Posts Tagged ‘bees’

Things that blow my mind

Space. It is literally mindblowing. There so much of it. There are so many universes and planets and stars and it goes on and on. When that guy skydived from space to earth… My mind EXPLODED! Sometimes I can’t even watch space programmes on TV because there is SO much to understand, I don’t even know where to start. It’s so epic.

Telescopes. Same as space, sort of. I just can’t believe how I can look in a little tube thing in my garden and see something quite clearly that is a billion billion hundred million miles away in the sky. (Don’t quote me on that figure.)

Bees. Of the last ten days on my blog, I think four have been about bees. They’re so amazing.

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The Romans. The fact that so much of what they made survives today. The fact that they got to so many places around the world. The systems they invented which still exist today, eg the rule of law.

The people at Pompeii. Because that’s real actual people who were actually alive two thousand actual years ago. And actually had lives and walked around Pompeii as real people and lived there. Actually lived there. Mind blowing.

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I asked Danda what he thought I should write next and he said, “Danda.”

I asked, “Cause you drive a taxi so well?”

He said, “No, because I just blow your mind. I’m just amazing. I’m just. Amazing. And I make a good cup of tea.”

Now, this is true. He does make a good cup of tea. So he is allowed on the list.

Making a beeswax candle

There’s not a lot to it but I thought I’d show you as we ended the second day of the beekeeping course by doing it and it was lots of fun.

It’s not complicated at all. When you have a manmade hive, you get frames to fit into the boxes and these will each have a sheet of wax made from melted down beeswax and moulded into sheets that the bees will build cells onto.

When you get some of these wax sheets, instead of putting them into the frames, you can make candles out of them! It’s much quicker than dipping wicks into hot wax over and over again and it’s less faff. Check it out.

You start with a sheet of wax and a wick.

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You stick the wick down and curl the end of the sheet over it, like so…

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You keeping curling the end over and over till at last it picks up momentum and you can just roll the whole thing up.

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You can then warm the edge a little and smooth it down…

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….giving you a fully working candle with just a few minutes of work…

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Ta dah!

Beekeeping (day 2)

Last Sunday was day 2 of the beekeeping course in London that I started the week before. And the second day was no less amazing than the week before.

We learned primarily about swarming and that is what I shall talk about here.

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A bee colony will naturally want to swarm because that is how they reproduce. One colony will split into two and they will each go on living their lives.

When a colony gets bigger, the bees at the outer edge will have less of the ‘queen bee substance’ as they are quite far away from her. If they get too far, they will think there is no queen and they will panic and start building queen cells. The queen is under instruction from the colony so will have to go and lay eggs there.

It is at this point that she gets ready to swarm, as she sees it is her time to leave (usually around the three year mark). Off she goes, taking all the flying (foraging) bees with her and we will deal with her in a moment.

Left behind are the ‘house bees’, who are worker bees who are not yet going out foraging and the queen bee cells. They will build more than one to give themselves a good chance that at least one will produce a queen. If the first queen emerges and she sees there are other queen bees developing in their cells, to get rid of the competition, she will go outside the cell, make a noise and if there is a response from inside, she knows there is a bee growing so she stings it to kill it.

If, however, one of these queen bees emerges and there are two in the hive, they will either have a full on fight to the death or the hive will choose sides and kill the unlucky one by crowding around her so the temperature rises and cooks her to death. Or they will sting her to death. Nice.

The half of the colony that left earlier, will hang out somewhere temporarily while you, the beekeeper, catch them (hopefully) and take them to a new hive. This can be a real headache if they’re in a neighbour’s garden or if they go somewhere high up and you can’t reach them or if you catch the colony but the queen bee is left behind so they will just fly back to her at the first opportunity. There are a whole host of potential problems.

But the clever beekeeper has a way of convincing them they have already swarmed by simply moving the whole hive about 400ft away and putting a new hive in the spot where the old hive was. You then take the frame which has the queen bee on it and put it into the the new hive. When the foraging bees go out to collect nectar and pollen, they will return to the new hive as it is where their old hive was. Thus, you have the queen bee and all the foraging bees in a new hive. And ta da! The bees think they have swarmed!

The bees left behind are the house bees and the eggs, which is how it would have been if there had been a natural swarm. Everyone is happy.

And no-one’s children have swarms on their bikes! Woop woop!

We also saw an extraction machine, which basically spins around the wax frame sheets, causing the honey to fly out and run off. We also tasted tons of different honeys, my favourite being the heather honey and the manuka.

My mind is blown. Yet again. Bees are my heroes.

A lesson in Beeing efficient

As I’m still reeling from learning about the amazingness of bees at a beekeeping course on Sunday, I’m going to give you some more bee facts that could potentially blow your mind. They blew mine.

There are 250,000 varieties of bee. Only one of these is a honey-making bee.

A bee hive is an extremely clean environment. When a bee knows it is going to die, it will fly away from the hive and die elsewhere. If the bee is very ill and cannot get away in time, the other bees will remove the dead body to a safe distance from the hive, to prevent disease spreading.

Bees also do not go to the toilet in the hive. They will fly outside and go somewhere else.

There are guard bees at the entrance to the hive. Each hive has it’s own scent (a unique mixture of the pollen that has been collected by that colony). As a bee approaches the hive, the guard bees will smell them to check they have the same scent. If they are not from that colony, they will be shooed away, unless they are carrying tons of pollen, then they will be allowed in.

When the young worker bees first leave the hive, they spend some time familiarising themselves with the hive and the local area. To help them find their way back, the guard bees flap their wings and fan the scent of the hive out into the air.

When a bee visits a flower to collect pollen, they will leave a scent behind that allows the other bees, who are also out foraging, to know that flower has already been visited. This prevents lots of other bees wasting time visiting the same flower.

A workers bee’s life lasts about six weeks in the summer, at which point they’re pretty knackered from all the flying and foraging etc. In the winter, because their main job is to keep the brood warm, as opposed to all the flying, they will live to about six months.

The personality of the queen bee dictates the character if a colony. If you have an aggressive queen, the colony will be more aggressive and you will get more stings, etc. If, however, you replace that queen with a more placid one, the whole colony will become more placid and calm.

Royal Jelly is produced by a gland in the bee’s head, which develops after a few weeks of life. The worker bee eggs will be given the Royal Jelly for two days only. An egg which is destined to become a drone will recieve a bit more and an egg which is to potentially become a queen bee will be fed solely on Royal Jelly. It is not that the Jelly is scarce. There is tons of it to go around. It’s that the worker bees need to be kept ‘stupid’ and so are rationed, whereas the drones and queens need to develop more and are ‘in charge’ of stuff, so they are given more.

I’ve just realised that this still doesn’t cover all of the bee facts I learned on Sunday.

A bee colony is the picture of efficiency. It’s funny to think that they don’t talk, yet they have developed all these complex systems to keep the colony running efficiently.

Prepare to Bee amazed

Yesterday, my mind was blown. My mind was blown because I never realised how amazing bees are. I went on the first of a two day course in beekeeping at Walworth Garden Farm in central London.

In central London? I hear you say. Beekeeping and a farm garden? In central London.

Well, yes. Yes, indeed. Walworth Garden Farm is near Kennington tube station. Put your hands up if this means anything to you. If it doesn’t, think council estates, think bricks, think high apartment blocks. And you can see why a farm would seem out of place here. Yet there it is and it thrives in the midst of the concrete.

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The morning was spent getting to know each other and getting to grips with the basics of bees, which consisted of the following:

There are three types of bees – a queen bee, the worker bees and the drones. They are all interdependent on each other and cannot survive unless each is present.

The queen bee, after she has hatched, will take trips out of the hive for the first few weeks of her life. These trips are to find male bees to mate with (which they do in the air). The queen bee saves up all the sperm from this mating period, as she will never mate again in her life. Her life is spent laying eggs and she uses the sperm she has saved to fertilise them. If she is laying a drone egg, she doesn’t fertilise it. It becomes an exact copy of herself. When that drone then goes out and mates with another bee, the queen bees DNA continues on.

The way a queen bee knows whether to lay a fertilised egg (which will become a worker bee) or an unfertilised egg (which becomes a drone) is by measuring the size of the cell the bees have built. The bees build bigger cells for drones so when the queen bee measures it with her legs, if it is a bigger cell, she lays a drone egg.

(By this point in the day, I was overwhelmed. I never realised bees were so mindblowingly clever.)

Bees also each go and collect one of three things when they go out – nectar, pollen or propolis. No-one yet knows how they figure out who’s doing what so that they have the rights amounts of each thing.

To keep the temperature of the ‘brood’ (the growing eggs and larvae) at 30 degrees, if it is cold outside, they will huddle together and vibrate their wing muscles (shoulder muscles, if you will) to keep warm. If it is hot, they will fly out to find water, then create an indoor aid conditioning system by spitting/spraying the water out and flapping their wings. The bees will all flap their wings in a certain direction to circulate the air one way and cool everyone down.

After sitting around being amazed all morning, it was time for a quick lunch break and wander in the garden…

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Then for the afternoon, we were split into two groups, with half of us going to look at the beehives. Off we went, to get kitted out…

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The guy in the blue t-shirt, Ian, is Mr Beekeeper and his knowledge of bees and their habits is so vast. He went in with no kit on and took the lids off the hives and showed us the cells and the workers and the queen bee and the honey and….

It went on and on and it was fascinating. I could have stayed there all day, in my unflattering beige suit, looking at the bees.

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Anyway, after some more bee chat, some of which is mentioned above, we called it a day and will be back next Sunday to find out about how to extract honey from hives and what to do with leftover wax.

Watch this space for more bee facts. I feel another post coming on tomorrow.

The course instructors were amazing yesterday. Everyone knows their stuff inside out and is passionate about what they do and about sharing their knowledge. If you can get to beekeeping course near you, I can fully recommend it, not necessarily to become a beekeeper, more to understand and appreciate how these fabulous little creatures help us and how they work. They are very, very interesting little things.

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Musings on a fabulous day

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of the challenges from my save-the-world-in-a-day type books. Don’t worry, it’s not because I don’t want to be a world-saver anymore. It’s simply because some of the things I’ve been asked to do have spun off in different directions and I’ve gone with the flow and followed that new path, rather than leave things after a day and start a new thing.

I’ve started volunteering at a stately home on the river, which has been the best thing to come from following the book so far.

As Going Green by Simon Gear encourages people to avoid the air miles involved with supermarket shopping and grow your own etc, I decided to give this a proper go. So I got some thyme and some chives and decided I would start small and try turning my back garden into a mini farm. The continued cold weather hasn’t been a huge help, neither has the difficulty with finding a space in the garden where I can make a proper vegetable patch that will actually get the light. The best place for the patch only has sunlight for a short time and the other side, which gets more sunlight has tons of lavender plants, which we grow specifically to help the bees, as their numbers are declining.

I gave it some thought and remembered that when I was last at the farm, while I made sorrel soup, someone else was making nettle soup and Adrian, the chef, was talking about picking them and using them instead of the spinach as the cold weather meant the spinach hadn’t grown yet.

And so, thought I, I shall go and find some nettles! That is what they would do on the farm so that is what I shall do here. I will become… Madame Forager!

Off I went, with a bag and good intentions, to the river to pick nettles. I wrapped a tissue over my fingers to prevent stings, I looked for plants about two hands height and picked just the very top leaves, the younger, greener looking ones. And I felt like a real explorer, surviving off the plants in the jungle until I managed to find other human beings (in actual fact, I was surrounded by them, they were passing every minute and looking at me strangely, as I foraged away).

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At some point, a man asked me what I was doing and we had a long chat about food and how to eat nettles like spinach. He was walking to Ham House so we walked and talked and I ended up going in and looking around the kitchen garden there and admiring their lovely huge asparagus.

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With my nettles in a bag and a large amount of garden envy, I then headed to Twickenham to meet a friend for early dinner/late lunch. We didn’t really ever work out which is was so we plunged straight into panini time at an Italian deli before walking into Richmond to go to a little tea room near Richmond Green for a spot of cake and tea.

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While walking to the bus stop afterwards, I saw a neighbour on her way home so went over for a cup of tea and some nettle-related chat. Equipped with her advice about whether to wash my nettles and whether to keep the stalks on, I ventured back home to my kitchen to cook my first ever meal with foraged ingredients!

I chopped a potato or two, a leek, an onion and a few leftover oyster mushrooms and fried them in a little bit of butter. Then I added stock and cooked til the potatoes were soft. Then I destalked my nettles and put them in, cooking for another three minutes until the nettles had wilted a little. Then I took my whizzer to it and whizzed like my life depended on it.

And it was lovely. It stayed a really vivid bottle green and had a light fresh taste that only needed a hint of seasoning to bring it alive.

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The light isn’t too good on this picture so you can tell about the colour.

And that, my friends, was my first foraging experience. All in all, a success, I’d say. Anyone got any foraging experience and can advise me what to pick next? At the moment, I’m sticking to nettles because I don’t know sorrel well enough to identify it and I’m scared of the whole deadly mushrooms scene.

So I guess now you can just call me MADAME FORAGER! … if you want.