Archive for year: 2010

I felt really bad.  For the first time since the bees arrived in April, I walked toward the hive with treason in my heart.  I was going to find, and kill, and replace the Queen. The decision had actually been made in June – the queen’s brood pattern was spotty, and the hive wasn’t happy with her.

Last time I opened the hive, there were scattered laying-worker eggs, no open brood, no capped brood… but I did find the queen.  It seemed that the queen was experiencing a total failure.  I firmed my resolve to re-queen, and ordered a queen from the folks at Bee Weaver.  Laura was very helpful, and had lots of good suggestions. She recommended a push-in cage, which became a drama of its own later on.

Packages of bees arrive in a box the size of a shoe box…. queens arrive with half a dozen helpers in a big envelope.  Much less threatening to the nice postman!

I had expected the new queen to be marked and clipped – but she was unmarked and entire.  I just hope she’s properly mated!

Of course, once I got the hive open, there was brood EVERYWHERE.  I think that the Queen had heard my plans for her demise, and was trying to rally the troops.  However, there were also two new supersedure cups – the worker bees were still not happy with the queen’s performance.  I took those out.

What followed, I didn’t get pictures of.  I was working alone, and a lot of it was fiddly, so I couldn’t handle the camera while I was doing it.  I sifted through the hive frame by frame, finally finding the dotted queen on the second pass.  I removed her and placed her in a jar – just in case something went horribly wrong.

Then, I found a frame which contained some open brood, some capped brood, a few empty cells, and some honey.  I brushed it clean of bees, and took it over to the garage to work away from the hive.  I had the garage open, so that there was good light – but it was far enough away from thei hive that I didn’t have the attention of the guard bees.  I had built the push-in cage from the window-screening that covered the package of bees when I got them this spring.  I laid the frame on the trunk of my car, and figured the best location for the push-in queen cage.  Now, I had to open the queen’s transfer cage, get the queen out and onto the frame, push the cage over her and down into the comb, and then put her into the hive and close up. I took my gloves and hood off, because it was delicate close work and I needed gentle fingers.

What happened instead, was that I opened the little container carefully… and all of the bees, including the queen, took off flying.  See above about the un-clipped wings.  After a moment of intense cussing, I calmed down and realized that there was a cloud of bees still hovering around – maybe the queen was still there?  I got my little butterfly net.  One after the other, I caught bees and put them in a glass jar.  Finally, I caught the queen!  They’re not all THAT different when they’re flying around, but you can tell once they are sitting down, how the body is longer.  So I got the queen onto the frame, got the cage over her, and after much amusing catch-and-accidentally-release, I got one of her court bees in the cage with her.  These bees know and follow her scent, and they’ll feed her if the other bees in the new hive don’t like her right away.  I was going to try for three, but it just wasn’t going to happen.  I went and reassembled the hive with the new queen in her cage, closed up, and mercifully dispatched the old queen.

After closing up, I caught a few more photos in the yard…

A really lovely lynx spider.

Gosh, she’s big.

A baby watermelon, hiding out in a tomato cage.

A tiny peek-a-boo lizard.  He was on the other side of the fence, so I had to peep through leaves to see him.  The camera didn’t like the focus.

Jeanette, who was advertised as a French Maran, but lays nearly white eggs.

Weezy, who is one of the two Ameraucanas from our original batch of peeps – she isn’t laying yet, but I look forward to eggs soon.  They should be green or blue.

And Penny, who really IS a French Maran, has taken to crowing. It’s never a full crow, but it’s very different from her “henny” noises.

This time of year, it’s not just the moths that are getting busy in the garden.

This lovely mantis is starting to show her egg belly – she’ll be laying hundreds of eggs in a tough, resiny casing soon.  I have very much enjoyed all the mantises this year!

Charlottte is yolking up, too.  She will hopefully lay at least one big case full of eggs; we had one on the back porch at the old house that made three full cases!  I’ve been tossing her milkweed bugs, to ensure she has plenty to feed her growing eggs.

I’ve been getting mulch, bucket by bucket, from a wonderful tree company, Preservation Tree Service.  I haven’t hauled any for a while, because it’s just been too hot, but when I was spreading out the sheet mulch early this spring, I was going multiple times per week, sometimes even multiple trips per day.  I probably carried 180 or 200 of the little tubs.  As we discovered, though, mulch compacts fairly quickly, and, through the wonder of decompostion, it becomes part of the soil.  So it seems like we have half the mulch now that we did then.
I had talked to their supervisor, back in May, and he said that as long as I didn’t mind mulch with the occasional log in it, they might be able to dump some at my house, if they were doing a job in the area.  I waited, and hoped, and hoped… and nothing happened.  I figured they’d lost my number, no big deal, I’ll get more once it cools off.  And then Supervisor G calls me this morning – they are clearing some land of cedar trees, it’s 100% cedar mulch, they will have 8 to 12 loads over the course of the next three days.  He dumped one load, and said they wanted me to look at it and see if I wanted more.  I checked it out at lunch, and found this:

Just at a glance, I think it’s probably about as much in this one pile, as what I carried in my little Saturn Ion this whole Spring.

And it’s GORGEOUS mulch. The whole yard smells like spicy Christmas.

I asked for one more.  I’m going to see, tonight, how much of it I can get moved around the yard.  If the yard eats it up the way I think it will, I’ll ask for one or two more loads tomorrow.

When we had to take back the three chickens who turned out to be roosters, we went up to Sanger and bought a couple of French Maran hens, one Black Copper and one Blue Copper.  We got two eggs when we brought them home, but then the stress of the move affected their laying, and we hadn’t gotten any since.  Today, there was a beautiful dark brown egg waiting in the hen house.  Yaaay, cool eggs!

A lot of lovely purple is happening in the garden.

This passionflower, Passiflora x “Incense,” is really coming into its own – it puts out three to five of these spectacular blooms each day.

This is Purple Majesty millet; I was worried that the photo was out of focus, looking at it on the camera, but then I realized that the flower itself has jaggedy edges!

This is a standard Ruellia.  It’s about waist-high now, and has usually a dozen or more blooms each day.  They fall off by late afternoon, but always put up a fresh crop.

This is a Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae.  I love to watch them – you can’t see it in a still photo, but the white areas on its wings are reflective, like metal.

She’s laying eggs on my passionflowers.  Fortunately, the wasp patrol keeps them pretty thoroughly in check.  I’m a little sad that I won’t be getting more baby butterflies, but glad there aren’t huge holes in my vine.  The caterpillars are voracious, and can strip a vine to stems in just a few days if conditions are just right.

I’ve never had an organic garden before.  I grew up in a house on an acre lot, and there was lots of nature going on… but the garden and the flowers were always sprayed with strong chemicals, and so there wasn’t much in the way of garden insect life.  Here on the creek, and in a woody, rambling part of Dallas, we’ve got an amazing ecosystem.  I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing a lot of the critters!   I encourage some and discourage others, aiming for a balance  heavy on the beneficial-insect side that gives me more vegetables and flowers, fewer holes and spoiled fruits.  So far, I’m using Bacillus Thuringensis (BT), Spinosad, and insecticidal soap, plus hand-picking.  I’ve done my best to use only OMRI-compliant choices.

I think these giant rhinoceros beetles are very cool.  They get to live, because they eat decaying forest-floor matter.  The chickens tried for a while to eat one, but eventually decided it was just a moving rock.

They’re nearly as well-armored below as they are above.

Apparently pretending to be a bee or wasp is a good way to make a living.  These are Mydas flies.

I have to admit, I gave them a wide berth the first time I saw them.  They do this thing where they arch their abdomens, pretending to sting the ground; it’s intimidating.  The fact that they’re about an inch and a half long doesn’t hurt.  There is considerable debate about what they eat – they’re not well studied.  Current understanding seems to be that they mostly dine on pollen.  I always welcome additional pollinators in the garden.

Also not a bee.  This is some kind of fly, but I’m not sure exactly which species.  I think it’s one of the “Bee-like Robber Flies.” They do a very good job with their mimicry.  They and their larvae are typically insect-eaters, which means they’re my friends!

A Snowberry Clearwing moth; these look a lot more like bumblebees when they don’t have their proboscis out!  The Bee Balm has been a popular treat for bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds.  I will definitely plant more.

Finally, an actual bee.  I haven’t kept count, but I’ve seen probably ten or more species of bees in the garden, from mason bees to carpenter bees, bumble bees to these tiny emerald sweat bees.  We are definitely not lacking for pollination.

Ok, this is one of the things where I’m a little torn.  We’ve had lots and lots of butterflies in the garden, and some really beautiful ones at that.  Monarchs, swallowtails, Gulf Fritillaries… and I am raising several host plants, on which they lay their eggs.  More butterfly means less plant, of course, but it’s worth it for some of the nicer butterflies that don’t eat my food crops.  Within reason, I want these caterpillars to live.

However, we have a really thorough crew of red and brown paper wasps.  They wait until the caterpillars are close to an inch long, and then they scour the plants, eating them all.  I kind of wish they wouldn’t… but at the same time, I have had zero hornworms on my tomatoes, so the wasps are definitely my friends.  I just wish they could get down into the plants and eat the damned cabbage white caterpillars that made some of the bok choi into lace.

I grew up with wasps that *look* just like these in Houston, where we most often saw them munching on daylily stems to make paper for their nests.  They were mean as hornets; I got stung often, and with essentially no provocation.  I knew how to be careful – and I almost never got stung by bees or other wasps, but these red ones were just bastards.  I literally had them fly up to me as I was standing in the yard, and sting me.  Here, they’re sweet-tempered and have never offered any offense.  I don’t know what makes the difference.  Also in Houston, the nests were under the eaves of almost every house; here, I haven’t seen a single nest.  I’m betting they’re high up in the trees, but I don’t know why they have the difference of habit.  It’s a delightful surprise to have wasps that are such effective predators, while also being such good neighbors.

Mantises, of course, are one of the coolest insects there are, and every gardener’s friend.  I hope we get lots of eggs this fall.  I’ve seen probably half a dozen or more in various parts of the yard.

Charlotte says, “MWWAAAMMNVVVHAAKMMNK”.  These Argiope spiders have always been one of my favorites, and I feel specially fortunate to have one in the garden.  I had to move her from the tomato plants, so she wouldn’t get hit with the Spinosad; now, she’s taken up residence in the Confederate Rose hibiscus.  I plan to start feeding her spent silkomths, so she can yolk up and get huge like the last big one we had on the porch in Farmers Branch.