Plum Wine, 2010

Mostly because I hated to see any plums wasted (and wasn't brave enough to try canning yet!) I decided to make a plum wine.  

Bottling wine

In anticipation of the summer fruits, I bottled our Pomegranate 2007 wine into bottles.  

Encapsulating August.

Chronological would not really be possible at this point without cross referencing, so - topics!  Compost, garden, bees and honey, wine, and house. 

Sun Day.

Woke up early to make two batches of Ginger Ale and get the deck ready for the extraction. (thankfully - the ginger ale was in plastic bottles and in a tub in the shed. One of them built up too much pressure and popped today.) Around 9am I added a small amount of Bee Quick to a cotton pad on the inner cover to encourage the bees to leave the top two supers. It works on the bees the way a stink bomb works on us - doesn't hurt us, but makes us leave the room. They did NOT like this. As I opened up the cover and set it down on the inner cover, the tone of the hive shifted quickly. I closed the outer cover and left them alone.

A busy week.

Where to begin!

Chronologically, I guess. :) Where we last left the hive - two brood supers with three honey supers on top. Oh, and plenty of active bees!

Sunday July 5 - put the mite board in to check. The Guild meeting got me thinking I'm not tracking the mite potential very carefully. Took it out on Wednesday evening (July 8) and after careful inspection we found wax caps, pollen, propylis, and no mites! hooray!

Wednesday M drove to Mann Lake in Woodland and picked up an extracting bundle, yay!

Holiday weekend.

Last Tuesday afternoon we added a third honey super to the hive. The girls took to it immediately, they were hanging out in the top the next day. I've also noticed they have appeared calmer - they seem to be staying in a bit later in the morning and heading in earlier in the evening.

Thursday night I went to the local bee guild meeting and talked to some members about the hive and honey harvesting.

Hot weekend weather.

Urania was washboarding again over the weekend, this time I was prepared with camera!



The bees are in their own space when they are doing this. The fact that I was sitting next to the hive did not faze them at all. They just kept with the behavior. This little bee got me giggling a bit - the rhythmical pattern made me think of vacuuming.

carrots and I didn't read about this in the books!

We picked our carrots! They went into a delicious chicken pot pie.