October 09- The Monarch is back

 The monarch butterfly is back!

OK, OK, I know it is not the same butterfly as last year but how exciting is this. And this one stayed in our garden for a good month. It was super exciting to have a resident monarch butterfly at the garden.

 

ahhhhh

 

 

We are using the the new chicken  coop as a chicken tractor to take out the chickens to the sun on rotation. It is great and the chickens love it!

 

Pumpkin harvest!

 

 I love the colors

 

This pumpkins are NOT from my garden but from a Half moon bay pumpkin patch. I stooped to get some for Halloween and pumping pie on my way to a meeting.

September 09- Chicken cribs & Seed Collection

This summer the garden was extremely bountiful and we left all plants go to see to collect  and use those seeds for next year

 

Of course we started the day with the Hello Kitty tattoo tradition. It gives you power!

Ella really like it.

 

Beautiful group of helpers

 

That was the wall of sunflowers that needed to be removed

 

Marylin did an outstanding job

 

Look at her! mixing in the horse manure into the soils. We got this horse manure for free from the stables of Tilden park.

 

 

Saving the sun flower seeds before the squirrels and the birds take them all

 

There were a lot of seeds

 

More seed collection

 

 

 

The zome also needed some fixing

 

Rob came up with this beautiful looking connector to keep the panels in place

 

David finishing the outside pannels

Becky hard at work-she was sweating!

 

It was Andreas birthday so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to build the chicken crib and show it off

 

It was awesome to watch them build it

 

Rusty and Andreas worked for months on this design for a small, modular, easy to assemble, chicken crib for all urban gardens. Rob cut all the parts in his shop with the CNC bot.

 

It's like a chicken dance

 

Kids loved it

yes, it works for the kids

 

 

Chicks like it too

 

But now we had to test the real chickens

Giancarlo let us borrow his chickens for the test

 

Andreas got the most beautiful one

 

Check, check-good!

 

And it works!!!

 

They seem to like it

 

yeah they approve!

 

 

And it was great entertainment for the kids

 

Look at that- isn't it beautiful? this is truly the designer version of an urban farm.

Who else has a greenhouse that looks like a jewel and a designer chicken crib?

  you can get your own, check out their web site:

http://www.zomadic.com/

http://www.chickencribs.com/

And as always there was a lot of chilling under the shade of the fruit trees. I love this garden and being able to share it with my friends

 

August 09- Honey harvest

Honey harvest time

This is one on the many honey combs

August is pretty much the end of the season and time to harvest honey.

I bough a triangle escape board to use to separate the bees from the top box.

 My bees went from just one box to three! The bottom box is the brooding box and the top boxes are where the honey is collected. Rule of thumb is to take only 40% of the honey, you want to leave your bees with enough honey for the winter.

The idea is to have the bees out of the top box, the one I was going to remove for honey harvest. I  placed the triangle escape board in between boxes and somehow it takes the bees 48 hours to figure out how to get back up. They can go down from the top box to the bottom of the hive where they exit but they can't come back up because their natural instinct is always to turn right so when trying to get back up to the honey chamber they can't because the triangle has all left turns. There is a window of opportunity for getting the honey box free of bees before they figure out the maze.

I wasn't sure this was going to work, but when I went to check, I was amazed, there were only about 5 bees which I carefully removed.

It was so easy to take the box that I felt really bad for the bees, I was a total dictator, tricking and stealing from them...But I was also so excited- I had a so much honey!!!

However, there was still a lot of work to be done.

I borrowed a centrifugal honey extractor from a co-worker and set it up int my kitchen to do the work

This thin knife is the main tool

So first thing to do is take out one frame from the box

Then very carefully I cut the thin layer of wax that cover the honey. Bees collect nectar from flowers that they then regurgitate and this become honey but it takes a while to solidify. Once it is honey consistency the bees cap it with the wax that they make. Which is the same nectar but it has gone through a longer regurgitating process and it becomes wax.

Here you can see  the cells full of honey after I cut the capping wax

At that point I placed the frames (3 at a time) into the centrifugal machine

I used this tray as I uncapped because a lot of honey dripped and I didn't wanted to waste any. I also wanted to collect the wax for candles

I poured all of that into the filtering, it is a double strainer. First one with bigger holes and second one is really fine, that way honey is completely free of wax or other particles

Once I was done with the extraction and all the honey was collected in the container, I filtered it

And this is how that looked. It was really exciting and the smell of the honey and the wax was truly intoxicating and delicious.

My kitchen, my jeans and my fingers were sticky with honey and propolis, which  is a very sticky resinous mixture that bees make to cover up small gaps on the hive, but I didn't care the honey was amazing and I was loving the process.

After all the filtering I got about 1 gallon of honey- not bad for a new hive started late in the season that only worked for about 4 months.

I love being a bee keeper and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more from my bees.