Awww, they're so cute!

My friend Drew and I built the hives.  They are Langstroth hives, basically just boxes built to specific dimensions.  They were easy and fun to make.

Abra...

cadabra!

The frames have to be assembled, too, and foundation helps the bees get started building comb where you want it.

I chose to mow a place fairly far away from the house, mostly to keep them out of the pool. TRACTOR!

Getting the bees was easy.  I just ordered them from a beekeeper who lives in Springfield (right in town) and apparently sells package bees every year.  They come in a package with a queen and three pounds of workers.  I got two packages.

Moving the packages into the hives I built went just as smoothly as I’d hoped.  Basically you just take the lid off the shipping box and find the queen.  She will be in a little cage with a candy seal at the end.  Put her in the hive.  Then gently shake and pour the bees into the hive.  They will pour out like granola.  You can gently spray them with water to keep them from flying much if you want.  I did this but I’m not sure how much difference it made.  It seemed like the bees were pretty content to let me dump them into the hive.  I’ve heard that when they are being moved, they are extremely docile because they do not have a home to defend.

Since they are new to the area and not yet established, they need to be fed sugar and water in a 1:1 mixture.  That’s what the little jars are for.

The glove kind of got in the way of taking nice pictures

Speaking of the glove, the protective clothing consisted of a veil and a pair of long gloves that came up nearly to my shoulders.  I would say that the equipment is more for the beekeeper’s peace of mind than for protection from a zillion stings.  I did get stung once, right on the tummy, but that’s because I forgot to tuck my shirt in and one of the little ladies got up there and probably got scared.  The sting was surprisingly weak; I wasn’t even sure I’d been stung until I raised my shirt and saw the stinger sticking out.  It itched for a couple of minutes, then promptly went away without leaving a mark.

I’m excited about this new hobby.  If it goes well, I could see expanding my hive count in future years.  I do love me some honey.

Looking good, ladies

The cooler is a Bee's Only watering hole

I picked up the rocks sized from softball to medicine ball.

It turns out that I don’t have any dirt, just a fine sprinkling of dust over a nearly-solid layer of rock.  I knew this was the case when I found a pine tree out in the woods that I wanted to transplant to my yard.  When I tried to dig it up, the shovel would never penetrate more than about an inch before it stopped against rock.  I tried a lot of places and could never make any more progress than that.  So I gave up on the tree.

The garden, though, wouldn’t be so hard to break up because — tractor! So I plowed what I thought was an appropriately-sized chunk, then gathered up the hugest rocks and left the rest.  I was able to fill the trailer up in two mornings of rock-picking.

The tractor was also handy for unloading the rocks. Tractors are handy for everything.

After that, I planted the usual things: potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, couple different kinds of onions.  I guess pretty soon it will be time to plant the melons, cucumbers, and all the rest of the seeds that I bought.

This is not the most informative blog post, because I really don’t know what I’m doing.  I feel like a single mom trying to teach my son the basics of football.  “Catch the ball!  Wait, aren’t balls supposed to be round?  Let’s call this an ‘oblong.’  Catch the oblong, son!  Run!  You are so fast, mommy can’t catch you.  Yes, you are supposed to give the quarterback a hug.  You are going to do great.”

As an added bonus, if I ever find myself in need of several Mexican day laborers, then giving them a ride in this thing should make them feel right at home.

When I got in the truck to drive it home, I turned on the radio and the first thing that came out was some cowboy singing “oh, I’m just an old lump of coal.”  So this truck is the lump of coal.

click me and I get BIGGER

]]> http://www.davidbarwick.com/old-lump-of-coal/feed/ 0 http://www.davidbarwick.com/walnuts-part-2/ http://www.davidbarwick.com/walnuts-part-2/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:20:07 +0000 David Barwick http://www.davidbarwick.com/?p=733

After six weeks of curing, these were my walnuts. It was no surprise that curing them was by far the easiest step in the process.

Cracking the walnuts wasn’t exactly difficult, just tedious.  Black walnuts are notoriously hard and will break regular nut crackers.  Therefore, I needed a special nut cracker — a hammer and anvil.

It’s messy and takes a long time, but it’s not a bad way to spend a morning with a cup of coffee and a pipe.  I wound up having to put on a pair of safety glasses.  These things can really fly apart when they finally break.  There actually is a technique to breaking them properly.  You hit the nut pretty hard several times all the way around, then settle on the fat side and hit it harder until it cracks.  That yields some pretty large chunks.  If you do it wrong, you end up with this:

As you can see, really difficult to remove.  Breaking the shell further from this point usually results in mostly crushed pieces of nut meat.

After three hours, this is what I had.  I really like black walnuts, but about half of the nuts I cracked were spoiled from over-curing.  Shoulda cracked ‘em after five weeks, I guess.  I’m going to pitch the rest and give it a better try next year.  For a learning experience, I’m happy enough with the way it turned out.

This thing is FUN, and useful too!  Of course, few good things come without a price.  I sold my bike, which hadn’t seen much use since I moved way out here in the woods.

The Beast graces the driveway of my parents' house

Click the picture to bask in the glory

Farewell, my little black friend.  Thank you for making way for the Great Pumpkin.

]]> http://www.davidbarwick.com/hello-goodbye/feed/ 0 http://www.davidbarwick.com/walnuts/ http://www.davidbarwick.com/walnuts/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:18:23 +0000 David Barwick http://www.davidbarwick.com/?p=693 Ever since I bought my new house I’ve had so much fun stuff to occupy my time that I haven’t felt like blogging.  But now the days are getting shorter and I feel like blogging again.  So here’s what I did today!

My house has 45 walnut trees in or directly around my yard.  It’s a big yard.  I didn’t gather walnuts to sell this year, but I did gather some to keep.

This is what 800 walnuts look like.

Considering that this was maybe one quarter the production of one of my smallest trees…. yeah, I got nuts.  It took less than an hour to pick up this many nuts, and that was even being picky about getting only the best ones.

Next I had to hull them.  I dumped them onto my driveway and rolled them underfoot until they came out, then kicked the nut into one pile and the hull into another.  This was a surprisingly fatiguing chore, and I wound up doing only about 300 before I quit.  This part took two hours.

Very messy.

Next you have to clean the walnuts.  This could have taken forever.  I cleaned them with a wire brush and water.  You put them in a bucket and if they float, they’re bad.  The first two I did I cleaned really well, tossed them in the bucket, and — they floated.  After that I didn’t clean them as much.

This water is still healthier than Mountain Dew.

Next you lay them out to dry in the sun (and wind, today) for a couple of hours.

You can click these pictures for larger versions, but in this case I'm not sure why you'd want to.

After they dried, I put them in the barn to cure.  You can eat them now, but they will be rubbery and kinda gross.  In about four weeks’ time they will firm up and get the flavor they’re supposed to have — at least I hope so.  This was more work than I envisioned, so it had better be worth it.  Right now the other 500 walnuts I gathered are still in those bags, and I probably won’t bother to hull and clean them unless I learn about a quicker method for doing so.

Of course, walnut juice stains everything it touches.  I didn’t really care about it staining my fingers, and it shows.

Walnut fingers.

Aaah, yes…. getting hungry.

Eventually, I got it out.  So I bought new nuts and bolts, got them tightened down, and the saga ended.  I think it looks pretty cool, and it’s way more comfortable than the stock bars.

One of the good things about naming him Shithead is the opportunity for nicknaming.  Basically, any word that uses “shit” becomes a nickname.  I’ll just let your imagination run wild on its own.

He’s actually a pretty darn good cat.  His personality closely mirrors my own: playful 8 hours a day, sleepy 16 hours a day.  He’s pretty big, too.  Not in a fat cat kind of way, but just in a big cat kind of way.  And he’s only about nine months old, so he could get bigger.

He definitely lives up to his name, but he’s a good little companion.

He looks fat in this photo, but it's just the angle.

This is probably too many pictures of my cat.