Sweet Corn is About to Come in

A short while back I explained how some recent rain and winds had knocked down some sweet corn.  That's not a good thing when the corn is about to tassel.  If the pollen doesn't fall on the silk, you'll have "blank heads."  I made a redneck sweet corn propper-upper with t-posts and baling twine and the effort was met with success.  The corn is standing tall once again in our two-row corn plot.

Let's look at a couple of zoomed in photos of the sweet corn tassel.  Although you'd never know it, the tassel is the male reproductive organ.  It produces pollen.

If I had zoomed in on the following two photos, you'd be able to see the yellow pollen.

As the wind blows, the pollen drifts in the air, falling (hopefully) on the silk sticking out of the ears.  Each one of those silk threads shown below, goes into the corn cob and where it's attached to the cob, a kernel of corn will come to be.  Pollination done by the wind uses gravity too, and that's why it was critical that I stood the corn upright before corn tasseled.  If you ever shucked an ear of corn and the ear had a bunch of gaps in it, you didn't get good pollination.  It's another reason it is a good idea to plant your corn in blocks and planted close together.  We're not going to count our chickens before they hatch, but it looks pretty good so far.

A pretty redhead

I will be watching the silk.  Once it turns brown, the sweet corn is ready to harvest.  In a few days we'll be able to see if the sweet corn is healthy.  Fresh sweet corn lives up to its name.  So sweet.  So delicious!

Making Splits

We've never done this before on our own.  As relatively new beekeepers we've made our share of mistakes, and we're certain to make more.  We decided to make our own 'walk-away splits' this spring.  A split is where you take a colony of bees, split it, and make two colonies of bees.  It's like compound interest.

Of our four hives we had at the end of last year, we have two left.  One was lost due to wax moths.  The second is a mystery.  Perhaps the queen died?  Perhaps they were a little weak and the cold weather did them in?  Whatever happened, we are told it is a common occurrence.  "If you want a beehive, get two," they say.  Some people lose all their hives, but they catch more swarms and resume.  

Tricia and I put on our suits and unstacked one of the hives we lost.  Here she is cleaning the bottom board.  She'll put that back down as it will serve as the base for one of our splits.

The two remaining hives appeared to be very healthy, and that is a must in order to make splits.  You'll note that we have two deeps with a queen excluder and then medium supers on top.  To make a walkaway split, you simply move one of the deeps and put on top of a bottom board and you're done.  But there's a few things you need to check before doing that.

Despite not feeding our bees, they have plenty of stores of honey in the supers.  This is money in the bank.  Spring has arrived and the bees are bringing in nectar and pollen and will have lots of honey to spare when we pull honey in the summertime!

Capped honey in the supers

Then we got down into the deep boxes.  We used our smoker to calm the bees.  One hive is naturally calm.  The other hive is aggressive and get up in your face.  The first thing you want to see is drones or at least capped drone cells.  The drones are the males and you need males so that when a new queen is made, there will be drones in the area (from your colonies or another) for the virgin queen to mate with.  We went through the boxes and found capped drones.  Good news.  The drone cells are laid on the bottom as their cells are larger and don't fit in the regular foundation.

Now we look for the queen.  In the frame below we found eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  All letting us know that we have a laying queen somewhere.  We flipped the frame over and found her!  Her tail is longer than the others.  She's a little difficult to see, but once you get the hang of it, she kind of stands out.  Good.  So that box with the queen gets moved to a new location.  This is done to fool her into thinking she's swarmed.  That's what we're told, so we did it.

Nurse bees and eggs

The other box must be gone through frame by frame.  The boxes must have at least 3 or 4 frames of eggs and brood and these are positioned in the middle, and then several frames of honey and pollen and drawn comb on the outside.  As long as you have this in both boxes, you should be good.    The box with the queen will continue going as normal (but with half the bees).  Not to worry.  She's laying eggs like crazy and the hive will grow exponentially in size.

The box with no queen...  Well, what happens next is simply amazing.  The bees in the queen-less box will realize there is no queen in about 5 hours.  They will begin to feed royal jelly from a gland in their heads to some larvae and these will make queen cells.  In about 16 days a queen will emerge.  She will get her wits about her and will make her maiden breeding flight where she will fly up to the drone zone and get bred.  She'll return to the hive and begin to lay.

So in the photo below, you'll see that we made two splits.  The bricks on top of the hives denote what's in them.  The bricks laying long-ways (the first and third hives) have a laying queen.  The hives where the bricks are laying cross-ways (the second and fourth hives) have no queen.  We will check both of those boxes in about 3 1/2 weeks to a month.  What we're looking for is eggs.  If we find eggs, we will know that the split was successful.  

You can buy a queen cell and speed up this process, but we opted to let the hive do it themselves.  You lose a little time, but that's okay with us.  Now, we wait...

What happens if the split didn't work?  Well, we'll be disappointed, but we'll stack the boxes on top of the existing healthy hives and we will try to make another split OR we'll try to catch wild swarms in the yard.  We actually got called to go get a swarm in someone's yard last Saturday, but we had company over.  When the company left, we put on our suits and started to go, but the swarm had left!  Oh well.  We'll keep you posted with our first attempt of making splits.

Brenda - The One that Got Away

The camellias are still blooming, and they are quite gorgeous.  The color looks like something that is fake, but it's real, I promise you.  The honeybees are working the camellias quite hard as there's not much else blooming.  I think they are using them as a pollen source.  Bees gather it to make bee bread.  Bee bread is a mixture of pollen, nectar, honey, and bee saliva.  The workers feed this to the honeybee larva.  I took some photos of the bees collecting pollen from the camellias.  I'll share those photos and also share a funny story from the Bayou Bee Keeper's Meeting tonight.

A worker bee doing her thing...

Our bee club meeting meets the second Thursday night of each month in a small cafe in town.  There are usually about 25 to 30 people in attendance.  We eat from 6 until 7pm while visiting with one another, and then we rise for the Pledge of Allegiance and Prayer and then the meeting is called to order.  The president of the club mentions things we need to be doing in our hives, sometimes there is a special speaker, there is a 'show and tell' time where people bring things they've made or helpful hints for beekeepers.  Sometimes they bring samples of honey, creamed honey, candles made from beeswax, and even mead.  The floor is opened for questions, and this is where it gets interesting because beekeepers are a strange breed, an eclectic bunch of somewhat eccentric people!

She's on the anther (part of the stamen that has the pollen)

Tonight a newcomer to our club raised his hand and had a story to share.  He last told us that he has violent reactions to bee stings and his throat closes up.  He got stung, called 911 and was driving to the hospital and had to pull over for the ambulance to rescue him as he couldn't breathe.  We told him that beekeeping might be a dangerous hobby for him!

Tonight's story was better.  He told us that he was catching a swarm of bees and caught the queen in the air mid-flight with his hands.  She got away and then he caught her again.  He gently placed her in a nuc and about 100 or so of her workers joined her in the nuc.  But it is cold outside, and he didn't want his new queen and her swarm to freeze.

Can you see the pollen she's collecting in her 'pollen basket' on her hind legs?

So he brought the nuc inside his house.  He thought that it was sealed.  Alas, it was not.  He came home and found that the queen and her little colony had escaped.  They were all over his house.  He caught the queen again.  He told us that this queen was so special to him, so he named her.  He used honey on a spatula to catch (again) all of her worker bees and put them back in the nuc and this time, he put them in a trailer out of his house that had a heater in it, but was ventilated.  He did not want his precious queen to die.

I raised my hand and interrupted his story.  I had to know something.  What did he name his queen?  He told us he named her Brenda.  He once knew a girl named Brenda and she had gotten away from him - twice.  The club erupted in laughter!!  So once he got Brenda and her workers in the nuc, they got really cold.  He checked in on them and saw Brenda laying on the bottom of the nuc and thought she had died.

She's using her mandibles and forelegs to place pollen in the pollen basket

He told us that he spent 6 hours constructing an elaborate bee coffin to bury her in.  He passed around photos on his phone.  People's eyes were as big around as silver dollars!  Well, he said he was about to place her in the coffin for interment, when she rose from the dead.  This story had achieved more than we had bargained for.  People were making sure he didn't put them back in his house.  Others were wondering if he sleeps in his bee suit just to be safe.  The president of the club tried to refocus the members on agenda items before adjournment.

Door prizes were announced a distributed.  I won a pretty neat item, but it wasn't nearly as nice as Brenda's hand-crafted queen coffin, that will go unused - at least for the moment.  He vowed not to let Brenda get away again!

About Time for Corn!

I have a row of corn that's planted densely.  I planted them twice as close as recommended.  The reason I did that was an experiment of sorts.  In some past years, when I would harvest the corn, there would be "blanks" in the kernels.  The somewhat empty heads were caused by poor pollination.  To try to mitigate that, I planted them very close, hoping that with more pollen in a smaller area, there would be a better likelihood of fertilization.  We'll see.  

There are two varieties of sweet corn planted on the 15 foot row.  One is Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn and the other, I think (I neglected to write it down), was Country Gentleman Corn.  As you can see, the corn is tasseling.

The corn tassel is the male reproductive organ of the corn.  You might remember this lesson from the movie, "Grease."  The pollen dangles from the tassel and the pollen falls down onto the silk of the ear.

Here is the silk.  When the pollen falls on the silk, the ear is fertilized.  Each strand of silk will produce a kernel of corn, if fertilized.  What you have to worry about is sometimes the corn will tassel before the silk is present.  Sometimes wind or weather affects pollination.  Some people, in order to ensure pollination, will cut the tassel off with scissors and will manually pollinate the ear, by rubbing the two together.   My garden is small enough to do that, but I figure the corn can do that on its own without me intervening.

Here are the tassels of another variety:

The silk on this variety is RED!

I wanted to show you something a little strange I saw in the corn patch.  Can you see the kernels of corn growing on the tassel itself?:

The phenomenon where the tassel and ear is on the same structure is called "tassel ear corn".  There are several reasons this happens: it can happen on the suckers when the growing point is damaged, or where there is low plant density (we know it's not this), or where the soil is compacted or too wet.

We will be watching for the tassels to turn brown.  At that point we will harvest and do our normal celebratory tradition of shucking and eating the first corn raw, standing in the corn row.

The Buzz This Spring

It is still chilly at night.  We have a fire burning in our fireplace most every night to keep us warm and cozy.  However, spring is right around the corner.  There are telltale signs everywhere.  The first is our column of bees.  As soon as the sun comes out and it warms up just a tad, the honeybees become very active.  They exit the column and fly off to find flowers.  They return with a large yellow bag on their back legs.  The bag is full of pollen that has a bit of nectar to make it sticky.

Normally the bees leave during the hot summer.  It must get really hot with all of them packed into the hollow fiberglass column.  This year, however, they stayed all year.  We enjoy having them here to provide pollination in the garden and for our fruit trees.

The blueberries are blooming like crazy right now.  Looking forward to another big year of blueberry production.  I do notice that one of our bushes looks like it might have died, though.  If so, we'll need to replace it.

But the blueberries aren't the only things blooming.  The navel oranges are, too!  This past fall we got ZERO oranges.  The very hard freeze that we got last March knocked the citrus back.  It killed some trees.  What trees didn't die were severely injured.  No blooms and no fruit last year.  This year the navels are blooming.  However, the tangerines and grapefruit have no bloomed yet.  We'll see what happens this year.

A beautiful day gave us the opportunity to go to the church and do a little weed-eating around the flower beds.  We recently did some work there and spread some fresh dirt that apparently had rye grass seed in it.  The rye grass is tall and green.  We raked up all the grass and put it in tubs and dumped it over the fence for the cows to eat.  Boy, were they happy!

I stood by the navel orange tree and marveled at the cows' ability to devour all of the grass we brought them.  They are eating machines.  While I watched, I noticed the honeybees had located the blooms on the orange tree.  The bee was busy as... a bee.

Ten feet to the south and east another bee was busy gathering pollen from the flowers of a gigantic turnip that we are allowing to go to seed.

Spring is on the way, and we can't wait to get in the garden and start planting all of the spring crops!

Getting Wild Honey from the Honeycomb

A beekeeper friend of ours gave us some honeycomb from some wild bees that he found in the woods.  We cut pieces off of it and used it to sweeten our coffee, but the wax made a real mess in the coffee cups which was hard to clean.  So we decided to go ahead and extract the remaining honey from the comb.  Bees cap the cells of the comb with beeswax.  To extract the honey, you have to uncap it.  Professional beekeepers use a hot knife to uncap it and then they have an extractor that uses centrifugal force to spin the honey out.  Of course we don't have any of that.

We just used a knife to cut through the beeswax-sealed honeycomb, exposing the honey.  You can see the sealed cells at the very bottom of the photo below and the cut open cells on top.

Capped and Uncapped honeycomb

On the left hand side of the picture below, you can see a cell that is bright yellow in color.  That's pollen!  Bees go out and collect pollen from male flowers.  They collect the pollen in pollen baskets on their back legs.  Maybe you've seen bees with large yellow "bags" on their back legs?  Anyway, they carry it back to the hive.  It will be used as food for the baby bees.  Pollen is high in protein. Bees will store this pollen in an empty cell that is used as a pantry for storing their food.

A cell filled with pollen

Since I don't have fancy beekeeping equipment, I tried to remove the honey the best way I could.  I just cut up the honeycomb to uncap it, put it in a colander that sat over a pot that sat over a skillet of hot water.  I used a potato masher to coax the honey out.

Mashed up honeycomb

You can see lots of pollen once the honeycomb is mashed. 

I lifted up the colander to see if we were getting any honey and... we were!  I left it overnight to drip.

American Honey

The next morning I used a rubber spatula to scrape all the honey off of the pot and into a half pint jar.

Now we didn't get much honey, but we only had a few pieces of the honeycomb.  It was still neat to actually see what getting the honey out of the honeycomb was all about.

A little bit of honey

And even though it was just a little bit of honey, we will use it to sweeten our coffee... without the mess that we experienced earlier when we put the whole chunk of honeycomb in the coffee cup.

The bees are back

Back in an earlier blog post from May: The Swarm I showed you how a colony of bees had inhabited a column by our side door.  We thought it was kind of neat and interesting and we learned a lot about bees just by watching them.  We had to warn neighbors coming to visit about the swarming bees, though.  A swarm of bees by your side door isn't exactly welcoming or hospitable, so when our colony moved away and left, we weren't sad to see them go.

A beekeeping friend of mine told me that I needed to pull the column down and clean the wax and honeycomb out as it would attract another swarm of bees.  I did not put it high on my priority list and wouldn't you know it, they're baaaa-aaack.  Five months later another swarm has moved in.  They are going to the exact same spot.  As you can see they fly to the top of the column and climb into the crack at the top and go into the hollow column where they have built their home.

Bee careful if you come visit us!

They aren't overly aggressive up to this point.  I can walk right up to them and you can hear them buzzing from within the column.  It is really loud and kind of a scary thing.

Home Sweet Home

Each morning we walk out to a multitude of dead bees on the sidewalk beneath the column.  Bees have a 'funeral staff' that are constantly pushing dead bees out of the hive.  With a queen laying 1,000 to 3,000 eggs a day and a bee's lifespan only lasting 6 weeks, there are always dead bees.  Lots of them.  Tricia has been sweeping them into the flowerbed.

Dead Honey bees

At night bees are supposed to slow down, but our bees have been busy as... well, bees.  Can you see them all around the light?

One good thing about having the bees back is their assistance in pollinating things in the garden.  Check out the honeybee in the picture below flying from right to left in the center of the picture.  If you look closely, you can see one of his pollen sacs absolutely full of pollen.

Pollinating the flowering basil

How long they'll stay this time is anybody's guess.  I just wish there was a way to rob the honey that they are making.

From "Scaries" to Berries...

Cough, cough...  AAAACHHOOO!  Excuse me.  Springtime is beautiful.  Cough, cough.  But the pollen in the air gives me fits.  It seems like there is a blanket of pollen on everything.  Take a look at the hood of Russ' truck.  It is actually a red truck underneath the yellow coating of live oak pollen.


Russ' yellow pickup truck

Okay, enough complaining.  Cough, cough.  Speaking of pollen, as I walk up to the side entrance of our house, I see that our visitors are back this year.  If you look closely in the next two photographs, you can see that a swarm of honeybees for the second year in a row, have made their home in one of the columns that supports the roof over our side door.  This is the door most people use to enter our house.  They fly up to the top of the column and with legs filled with pollen, climb into the space between the top of the column and the roof.  Their hive is inside the column, with a large honeycomb that I have no way to get to.

My beekeeping friend says I should cut a hole in the column and rob the honey, but a big hole in the column is not aesthetically appealing, now is it?  I think for now, I'll leave them alone.  They haven't bothered anybody and we just sort of ignore them.  As long as they don't sting us, they are beneficial as they will pollinate our garden and fruit trees.  That's a plus, right?  Also, I look at having a bee hive at my back door as somewhat of a discouragement to salesmen, census takers, etc.  If only I could train the bees to be discriminating.  I don't want them to chase off our friends and family:)


Our "Watch Bees"

Here are a couple in flight with one honeybee coming out and one going in as well.  Yes, I need to pressure wash the house and repaint the columns.  It is on my list, I promise. 

Not Killer Bees

Along with "friendly" animals in the insect kingdom, we have some "not so friendly" ones as well.  On the gate that leads to our pasture, I captured a shot of a caterpillar that most people in Louisiana call an asp.  They fall out of the live oak trees and usually on your neck.  They are supposed to sting you, although I've never left one on me long enough to find out. 

When I "googled" it using the name asp, I get a lot of things, but not a picture of the caterpillar in the photo below.  Actually, according to a caterpillar identification website I found, this thing turns into something called a tussock moth and will sting you and leave you with a painful rash.  Okay, I'll steer clear or squash them.  They're not beneficial to the extent that our friendly bees are.


Tussock Moth Caterpillar waiting to sting me on the gate to the pasture

Let's close with some good stuff.  Russ, Benjamin, and I went to check on the progress of the dewberries growing in the ditch on the property by our mailbox.  Bingo!  They're ripe.  Go get the bucket, boys!  In a previous post: http://ourmakersacresfamilyfarm.blogspot.com/2013/02/making-homemade-dewberry-jelly.html we showed you how we make homemade dewberry jelly with these berries that grow wild and run along ditches and fence rows.


Ripe Dewberries!

Houston, we have a problem.  The dewberry crop was not as plentiful since the farmer plowed the land last year.  He hadn't plowed in several years and by plowing, I think it killed a lot of our dewberries.  We'll have to see if we can get together with my family and go to the farm in Oberlin and pick blackberries to supplement.

Here's all we got after picking for about 15 minutes:


Slim Pickins'

Maybe another issue affecting the low yield of berries was the fact that Benjamin didn't put a single berry into the bucket.  They all went into his mouth!  They're meant to be enjoyed.  What a blessing - a crop you don't have to plant or care for.