Mountain Beaver Capitol of the Known Universe

A continuation of The Saga...

Part 1        Part 2        Part 3

Part 4:  My husband spotted a NEW interloper in our rockery yesterday while he was gardening.  This guy is even less attractive.  And look how he's trying to stare me down.  Or maybe he's trying to smile for the camera.  He didn't even try to run away.  What cojones!

We've named this guy Beavis.

Britt's Beekeeping, Part 3: The Queen Bee

A good friend of mine recently made a trip home to Boise to visit her family and had the opportunity to learn about some local honey beekeeping efforts. She's been talking about getting a hive for her yard here in Seattle for some time, so was an eager student as she learned about many of the details of bees and beekeeping. She took incredible pictures, which she posted on Facebook, and added very informative captions for each one. I thought they were so great that I asked if I could highlight them here on Skruben as well. She said "great!"  Here is the final installment of Britt's Beekeeping...

The Queen Bee:

When the queen is introduced to a hive, she's inserted in a small mesh box with a fondant plug. After the two days it takes the workers to eat their way through, they're used to her scent and she's welcome rather than killed as an intruder.

There are multiple breeds of honeybees. The hive is a blend of a couple of different swarms and this queen is from a generally placid breed. She should produce happy, mellow bees.

One thing to look for when checking a hive is too many drone cells. The queen only takes one 2-3 day long mating flight in her lifetime, so not many are needed. A drone can mate within one week of hatching. Once he does, he dies. He's got no stinger and buggier eyes.

Typically, brood cells - and the queen - are in the center of the box. The outer frames are the honey cells.

She will lay about 1500 eggs a day, so she's pretty mobile. She does nothing else after her mating flight.

Here we are, looking for the queen. It takes a month for a queen-less hive to produce a queen that can lay. By that time, the drones can outnumber the workers and the hive is often irreparably out of balance. This is why it's important to keep an eye out for the queen.

Still looking for the Queen. Three bee hoods make for a tricky huddle.

There's the queen! Though she can live for several years, most beekeepers "retire" their queens after one. Some are set into smaller boxes as back-up queens. Others are just squished.

Now that she's been marked (with an enamel paint pen), she should be somewhat easier to find during hive checks.

Once these frames are full of honey, a queen excluder will be added on top and a new box will be added. Her hips are too wide to fit through the excluder, but the workers can easily move up to the new box.

Any honey above these two boxes, which the bees need to survive the winter, may be harvested. Depending on how the summer goes, there might be a harvest this year!

Britt's Beekeeping, Part 2: Honeycomb

A good friend of mine recently made a trip home to Boise to visit her family and had the opportunity to learn about some local honey beekeeping efforts. She's been talking about getting a hive for her yard here in Seattle for some time, so was an eager student as she learned about many of the details of bees and beekeeping. She took incredible pictures, which she posted on Facebook, and added very informative captions for each one. I thought they were so great that I asked if I could highlight them here on Skruben as well. She said "great!", so here is Part 2 of Britt's Beekeeping...

Honeycomb:

Here's pretty new honeycomb. Two weeks ago, only the black starting plastic was there.

Here's more established comb.

The rubber bands are holding in rescued comb from a hive in a house's walls.

Burr comb is excess honeycomb -- not particularly useful to the hive. It makes it tougher to move the frames in and out. They're often used for drone cells, as well.

Britt with burr comb.

These are all honey cells. Once they're full, the bees cap them with wax. They build comb on both sides of the frame.

These darker cells are filled with worker bee larvae. They're nearly ready to hatch.

That more bullet-shaped cell 8:45 of center is a drone cell, I believe. They are larger and more conical. If the queen disappears, the workers can start laying drone eggs. Since the drones do nothing but mate with the queen and be fed by the workers, a hive overrun with drones is bad news.

In this picture, you can see the little larvae pretty well - the half-moon wormy shrimp dudes. They're about 10 days along, I think. The eggs, which I didn't spot, float in royal jelly when they're laid.

In the next installment of Britt's Beekeeping...Part 3: The Queen Bee

All photos courtesy of Britt McCombs

Britt's Beekeeping, Part 1: Bee Basics

A good friend of mine recently made a trip home to Boise to visit her family and had the opportunity to learn about some local honey beekeeping efforts. She's been talking about getting a hive for her yard here in Seattle for some time, so was an eager student as she learned about many of the details of bees and beekeeping. She took incredible pictures, which she posted on Facebook, and added very informative captions for each one. I thought they were so great that I asked if I could highlight them here on Skruben as well. She said "great!", so here is Part 1 of Britt's Beekeeping...

Bee Basics:

This is the hive.  There are two stacked boxes which contain frames that can be slipped out from the top.  Smoking the hive makes the bees crave honey so they stay down in the combs and are less likely to sting, or leave.

This is the bees' ground floor entrance to the hive.  

There's another entrance in both boxes. The top one leads to the sugar water (simple syrup) feeders.

This is the sugar water feeder. Right now, they're drinking almost a gallon of sugar water every two days. The more of it they drink, the less they'll eat the honey.

The bees eat honey. The pollen they collect is fed to the larvae. A bee produces about 1/4 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.

The yellow-legged bees have full pollen sacks. They can visit up to 2000 flowers a day, but only carry 50-100 flowers' worth at a time.  The most productive worker bees may wear their bodies out after 2-3 weeks. Worker bees can live 2-3 months in the active season.

On the warmest days, some workers stand at the entrance and fan with their wings to lower the hive temperature to 93 degrees Fahrenheit.  Over the winter, bees can live longer. They huddle around the brood (egg) cells and take turns vibrating their bodies to maintain the 93 degree environment.

Workers have multiple roles in their lives. The youngest produce wax flakes from chest glands that other workers chew and soften to build the combs.  All these workers are imperfect females, meaning they can't lay eggs that become workers.

Bees also produce propolis, which is a very very sticky, dark orange, resinous substance that they get from plant sap and they use to hold things together in the hive. It has to be loosened to lift out the frames.  A full frame weighs about 8 pounds.

In the next installment of Britt's Beekeeping...Part 2: Honeycomb

All photos courtesy of Britt McCombs

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The Mountain Beaver Saga

Since it's the weekend and some gardening is going to happen, I thought I'd do an update on my ongoing Mountain Beaver battle.  Here's a brief summary:  a Mountain Beaver (named Butt Head) lives in the bushes on the edge of our yard.  Every year he waits until our new raspberry shoots have grown long and lush, then he chops them off with his sharp little teeth and carries them off to his evil lair.  We had a total harvest of about 10 berries last year. It makes me so mad I could spit (as my Grandma always said).  After several years of trying an electric fence solution, I finally gave up on it.  I just never felt confident that it was working, either because my kids had turned it off when they played in the yard or because the power supply would fail.  I was constantly preoccupied with checking to see if it was functioning properly.  I was living a life of paranoia and obsession... a shell of a woman.

So this year I just put up a chicken wire fence.  I like it because I can actually see that it's working.  It may not look great, but it's totally serving its purpose.  I just used lengths of rebar every two or three feet, which I wove through the wire and hammered into the ground.  I tacked down the bottom edge of the chicken wire with tree stakes to make sure BH couldn't push his way under.  True story...on the day that I went to Home Depot to buy the tree stakes my husband was out in the yard and saw BH walk around the edge of the fence and try to nose his way under it.  What a little s#@t!  

Happily, he was not successful.  See how nicely everything's growing in!  I'm feeling very hopeful.

The Saga continues...Part 4

Caught in the Act!

A follow-up in our mountain beaver saga...

The kids and I were outside today hanging out in the yard (not very quietly, I might add) when we heard a rustling in the bushes behind the raspberries. I looked down into the hedge and saw a tiny little clawed hand clutching a laurel branch and the beady-eyed creature attached to it. A real, live mountain beaver sighting! The kids were thrilled.

I ran to fetch the camera and didn't have to wait long for the chance to snap a few shots...the Mountain Beaver (who I call Butt Head) seems to have no fear of people...or regard for their ownership of prized fruit plants. He can't get at the raspberries now because of my elaborate electric fence shield.

Latest update: Summer 2011

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The Mountain Beaver is my enemy.

I have a long-standing war with a Mountain Beaver that has taken up residence in the bushes near my yard. His scientific name is Aplodontia rufa, but let's just call him "Butt Head." You may have never heard of a Mountain Beaver. They aren't actually beavers and they don't live anywhere near the mountains. They rival Skruben in their elusiveness. They have opposable thumbs. They eat my raspberry bushes, and therefore, are my sworn enemy.

Two summers ago I started noticing the new shoots of my raspberry bushes (the next year's crop bearing stalks) were being cut off near the base. After first secretly blaming several different people for the damage, I spied a small fury creature trotting along the base of my raspberry bushes...clutching a bouquet of new shoots in his hand. I instantly knew who the culprit was after having heard tales of local mountain beavers. I consulted with several different garden experts here in Seattle and eventually settled on putting up an electric fence to keep BH out. That worked well, and I settled into a state of egotistical and reckless complacency.

This spring I took down the electric fence, thinking that BH had moved on to greener pastures. There was no sign of him at all through the spring and early summer. My raspberries grew long, lush new shoots and were looking very fine, if I do say so myself. Last Thursday, in the dead of night, he came back. He took half of them the first night and most of the rest over the next few days after I thought I had re-installed the electric fence properly. Idea for a new blog post: how to correctly install an electric fence.

Mountain Beaver: 2, Anne: 0

Follow up (with actual photos):  Caught in the Act!

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