest" (ferment) pollen while keeping the hive from getting sick by crowding out pathogens.  Using chemicals in the hive is like taking antibiotics every day --- you kill the good microorganisms along with the bad, so the system doesn't work as well.  In addition, feeding sugar water (pH 6.0) instead of leaving bees enough honey (pH 3.2 to 4.5) creates an enironment that helps the pathogens thrive.
  

Michael Bush's solutions --- while they can be hard to implement --- are very simple.  He says we have to stop using chemicals in our hives, even if that means many of our colonies die and only the strong remain.  Deleting foundation allows bees to build clean wax at a natural cell size.  And we must make sure that our bees always have enough honey rather than stealing too much and then feeding sugar water.  More on the specifics of his beekeeping method in tomorrow's post.

My kitchen forest garden island gets all the love while the peach tree just one year younger is out of sight and out of mind.  No wonder my favorite peach's younger sister has a canopy spread barely half the width of my darling kitchen peach.

I decided to begin to remedy matters by expanding the little sister's raised bed.  I wheelbarrowed some partially decomposed weeds from the compost pile in the chicken pasture to line one of the bed's edges, then added another wheelbarrow load of deep bedding, lightly sprinkled atop the soil all around.

Meanwhile, I ripped up the mushroom rafts (which I wasn't very pleased with) and rearranged the aging logs in a big square around the peach.  A friend and I weeded the areas that were mulched last year, then I laid down a newspaper kill mulch atop the parts of the square that were lawn.  (I would have preferred corrugated cardboard to newspaper, but you have to use what you've got.  Mom kindly saved all of these newspapers to be firestarters, and I never ended up burning them since I had too much junk mail.)

Finally, I topped it all off with leaves and promised little sister peach to pay more attention to her needs.  With fruit trees, you don't really see the full results of your actions until two seasons later, so I'll be waiting for baskets of peaches in the summer of 2013.

It's been almost a year since I used some scrap cardboard to block the wind in the used pallet chicken coop.

There's no direct sun, and the roof keeps it dry.

I'd say it's holding up pretty good. I can notice some slight fading, but it seems to have years left in it as an effective barrier.

The Practical Beekeeper: Beekeeping Naturally by Michael Bush is the epitome of a self-published book.  (Yes, I do include my 99 cent ebooks in this category.)  The text is chock full of very good information that you can't find anywhere else, but is definitely a bit rough around the edges.

First of all, the author is up front about the fact that the majority of the information can be found for free on his website.  I've spent years dipping into his informative website and was quite willing to pay a bit of money to have that information distilled into a more linear format.

Unfortunately, I felt like he didn't distill all that much.  There's no index, and the book is divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced sections, each of which covers most of the same topics in different degrees of depth.  So, to find out what Bush thinks about strains of bees, I had to read the entire table of contents and then flip through three different sections of the book.  I even noticed a few paragraphs that were included, verbatim, in multiple sections.

Meanwhile, the book is hardcover and large print, which means it's hefty and sells for the scary price of $49.  In retrospect, I might have been better off with the ebook ($29 on his website) since the photos are black and white and only moderate quality (meaning they wouldn't lose anything by being viewed in eink.)

Whichever format you choose, though, I highly recommend The Practical Beekeeper to any intermediate beekeeper who's struggling to navigate the maze of creating a chemical-free apiary.  The book appears daunting, but is actually an easy read and will definitely open your eyes to concepts you'd never considered.

The first crocuses opened on February 3 this year, and the Wood Frogs hit full chorus on February 5.  Meanwhile, the human chorus of "this is a crazy winter" just gets louder and louder.

However, take a look at the graph at the top of this page, showing average February temperatures at our closest major weather station for the last 64 years.  (We're actually a zone colder than them, but the trends are mostly the same here.)  Isn't it interesting to see that January 2012 is only the 13th warmest year during that time period?

This post is in no way related to global climate change, in case you're curious.  No single data point (and no comparison to the past 64 years) proves anything in that respect.  My thesis is --- our weather is always erratic, so enjoy the crocuses when they come!  I transplanted some of our little beauties into our forest garden island so I can watch them out the kitchen window.  I suspect no one else gets so much mileage from a few little bulbs.

Back in December of 2009 I posted about having some trouble with one of the golf cart lug nuts.

The hardware store didn't have counter sunk nuts, so I got some regular nuts and added a set of washers.



Turns out it was a mistake to take this short cut. Our mechanic fixed the problem with proper lug nuts on our last visit and kindly advised me to not do such a thing again.

It's hard to be sure, but the lug nut situation may have contributed to the bearing going bad.