Winter Solstice Soap

In all the mad hurrying and scurrying to get ready for the holiday sales season, I made a blunder on one batch of soap.  I accidentally added the essential oils from two different varieties to the same batch.  Happily, it turned out to be a lovely mistake.  It's a little like those old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials from the 1980s where two people run into each other on the sidewalk and chocolate and peanut butter collide...a wonderful accident.

Winter Solstice Soap is made with honey, beeswax and the oils of frankincense, myrrh, clove and orange.  It's warm and spicy and sweet, all at the same time.  It's a perfect winter scent.

I wanted to choose label art for it that made folks think of the cozy glow of candles in the long, dark winter.  I chose today (Daylight Savings Day) to make it available because I think there's lots to love in this stretch of time until the Winter Solstice on December 21st.  The darkness of the longest night is always lifted by candlelight.  

Thanks to the Graphics Fairy for this great image.

Each bar is individually wrapped and labeled for gift-giving.  There is only one batch, so don't miss out!

How To: Fabric Tape

My crafty friend Britt (who also happens to be a fledgling beekeeper), came up with this great DIY project when she needed some decoration for her lovely honey jars.  Then she was kind enough to let me post the tutorial here on Skruben!  Here's how she did it...

I needed to secure the lids on my 2oz honey jars (they only screw on about 1/16 of a turn) and thought about Japanese Washi paper tape, but thought fabric tape might be more fun. I'm not the first to make it (or to do a how-to) but this is the first I saw with just the regular clear tape.

Pick a fabric. Small prints and solids make the prettiest tapes. Fat quarters and even scraps work fine.

If you're going to use the tape immediately, standard double-sided tape is great. If you want to make it ahead, use something like this  double sided tape with the protective backing on so you can store it.

Apply your tape. If you have a pattern to work with, clear tape is great here because you see through to check your alignment.

You could use scissors to cut out your tape, but a rotary cutter, straight edge and mat allow for the cleanest cuts.

Voila! Cut your tape to the required size.

An angled edge adds interest.

Beautiful!

Tough Chick Soap

I have a new One Batch bare bar soap available on the website today.  It's called Tough Chick Soap because it's a mixture of floral, feminine sweetness and rough and tough ground organic oats.  It's scented with fine French lavender essential oil and is made with honey from the Ballard Bee Company.  The smell is a complex, sweet floral.  It's lovely.  You should try some!

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

Local Honey Buzz

I am very happy to announce that Seattle Sundries is now using honey (and soon beeswax) produced by neighborhood bees and gathered by the Ballard Bee Company..."Keeping the Bee in Ballard."

The very friendly and accommodating owners of Ballard Bee Co. (Corky Luster and Karen Percelle) place hives all around Ballard, which means the honey collected is a true reflection of our neighborhood and the " diverse plants that thrive in our local gardens and parks." They supply select local restaurants and grocers with the raw honey that they harvest.

The city of Seattle allows a maximum of four hives per lot in city limits, so Ballard Bee Co. has set up "hosting" relationships with neighborhood residents who are willing to have hives placed on their property, and be maintained by BBC. I'm considering getting on the waiting list for hives to be placed at our house. BBC also rents hives and does consultation work for folks interested in learning beekeeping themselves. It's awesome!

To read more about the Ballard Bee Company, visit their website and read the interview done on MyBallard.com. Good stuff!!

photo courtesy of the Ballard Bee Co. website

Highland Fling Soap

I thought I'd use this blog also as a place to give more information and background on some of the soaps I make, ingredients that I use and projects I've been working on:

One of the first kinds of soap I started making (in the early 90s) was a GREAT smelling bar made with honey, oatmeal and beeswax. The beeswax is added because honey makes the soap really soft and hard to get out of the molds. Beeswax firms it up and contributes to its color and natural scent. The soap is a beautiful amber with little flecks of ground oatmeal (which I use a coffee grinder purchased at Value Village to make). I made and loved this soap for a number of years before I decided to start a soap business.

When I needed a label and a theme for it, something Scottish seemed like an obvious choice. I have strong associations with honey, oatmeal and Scotland...and bagpiping, of course. I've played the bagpipes for the past 27 years and am a founding member of the Elliott Bay Pipe Band here in Seattle (since 1992). The bagpiper on the label was a tribute to those long-time friends in the piping world. After a name change or two, I have finally settled on "Highland Fling Soap." Check it out!