Arizona Urban Ark

A Family Micro-Farm

Jeremiah

The Summer’s First Family Project on the Micro-Farm — Canning Cherries

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Do you need a family project? Can some cherries.

Do you want cherries year round? Can some cherries.

I know what your thinking, canning, who would want to do that.  Since when was: boiling water, sharp knives, raw food, mold, and little kids, a good combination. Well, if you do it properly, no one will get hurt, no one is going to be poisoned, and everyone will have unforgettable memories. Oh, did I mention you don’t need sharp knives for canning cherries, you just need a cherry pitter, it is much safer and easier.

Like most things canning cherries requires you to assemble the needed tools and/or products. First, you need cherries. Then you need the pitter, stock pots, canning jars of various sizes, lids for those jars, and a canner.

To limit the chaos we used several workstations, each station had a different job.

First, came the sorting, having to decide which cherries to keep or toss, this was followed by washing the good cherries.

Which was followed by the plucking of the stems.

Then came the pitting.

Once the cherries were pitted they were put into jars and had a sugar water mixture poured on top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was followed by the process removing of air bubbles, wiping the edge of jar.

Then we place a lid on the jar and tighten it with a band,

Once we had filled 6-8 jars were full we moved them to the canner.  Once the jars were in the canner the water was brought to a boil. The jars would sit for 25 minutes in the boiling water.

Once their time was finished, the hot jars were carefully extracted and place on the counter.

After the water cooled off, the next set of jars went in. If you did not let the water cool-down the hot water would break the jars with insertion. After all the jars had been canned, we had 35 jars of Bing cherries, and 12 jars of Rainier cherries, not to mention the gaining of family memories.

The Beehive – Update

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After about a week of checking on the bees everyday, removing the caterpillars, cocoons, and infected honeycomb, I thought progress was being made.  However, things changed when I went out the next evening to check on the hive.  There was no activity around the hive entrance.  As I opened the hive I was greeted with the horrifying sight of dried honeycomb and multiple dead bees scattered throughout the floor of the hive.

Upon further examining the hive, I discovered that ants were crawling around inside.  The ants, God’s little clean-up crews were already hard at work.

Emotionally distraught, I closed the hive and return to the house to break the news to the family.  I do not know for sure what killed the bees, but, I do know that most weak hives will usually die.  As sad as this was, it was just another step in becoming a better beekeeper.

Now looking back over the past several weeks later, I take comfort in these truths, “The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away” and “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven”.

 

 

The Wax Moth: Trouble in the Hive

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While preparing the new house for the swarm, I decided to conduct another inspection of the original hive since it had been a couple of weeks since my last inspection.

Things had dramatically changed in two weeks.  Instead of finding the inside of the roof all nice and clean, it was covered in silky, web-like material, and white cocoons.

Digging deeper into the hive I quickly determine something was amiss, no bees were buzzing around me, unlike the previous inspection.  Plus there were only a few bees in the entire upper brood super.  Something was definitely wrong!  Then I  discovered the problem.  Wax moths had invaded the hive, and in a short time had almost completely destroyed it.

The wax moth larva or caterpillars, had eaten through almost all of the frames of honeycomb.  All that was left was four frames at the center of the hive, where the bees were making their last stand.

After some quick thinking, I realized I had to destroy all these caterpillars before it was too late. Working slowly but vigorously, I removed each frame squashing caterpillars, scraping off cocoons, and removing all damage done by the caterpillars.

The invasion raised the question, what can I do to prevent the moths from coming back and laying more eggs. In my research on wax moths I found that they do not like mint. However, we did not have any mint plants that could be placed around the hives.  So I did the second best thing, I sprayed a solution of peppermint essential oil and water all over the inside and outside of the hive.   Hopefully, it is the mint fragrance that repels the moths.

Then I thickly spread some Dichotomous earth around the hive to keep the ants out.  Now all that is left to do, is wait and inspect the hive daily and assist in any way to help the hive survive the attack.

Does The Hive Still Have A Queen?

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With the swarm leaving the hive, it raised the question, “Is there still a queen in the hive?”  There was only one way to find out.  A hive inspection.

Donning my bee suit and gloves, off I went to search for a queen bee.  The removal of the lid, prompted a couple dozen bees to come check me out. As I went through the top deep super, bees began to fly up and around me.  As I removed the frames, the activity level increased. Bees were running from one side of frame to the other or going airborne as I picked up the frame. After looking through six frames, I still had not yet found the queen.

When I opened the bottom deep super and removed frames, the bees in this area acted differently. Instead of flying around, they ran around in groups. I started seeing bees that were bigger that the ones around them, those were the drones or male bees, but still no queen bee.Then I caught a glimpse of one bee that a group had stayed thickly clustered around, that was the queen bee.  After re-assembling the hive, I began the long walk back to the house.  Several bees who were still mad at me for disturbing their home followed me all the way to the door.

As we sat around the table eating our dinner, they questioned me about whether I found a queen bee or not.  I told them about my inspection of the hive.  The conclusion we still had a queen so the hive should continue to thrive and be productive especially since the bees seemed to be healthy and happy.

What are the bees doing?

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Several hours after transferring the bees to their new home, I went out to finish setting up the hive and saw this:

Full of curiosity, I went over for a closer look. I saw some bees going in and out of the entrance, but some were not going into the hive.  Instead they were joining a group of bees on the outside of the hive.  My dad asked me “if this was normal,” to which I replied “I don’t think so, but maybe they were still getting re-orientated.”

After checking on the hive, several times throughout the evening.  We were convinced that something was wrong.  After doing some research we narrowed down the possibilities, it was either a pre-swarm party, or the hive’s cooling system.

Bearding or The Hive’s Cooling System

Since the bees were not close to the door fanning it, we concluded they were not trying to lower the hive’s temperature, but instead were getting ready to swarm.  This was consistent with the fact when we moved the hive it looked like they were getting ready to swarm or had swarmed since there had been two empty queen cells.

So what is a swarm?  Swarms are when the bees divide the hive to create more hives.  It happens when a hive gets too big for the queen to communicate with all the bees in the hive.  This lack of communication causes the bees to create several new queens, these new queens will battle to ensure the best genetics for the hive.  However, when the bees create a new queen, the old queen will take about half the bees and leave the hive.  Afterwards, they will find a place to wait until they find a location to call home.  Apparently, the outside of the hive and roof was just such a place.

Great, so where would they go? I did not know.  Would this happen again?  Probably, I am not completely sure, but swarms generally happen between April and July.  Some say that swarms can happen every year or two.  The good news is a hive usually only swarm once per year.  So what am I going to do? How can I capture swarms?  Well, I used a bee-vac to remove them the tree originally, so a bee-vac should work in this situation.  However, that would require me to get a bee-vac.  Knowing that I should get a bee-vac sooner than later, we decided to order one.

However, before I had an opportunity to order the bee-vac, I discovered that all the bees on the outside were gone.  Anxiously I began to search all the trees nearby, only to find nothing.  Discouraged that I had just lost about half of my bees, I went off with a heavy heart to set gopher traps.

While checking the front yard for any gopher activity, I also checked the trees in the area for the swarm of bees.  That is when I found a small group of bees huddled together on a branch nearby the previous hive, probably about 12-15 feet off the ground.  What a relief, I could capture this group and expand the apiary.

The Relocation of The Honey Bees

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The time, 5 am and  Derek from Abello Bees is here to help us relocate the bees from the tree to their new hive.  The reason for doing the relocation so early in the morning is to catch as many as bees as possible before they begin the day’s foraging.

After inspecting the hive from the ground, Derek brought his truck around to begin the job. Hopping into our bee suits the job began.  First, he sent me up the ladder with a pair of loppers to trim back the branches in and around the hive. Once this was accomplished he set up his Owen’s bee-vac, and showed me how to operate it. Then up the ladder I went to begin vacuuming the bees. The bee-vac is specially designed to suck the bees into a cage, without hurting them. As the bees began to fly around me, I started to suck them up, working from the top of the hive, towards the bottom. This is done to prevent the bees from running up the tree branch and out of reach.

Once most of the bees had been captured using the bee vac.  Derek carefully explained what we going to do next. Taking his hive-tool in hand, he began to separate the different sections of the honeycomb. After he cut the first piece, he handed it to me, I took the comb, laid it on a frame, then cut the comb to size, and attached it to the frame with rubber bands. Twice, Derek showed me pieces of honeycomb, where small parts of the comb have larger cells than the rest of the comb. He explained that is a queen cell, where the bees raised new queens before they swarm and create a new hive. Since we saw nothing in either of the cells, we wondered if the bee had swarmed recently or if they were getting ready to swarm in the near future. We continued to transfer the hive to my Langstroth deep supers, piece by piece, frame by frame, we kept going until we could not get any more off the branch. When we had finished transferring the hive, we had filled 12 frames or 2 deep body supers.  The estimate was 50 to 70 thousand honey bees.

As a precaution, to prevent the bees from returning to the tree, we cut the branch off the tree completely. Since there was still honey on the branch we put it into a 5 gallon bucket so the bees could move the honey into their new home.  Then we headed off to the empty stock-pens at the back of the micro-farm where we were setting up their new home.

We took the 2 supers into one of the stock-pens, and placed them on their stand. Once the supers were in place, I took the cage full of bees and poured them into the stacked supers, and quickly put the roof on.  Next to the hive we placed the 5 gallon bucket so they could take the honey from the branch into their new hive hopefully making it an easier transition.

The Finished Product