Taste Test Sept Pear Mead: 6 months later

"To understand bad taste one must have very good taste." - John Waters

On July 24th, Noah and I opened the second bottle of the Sweet Pear Mead. Still very disappointing.

On opening the bottle, I still smelled the aroma of beer. It faded after it had breathed for 20 minutes.

In the glass it smelled sweet and had a clear amber color. 

The first taste was a shock. Very dry, faint taste of honey, and finished with that tallow sensation on the back of my tongue.

We tasted it a few times more just to be sure. The only thing that changed was the tallow sensation seemed to lessen.


We divided the bottle into 7 glasses. 1 for my wife, and 3 each for Noah and myself. The mead was so strong that Noah and I both got a really good buzz. Neither of us are lightweights, so it was a very strong mead.

On our second two glasses, we added a few drops of honey and found that it improved the taste drastically. In our opinion, the only thing wrong with this mead, was that it was just too dry.

My first tomatoes

"Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

My Papaw was a carpenter by trade and lived in the suburbs of North Miami. His tiny backyard always had chickens, fruit trees, and a small garden. Slowly, my backyard is beginning to look the same.

This year, I tried my hand at gardening. I live in town but have a large yard, though most of it is in the shade. So I bought three huge plastic pots, 5 tomato plants of varying verities, 3 bell pepper plants, and an olive tree.

The olive tree, to my surprise, actually produced two tiny olives. However, it turned out, that olive trees need lovers to pollinate and I only had the one tree. It did well at first but seems to be dying now - perhaps from loneliness - perhaps it just needs a bigger pot. Either way, I don't think it's going to make it.

I planted the rest of the plants in the other two pots and placed them in the sunniest part of the yard. I know - way too many plants in each pot.

I used the mulch I had been making all winter. A combination of pine chips, hay, food scraps, and chicken shit. Since I didn't have enough, I filled the bottom 1/3 of the pot with hay, covered that with news paper, covered that with mulch, then added a little potting soil on top of that.

The bell peppers never seemed to grow. They hung in there for a a month or two but eventually gave up the struggle.

My cheery tomatoes where the first to bloom and I got about 20 little tomatoes. Then the plant turned brown and died. We've had a lot of rain this year, but on the dry days I always watered my plants.

I read somewhere not to splash the water on the soil as this could cause fungus in the soil to get on the leaves. So I always did my best not to do that. I also saw on a YouTube video last week that you should trim the bottom leaves and shoots up about 10"-12" to prevent the same issue. I think that information came a little too late.

I think that fungus, did in fact, get to my tomatoes. No matter if the soil was dry or wet, the plants always had brown tipped leaves. Then as the tomatoes began to ripen, the majority of them would split or get black spots on them.

I fed the rotted tomatoes to the chickens, while struggling to harvest enough good tomatoes to make so much as a single bowl of bruschetta.

I'm not upset, it was my first try. Next year, I will do better.
1. More potting soil.
2. Only one plant per pot.
3. Prune the lower 12".

I bet next year, I'll be swimming in tomatoes.

My Cup Runs Over

My bees are flourishing like never before. 20 of the 22 hives at Dr. D's place are packed with bees and honey. Two needed some help but still had bees in them.

I am also happy to say, that I didn't see a single beetle yesterday - not that I looked too hard for them. The heat index was well over a 100 degrees and 1.5 hours was enough to exhaust me completely. Noah is younger and fared better than me but he still looked spent by the end.

We added 11 supers to the hives that needed more room but we needed 13. I'll have to make two more boxes this weekend and wax 20 more frames.

By the way, I bought 13 pounds of wax to coat my old plastic frames. 1 pound of wax is enough to paint 10 plastic frames.

I still have lots of old plastic frames but I have used all but a couple of my old supers. So from here on out, if I want to expand anymore, I'll have to build more equipment.

Nonetheless, my bees are doing exceptionally well, as are all the aspects of my life. I have just kept my head down and pecked away at the work and God has done the rest.

"Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it." - The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

Nothing in life is promised. Yet, I feel optimistic about the future in a very real way. My cup runs over.

Hive Count: 23 Hives

p.s. The moist black wax in the hive I mentioned in the last blog is gone and that hive looks perfectly healthy. Whatever it was has self-corrected.

Wedding at Dr. D's

My energy is split between what I have to do and what I want to do. However, it is absolutely impossible to devote time to everything. Family, work, and sleep are non-negotiable. So I am left to juggle downtime, beekeeping, writing, and inventing.

While it sounds like a rationalization of my shortcomings, the truth is I accomplish a lot each week - just not enough beekeeping. Of course that is real key to success - accomplishing more than average. I've known far too many people that complain about their lives, lack of money, or lack of success but never do anything more than work 40 hours a week.

Success is achieved when your 40 hour work week is over. But I digress.

My wife and I went to an outdoor wedding at Dr.D's this past Saturday - it was epic. However, since most of my bees are located at his country home (were the wedding was held) I couldn't go bee keeping until it was over.

The horror came halfway through the wedding when my wife whispered to me that Dr. D had been spraying the property for mosquitoes all week. While she didn't catch the problem, it made my mouth go dry.

So Sunday afternoon, when I was confident Dr. D's guest were gone, I did a quick hive inspection. All 22 hive are doing well - with the exception of one that is queenless but has queen cells in it.

Given I have let the other aspects of life prevent me from beekeeping for nearly 3.5 weeks, God has smiled down on me and my bees are thriving in spite of me - as usual.

Hive Count: 23 Hives

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the more I work the more I have of it." Thomas Jefferson

The Mating Sign?

Let me start this blog with a question: What does the "Mating Sign" look like?

All 22 hives at Dr. D's have bees in them. It has been two weeks since I made my last hive splits. There are lot of good reasons why I was too busy to get out to the apiary sooner but none of them make me feel less guilty or get me any closer to my goals.

I spent Monday and Tuesday night waxing 110 plastic frames. I used up almost all of my wax reserves in the process. So on Wednesday, Noah and I took 11 supers to Dr. D's.

Only one hive looked like it had a beard and it was the one I suspected would (see pic).

This is the beard 3min after smoke

Most of the hives looked strong, though several did not have any brood (but they did have empty queen cells). After all this time, I can speculate what had happened but I can't be sure. In one of these hives I found the queen who had two tiny white specs at the end of her tail. I think this might have been "The Mating Sign". I couldn't find any good pictures with Google so I'm not sure.

I don't believe my hives have swarmed, simply because there were still empty frames in each hive. It could simply be that the hives are growing slower than I expected.

Nonetheless, in every hive that lacked brood, we placed a new frame of eggs. If the hive needs a queen, then the bees can convert a young larva. If the queen is there, then the added brood will strengthen the hive.

Since there were 22 hives and I only had enough freshly waxed frames for 11 supers, we divided the frames among the hives where needed. We inspected the first 15 hives closely, however the sun was going down so we simply opened the last 7 and added a super to each (all seven looked healthy but we didn't search for brood.)

We accomplished all of this in just 1.5 hours. At this rate, it would only take us 8 hours to inspect 100 hives. I also tried out my new bee jacket for Bush Mountain Bees and it worked great - no stings. (You can see how big it is in the picture - I'm fat but that's not all me in that jacket). Of course Noah was wearing an old cotton jacket and didn't get stung either, so the bees might have just been in a good mood.

Final Hive Count: 23 Hives

"A bee is never as busy as it seems; it's just that it can't buzz any slower." Kin Hubbard

With my shoes off, I can count to 20

"Oh heart, such disorganization!" Sylvia Plath

Well, I have split 6 hives into 22 in just a couple of months. This has been the best year by far. This will be my last splits until after I harvest honey. Though, if the bees continue to do as well as they are doing, I should have a crop of honey in late July to mid August... I hope.

17 Hives on 4/30/18

The splitting process went well but ultimately became chaos. In the new diagram below, I have changed my numbering system to help make it clearer.

 At the start of the day, there were 17 hives at Dr.D's. We had considered moving all the hives to their new locations and then make the splits but we thought we might get confused (it was a simpler time).

First we split Hive-D2 to location E5. The first frame we pulled had the queen on it, so we put her back on location D2 and closed up both hives. (We felt pretty smug!)

Then we split Hive-B2 to location D4. However, despite being packed with bees and honey, there was no queen. First hiccup. So now we needed two frames of eggs. We marked the two boxes by placing an empty super on each lid and then took a break. (It was 89F and I'm fat... don't judge me.)

Now when we returned, we opened Hive A-2 (and even though I found the queen last time) it was now queenless. So we didn't split it but we made a mental note to put a frame of eggs in it. (Mental note, humf.)

Next we made it easy. We decided to move Hives-A3,B3,C3 to location A5,B5,C5.

Hive-C3 was split onto location C5.

Hive-B3 was split onto location B5... and that's when we found it was full of swarm cells. So we started pulling those frames out and giving them to the other splits. A2 B2 B3 C3 D4 and E5 all got a frame with a queen cell on it... (I think!)

However, Hive-A3 didn't have a any brood, so we decided not to split it. We added eggs (I think) and left it as it was.

Then we decided to split Hive-A4 AND THAT WAS WHEN IT TOTALLY WENT TO SHIT!

We had already split Hive-A4 at some point in all of this. In retrospect, I "think" we split it to location D3 but I can't be sure. It had a new lid and bottom on it, so we had definitely split it but neither Noah or I could remember when.

In just two hours we had made all of the splits and, in doing so, had lost the largest game of Three-Card-Monty ever played. In the end, I have 22 hives at Dr.D's.

Final Hive Count: 23 Hives

And the splits just keep on coming

"By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination," Christopher Columbus ... Big talk for a man who thought he was in India.

If the following blog goes off the rails, forgive me. I woke up at 3:00am with my "Night Dreads." If you're not familiar with my "Night Dreads", it is the phenomenon where I wake up in the middle of the night and begin worrying about the most ridiculous things. Last nights night dread topic: How I would change my life if I somehow traveled through time and was 17 again. At 5:20am I concluded that I would have to go back to age 16 to make any real change but that I would have started building bee hives the moment I arrived in 1990! "There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line." - Oscar Levant.

THE PLAN:
This past Wednesday I had planned to build 10 lids & 10 bottoms and Saturday I would make my 10 splits.

THE OBSTACLES:
When Wednesday came, I allowed myself to be lazy. If failure was a sickness, laziness would be the symptom. I instead told myself, I would build them Saturday and make my splits Sunday.

Well Thursday, on my way to work in Vicksburg, the water pump on my truck began leaking - like a sieve. There was a lot stress and drama involved in getting home but by 6:00pm Saturday, I made it back.

Sunday I bought the new seals for the water pump and while I waited for the truck to cool down, I made the lids and bottoms for the splits. I then spent the rest of the day taking the whole truck apart to put in the seals. Thanks to YouTube, the job went smoothly but it took all day.

So yesterday, Monday 4/30/18 at 5:00pm (after I got home from work) Noah and I went out to Dr. D's to make splits.

THE SPLITS:
We only had time to make 4 splits - A,B,C,D. We started with D and found 5 frames of swarm cells. So we removed them from the box and divided them amongst the other splits.

On split C we found that the box was full of honey but no brood, so we decided to put a frame of queen cells in both boxes. Figuring that it might be missing a queen or just need a better one. However, when we retrieved the the frame with a queen cell, the cell was open and empty. Noah checked the other frames we had set to the side and there she was - the virgin queen. So we grabbed her (gently) and popped her in the hive. So as you can see the splits were just in the nick of time.

I worry that there might be other hives on the verge of swarming but I just don't have time to do anything about it. If all goes well, then Saturday, I will build boxes and wax the old plastic frames. Then Sunday, I will continue with the rest of my splits.

For now, HIVE COUNT: 18 Hives.