Eco-friendly laundry. Washing clothes in cold water is old news.  If you’re still using hot, you’re behind the times.  Ninety percent of the energy used by washing machines goes toward heating water, but unless you’re dealing with super greasy clothes, hot water doesn’t get the load any cleaner.  Cold works.  There is some debate raging right now as to whether or not you even need to use detergent.  For me, this is a mind bender.  A recent article I read said that detergent is relatively new, people have been cleaning clothes for centuries without it, and the thing that actually takes out dirt is agitation, not soap.  For those of us who are slow to believe, the writer suggests making our own detergent.  Pretty much all you need is cheap bar soap and Borax.

Home upgrades. We live in a house built in the early 1950′s which needs constant repairs and renovations.  It’s a charming headache that I described to friends as “a shack” when we first bought it.  Everything needed to be replaced.  This year, we decided to bite the bullet and make some energy-saving investments.  We replaced the entire AC system, ducts and all, as well as the huge bay window at the front of the house.  I dragged my feet on the second one because they just don’t make windows like that anymore.  Plus, the EnergyStar choice looked so different, and I always balk at vinyl.  But even the AC guy took one look at our living room  and said, “You need to get rid of that window.”  The good news is that our modern vinyl window doesn’t leak in the rain.  And I’m anxious to see what the changes will do to our electric bill.  (There are tax incentives right now for energy saving improvements, so if you’ve thought about upgrading, it’s a good time to do it.)

Garden update. What’s new in the garden?  Strawberries and tomatoes.  The birds will get the berries, as they do every spring, but we have our fingers crossed that 2010 will be a better tomato year than the last.  The roses, hot lips, orange columbine and azaleas are all in bloom, and we’re just a couple of weeks away from seeing hydrangea blossoms.  Papyrus, hostas, salvias, morning glory and hibiscus have re-emerged from the earth.  No flowers yet, but butterflies have started to appear.

The front berm is coming along.  We’ve had a few casualties, so I was out there yesterday replacing plants.  For some reason, I keep killing sage bushes when I move them from the back yard.  Not all of them.  There’s just one patch on the berm where transplants wither.  Probably coincidence and a lack of root ball.  But the Swiss chard we transferred from the vegetable garden is doing well.  It survived this past winter, which was harsh, and since we don’t eat it but like the bright red and green leaves, we decided to treat it as an ornamental.  I’m sure there are plenty of chard fans out there with favorite recipes, but after dining on homemade chard and lentil soup-that-tastes-like-dirt last summer, Chris and I have sworn off the stuff.

The vegetable garden is full of lettuce, more than we can eat.  At the start of the summer, it was too bitter to use in salad, but now it has turned sweet, and I’ve been going out most days to grab a few leaves and pull up carrots for a salad.  Because the soil here is clay (not sandy), carrot growth is constrained and you end up with fat, stubby vegetables.  But they taste great, so we’ll probably do carrots again in the fall.  The tomatoes and eggplant are taking off, which means I’ll be sharing plenty of recipes over the summer for both.  I’m already on the hunt for the perfect baba ganoush, because if last year is any indication, we’ll be eating lots of eggplant in July and August.

Three cheers for the rain barrel, which is working out well.  It fills up quickly and provides a few days of watering.  I just can’t figure out how to turn on the irrigation system.  Chris will have to give me a lesson this weekend.

In general, I’m constantly amazed by what grows happily around our house, even more than what doesn’t.  After struggling for several years to get anything to grow in the shady garden where we keep the bees, suddenly this spring, we have a jungle.  The lamb’s ear has spread and is popping up everywhere, and the crawling begonia is knee-high.  I’ve added a few lavender plants, wild flowers, strawberries and shade roses that seem to be doing well, but clover has snuck in, and the stone path we put in three years ago has disappeared beneath the weeds.  At one point, I’d tried to grow an herb garden in the space, but there isn’t enough sun.  Still, oregano and chives form a huge clump next to the bee hive, which requires some grooming.  Overall, Chris and I just need to put on our bee suits — now, before it gets hot — and spend an hour establishing some order.  I like wild, but right now, our little garden just looks like a mess.  Check out the “before” photos in the top right.  I’ll add “after” when we finish the project.

Anne

Click on the “More Photos” box to see pictures of the roses, hydrangeas and the front garden berm.

Spring is bee time, when the nectar flows and the colony is calm and drunk with pollen.  We recently got word from John Talbert, our local bee expert and mentor to apiarists across North Texas, that our young bees are ready to be picked up from his farm.  We had so much success last year with our hive that we decided to add another, and John is supplying the “nucs,” eight hive frames with larvae and young bees that we’ll install in our second hive box.  John operates the Sabine Creek Honey Farm in Josephine, TX, where he keeps hundreds of hives and offers workshops to new beekeepers.  That’s how Chris and I got started — it was John who taught us the basics of how to find our queen and what a “brood cell” looks like.  We still go to him when we have questions.

In preparation for our bumper crop of honey, Chris has bought a stainless steel, four-frame, hand crank honey extractor, as well as a filter and other odds and ends for speeding up the honey removal.  It’ll be a big change from last year when we stuck the dripping frames in buckets around the kitchen before running the honey through a sieve,  which was a long and messy process.

For me, one of the best things about producing honey is giving it away to our friends, families and neighbors.  We were amazed last year by how quickly our quarts disappeared and a little disappointed that we couldn’t share our honey with everyone who had been so encouraging about our hive.  Honey is a personal thing, the product not only of your time and labor, but also the garden you have planted, the bird baths you have filled and the stings you have endured when your wife knocks over the hive.  Azalea Lane Honey, as we call ours, probably tastes no different from what you could buy at the store, but to Chris and me, it dazzles our tongues like ambrosia.  It captures the colors around our house more vividly than a picture, containing the flavors of our pink rose bushes, purple sage, coral bells and yellow daises we’ve planted on our berm.

Our home is in our honey.  And when we pack it in boxes and send it to people we love in NJ, DC, and other cities far away, we share with them these brief spring days when the columbine is in bloom, tomatoes hang green on the vines, and dinner is served in the garden.

Anne

To find locally produced honey in your area, go to the National Honey Board’s Honey Locator.

On Sunday, April 18, 11 Dallas chicken-keepers opened their coops to the general public and gave us a look at local egg production.  It was a drizzly day, but “A Peep at the Coops:  The Urban Coop Tour” went on as scheduled, and Chris and I headed out for a look.

The joke around our house is that we’re “this far from getting chickens,” with “this far” being a tiny space between my thumb and index finger.  Because after you get beehives and worm farms and vegetable gardens, chickens are the next logical step.  And we probably would have gotten them by now, having attended several chicken talks at North Haven, but Chris has been stumped as to what to do with our chickens when we go out of town.  I keep telling him, “Park Cities Pet Sitter,” the people who watch our dogs, Simon and Pluto, and Jesus the Canary.  Because they sit pets, and chickens fall squarely into that category.  Chris also worries about a potential Great Escape, with chickens squeezing under and flying over our fence, as well as the hawks, foxes and coyotes that roam our neighborhood at night.

I, of course, worry about none of these things, thinking, “Let’s just get the chickens and the rest will sort itself out.”  But Chris wants a plan.

And so he was a little hesitant at first to commit to the chicken tour, knowing that I would fall in love with a little a red hen and want one.  But after a few hours spent on the Internet researching coops, Chris announced that, if I really wanted chickens, we had space by our compost bin for a small coop and enclosed chicken run.  He agreed to join me for the Peep.

We began our soggy chicken tour at Stonewall Jackson Elementary on Mockingbird Lane where the students have planted a beautiful organic vegetable garden and installed a new and very swanky chicken coop.  (Funds raised by the “Peep” tour went toward completing the coop and buying chickens before the school year ends.)  The structure was quite large, too large for our little yard, but we learned at this stop that, when you first build your coop, you have to put eggs in each chicken’s nest so she understands where she’s supposed to lay.  Hm.  It’s a very cool project — and exciting to see crops and chickens being raised by kids right in the middle of our city.

We then headed east, toward White Rock Lake, to see the coop that belongs to the owners of The Custom Coop Company, which builds chicken coops to order.  These folks not only had quite an impressive chicken operation, they also had dwarf goats, which Chris assured me would not be happy in our backyard, as well as peacocks and a turkey.  I was surprised to see all the various breeds of foul, including the chickens, living happily together.  Like some kind of peaceful poultry wonderland.

After buying a colorful Peep T-shirt, we continued our journey around the lake, looking at the variety of chickens and coops that people in East Dallas have set up, including a model built by Mobile Chicken Coops, a tour sponsor.  One thing that struck us as we wandered through the White Rock area was that our yard is much smaller than the ones we saw, and our neighborhood  is very different.  While White Rock is kind of groovy, Preston Hollow is kind of not.  In fact, when North Haven, which is right around the corner from us, announced their plans to sell chickens, some of the neighbors made such an uproar about the potential “public nuisance” that the company decided not to.  I mean, we’re just a few minutes north of the now notorious native plant garden in University Park, labeled “ugly” by many local citizens, that was recently ripped out and replaced with annuals that require more maintenance and more water than what was there before.  Plus, it seems like some kind of ecological de-evolution to install pansy beds in North Texas.

Chris and I are lucky, though, because our house sits right in the middle of a little groovy enclave.  The neighbors around us appreciate our bees, love our honey, and would welcome fresh chicken eggs, so we don’t anticipate problems — should we decide to go to the chicken side.  As for poultry laws, Dallas is impressively progressive.  Like honey bees, which are neither discouraged nor regulated, chickens are an accepted species, providing you stick with females.  It is against the law to keep a rooster, for obvious reasons, within the city limits.  (In Dallas, we call someone who rats out a rooster owner a “chicken snitch.”)  But as long as the chickens are quiet, which chickens tend to be, you’re free to raise them on your property.

I imagine, though, if you turn into a crazy chicken lady, filling the backyard with dozens of layers, the police will come knocking.

So, did we get chickens?  Well, as I write this, Chris and I are still chicken free.  But stay tuned.  My birthday is coming up.

Anne

For a look at the daily life of a Dallas chicken farmer, check out Leslie Halleck’s blog “Grow Lively.”

But the most important thing that happened was our marriage.  We bought the house and began the garden not long after saying “I do,” and what we both first envisioned reflected what we’d build if we had no one else to consider.  There have been plenty of arguments in our garden, as Chris lectured me on the right way to plant things and which perennials went where, and I ignored him, preferring to experiment and figure it out for myself.  The garden that now sprawls across our back yard reflects three years of compromise, getting used to each other, and learning not to go to battle over salvia.  Now, when we go to North Haven, I still pick up plants that have no hope of surviving the Texas summer, but instead of ordering me to put them back, Chris tells me, “Sure.  Let’s try them.”  But my experiments have become less ridiculous.  I’ve embraced the fact that if the tag says, “needs six hours of full sunlight,” it really does, and two hours in the morning isn’t enough to keep the plant full and blooming.  And I surrender quicker, recognizing that I’ve made a mistake and moving shrubs that are struggling — because I didn’t follow the planting suggestions — to a place in the yard that makes more sense.

Chris, too, has changed his garden style.  Bird feeders dangle haphazardly from our trees, and several bird houses hang from our fence, hidden behind Japanese maples — all purchased and installed by my husband who knows I love to watch the cardinals from my office window.  There is also a large, multi-colored sculpture that spins in the wind, a piece he bought me for my birthday several years ago.  And he has embraced the chaos of our perennials and joined me in adopting the belief that “green is good,” abandoning herbicides to let the violets and wild strawberry mingle with the St. Augustine.  He still likes his annual color, so there are pots of zinnias and gerber daisies on our pool deck, and we plant impatiens in the front yard every spring.  And yes, there are bushes and bushes of azaleas, because he loves them, and I have stopped pushing him to pull them out and replace them with sage.

The whole history of our last four and half years together is contained in our garden.  Stone borders and knockout roses provide an underlying sense of order.  But crawling begonia, coral-bells, hot lips, and rosemary wander over, under and between, tangling and spilling onto the stone walkway.   Behind the holly bush hides a shade rose, blooming on its own for no rhyme or reason except to fill a space with color.  And a red-flowered sage grows between a clump of azaleas and a pink tea rose that bends over the grill and needs pruning.  Chris will tell me again this year that the black-eyed Susans need to be thinned, and I will remove a few and give them to my friends, leaving half a dozen more than he would like, which is half a dozen fewer than I prefer.  But we will happily move on to other projects, knowing there is no perfect number that suits us both.

Even in this short time that we have been married, we can already see the constants that will follow us through the years.  Chris will do laundry every day and forget to turn off the closet light, and I will send Valentines to his office and, once each year, back my car into his in the driveway.  And when he comes home in the evenings, we will stand together on the patio, watching the bees dancing at the birdbath, discussing the small events of our days, and admiring the garden that we have made.

Anne

To see pictures of our garden as it starts to bloom, click on the image in the upper right.

Every time we saw a rain barrel, we had our same discussion, and every time, we left the store without one.

The Great Rain Barrel Debate didn’t start over eco-issues.  We were visiting my parents in Florida and came across a display of charming rain barrels, painted with butterflies and flowers, at a local store.  ”Oh, honey.  Cute.  Let’s get one,” I said.  Chris told me, “You can’t even water the garden once with that.”  And we returned to Dallas without a charming rain barrel.

The debate continued amongst other still on-going discussions.  (Should we cover our tiny roof with solar panels?  Install a 200-gallon cistern either underground or upright, like the Petticoat Junction water tower?)  My rain barrel “for” argument was simple:  It can’t hurt.  Meanwhile, Chris stuck to the counter, “It won’t help either.”

As the controversy raged, we pushed forward on other projects.  One of these was moving our vegetable garden from the northeast side of the house, where it didn’t get enough sun, to the southeast, where there was plenty of sun but no water spigot.  Which meant that when we watered our tomatoes, we had to drag the hose from the backyard and through the gate, while wrestling with the dogs (“Back! Back!”) and fighting the fence, which refused to let the hose slip easily by.  As primary tender of the tomatoes and hose wrestler, Chris started thinking about other solutions.

I continued to suggest “rain barrel,” pointing out every charming model I saw in catalogs and farmers’ markets.  But Chris still balked.  Then last week, he had a sudden and inexplicable change of heart.  While we were shopping for plants at our local Home Depot, Chris pointed to a rain barrel and said, “That looks pretty good.”

It wasn’t charming.  It didn’t have painted butterflies.  But I’ve been married long enough to know when to accept victory and not push my luck.  I looked at the brown plastic jug and told him, “I like it.”  But Chris wasn’t ready yet to buy.  Instead, we headed home where, in Typical Chris Fashion, he spent an hour on the Internet investigating ways to hook up a rain barrel and create an automated watering system.  (And I thought you just put it outside and attached a hose.)

Later, as I was cooking dinner, Chris announced that he was going back to Home Depot to buy the barrel.  He returned a half hour later with a 58-gallon jug and various pieces of pipe and hardware he planned to assemble into a garden irrigation system.

I went outside after dinner to see what he’d done, and I was pretty impressed.  Chris had put the rain barrel next to a drainpipe, where he’d installed a diverter to pull water from the roof into the barrel.  He’d also hooked up a timer and a drip system that he could just turn on and set for a couple of hours, leaving the garden to water itself.  (Yes, the question “Do we have to have a big hose running through our lettuce?” was on the tip of my tongue, but no, I didn’t say it.)

This is Texas, so we haven’t seen rain in a while, but we’re scheduled for showers this weekend.  I’ll let you know what happens in the rain barrel.

Anne

To check out a wide variety of rain barrels, go to SimplyRainBarrels.  If you have a rain barrel story of your own, please post it here.

A raw vegan diet excludes all foods with animal origin and all food cooked above 46 degrees Celsius.  People follow this diet for a lot of different reasons — spiritual, ethical, and environmental — but most will tell you that there’s a real health benefit to the balance of micronutrients that are contained in raw vegan foods.  Plus, people who’ve switched to raw vegan say it’s a great way to lose weight and keep it off.

I confess:  It was the brownie on the table next to us that convinced me to give it a try.

Lori and I ordered two of the cafe’s top sellers:  Pad Thai (kelp noodles tossed in almond butter and chili sauce) and Coconut Kale Enchiladas (marinated kale with pico de gallo, salsa verde and cashew sour creme wrapped in coconut tortillas).  The Pad Thai was good, but the enchiladas were delicious.  And the sauces for both dishes were out-of-this-world good.  For dessert, we got the brownies and the white chocolate cheezecake.  These, alone, were worth the trip.  Neither tasted like their non-vegan, non-raw counterparts, but they were yummy in their own right.  I’m not sure what made up the “cheeze” of the cake, but the crust was ground pecans — so good, it made me want to order a restaurant-grade mixer for my kitchen and start making cheezecakes of my own.

We got a chance to spend a few minutes talking with the chef, Miranda Martinez, who’s a true believer in raw.  When I asked her why, she told me that she’d lost sixty pounds just by changing her diet.  Desserts are her specialty, and last year, she was invited to do a cooking demonstration, preparing her pineapple cobbler, at the Texas State Fair Celebrity Chef Kitchen.  It was the first time in the State Fair’s history that the event had featured raw, vegan food.

Because it’s raw, the food at Bliss is difficult to store.  That means that all their dishes are made fresh every morning.  As a result, the cafe is a little more expensive than the diner around the corner, and popular entrees do sell out.  Another caveat:  the seating area is an enclosed patio, so the environment is casual and the restaurant’s strongest selling point.  I went at lunch, so I’d love to hear from something who went at night.  Maybe candlelight gives the place a little more atmosphere.

If you’re a complete carnivore and a hesitant to go the raw route, stick your toe in the water by dropping in for dessert.  Get loosened up with a slice of cheezecake and you’ll be ready, on your next visit, to try an enchilada.

Anne

Bliss Cafe is located at 6855 Greenville Ave., 1/2 block south of Park Lane.  Hours are Monday thru Saturday, 11 am to 10 pm, and Sunday, 11 am to 4 pm.

Here’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity coming up on Monday — the whole Book 2 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  I was there for Book one last Thursday, and to hear all 24 Prelude and Fugue sets, played by 9 different musicians, was quite an experience.  Not only did I get to enjoy the genius of Bach, I had the chance to hear a wide variety of styles and approaches.

On Monday, a whole new group (of 10 pianists) is taking on Book 2.

I will tell you that this is kind of a hardcore experience.  Two straight hours of Preludes and Fugues is a lot of Bach.  But if you’re a musician or a Bach lover or someone who’s just in the mood to sit back and hear great stuff, head over to SMU’s Caruth Auditorium on Monday night.  Not sure if Bach’s our thing? Get a taste of Book 2 with Glenn Gould playing the Prelude and Fugue in F-sharp minor at YouTube.  These are my Book 2 favorites, and though he makes them sound easy, they are truly beasts, as are all Bach’s Preludes and Fugues.

Just a little background:  Bach composed Book 1 in 1722, writing a Prelude and Fugue for each of the major and minor keys.  He finished Book 2 in 1742, and it covers the same.  The Well-Tempered Clavier is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of western music, and even Beethoven was a big fan.

So what does “well-tempered” mean?  ”Temperament” refers to the tuning style of a keyboard.  Although I’m not an expert in tuning history, here’s my way-too-simple explanation of Bach’s title.  Today, we have a standard method for tuning a piano, but that wasn’t always the case.  Before the Baroque period, keyboards were tuned for a particular key, which limited composers because they couldn’t modulate from key to key within the same piece of music.

In Bach’s time, tuning practices were changing, and there were experts who wrote instructions for tuning the keyboard so that all key signatures could be used and giving each key a distinct characteristic sound.  This was a big breakthrough for composers who could then use different keys within one piece to create different sounds and moods.  TWC was amazing because it covered all 24 keys and really demonstrated the different sounds those key signatures could produce.

Tuning took a big step forward in the Baroque period, but it wasn’t yet standardized, as it is today, with equal half steps (so that if you transpose a piece up a half step, for example, it sounds exactly the same).  The piano at SMU that will be used for Monday night’s performance has been tuned according to the instructions of Bach’s time.  If you’re truly hardcore and know all the Preludes and Fugues, you’ll hear the difference between how TWC sounds on that piano and how it would sound on your piano at home.  (I’m not quite that hardcore and couldn’t hear it.  But I still enjoyed the concert.)

If you can’t make it Monday but are interested in other concerts and recitals at SMU’s Meadows School, check out the calendar on the school’s Web site.

Anne

Johann Sebastian Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2″ will be performed Monday, April 5, 2010, in Caruth Auditorium at 8 pm.

There are neighborhoods in Dallas where you can find front yards filled with native flowers.  But those areas are south and east of us, in Oak Cliff and Munger Place, where the attitude is much funkier than over here in Preston/Royal.  In our neck of the woods, people have grass, so we figure if we’re going to take up the yard, we’ll need to do it gradually.

Our chance to begin arrived last summer when the people next door cut down their giant oak tree, turning half our shady front yard into a wide-open patch of sun.  So we made an appointment with Pat at North Haven Gardens to talk about the space and ideas for filling it.  She agreed that our new sunny space would be a great location for sun-loving, draught-tolerant perennials, and we left North Haven with a plan to build a small berm and extend our front garden.

There are pictures on the right of the new garden when it was empty and just after we put in plants.  As you can see, we’ve created a large garden space, 15-feet deep in the widest spot and 30-feet long.  Our biggest concern was that we didn’t want it to become a brown mound in the winter when the perennials die back, which is what we have right now in our backyard sun garden.

We returned to North Haven yesterday to meet with Pat and show her pictures of the garden we’ve built.  We told her we didn’t want to use annuals, nor did we want the entire garden to die in the winter.  Also, we said that we’d like to use a primary color scheme, planting mostly plants with green, blue and yellow flowers and foliage.

Pat recommended that we build the garden around lavender and rosemary, because they both flower and stay green throughout the year — and that’s what we’ve done, adding expanded shale on top of the soil around the lavender, to help with drainage.  In the front half of the garden, we’ve also followed Pat’s advice and planted lemon thyme down by the border stones, and behind that, catmint nepeta, red dianthus, 4 nerve daisy, and pin cushion plants.  We also brought over  from our pool deck a Copper Canyon Daisy and a germander bush that had become root bound in their pots, as well as three sage plants from the backyard that weren’t getting enough sun.  In addition, we dug up a lantana bush that had grown up on its own — an offshoot of the one in our garden — between the stones of our backyard path.  We planted that in the back of our new front garden.

Once the garden begins to fill in, we plan to add daffodil bulbs, butterfly weed, and coneflowers.  But for now, we’re going to give our new plants some time to grow.  I’ll keep you posted on our progress.  And keep your fingers crossed we don’t get another freeze.

Anne

To meet with a North Haven garden consultant, call (214) 363-5316.  The service costs $50, but you receive a $50 North Haven gift card, so it’s basically free.

We asked her about our jug o’ brown stuff, and she said it was from the vermicompost in her worm farm.  Then she reached under a table, pulled out a big plastic tub, and showed us her worms.

I’m going to reveal my city-fication and say that I’d never heard of or seen a worm farm before that day.  For those like me who are new to this, here are the basics:  the worms break down fruit and vegetable waste to create an amazingly rich compost.  The “farm house” can be as simple as a Rubbermaid tub or as fancy as ours, which as you can see in the picture on the right, is the worm version of Trump Tower.  Since the worm farms need to stay warm and don’t smell — I know:  hard to believe but true — some people keep them under the kitchen sink.  Ours is in Chris’ rumpus room, otherwise known as “the greenhouse,” which has heating and air conditioning — again, I know:  hard to believe but true — so that our worms can live in luxury.

This was a big surprise for us, as we’ve had plenty of naysayers, “experts” who’ve said “it’s too late in the season,” “you missed the honey flow,” “your hive is too young.”  It took a visit from Chris’ sister to get us honey-bound.  Libby put on a bee suit, stuck her head in the hive and said, “That’s honey.”  Chris asked co-worker Rob, a former bee guide, if the evidence supported Libby’s theory, and Rob said, “Sure.  Why not?”  And that was that.  We harvested.

Our hive has certainly seen as much trouble as a telenovela, but nature always wins, even when she gets jostled around by bumbling beekeepers like Chris and me.  Bees were born to make honey, and honey they did make.  In fact, those jars at the top of this blog are sitting in our kitchen right now, waiting for the honey bear bottles to arrive so that we can fill ‘em up and share honey with our friends.

And, of course, our neighbors, who have been very supportive of our hive.  Even the folks next door, the ones involved in The Bee Incident.  We’re looking forward to sharing with them the fruits of our bumbling.

We gathered honey the old-fashioned way.  Chris hauled the frames into the kitchen and set them across the counters draining into buckets.  Yes, there is a thing called a “honey extractor” that makes honey harvesting clean and easy, but ours is on back-order, and once Chris got it into his head that he was getting honey, there was no stopping him.  It was a messy process and much comb was harmed in the making of our harvest, so there will be no homemade candles or lip balm this time around.  But we do have honey.  And that is a great success.

Bee-saster

Just in case there’s anyone left on the planet who hasn’t heard Chris tell the story of how I knocked over the bee hive, let me fill you in:  I knocked over the bee hive.  And it was the bee version of the Poseidon Adventure, boxes turned upside down, panels flying across the yard, sugar water pouring into the flower bed.  Here’s how it happened, excuses included:

After The Incident when the neighbors’ yard crew discovered the hive and refused to mow their lawn, we moved the bees closer to our house.  It was a long process of shifting the hive just a few feet every week, so that the bees wouldn’t lose their bearings and get lost on their way home.  Finally, we’d gotten the boxes to their target location, but the hive was slightly off center on its supports.  So, Chris said, “You lift it and I’ll move it.”  I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to being bossed around the garden by my husband, so when we’re doing an outside chore, I tend to turn off my brain and just follow the steady flow of directions.  When Chris said, “Lift,” I expected it to be followed by, “Higher.  No, lower.  Higher.  Slower.  Faster.  Lower.  Higher.  Stop.”  Instead, all I got was lift, so I lifted until I’d tossed the hive to the ground.

What followed was something out of a Stephen King novel.  Buzzing that crescendoed to a roar, thousands of bees on attack, and Chris yelling, “Run.”  Which we did.

When a bee is killed, her body lets off a chemical that tells the rest of the colony that the hive is under attack.  Squishing a bee or two when you check on the hive is common, and the bees seem to roll with it.  But when you knock the whole thing over, it’s bee carnage, and the chemical message is like a tornado siren.  We’d never seen our happy bees quite so unhappy.

The unfortunate part was that we had to go back quickly and reassemble the hive — while they were still on red alert.  Chris did a heroic job — I was terrified the whole time he was picking up boxes and panels.  But he got it back together and ran into the garage, only getting stung a couple of times.

Bee hive-inars

Despite our multiple attempts to commit bee murder and send our colony fleeing to the hills, the group is happy and thriving.  In fact, the colony is so healthy that we’ll soon need to move some of the bees into a new hive to prevent swarming, which is what bees do when their hive gets too crowded.  A group of them will leave, raise some key money and go looking for a bigger apartment.

We have another bee box ready to go.  We just haven’t been sure how to move the bees safely from one hive to another.  We’ve asked our local experts, who fill our heads with mystery and voodoo, and as a result, we have become (to steal a cheesy movie line) paralyzed with fear.

Fortunately, Chris discovered that the Brushy Mountain Bee Farm in Moravian Falls, NC, a company from which we buy many of our hive supplies, offers regular Webinars to help people like us keep their bees happy and productive.  Last week, we joined one on “Making Colonies From the Ones You Own” hosted by a nice Brushy Mountain fellow named Shane and featuring bee expert Larry Connor. 

Here’s the big message I got from the Webinar:  They’re BEES.  They’ll be fine.  You can make a lot of mistakes, and they’ll still gather pollen, raise new workers, and make honey.  It was all pretty liberating.  So, in March, when it gets a little warmer, we’ll be moving a few frames from the current hive into a new one.  Larry Connor says, “Don’t worry.  They’ll make their own queen.”  (That’s something I like about Larry Connor.  He’s not a bee alarmist.)  But we’ll probably buy one anyway.   And drop her.  And lose her.  And accidentally squish her.