Look at the bee just right of the middle doing the splits. Ouch. I suppose this behaviour is a variation of festooning.

Here’s a half-drawn comb on a foundationless frame:

Now don’t tell me that ain’t way prettier.

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The bees haven’t been too active for the past week. I thought maybe I squished the queen during my last inspection. I usual, I don’t know. But the temperature went up and they were back to normal today. If we get a warm, dry September, I think both of my hives will have strong populations and plenty of honey stores for the winter.

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We included four foundationless frames in the hive when we added a second brood box. Two of the foundationless frames were fully-drawn and filled with honey and brood within 13 days. One frame was more than half-filled. The fourth frame, on the outer edge of the box, showed the beginning of some natural comb. Not bad.

Today, we took another look at that same foundationless frame — and look at it now:

But that’s nothing. Check this out:

That’s pretty much a fully-drawn comb of honey — on a foundationless frame made in thirteen days by Newfoundland honeybees in our backyard. Incredible. Had I known foundationless frames would turn out this well, I would have gone foundationless from the start. Here’s another foundationless frame of honey:

Notice the comb is gradually being connected to the sides of the frame. I still wouldn’t flip the frame to inspect it, but it’s sturdy enough that I’m not worried about the comb breaking off.

This is the one foundationless frame that had barely been touched since it was installed thirteen days ago — but they’re working on it.

Another shot of the first foundationless frame.

And a close-up. UPDATE: I didn’t notice all the brood in this comb before. Can you see the little grubs curled up in the cells near the bottom half of the frame?

We did a full inspection of Hive #1, pulling out and inspecting every frame. Here are the rest of the pics from the inspection:

This is after removing one frame from the top box. The frame feeder, installed only a few days ago, is half empty. (It can hold 7 litres of syrup but was filled with 6 litres to avoid spillage.)

The bees inside one of the “bee ladders” (a mesh tube that reaches down to the bottom of the feeder). Both ladders were full of bees. I like the frame feeder, but it doesn’t leave much room for the rest of the frames (it’s a tight fit). And of course I’m worried I squished the queen.

A close-up on some brood comb. As impressed as we are with the foundationless comb, so far we haven’t seen much brood on them, mosty honey. UPDATE (an hour later): We zoomed in closer on all the photos and found larvae on all the foundationless comb. The larvae (tiny curled up white grubs) aren’t as easy to spot against a naturally translucent background, compared to black plastic foundation.

Brood comb with mostly broken-through comb (bees that have hatched).

Mostly capped honey on a frame. The majority of the frames are well on their way to being fully-drawn. The colony in Hive #1 is thriving, as far as I can tell. I just wish we had more foundationless frames to give them. We will remove all the foundationed frames from the hive down the road, but for now they’ll have to make due with only four foundationless frames. Backwards Beekeepers, here I come.

To be continued…

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I assume they’re just really healthy bees and not bees getting ready to swarm.

Our Boardman feeders attract ants, wasps and even big ugly slugs. It’s not a problem for Hive #1 because their numbers are so high. But Hive #2 is weaker and having wasps around probably doesn’t help.

Not having to poke around the hives as much may be another advantage of switching to frame feeders. Hive #1 sucks up about a litre of syrup from the Boardman feeder every three days. If the bees continue at that pace, it could take them up to three weeks to empty 7 litres from the frame feeder, though we’ll likely refill it every two weeks after regular inspections regardless.

UPDATE (Aug. 25/10): I just added one of the feeders to Hive #1. I had to remove two empty frames and one of them was full of bees just starting to build comb, so I placed it in front the hive. They’ll fly back to the hive after they realized, “Hey, we’re not inside anymore!”

I only wore my veil and gloves. I sprayed the bees once with some sugar water when I banged the feeder down heavy. I only had 6 litres in it, but it still wasn’t easy to handle. I have to buy a large funnel for refilling. There’s no way I’m pulling that thing out every time I need to refill it. I’ll take a peek under the roof this weekend to see how fast they’re drinking the syrup. The colony in Hive #1 is still looking great to me.

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Did I mention I’m about a thousand times more engaged with beekeeping these days than I ever was with growing vegetables? I love hanging out in our backyard, and a large part of it has to do with the fact that I’m surrounded by green things growing like mad all over the place. But it’s the honeybees that complete the picture for me.

So although I’m not giving up on the gardening side of Mud Songs, I’m compelled to take a different approach to it. Yes, compelled! The new approach is this: I’m not going to bother with “garden updates” or any kind of updates. What’s the point? Whatever there is to learn from our experiences as backyard gardeners — and from growing things upside-down in buckets and bags and other contraptions — can be appreciated just as well after the fact. That’s probably the best way to do it, anyway. I can take plenty of photos throughout the growing season, take note of a few key and scintillating developments, and then write all about them in a more interesting and cohesive form over the winter, when I have a lot more time on my hands.

So that’s it. I probably won’t write another gardening-related post until sometime in the fall or early winter. I’ll write a few more gardening posts in late winter to talk about what we plan to do for the next season. Then no more gardening posts until it’s all over and we can document it online in a manner that’s more interesting and informative than most of what’s been posted so far. Okay, then. So it’s settled. {Deep sigh.}

To all of my readers, all three of you, thanks for listening. Carry on.

P.S., A reader asked, “Why do you have five categories (Beekeeping, Zucchini, Tomatoes, Broccoli, and Planting / Transplanting) at the top of your page, and then a full list of categories in the sidebar?”

Good question. The short answer: Those are the top five topics I’ve written about. Beekeeping is by far #1 with 36 post so far. The other four categories are tied for second place at 6 posts each. If for some reason I upload another stimulating post about tomatoes, then the “Tomatoes” category will show up next to “Beekeeping” instead of “Zucchini.” The top five categories could easily change once the beekeeping posts pile up. I may eventually remove the top-five feature, because I see how easy it is at first glance to think those are the only topics I write about.

Hive #2 wasn’t fed until the second week, but for the past week has had two Boardman feeders installed. It doesn’t get as much late-afternoon sun as Hive #1, and the last time we checked a couple days ago, only seven, maybe eight frames had partially or fully drawn out comb on them. (We also pulled a huge ugly slug from the bottom of the hive the same day.)

Those are the differences between Hive #1 and Hive #2. Here’s a quick video I shot today that illustrates the differences:

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Hive #1 is in fantastic shape as far as I can tell. If the activity outside the entrance is any indication of the health of the colony, then the colony in Hive #1 is doing three or four times better than the one in Hive #2.

It’s not uncommon to prop up a weak hive by installing a frame of brood taken from a stronger hive. But I’m reluctant to try anything like that because: 1) We already rolled the dice last week when we checkerboarded the brood frames after expanding Hive #1. We were lucky the colony was strong enough to handle having the brood all spread out. But if we chance it and mess with the brood again, I think we’d be pushing our luck. 2) We don’t have enough experience to try something like that. The queen would get squished, I know it.

I’m making a call to the one local experienced beekeeper I know, and if he says we should move a frame of brood from the strong colony to the weak colony, then okay, we’ll do it — if he supervises the operation. Otherwise, the plan is to wait until next weekend and add a second brood box to Hive #2 and hope for the best. (We do a lot of that around here.) For all we know, Hive #2 could be doing just fine the way it is. So we’ll see…

“Foundationless frames have nothing but a little strip of plastic or wood near the top called a starter strip. The bees hang off the [beeswax-coated] starter strip and construct their comb like they would in nature, creating cells the size they want them to be, not the size that’s imposed on them by following the pattern on a plastic foundation.” It’s argued that a colony is generally healthier when the honeybees are allowed to build comb as they would in nature — and this is about as close as it gets in a Langstroth hive. It’s the Backwards Beekeeping approach and it’s what got me hooked on beekeeping long before I had any bees. I just wasn’t sure it was even possible in the cold climate of Newfoundland. But now that I see evidence it can work, I’m inspired. I love it. These honeybees are incredible. Here’s how it played out:

We added a second brood chamber to Hive #1 six days ago because the colony had drawn comb on at least 9 of the 10 frames. They were ready to expand. We took about half the drawn frames, a mixture of brood and honey, and placed them in a second brood chamber, checker-boarding them using regular empty frames with foundation. We checker-boarded the original bottom brood chamber, too (that is, we placed an empty frame between all the frames with drawn out comb), but those empty bottom frames had no foundation, only a waxed starter strip and some wire between the frames to provide extra support for the comb. Theoretically, the bees would build comb first by festooning — that’s when the bees hang off each other in a chain to determine the straightest line down on which to build the comb. Check out the photo on the left: That’s what I call festooning! Honeybees have been festooning for hundreds of millions of years. There’s no stopping them now.

The bees built straight through the support wire like it wasn’t even there, and they’ve already begun to fill the comb with honey — and it’s only been six days. All the comb they’ve drawn out will eventually join up and fill the frame.

So as long as the warm weather holds up, I’m not worried about Hive #1. These bees are going at it like gang busters. I’ll keep feeding them and check them again in a couple weeks, but I think they’re doing great.

Next summer when we can hopefully harvest some honey, we’ll go with foundationless frames for the honey supers too.

That way when the honey is capped and good to go, we’ll just cut the comb right out of the frames and extract it by following the crush-and-strain method.

I’m feeling encouraged by what we’ve seen today. I’d love to be the first successful Backwards Beekeeper in Newfoundland.

I might even have to get myself one of their t-shirts. (We’ll see if the honeybees in Hive #1 keep up the good work.)

Anyway, check out all this beautiful, natural honeycomb. You don’t see that on plastic foundations.

To be continued…

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UPDATE: The bees probably aren’t cooling the hive. I’m not sure what they’re up to, but I saw them doing the same thing today when it was cold. I can’t imagine they’d want it even colder on a cold day, but maybe. As is often the case, I don’t know.

We have two cats, a young cat and an older cat. The older cat, Nigel, is so completely laid back, it’s absurd. He doesn’t even notice the bees, and so far the bees haven’t taken much notice of him either.

The younger cat, Winston (seen in the photo), will chase after anything that flies. He approached the bees cautiously when he first saw them. Then he got bolder and sat in front of a hive entrance one day and tried to catch a few bees — and got stung in the face. He didn’t make any noise when he got stung, but ran away and tried rubbing the sting off with his paws. A couple minutes later he was back to normal and hasn’t tried to catch a bee since. He will notice bees crawling on the ground once in a while, but even then he’ll just sit there and look. Cats learn fast.

The regular carrots in our raised garden bed are still growing slowly.

In other riveting garden news: Our zucchini plants are producing so much that we can’t keep up with them. We’ve been eating peas and beans for the past couple weeks, though not in large numbers. The beets are coming along, slowly. The celery looks beautiful but not large enough to harvest yet. Cucumbers are just beginning to grow on the vine. And our run of fresh strawberries for dessert every night is over. It lasted about 3 weeks. Oh — and we cut the splitting head off our garden bed broccoli last night and had it with some pan-fried cod. The broccoli was okay, but hardly worth the 2 square feet of garden space we sacrificed for it.

Lots of changes for the garden next year. This is still a gardening blog, right?

Sad looking, isn’t it?

The forecast called for sunshine today, but the sun did not come out.

It was cold and wet all day, not a good day for bees, especially after I split up the brood nest the day before — and that’s probably what I should not have done.


Moving some fully drawn frames into the new box was an okay move, but separating them by putting empty frames between all the drawn frames may have split up the brood too much for the limited number of bees to keep them warm enough to develop properly… and so inevitably a few have died from the cold. I hope it’s only these few.

I called a local beekeeper for advice before I added our second brood chamber, but no one answered and I didn’t leave a message. The next time I’m uncertain about something this important, I’m leaving a message and waiting until I hear back. I may be overly concerned again (I usually am). But I hope the weather warms up fast so the bees can get back in action.

UPDATE (Aug. 19/10): I only saw dead white bees that one day. The weather has been warm since and the bees have been out every day in impressive numbers. I’m not worried about Hive #1 as long as the warm weather holds up. Even on cloudy days with showers, as long as it’s warm, they’re out en masse. Hive #2 was slow for a while, but their activity has picked up in the past few days.

Related posts: Foundationless Frames, Adding a Second Brood Chamber and Expanding the Hive (Video).

SWITCH TO THE 480p SETTING FOR SHARPER AND SMOOTHER VIDEO PLAYBACK.

The editing isn’t the greatest because I asked our friend, Vanessa, who was shooting the video, to take some photos during the video as well. I read in the manual that my camera can integrate photos while still rolling on video. But it didn’t work like I thought it would, so I had to cut out most of the integrated photos. It’s a choppy edit. Details on expanding the hive were posted yesterday in the Adding a Second Brood Chamber post.

Related posts: Dead Baby Bees and Foundationless Frames.

We added a second brood chamber (or deep body or brood box) to Hive #1 yesterday. As far as I can tell, it went well. The bees were extremely calm being misted with sugar water, way less agitated than when we’ve used the smoker on them. All the frames had drawn out comb except one. We put about half the drawn frames in the new box on top with empty foundation frames between them. We installed 4 foundationless frames in the original box, placing them between drawn out frames. The honey and the brood seemed mixed together on the frames, so there were no all-brood frames or all-honey frames. There was brood in just about every frame we inspected. We saw some honeycomb hanging off the bottom of one frame, but no swarm cells. Hive #1 appears to be doing great. We’ll see how the colony adjusts to the new box and having all their drawn out frames spaced out. The big experiment is the foundationless frames in the bottom box.

Here’s a shot of the bees after we removed a few frames from the hive:

I’ll upload some video of the procedure soon. (UPDATE: The video is posted.) Until then, allow me to present a big load of photos and descriptions of what we did. (The full series of photos can be view on my Picasa page.)

This is what we saw when we lifted up the inner cover. Not too many bees and more honeycomb built on top of the frames. (UPDATE: We were informed that we’ve had the inner cover upside-side down all this time. That’s why we kept getting burr comb — the honeycomb on top of the frames — in this hive. The flat side of the inner cover should face down, maintaining the crucial 1 centimetre of “bee space.”)

We scraped off the honeycomb before inspecting the hive. The comb was glistening with honey, most of which was sucked up by the bees or dripped back into the hive.

Here I am pulling out the first and only empty frame from the hive.

One of the original frames from our nuc box (it came with white foundation), half-filled with honey.

Most of the bees were front and centre by the time we began pulling out frames. It was a moving carpet of bees. The population in Hive #1 has easily doubled since we first got them 4 weeks ago. This is only a guess, but I’d say we have about 20,000 honeybees in Hive #1.

Here I am inspecting a frame and then trying to put it back in the hive without squishing too many bees. My on-the-fly technique for this is to move gently without hesitation, slowly nudging the bees out of the way. We have a frame grip, but it’s more fun using our hands and feeling the direct buzz of the bees through our gloves. (It could be awhile before we go gloveless.)

Spraying the bees with sugar-water instead of smoking them — we’re 100% sold on this method of keeping the bees calm during an inspection. The bees got agitated sometimes after we pried a frame off with a sudden movement. It was so hot in our bee suits, the sweat was dripping off our faces about 5 minutes after we put them on. I exhaled from exhaustion right onto the bees at one point, and they began to buzz like a bear just stuck its nose in the hive. Then we hit them with the magic sugar rain from the sky and they forgot all about us.

Here’s a frame of brood. The top half is capped brood. The bottom half is uncapped. Can you see the little larvae?

Can you see them now? Hive #1 is full of brood like this. I love it.

Another frame of brood. If anyone with a good eye can spot the queen in any of these photos, please let me know. Our intent during a full hive inspection is to get in and out as quick and calmly as we can. We keep the frames over the hive or the flipped top cover the whole time in case the queen falls off her frame, we don’t flip the frames to inspect them, and we don’t spend much time looking for the queen.

This is Jenny sliding a frame flush against the other side of the hive — and trying not to squish too many bees in the process. All the self-spacing frames have to be pushed together to maintain the “bee space” of 1 centimetre between the frames. That’s what’s cool about the Langstroth hive: “if a space of 1 cm (3/8 inch) is left in the hive for the bees to move around in, the bees will neither build comb in the space nor cement it shut.” Two frames were improperly spaced in Hive #2 and the bees immediately built a warped comb between the two, which was a mess.

Here you can see Jenny arranging the frames in the bottom brood chamber. Two things are happening in this shot:

1) Empty frames are being placed between drawn out frames. So we have one drawn out frame full of brood or honey (and perhaps pollen). Then an empty frame. Then another fully drawn out frame. Another an empty frame and so on. This arrangement, sometimes referred to as checkerboarding, apparently encourages the bees to build on the empty frames quickly because they don’t like having empty spaces between drawn out frames, and it prevents swarming (supposedly). But I’m wondering if we took the concept too far and should have kept more fully drawn frames next to each other. I don’t know.

2) The empty frames are foundationless — and this is the big experiment. To quote myself: “I’ll quickly check the foundationless frames next week. If the bees are building comb on them, hooray! If they’re not, the experiment is over and I’ll insert foundation into the frames. I will be thrilled if it actually works, though, because my admiration for the Backwards Beekeeping methods is what got me into beekeeping in the first place.”

We used the bee brush to remove the bees from the edges of the bottom box before we placed the second box on top of it, but the brush only made the bees angry. So…

We took out our trusty spray bottle again, set it to jet, and squirted the bees out of the way. A little undignified perhaps, but it was better than squishing them.

Making a few final adjustments to the hive before we put the roof back on.

Here we are putting the inner cover back on. Notice that we slowly slide the inner cover back in place to avoid squishing bees. It kindly nudges them out of the way (though I think one or two still got squished).

All done, and only a tiny amount of sweat on our photographer’s lens (she was wearing a bee suit too) making the shot slightly out of focus, but what odds. Or maybe we sprayed her with some sugar-water. Anyway…

Ten minutes later the bees were back to normal. We’re supposed to have excellent weather for the next week, so I hope they make the most of it. I’ve been watching them all day today (it’s about 4pm now), and the hive looks fantastic to me.

I’ll report back next week with an update on their progress. In the meantime, he’s a slideshow of all the photos that were taken by our friends, Vanessa and Elaine.

NOTE: I’m not happy with how the Picasa slideshows work these days. They don’t work like they used to. When you click the PLAY button, sometimes it opens the Picasa page in another tab or window. Then you have to go back to this page and manually flip through the photos in the slideshow (the slideshow used to be automatic and it didn’t open the other page). If I post any more slideshows, I’ll have to use something other than Picasa. It worked fine before; then they updated it and now it’s a pain. I hate updates.

Related posts: Expanding the Hive (Video), Dead Baby Bees and Foundationless Frames.

Conventional frames (photo) hold a plastic foundation the bees use to build their comb on. They follow a honeycomb pattern that’s impressed on the plastic. Foundationless frames have nothing but a little strip of plastic or wood near the top called a starter strip. The bees hang off the starter strip and construct their comb like they would in nature, creating cells the size they want them to be, not the size that’s imposed on them by following the pattern on a plastic foundation. It’s argued that the natural sized cells are better for the bees because they help prevent infestations of various mites, and the bees are generally healthier when they’re allowed to do what they would naturally do. Look at this video from the Backwards Beekeepers to see how frames with starter strips are made:

Check out this video at the 1:30 mark to see bees building off the starter strip — and don’t tell me it isn’t cool:

It’s the Backwards Beekeepers who got me hooked on beekeeping, so I’m trying to follow their example. I don’t know how well the more natural methods of beekeeping will work in the cold climate of Newfoundland, but I’ve asked around and I’ve been told by more than a few beekeepers in similar environments that the foundationless methods will work. So I’m going for it.

I built the foundationless frames like I did my regular frames, but I also had to do the following:

1) Cut out and insert plastic starter strips. I made my starter strips from a corrugated plastic sign I got from a friend of mine pretending to be a politician. (Skip to the 4:18 mark on this video to see what I’m talking about. You might want to watch the other Bushkill Farms videos while you’re at it. Lots of good stuff.) Cutting and trimming the plastic and then inserting it into the frame with carpenters glue was time-consuming and tedious. All of this stuff is tedious.

2) Wax the starter strips. I took the little bit of wax I scraped off the top of my frames in Hive #1 (see the First Taste of Honey post), melted it in a jury-rigged double boiler, and then applied it to the starter strips with a toothbrush. I could have done it like the Backwards Beekeepers in their instructional video, but I had a minuscule amount of wax. I hope it was enough to encourage the bees to build off it. UPDATE: I got hold of a big chunk of natural raw beeswax, melted it down in a pot and re-waxed many of the starter strips just like they do in the video. Worked like a charm.

3) Wire the frames. Freely-drawn comb is usually anchored only to the top of the frame, which makes it easy to accidentally break off during inspections. (UPDATE: Our bees seem to connect the comb on all sides of the frame. A strong anchor is not a problem.) The bees have no problem building through the wire, though, and the wire provides greater support for the comb. I couldn’t find any half decent wire locally, so instead I used the strongest mono filament (or fishing line) sold at Canadian Tire. Apparently it works just as well. If the line gets old and eventually breaks, I’ll tie wire on the outside of the frames and be done with it. The bees can work around the wire and it’ll due for brood frames. The wire is strung through holes that are already drilled in the side of the frames. Just make the wire tight and you’re good to go.

I’ll quickly check the foundationless frames next week. If the bees are building comb on them, hooray! If they’re not, the experiment is over and I’ll insert foundation into the frames. I will be thrilled if it actually works, though, because my admiration for the Backwards Beekeeping methods is what got me into beekeeping in the first place.

Related posts: Adding a Second Brood Chamber, Expanding the Hive and Dead Baby Bees.

One bag had a zucchini plant growing out the bottom and it looked like this on July 27th and it only got better.


We picked the first zucchini from it yesterday and it looked like this. I included the Mason jar lid to provide a sense of its size — it’s a good sized zucchini.

We’ve picked zucchini from both our garden bed plant and the one we have growing in a large container, and the one from the bag is by far the best of the bunch. Unlike the zucchini that grew in the ground, the zucchinis grown upside-down in the bag have no sign of rot. They took a while longer to develop, but judging from the one zucchini we’ve picked and all the others still growing from the bottom of the bag, they’re worth the wait. Nice solid, nearly-seedless and delicious zucchini. Nothing this good has come out of the ground yet. Who woulda thunk, ah?

If the bag zucchini continues to produce like this, we’ll give up growing them in the ground and stick to the bagged method for now on. In a season where just about everything is slow to grow and not growing well, this is a pleasant surprise.

There’s not much point in having an association of two, though, is there? So there is no Newfoundland Beekeepers Association.

But there is an interest in beekeeping in Newfoundland at least among backyard beekeepers like me. The Newfoundland Bee Company sells a fair number of nuc boxes every year to beekeepers across the island. I know a few people in the St. John’s area who recently started up a honeybee hive or two within the past year, and I met up with about half a dozen more wannabe beekeepers earlier this spring at Paradise Farms.

So I know they’re out there, and if they’re like me, they probably wouldn’t mind talking to other local beekeepers — because there’s a lot to know about beekeeping in Newfoundland. I specify Newfoundland because, although cold-climate beekeeping isn’t anything new, beekeeping on a big cold rock in the middle of the North Atlantic likely poses some unique challenges that are best handled by talking to other beekeepers dealing with the same environment.

An informal association of beekeepers on the island would a valuable resource. Even if it’s a bunch of amateurs comparing notes over the internet — you got to start somewhere. So I’m starting here, right now.

I’ve set up a distinct page on Mud Songs called Beekeeping Q&A just for talking about beekeeping in Newfoundland, or at least beekeeping in the St. John’s area of the island — or cold climate beekeeping or beekeeping in general. Whatever works. Comments are still welcomed on regular beekeeping posts, but questions and comments about other beekeeping topics can be left on the Q&A page. I may also use the Q&A page for small updates about my own beekeeping adventures if the topic doesn’t warrant me writing an actual post about it.

In all likelihood, the Beekeeping Q&A page will be ignored by most people who visit this website. It could be me and one other person talking back and forth for a long time. Or just me talking to myself (which is my modus operandi for Mud Songs anyway).

But I guess it can’t hurt until something better comes along.

SWITCH TO THE 480p SETTING FOR SHARPER AND SMOOTHER VIDEO PLAYBACK.

See the previous post for a close-up shot of the bees loaded down with pollen.

Within 20 minutes of leaving the hive, many were coming back loaded down with pollen. You can see balls of pollen on their legs in this close-up.

That’s what we like to see.

(Click the image to view the full photo. I’ve never seen so many bees coming back with so much pollen before today.)

Related post: Non-intrusive Hive Inspection.

By non-intrusive, all I mean is I didn’t pull out the frames. I just removed the roof and the inner cover and looked down at the frames. The bees in Hive #1 have built more comb than those in Hive #2, probably because they went at least one extra week with a feeder. (No doubt about it, feeding the bees at this early stage accelerates comb building — more places for the queen to lay her eggs.) I scraped more honeycomb from the inner cover of that hive. I plan to use the wax (I already ate the honey) to build some starter strips. From what I could see today, the bees in Hive #1 have drawn out comb on at least 7 of the 10 frames, maybe more. I was impressed with what I saw. I’m not sure when I should add another brood box to the hive, but I’m thinking as early as next weekend, the weekend after that at the latest.

Again, I followed the example of the Seldom Fools beekeepers and didn’t use the smoker on the bees. I sprayed the bees with a very fine mist whenever they seemed agitated — the buzz from the bees becomes more ominous — and ten seconds later the buzzing would die down. I love it. (We’ll see how well it works out during our next full inspection.)

There’s not much else to see or report. But for anyone interested, I’ll link to a few more photos… One: Hive #1 with an empty bag feeder. I put the bag feeders in a week ago after I noticed too many pests (wasps and ants) hanging around the hives. The bees sucked up the bag juice pretty quick and I didn’t have time to add any news ones. So they probably went three or four days without any feed. I reinstalled board feeders to each hive today. If the wasps come back, I’ll switch to bags again. Two: All the bees on top of Hive #2. There were hardly any bees visible on top of the frames when I first lifted off the inner cover. About a minute later, though, the tops of the frames were covered with bees, probably glad to get a little fresh air (it must be hot down in the hive). Three: A closer shot of comb in Hive #2. Jenny and I didn’t press the frames as close together as we could and you can see the bees building comb out from this frame to fill in the extra space. I hope that doesn’t cause any problems down the road.

See the next post, Video of Mini Hive Inspection, to view a 5-minute video of the inspection shot on my new high definition camera.

A few wasps hanging around aren’t usually a problem, but I read it can become a problem if the wasps nest is close to the hive. The bees become constantly on the defence. If some wasps actually get into a hive, well, it’s not good — and I just noticed a wasps nest in the apple tree close to my shed, about 50 feet away from the hives.

It’s times like this I wish there was a Newfoundland beekeepers association. I’ve done plenty of research, but research and real world practice are not the same. Confidence comes from practice, not from research. I wish there was a local beekeeper I could meet with close by.

But I’m on my own and so I decided to remove the feeders, at least until I can deal with the wasps nest so close to the hives. I don’t like messing around with the bee hives so much. I would much rather leave them alone and only poke my head in for an inspection every two weeks. But I have to deal with the wasps because I’m not comfortable with them in our small backyard (there’s nowhere to run). They’re just too nasty to be around, and I’m pretty sure the bees don’t like them either.

So until I know the wasps are gone, I’ve placed a bag feeder (essentially a Ziplock bag full of syrup with a slit in the bag) into each hive, just laying the bags on top of the frames. The bees drink from the slit and it doesn’t attract wasps like an outdoor Boardman feeder. I put the bag feeders in yesterday. I took a quick look under the hive covers this morning to see how they’re doing and they’re doing fine, slowing sipping away at the syrup.

UPDATE (Aug. 15/10): I didn’t like the bag feeders, so I went back to Boardman feeders and made a few modifications to keep wasps away. I’ve also ordered some frame feeders. I added a second brood chamber to Hive #1 yesterday. The colony is growing fast. I’ve noticed some wasps hanging around the hive again, but they don’t go near the entrance. I think there are too many bees for them to mess with now. I’ve actually seen the bees attack the wasps more than once. So I’m not worried about the wasps pestering the bees anymore.

Even if it turns into the best broccoli we’ve ever tasted, we’ve decided already not to grow it again because it’s too much of a slug-magnet and takes up too much garden real estate (2 square feet) that could be better used for more productive crops.

It was rotted all the way down the middle.

We had some rot like this last year, but nothing this bad. Apparently this type of common zucchini rot is caused by a lack of calcium and magnesium in the soil. It probably doesn’t help that we didn’t add much lime to our soil this year. I know some gardeners who feed milk to their squashes to give them an extra calcium boost and help prevent rot. We’ll give a try the next sunny day and see what happens.

This hasn’t been the best year for vegetable gardens in Newfoundland. It seems like most farmers are struggling a bit this year. A wet cold spring gave the slug population a big boost and hindered pollination from bees. Everything is growing later than usual, slower than usual with more pests and weeds than usual.

UPDATE: We picked other zucchinis from the raised bed and a large container. Some were okay, some partially-rotted and others were completely rotted. But check out the bag zucchini.

We’ve decided we don’t like smoking the bees. The Seldom Fools beekeepers spray their bees, and now so do we. Whenever the bees were agitated (we could hear the difference in their buzzing immediately), we just misted them with a little sugar water and five seconds later they were back to normal. We probably could have used plain water mist, but a little sugar never hurt no one. The last time we used the smoker on the bees, they were buzzing like mad and flying around the hives in large numbers for at least an hour afterwards. It took them awhile to recover. Today, using the water mist on them, they were totally cool. You’d never know we’d completely dismantled their houses and put them back together again. I can see maybe using the smoker next year when we harvest some of the honey and have to brush the bees off the frames, but I’m convinced for now that misting the bees with a little water is the way to go.

We didn’t take many photos. We concentrated more on not dropping the bees or squishing the queen. The inspection went well, though. We didn’t find any swarm cells and we saw plenty of brood and honey — all good news. Here’s a closer shot of what I think is a frame full of capped brood (there were several frames like this):

We had no problem separating the frames connected by comb (I was concerned about this). The comb connecting the frames was empty anyway, so no harm done. But the honeycomb I sampled yesterday was still there on top of a couple frames, so I scraped it off.

We got about a Mason jar full of loose honeycomb from it. Half the comb was empty. Half was full of honey. We sampled the comb full of honey. Delicious and chewy.

Two weeks ago, each of our hives consisted of 3 drawn out frames, one full of brood, one full of honey, one full of pollen. (A drawn frame means the bees have built comb on it.) Today, each hive has close to seven drawn out frames, some full of brood or honey, some half-way there. We’ve been feeding one hive the whole time (that’s Hive #1 with the honeycomb on top of the frames, and a very sticky hive, too, compared to Hive #2); the other didn’t get a feeder until a week ago. We’ve been feeding them a honey-sugar-water mixture, sometimes just a sugar mixture. I plan to keep feeding them at least until we’ve added the second brood box, which I think will be in about two weeks at the rate they’re going. I won’t be doing much with the hives until then, except to refill the feeders. (I do have some plans on going foundationless, but I’ll talk about that later.) So far so good.

Here I am cutting honeycomb from the top of the frames in Hive #1:

Nothing else to report.

This is what it looks like at the bottom of a Mason jar, a mouthful chunk of comb with honey in it.

I decided to inspect the hives this morning because it’s going to rain for the next few days and I knew I’d be too busy with my silly job next week to poke around with the bees.

I wanted to look down at the frames to see how much comb has been drawn out, but I didn’t want to pull out the frames and disturb the bees too much.


I didn’t use a smoker on either of the hives because I don’t like the way smoke agitates the bees, even though it’s supposed to make the bees easier to handle.

This is what I saw when I pulled off the inner cover from Hive #1. That’s broken honeycomb attached to the middle. I didn’t plan on sampling any honey, but I knew I could scrape some off the top without bothering the bees too much.

Here you can see how thick the honeycomb is on top of the frames — and it’s full of honey.

I’m not sure if I should be concerned about this, if I should clean it up before it gets out of control — I don’t know.

The last time I used the smoker on the bees, the whole hive lit up with a rumbling buzzing sound. Not using the smoker this time, they acted like I wasn’t even there.

Here’s a close-up of the broken honeycomb. The bees were virtually silent during all this. Maybe they were wondering what happened to the roof and why there’s honey all over the place now. Most that were on the honey stayed on the honey, eating it up, I assume.

Many of the frames were connected together with comb. It’s going to be messy when I have to pull out the frames for a thorough inspection, which I have to do soon.

I wonder, should I break up these connections now before it gets worse? It seems like it might be trouble.

And this is what I saw under the roof of Hive #2, a well-behaved and tidy little hive — and no honeycomb on top to sample. These bees haven’t drawn out as much comb as those in Hive #1, probably because I didn’t feed them anything for the first week.

There are more bees in the hive now than there were two weeks ago, and more of the frames have been drawn out — in both hives. So the hives seem to be doing alright. I will have to give them a thorough inspection soon just so I can see exactly what’s going on — how much brood is being reared, if there are any swarm cells and so on. I’d like to find an experienced beekeeper to help me out with that, but if I have to I’ll keep doing what I’m doing: taking my best guess.

Anyway, the honey is delicious.

(All the photos I took can be viewed on my Picasa page.)

The Mason jar is filled with a honey-sugar mixture. It sits upside-down on a round piece of perforated metal. The bees crawl onto the lip of the feeder from inside the hive and suck the mixture out of the holes. Here’s a photo of a feeder I made today. You can see on the left where the bees crawl in and get under the bottle to feed:

There are conflicting opinions on whether or not to feed bees, what kind of feeders and mixtures are best, when and when not to feed — there is no consensus. Some say feeding encourages robbing, especially with Italian honeybees (the kind we have); some say the colony will swarm when they’re fed too much; and then other beekeepers say it’s essential to feed bees from a nuc box at least until they’ve filled an entire brood chamber (that’s what I plan to do).

The problem for me is that beekeeping practices vary from region to region based on local climate and geography — and most of the information I read does not come from beekeepers in Newfoundland, or any place remotely similar to Newfoundland (being on island in the middle of the North Atlantic does pose unique challenges). There is only one professional beekeeper in St. John’s that I know of, and he’s busy running his business. So I’m pretty much on my own here. Everyday I go out and watch the bees doing their thing, and every day I see something new I don’t understand. I don’t think I’ve done anything drastically bad so far, but having a few local beekeepers I could meet with once in a while, even beginners like me, would be a great help.

So, hoping for the best, I built my own Boardman feeder today because I noticed how the bottle doesn’t fit snugly into the feeder hole. This attracts ants (that you can see in the top photo) and allows bees to take up the feed from outside the hive from the space between the feeder and the bottle’s lip — which I think defeats part of the purpose of having the feeder in the first place. If other bees from outside the hive can get at the feed easily, it’s no wonder they get the idea to start robbing. Here’s my homemade Boardman feeder in action:

I made my own perforated cap from the Mason jar lid, then shoved the outer lid into the feeder hole, nice and tight (see the second photo above), so now when I put on the jar of feed mixture, it screws on tight so the bottle can’t tip and spill sweet liquid all over the place (which would attract more ants). It also makes refilling the feeder much easier and less messy.

But more importantly, it’s working for the bees. I’ve checked the feeder every couple hours today. I’ve seen only one ant instead of 10, and there are no bees trying to get at the feed from outside the hive.

Way to go, Phillip! I’m in the process of making a second Boardman feeder for the other hive. The next big event will be our inspection of the hives about a week from now. We haven’t pulled out any of the frames for inspection yet. That’ll be a big day. I want to see tons on brood and honey and no swarm cells. That’s exactly what I want to see, because if I see anything else, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

UPDATE: Boardman feeder plans — here are the pieces for the second Boardman feeder I made, with measurements written right on the pieces (in inches). I stuck it all together with carpenter’s glue. Click the image to biggify.

I’ve also posted an image of the basic feeder to give an idea of how the pieces go together, and the final product.

UPDATE (Aug. 10/10): I gave up on my home-made board feeders because the glue I used wasn’t the best. The feeders began falling apart in the rain. I’ll stick to my store-bought feeders with a some minor modifications instead.

UPDATE AGAIN (Aug. 23/10): One of our hives was slow to grow, and the season is getting short, so we pulled one of the homemade feeders out of retirement and gave the weak hive two feeders. All the Boardman feeders, though, attract ants and wasps. We’re hoping frame feeders will reduce the number of pests attracted to the hive.

“Green bags” are ubiquitous these days, supposedly meant to replace plastic shopping bags. But we’ve collected so many that we don’t know what to do with them all. As a lark, I filled three of them with soil, cut a hole in the bottom, inserted some extra transplants up the hole, stapled the hole together to keep the soil back, hung the bags on our fence and hoped for the best. And I gotta say, I’m impressed with the zucchini plant. There’s hardly any soil in the bag, the plant is alive, flowering and producing zucchinis. They’re not as large as our regular zucchinis, but they’re not too bad.

Here’s a shot of a zucchini in a large container, grown from a seedling planted around mid-June and doing well. We’ll be picking our first zucchini from it in less than a week.

All growing upside-down, from left to right: Tomato in a bag (no fruit yet); 2 peppers in a bag, one out the bottom, the other on top — and looking great; and a tomato in a bucket (just starting to show fruit).

Here’s a shot of one our mini potato towers, the Red Organic Chieftain potatoes that have been slow to grow but should be alright in a couple weeks. I discovered the best way to hill the plants as they grow is simply dump more soil over the entire plant as soon as it pokes through the soil a couple of inches. Then you just stop when the plants reach the top of the mini-tower.

Here’s the mini-tower with Blue Pride potatoes (they grew much faster and first blossomed a couple weeks ago).

This is our new 4 x 8 raised vegetable garden bed.

In our 4 x 8 bed, we have two experimental crops, broccoli on the left (we’re not growing it next year) and celery on the right (mixed in with some cucumbers, both of which we’ll grow again). The tiniest head of broccoli began to show yesterday, but it seems to be more trouble than it’s worth. We’re also growing some carrots and beets in the 4 x 8 bed. The beets are sad and the carrots are okay, but this time last year we were thinning both and eating up all the delicious tiny ones.

This is our 8 x 8 raised vegetable garden bed (also available from this angle and this angle).

From left to right: slow-to-grow onions; lettuce we’ve been eating for about 10 days now; slow-to-grow carrots; and bush beans and pole peas, which have barely begun to flower.

From this angle we can see the peas beginning to climb up the netting (netting is the way to go). The pole peas, ironically, don’t grow as high as the bush snap peas, and the slugs seem to prefer the pole peas. So next year we’re going back exclusively to bush snap peas. They’re sweet, juicy and delicious.

These are the 4 Latah tomato plants in the 8 x 8 bed, grown from transplants, just now beginning to show some fruit (not much to see until September).

Two cucumber plants and 2 celeries in an old speaker, grown from transplants and doing well (most of our transplants were planted around mid-June this year). We’re eager to sample the celery.

Then we’ve got a cucumber in a bucket by the shed; three tiny raspberry bushes also growing up against the shed; some radishes in a window box gone to seed; a blueberry bush that was packed with blossoms, but the blossoms got knocked off or died or something, so there are no blueberries this year; and an overgrown strawberry patch where all the ripening strawberries are hidden by the plants (we began eating them this past week).

A slug-eaten broccoli in a large container. Broccoli takes up too much real estate. These better be the world’s most flavourful broccoli. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

On the left, a tomato plant in a container doing well; on the right, a blue potato plant growing in a small pot just for fun.

Spanish onion and a few leeks growing inside an old speaker. The onions grew beautifully for a while. Then we went away for a week, and when we came back, most of the onions had been eaten away by slugs. It was gross and it was sad. We’ve since moved the speaker onto our back deck where the slugs can’t get at them as easily. We’re hoping they’ll rebound. Damn slugs.

Two herbs in pots growing like a jungle. Cilantro on the left grown from seedlings; dill on the right grown from seed. I sprinkled in a whole package of seeds, barely covered them with soil and presto! More dill than we know what to do with. (We have another pot of cilantro grown from seed, but it’s kind of pathetic.)

We have a few window boxes full of green onions like this. Easy pasy. Chop ‘em up and put them them in the bowl before pouring in your soup — beauty. Grown from seed tape.

On the left, oregano in a pot grown from seedlings (we haven’t picked any of it yet); on the right, pots of basil and mint — the basil is perfectly paired with tomatoes and the mint works well in springs rolls. We’ve been pulling leaves off for about a week.

Thyme in a pot grown from seedlings. We’ve been eating this for about a week too. Excellent in soups and tomato-based sauces.

That’s a unknown type of tomato with large leaves growing well in a pot. And over here is our rosemary we bought on sale for $11 last year at Home Depot. We kept it inside and harvested it for most of the winter. Its growth slowed down only after we put it back outside this year. We’ve been letting it grow (not easy because it’s our favourite herb), but it’ll be soon time to start picking it again. Best deal on rosemary we’ve ever had.

I could show you two more tomato plants growing in buckets and a sad, slug-ravaged pepper plant, but it’s a pitiful sight. So let’s just end off with some baby carrots growing in three window boxes all in a row. Sweet, sweet juicy carrots. They taste fabulous with dirt.

Just sitting there together, not moving, but fanning their wings like crazy. I’m guessing they were trying to cool down the hive, get a breeze blowing through it. At first there were three bees in a row. Then one flew away but the two remaining kept at it.

Maybe they’re just a couple of baby bees drying off their newly-minted wings. As usual, I don’t know, but I’m going with the cooling-the-hive theory.

More bees seemed to appear as I got closer to take the photos, but they also seemed happy to ignore me.

And the two cool bees kept doing their thing. Give it up for the Cool Sisters! (All worker bees are female.)

We’ve noticed more bees hovering around the entrance of the hives from time to time since we switched up the feeders. They weren’t hovering like this before. I did some quick research, and apparently feeding the bees can set off a robbing spree. Bees from another hive will force their way in and steal honey. The bees being stolen from can eventually starve to death from a lack of honey. But it’s also possible the hovering bees are just young bees orientating themselves to the hive. I think that’s more likely the case since the nuc boxes came with at least one full frame of brood (eggs), and many of those eggs may have begun to hatch now. I hope that’s what it is. Here’s a low-rez video of what it looks like (I have a high-rez camera coming soon):

I’ve since removed the improvised feeder because it doesn’t provide much protection against marauding bees. I’ve installed an entrance reducer on both hives so the bees have less area to defend against thieves. I may remove the entrance reducers in a day or two; I might also keep them on until the hives have establishes themselves. But I won’t add another feeder to Hive #1 until the real Boardman feeder arrives probably next week. I’d rather do they without than invite more thieving.

I’m making a phone call to a local beekeeper today to see if he can come by and assess my hives. I’m not sure if I’m doing any of this right.

UPDATE (July 28/10): I added an entrance reducer to both hives and one hive is feederless (until another one arrives in the mail). That seemed to work for a while, but now it’s pretty much back to normal. A couple times a day when the sun is shining, a more than normal number of bees will begin buzzing around the entrances of the both hives, creating mini-swarms. It starts with one hive, then picks up in another, and then an hour later they’re more or less back to normal. It’s probably young bees orientating themselves to the hive, but at this point I really wouldn’t know. I just shot this low-rez video of a mini-swarm in front of the feederless hive:

(We ordered a hi-def camera today, so all future videos are going to look great.)

Smoking the bees supposedly makes them more docile and easier to handle, but they sound angrier whenever I smoke them. I know some beekeepers say spraying them with water works just as well and doesn’t upset them as much. I might try that (our smoker keeps going out anyway). The bees were buzzing all over the place for an hour or two after we messed with them. I can see why it’s best to leave them alone most of the time.

UPDATE: I would never smoke the bees like this anymore. For this kind of operation, I don’t think I would have done anything to them. But it I did, I’d spray them with a fine mist of water or sugar-water instead of smoke. Works just as well, doesn’t agitate them nearly as much and they recover much faster.

We didn’t have a problem with slugs last year, but this year they’ve nearly decimated our container broccoli and some Spanish onions that have been growing beautifully in a speaker on the side of our shed. They’re eating away at our pea plants and beans too. I’ve used containers full of beer and spread out coffee grinds as pesticides, but neither seem to help much. From now on, we’ll have to go out at night and pick them off with our hands and kill them. That’s apparently the best way to get rid of them — squish the adult breeding population. I’m not sure what brought the slugs on in such force this year. We picked some long green caterpillars off one of the broccolis today too. Maybe the broccoli are too attractive for the slugs and bugs to ignore. The broccolis move in and there goes the neighbourhood.

Another discouraging development is the lack of growth in the beets and peas. Here’s a photo of a row of beets on the left next to two rows of carrots on the right. It’s pathetic. We’ve pulled out weeds that are larger than those beets. This time last year we had to thin our beets, and even those beets were 10 times larger than what we have so far this year. We didn’t add much lime to the new garden bed this year and we planted the beets a couple weeks late. But they should have caught up by now. Do beets need lots of lime? I don’t know.

But I do know what’s happening with the peas. Last year we planted bush peas that grew large and had no problem crawling up some poles. They were delicious to pick right off the vine. We planted more of those this year along with some actual pole peas — but it’s the pole peas that aren’t growing up the poles (see them on the right in the linked photo). The slugs seem more attracted to the pole peas too. What a waste of space. I hope they hurry up and catch up with the bush peas that have grown at least 3 times as high so far. We won’t be wasting our garden space of pole peas next year.

We’ve had to deal tons of weeds this year too. Only in the past week did we managed to clear away most of them.

So I don’t have high hopes for the broccoli, the beets or the pole bees. If the broccolis don’t produce, the solution is simple: we won’t try growing broccoli anymore — especially if they’re responsible for attracting the slugs. The pole beets we’ve already decided not to plant anymore. Bush peas that have no problem growing up poles will be our source of peas for now on. And the beets — we have to figure what happened there. Beet greens are delicious and fresh baked beets and pickled beets are even better.

But we’ve had surprising success (so far) with some other crops. So stay tuned!

UPDATE (July 27/10): Jenny was just talking to a fellow gardener about slugs. He said there aren’t any in his garden, but has had problems in the past. Planting crops that don’t attract them (like broccoli) is the most effective defence. Also, broccoli and other cabbage-relatives attract the cabbage moth — those are the green caterpillars we saw on the broccoli leaves. Apparently they can decimate broccoli, but don’t migrate to other vegetables. The bottom line is that broccoli is a trouble maker. We’re not planting it next year. Stupid broccoli.

This is the first hive after we installed the bees.

The emptied nuc box on the ground still had a few bees in it that eventually flew back into the hive.

The upside-down Mason jar is full of a honey-sugar mixture. The bees will feed on it for a couple weeks while they get oriented to their new surroundings. It also helps them build comb quicker.


And here’s Jenny a few hours later opening the second nuc box.

We smoked the bees a bit, but our smoker technique needs some work.

These bees were more agitated than the others, buzzing louder and flying around more, but most of them were docile and didn’t pay much attention to us.

And here’s a closer shot of the just-opened nuc box full of bees. I’m guessing that’s about 10,000 bees.

Jenny pulls out a frame full of bees.

We can’t tell the difference between a frame full of brood, honey or pollen yet. We didn’t look too closely to find out. We just wanted to get the bees in as quickly as we could. We knew it was best to place a frame full of brood and a frame of honey close to the middle of the new hive, leaving an empty frame between each of the newly-installed frames because the bees are more compelled to fill in empty spaces than to work outwards. We took a guess at which frames were full of brood and honey.

Jenny places the second frame into the hive.

Frame of brood in the middle, then an empty frame, then this frame of honey and so on.

Jenny pulls out another heavy frame:

Jenny installs the last frame from the nuc box.

It’s not heavy because it only has the beginning of some drawn comb on one side.

Now it’s my turn to dump the stragglers into the hive. That’s right, I tipped the box on its side, banged the box so the bees fell down to one side, then tipped it upside down and banged it again and the clump of bees fell into the hive. They didn’t seem to mind.

At this point we didn’t have all the parts for hive #2, so we had to put something together with scrap lumber and an old window pane.

It doesn’t look like much, but the bees don’t care, and having the glass top (with cardboard on top to block out the light) means we can look through the glass and watch the bees do their thing without bothering them.

Exhibit A:

Any questions?

I’ll install the bees into my hives later today. I’ll document it all eventually. In the meantime, this is what the bees sound like in their boxes.

On the east coast of Newfoundland, even by the end of April, there are barely any leaves on the trees. It’s depressing. Or maybe it’s all part of the rugged beauty of the island. In any case, the window of opportunity for vegetable growth is brief. A week, two weeks, three weeks or more of wet, cold weather will substantially reduce the chances of a bumper crop — and it ain’t lookin’ good this year. The photo on the left of our 8×8 raised garden bed was taken a year ago today; the one on the right was taken today. The arrangement of the vegetables is a little different this year, but it’s easy to see what a lame growing season it’s been so far.

It’s July 9th today, and it’s just now beginning to feel like summer. The humidity is finally kicking in, and with it I expect to see some growth spurts in our garden. With the exception of our Blue Pride potatoes, everything we’ve planted is just sort of sitting there, not growing. We started a little late this year, but with the lousy weather we’ve had so far, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. I hope things pick up soon.

Bag #2: A zucchini plant growing out of a hole in the bottom. I can’t see this working at all, but it gets plenty of sun, so who knows.

Bag #3: A tomato plant growing upside-down from a hole in the bottom of the bag. This one might actually work. I don’t know what type of tomato it is. We picked it up from the farmer’s market with no label on it.

You can follow the progress on my Picasa page. I don’t have high hopes for any of them.

Okay, so what’s a nuc package and how does it work?

This is a nuc package. To reduce confusion, let’s call it a nuc box, because that’s what it is: a small box that contains the nucleus of a honeybee colony. A nuc box typically holds 4 deep frames (photo), several thousands bees and a mated queen. Three frames will contain a combination of honey, pollen and eggs, everything a colony needs to stay alive. One frame is usually left empty so the worker bees have something to work on while they’re stuck in the box during shipment to their new hive.

The installation of the honeybees from a nuc box to their new hive is a relatively straightforward procedure. Basically, the 4 frames from the nuc box, along with all the bees and the queen, are placed inside a hive body and left alone.

More precisely, it works like this: Six deep frames with foundation are sprayed down with a sugar-water solution (1 part water, 1 part sugar) and placed into an empty hive body (photo) (aka a deep super). The sugar water compels the bees to begin working on the frames right away. Some foundations already have a coating of beewax that’s equally attractive to the bees and reduces the likelihood of them flying away and never coming back again.

The hive body is placed on a bottom board (photo), which is usually on some sort of stand that keeps the hive off the ground (photo), away from morning dew and moisture. The bottom board provides a landing pad for the bees to enter the hive through a big slit on the bottom of the hive. The hive entrance usually faces the rising sun so the bees warm up and get to work as soon as possible. A piece of wood called an entrance reducer is placed in front of the entrance so the bees, whose numbers are low at the beginning, only have to defend a small entrance to their hive. A feeder is sometimes attached to the hive body as well so the bees have some food to hold them over while they’re getting used to their new surroundings.

Then the nuc box is opened and the bees are either smoked a bit or sprayed down with sugar water to make them more docile. Each frame is then carefully removed from the box and placed in the new hive body, usually in the middle, not on the sides. Any bees left in the box can be dumped into hive body, or the box can be left open close to the entrance and the left over bees will fly into the hive themselves. And that’s it. An inner cover and a top cover are placed over the hive body and the bees are left alone. The hive is inspected 4 or 5 days later. If everything is going well, some of the empty frames that were sprayed with sugar water should have the beginnings of new comb drawn out on them and the queen should have begun laying new eggs. Another hive body and eventually honey supers are added to the hive as the bees work through each level of frames in the hive.

UPDATE (July 22/10): Our Installing Nuc Boxes post shows exactly how all this played out for us.

A nuc box is more expensive than a regular package of bees, but it’s usually worth it because the bees are less likely to abscond — that’s a polite beekeeper way of saying they gather outside the hive in a swarm and fly away. Bye-bye bees.

This is a typical package of honeybees. It’s a cage that holds about 10,000 bees and a queen who is in a separate smaller cage inside the big cage. Some people install bee packages simply by placing the open cage inside a hive body (video) with some frames and leaving it alone for a few days. Then they just remove the cage once the bees have moved onto the frames inside the hive. More commonly, the bees in the cage are sprayed with sugar water and then dumped into a hive body with new frames. There’s more to it than what I’m describing, but watch this video to see how it’s done.

I’ve heard more than a few stories of bees swarming and flying away a few days after a package is installed. The queen emerges from her little queen cage, finds a hive full of empty frames and nowhere to lay her eggs, so she gets up and flies away and takes the rest of the bees with her. An easy way to prevent that from happening is to place a queen excluder on the bottom of the first hive body. A queen excluder is a screen-type device that’s usually placed between the hive bodies and the honey supers to prevent the queen, who is larger than the other bees, from laying eggs in the honey supers. But when placed on the bottom of the hive, the excluder prevents the queen from leaving the hive and absconding with the rest of the bees. Placing drawn comb in the hive body helps too, but the excluder-on-the-bottom method guarantees she isn’t going anywhere.

I may use queen excluders until I know the colonies are staying put, but with nuc boxes, absconding isn’t much of an issue. I guess I’ll find out for sure in about two weeks.

We thought the garden bed broccoli would do better because it gets more direct sunlight, it’s in the ground (which is usually better than being in a container) and it has over 2 square feet of garden space to live long and prosper. But so far it appears the container broccoli is kicking the garden bed broccoli’s butt. The container broccoli doesn’t get any sunlight until the afternoon, but it also gets that low-on-the-horizon evening sun that can burn your face off in about 10 minutes. Maybe that’s what’s doing it.

You can watch the broccoli grow side by side in these slide shows (reload the page to restart the slide shows) or view them on my Picasa page.

It’s not a bad way to make the most of limited space.

Gardening stores are now getting in on the action, too, selling more expensive, fancier versions of the same thing.

But a $3 bucket with a hole poked in the bottom works just fine for us. All we did was smash a hole in the bottom of a bucket, stick a tomato seedling through the hole, hang the bucket on a stick, fill it up with dirt and water it.

I was impressed with how quickly the Latah tomato plant began to turn towards the sun. The bucket isn’t located in the sunniest part of the yard, but it’ll have to do. We’ll feed the little guy some tomato food every 2 weeks and hope for the best. You (i.e., all 3 of you who read this blog) can follow the progress through the slideshow as we add photos throughout the growing season, or you can follow it on my Piscasa page.

This field was full of dandelions for the month of May. By August, it’ll be filled with other wild flowers.

The trees on the left are already full of blossoms.

Maybe they’re alder bushes. I don’t know. But there’s a few hundred of them growing back there.

I’m guessing honeybees would love to dig into these blossoms.

Tonnes of them!

Look at all that pollen.

The place is backed with blossoms.

We have loads of apple blossoms back there too. Honeybee paradise, man.

If only we had some honeybees.

And so it goes…

We bought it last summer for about $20 at Home Depot. It lived in a larger container until we put it in the ground last weekend. We didn’t get many blueberries last year, but the ones we did pick were big and juicy. There are about 5 five times more buds on the branches this year, so we’re expecting a bumper crop. Blueberry bushes don’t grow fast, but they produce more fruit every year and can grow up to about 5 feet high.

We dug a hole, filled it with organic soil and some fertilizer and moved the bush from the container to the ground. The roots didn’t go deep. We’re not concerned about lead getting into the fruit through the soil because anything that has bark on it, like a fruit tree or this kind of bush, filters out the lead before it can make it into the fruit. We hope.

And I need a new camera. The white balance on this camera doesn’t work. All the whites are blown out.

At any rate, I got a little practice in last night when Aubrey at Paradise Farms let me take a peek inside one of his honeybee hives. Check it out (or view the full slideshow over here):

That’s me smoking the bees. The smoke makes the bees easier to handle. They react to the smoke as if the hive is about to catch on fire. That is, they gorge themselves on honey in case they have to evacuate and build another hive elsewhere. The smoke also disguises the pheromones the bees use for signalling alarm. Some beekeepers spray their bees with sugar water instead, which apparently has the same effect. Either way, it’s probably better to leave the hive alone most of the time and just let the bees be bees.

(Note: There are no close-up shots because Jenny, who was taking the photos, didn’t have any protective gear, so she had to stand back a bit. We’ll have to get her a suit if we ever do this again.)

The frames on the left in this photo are loaded with bees.

I knew everything I had to do to inspect a hive. But my mind went blank and I stood there like a dummy. I got stung on the back of my ankle because I was standing in front of the entrance to the hive, getting in the way of the bees. I knew not to stand in front of the entrance, but I wasn’t thinking. I ignored the sting, didn’t tell anyone, and the pain went away after about a minute.

Here I am pointing at some swarm cells at the bottom of a frame. A swarm cell is a type of cell that’s constructed for creating a new queen. The new queen will leave the hive and take enough bees along with her (in a swarm) to build another hive. Aubrey told me that some queens produce workers that tend to build swarm cells. Some don’t. Usually the hive will create queens like this when the hive gets crowded and there’s enough bees to start up a new healthy hive elsewhere. The other type of queen cell is called a supercedure cell. It will sometimes show up at the centre or the top of a frame. It’s big and shaped like a peanut (similar to the swarm cell), but the hive produces a new queen in this manner only when the current queen is sick, old or not laying as well as she should. Man, those bees are smart.

Now check this out. This is what I’m talking about!

Nice brood pattern. Those are capped (or sealed) brood cells on the right half of the frame. Many of the open cells are filled with honey, eggs and larvae ready to be capped. Eventually most of the frame will be filled with capped brood cells. That’s why the big boxes at the bottom of the the hive are called the brood chambers. All the honey produced down there is for the worker bees and the rearing of baby bees. You wouldn’t want to try to harvest that honey, anyway, because you’d get a mixture of honey and eggs. Yuck (though I’m sure it would still taste sweet).

Now it’s my turn to pull out a frame. I used a frame grip. All the bees just got out of the way of the grip. I was a bit nervous about dropping the frame, especially if the queen was on it.

Studying beekeeping for the past five months is one thing. Doing it was a whole new ball game. I knew what to do, but it definitely takes practice to get a feel for it.

The hive was humming (really). But then we banged it a bit and the hum transformed into a buzz. Still, the bees just went about their business like we weren’t even there.

The frame I pulled out was packed with honeybees.

Aubrey showed me some drone cells on one of the outer frames too. The drone cells, which are larger and bulge out compared to regular cells, are constructed for the rearing of male bees whose sole purpose is to mate with the queen — which happens once during the queen’s life. Every hive will have at least 20 or 30 drone bees at all times, even if they sit around and do nothing. A drone is produced somehow from unfertilized eggs.

I could have stood there watching the bees all day, but we only had about 5 minutes and Aubrey had to go.

Aubrey can’t supply me with bees this year because his populations are down due some crappy weather that kept the bees stuck inside their hives early in the spring.

I hope I can get some bees from the beekeeper on the west coast soon. I’m ready to move to Nova Scotia just so I can start something up this year. I would hate to wait another year after all the work I’ve put into it.

This may be the last time I post anything about beekeeping until I know for sure whether or not I can start up some hives this year.

This is Phillip, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off…

If the stalks grow and get hardened by the sun, then you can forget about them turning into roots and tubers when they’re covered with soil. They have to be soft and rooty to transform into roots that will eventually produce the glorious bounty of potato tower spuds (theoretically). So we plan to bury the stalks while they’re still soft, covering all but an inch or two of the plants until they’ve reached the top of the mini-towers. That shouldn’t be too hard on them because they’re only going up a couple feet and then they can relax (a benefit of growing in a mini-tower).

Late-season varieties are more ideal because unlike short-season spuds, they continue to set tubers throughout the season — essential to growing potatoes in any kind tower. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any late-season varieties around town, so we planted a mid-season blue potato on June 5th called Blue Pride in one mini-tower. For the second tower, we ordered a mid-to-late season red potato from Veseys called Chieftan Organic and planted it on June 8th.

We might also plant in multiple layers. That is, we’ll plant more seed potatoes about half-way up the mini-tower as the first layer of plants grow up. That way, if the plants from the first layer don’t produce anything higher up (we would give up on the tower concept completely then), then at least the plants on the top layer would produce something and the extra soil would not have been wasted.

We also read that adding a slow-release fertilizer can help the potatoes along. But we’ve also been told not to add much fertilizer — some people say don’t add any. We compromised and added a light sprinkle of a generic 10-10-10 fertilizer and we’re hoping it’s not too much or too little. The only fertilizer we added last year was a basic tomato food that we mixed in with the watering once in a while, and the potatoes were excellent.

So we’re modifying our methods from last year and hoping it’ll pay off (it better). If the yield is impressive, then we might get back on the horse and build a full potato tower next year.

We’ll post photos of the mini-towers after they’ve begun to sprout.

To be continued…

Related category: Potato Towers.

I painted only the outside of the supers (the boxes). We thought about using a white exterior latex paint as a preservative, but we prefer the look of natural wood. We’re also using linseed oil instead of a varnish because it’s a natural product.

And we’re still waiting for the bees. No word yet. We’re hoping to get at least one nuc package by July, though two would be preferable. We won’t buy the next hive until we know we can get a second nuc. If we can get two nucs at the same time, we’ll still have plenty of time to order and build the second hive. Each nuc package would start off in a single brood box (or deep super). We’d have the second hive built by the time the bees were ready to expand into a second brood box.

The story of these speaker crops will unfold in this photo album throughout the 2010 growing season. Are you excited? I know I am. Stay tuned!

Again, I used the photo-illustrated instructions from Bees-and-Beekeeping.com as a guide before I got started. I’ll build another 20 frames next weekend.

The larger box on the left (below) is what I call the brood box. I call it that because when you hear “brood box,” it doesn’t take much thinking to understand what it is: It’s where the queen lays her eggs, her brood. It’s the nursery for baby bees and the winter home for the hive. The brood boxes are also called deep hive bodies or deep supers, and all the honey in them is left for the bees. They gotta eat something to stay alive.

The box on the right is a medium honey super. (I don’t know why it’s called a super.) It’s placed above the brood boxes and it’s where all the excess honey is stored — it’s the stuff we get to eat. Both the brood boxes and the honey supers contain 10 frames of honey comb. Here’s what a medium frame looks like unassembled:

The white plastic piece on the left is called foundation. It’s coated with beeswax and has a honeycomb pattern impressed on it. It fits inside the frame. The bees will build their honey comb by following the pattern on the plastic. Many bees seem to do fine without the foundation (watch the Backwards Beekeeping videos), but just to play it safe, I plan to use foundations in my first hive because that’s what I know works for Newfoundland honeybees.

Anyway, you can read the captions on my Picasa photo page for more details on exactly how I assembled the frames. Basically I glued and nailed them together with little nails and carpenter’s glue. But here’s what’s bugging me:

My supplier sent me some defective pieces that won’t fit together properly with the other pieces because they’re cut wrong. The notches in the two pieces in the photo on the right should be identical — they’re not. I may order from another supplier next time — just to compare quality. Some of my hive pieces weren’t precisely cut either. Who knows, maybe these little pain-in-the-neck defects are commonplace. (UPDATE: I had to chisel the pieces to make them fit. It was a big pain. The resulting frames aren’t as sturdy as the regular ones. I got it done, but I’m not entirely impressed with my supplier on this one.)

My other concerns look like this. Number 1:

Should there be so much space between the frame and the foundation? I don’t think the bees really care — but maybe they do. I’ll have to look into it. Number 2 looks like this:

Again, it’s about the extra space. Should there be so much space left over in the super after placing in the 10 frames? There’s almost as much space left over in the brood box for another frame. I thought the spacing of the frames was crucial. Are my supers the wrong size? What’s going on? Again, I don’t know. But I’ll update this post as soon as I find out.

And I’m still waiting on the bees.

The major problem was that some of the joints didn’t fit perfectly, so we had to force them in place with a hammer, literally splintering the wood off to make them fit. This made gluing the pieces more of a mess, so we didn’t bother with the glue by the time we got to the last honey super (photo). We still need to build the 40 honey comb frames (that’ll be tedious) and we need to paint the outside of the hive with linseed oil (we’ve decided not to use paint because we prefer the natural look of the wood), but otherwise, this is the complete hive:

Now we wait to hear from one of the two bee keepers in Newfoundland who might be able to supply with us with some starter bees in June.

UPDATE: The baby birds have flown the coop (one of them may have been eaten by a predator). Ah, they grow up so fast. Click the image to view the webcam page which may or may not be broadcasting now.

(Thanks to Seth.)

Skip to the end of this post for a detailed price list of everything I would need to start up a single hive.

Update: I got some quotes from another supplier in New Brunswick, but even with cheaper shipping, it would have cost more to get everything on my list from them. So the order was placed from a Manitoba supplier on April 26, 2010. The final total is slightly more than my original estimate, but it still comes to about $500 just for the gear and everything I need for one full hive.

I’ve been excited about starting up a honeybee hive since I discovered the Backwards Beekeepers out of California a few months ago. Their natural method of keeping bees and harvesting honey is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. (Watch their videos and tell me if I’m a liar.) I saw what they did and knew I had to do it. So I did my homework and learned everything I could about bee keeping. The detailed bee keeping lessons posted by Long Lane Honey Bee Farms were by far the most practical instructions I found online. After I got through their lessons, I felt ready to start up my own hive.

I met with a local bee keeper at Paradise Farms who confirmed everything I already knew and told me everything else I needed to know to get started: 1) I don’t need a permit to have a bee hive in my back yard in Newfoundland — though it’s nice to ask the neighbours first. 2) Newfoundland honeybees are mite-free and they want to keep it that way. Subsequently, it’s illegal to import honeybees into Newfoundland. 3) If I want a queen and some worker bees to start up my own hive (a nuc package), I have to buy them from one of the two bee keepers in Newfoundland — at approximately $200 per package. But there’s only one bee keeper on the island who can provide nuc packages early enough so that I can get a honey harvest this year. I’ve since emailed and called that bee keeper and she said she won’t have any nuc packages available until mid-June or early July. That gives me some time to look into building my own hives or ordering them online.

I shopped around and got prices from most of the major bee keeping suppliers in Canada. I found a few places that sell starter kits, but they don’t sell complete hives with those kits, so what’s the point? It’s cheaper to buy everything I need in a single order. The best prices I found are from a company called Beemaid — affiliated with the Manitoba Honey Cooperative. They sell everything a bee keeper needs. I’ll explain all the components of the hives and purpose of all the gear in a later post (assuming I go through with it), but for anyone interested in knowing what it will actually cost to order all the gear necessary for a single bee hive and have it shipped to Newfoundland, here are some screen shots of my order. The order initially included a pollen collector and frame rests, but I removed them to break it down to the bare essentials.

The total comes to $325.70 + 61.75 (taxes) + 115.34 (shipping) = $502.79 + $200 (nuc package) = $702.79. Again, that’s the cost of one full hive consisting of 2 brood boxes and 2 medium honey supers, plus all the gear and protective clothing — and the bees. Add $35 to the total to include a pollen collector and frame rests.

The cost of a second complete hive is $180 before taxes and shipping + $200 for the bees.

It would be a great field for bee keeping because it fills with wild flowers over the summer. But I can’t risk it.

These Backwards Beekeepers videos are what go me interested in the first place, especially this video about harvesting the honey (I posted it before, but I’m throwing in a few more to go with it):

I would choose the above destruction method of harvesting if I could. It’s the simplest and most economical process, and the bees don’t seem to mind. The other method usually requires inserting a plastic comb foundation into the frames and then later spinning the honey out of the comb using an extractor — and then cleaning it all up afterwards. The Backwards Beekeepers get their honey from wild bees in Los Angeles, California, where the destruction method isn’t an issue, I assume, because they don’t have to concern themselves with a short season like, say, Newfoundland bee keepers do. There’s plenty of time for bees to build new comb in California. (I’m guessing.)

Philosophically, I’m attracted to the Backwards Beekeeping method of creating frames for honeybee combs too. They call them starter strips. Check it out:

This next video is even better. It demonstrates how to light and use a smoker, but it also shows the bees building their honeycombs off the starter strips. Bees are amazing.

Here’s another Backwards Beekeepers video showing the bees hard at work cleaning away dead bees after a heavy rainstorm:

There are more videos from Backwards Beekeepers on their site and on YouTube. Not a bad place to start poking around for anyone interested in bee keeping.

Related post: Starting a New Bee Hive (Video).

In the meantime, here’s a video of a guy starting a new hive with a 3-pound mail-order package of bees and a queen — the typical method of starting a new hive. (Heads-up: There’s wind and noise in some portions of the video.)

Hopefully I’ll write another post in April about my first honeybee hive.

Via Central Beekeepers Alliance.

It took a while to decide what to plant and where to plant it because some vegetables get so big they grow over other plants and block their sun; certain parts of the 8 x 8 bed don’t get any morning sun; and some vegetables grow best in the corners or on the sides where they can fall outside the bed frame. So it took a bit of juggling, but we got it. (UPDATE: We didn’t even know it, but all that juggling is part of the practice of intercropping.) We’ll see how well we stick to the plan come early June when the last of the seedlings go in the ground after the last frost. (Last frost in St. John’s, Newfoundland, is June 2nd.)

We tried using the Online Garden Mapping Tool to create our map, but it doesn’t allow for an 8 x 8 configuration; some of its estimates were a bit optimistic; and it was quicker and easier to just map out the garden by hand. Still, it’s not bad for people starting up their first garden beds. This is only our second year, but we’re already relying mostly on our practical experience from last year.

We decided to pass on the potato tower this year, because filling it up with new good soil is too expensive; it requires more work than anything else; and it still might fail miserably. We plan to use its old frame to build two 3 x 3 raised beds instead. We’ll probably get twice as many potatoes that way. It’s a safer bet.

We might also build a small raised bed just for herbs, and of course we’ll grow as much as we can around the yard in various containers. I hope it’s a good year.

Next on the list: Start some of our indoor transplants so they’re ready for planting in about 10 weeks.

Related posts: How to Build a Raised Garden Bed, Filling a Raised Garden Bed and Garden Update (Video).

But if you’re a beginner and you want to get fancy and let a computer do all the calculations for you, check out this free online Garden Planner. It’s provided by a retail outfit that sells stuff you can build yourself for much less cost, but they offer all kinds of sensible advice for growing veggies in a raised garden bed, and they have this nifty little online garden mapping tool.

Simply enter the dimensions of your garden bed and then drag and drop any of the 47 veggies in the illustrated menu into one of the 1-foot squares on the map. (It takes less time to learn than it does to read that last sentence. It’s easy.) One of the more useful features is that it calculates how much of the chosen vegetable you can grow in each square foot. For instance, if you drag and drop leeks into one of the squares, 6 leeks will appear in the square. (I just found out I can grow 9 parsnips in 1 square foot. Nice.) Then once you’ve mapped out all your veggies, click the big “Generate My Detailed Plan & Planting Guide” button and you get something like this (a randomly selected sample map):

Then underneath the grid is a list of everything you’ve selected for your garden with detailed information about each crop. For instance, the first item listed under the above sample map is thyme. The following information is provided:

Thyme

— Plant: Start with a small potted plant in mid-spring. Hardiness varies depending on variety. Tender or hardy perennial.
— Spacing: two plants per sq. ft.
— Days to harvest: Leaves from first year plants can be picked sparingly by midsummer.
— Hint: Good drainage is essential for success. Work in plenty of compost, but no fertilizer is needed.

A link to a Vegetable Encyclopaedia is also provided for each item on the list.

The site also has a Soil Calculator so you know how much soil to get to fill your garden beds.

The only problem with the mapping tool is that you can’t enter a width greater than 4 feet (which isn’t much help with our 8 x 8 raised garden bed), though the length can go up to 12 feet. I don’t get that. My other complaint is that if you want to save the map when you’re done, you have to provide your email address, where upon I assume you’ll get your map sent to you probably along with all kinds of junk mail from gardeners.com. There’s an option to print the map, though, so when you’re done, you can just print the grid with all the detailed information on each crop. So that’s not too bad.

Altogether, it makes for a useful online resource, at least for novice gardeners. I’m not sure I would make full use of it; most of the information I can probably get from the back of my seed packages. But at this point in my vegetable gardening life (I’ve only got one good year under my belt so far), it might come in handy once in a while.

Related post: Our 2010 Garden Map.

Via Living the Frugal Life and Backwards Beekeepers.

I would have liked to have seen photos of the potatoes in the tower as she was harvesting them so I could actually see how high they grew, and links to her online references would have been helpful too, but otherwise Jaki’s post is very detailed, showing how the whole project went every step of the way, from building the tower to harvesting the potatoes.

I found something in Jaki’s post that might explain why potatoes didn’t develop above the first level of my potato tower. Everybody pay attention now because this might be the magic trick that makes the potato tower work. Jaki got some of her info from the Gardening with Ciscoe web site. Let’s hope it’s correct. She says:

[You] definitely cover all but the very top leaves to avoid letting sun get to the stalks and lower leaves. Ciscoe says at 4 inches cover all but the top inch. The concern is apparently if the stem and leaves get too much sun they don’t produce potatoes. That would be horrible to do all that work and get nothing.

Yeah, tell me about it.

If her information is correct, then it’s no wonder I didn’t get potatoes above the first level. I let my potato plants grow into a jungle before I piled more soil up around them — they were well over 12 inches by the time I first added more soil. Check it out:

Look at those stalks. They got plenty of sunlight while they were growing. If exposure to sunlight makes the stalks of the potato plants too stiff to sprout roots under new soil, then I spent 4 months last summer nurturing potato plants with the world’s longest stalks. Neither John Saul or Greg Lutovsky say anything about this in the original article on potato towers in the Seattle Times. Let’s get ‘em!

The relevant info comes from Ciscoe Morris who provides instructions on growing potatoes in a garbage bucket, which is smaller than a potato tower, but the process is similar. During planting, he recommends using the slow-release fertilizer Osmocote 14-14-14 that will stay active for the first couple months of growth. He suggests covering the plants with new soil as soon as they grow 4 inches. He says, “Every time the vines grow another 4 inches, keep covering all but the top inch.” So in a potato tower, you would have to carefully add the new soil by hand, building up the tower until it reaches the desired height (we capped ours off at about 40 inches because the plants weren’t growing much after that). Then just wait for harvesting time and see what happens.

Jaki at [the now defunct] Country Dreams, who managed to get 25 pounds of spuds from her tower remember, thinks she may have gotten more if she hadn’t let the plants grow out of control in the higher levels of her tower:

In hindsight I think I got lazy in hilling my potato plants as they were growing. Sometimes I would let them get to be 8 or so inches tall and jungle-like before dumping more dirt in and covering the stems. I now know that causes the plant to become a stem rather than a root, stopping growth. As it is, I didn’t get much production in the top part of the bin. I think that’s the reason. Remember, constant vigilance!

Rob at One Straw voiced concerns over this hilling process, though. Constantly burying everything but the top inch of the plant may stunt the growth so that the potato plant doesn’t develop a healthy canopy large enough to produce the sugars needed for big potatoes. But who knows, maybe the plants do well by the time they have a chance to rest at the top of the tower.

I’m almost tempted to try it again in 2010.

Related posts: How to Build a Potato Tower, Potato Tower Failure (Part 1), Potato Tower Failure (Part 2).

Potato Tower Results — An End to the Hype? by Rob over at One Straw provides a more realistic account of what it’s like to grow potatoes in a potato tower. He had about as much success as we did. The problem for us was that the potatoes simply did not grow above the level they were planted. They grew well within the first 10 inches of soil, but no potatoes grew in the other 40 inches of soil above that. We were supposed to get about 100 pounds of potatoes, but I’d say we got more like 7 pounds, probably less. We put a lot of time, money and effort into those 7 pounds of potatoes.

So what went wrong? Why didn’t it work for us? Let’s take a look at what we did first:

Our potato tower was 3×3 feet square (we used this diagram as a rough blueprint). The bottom was lined with a cardboard barrier because we have lead in our soil. The first level of about 10 inches was filled with 100% composted soil. We planted 8 or 9 small seed potatoes (a red variety, maybe Yorkland Reds? — something like that) on May 17th. We saw the first sprouts on June 7th. By June 27th, the plants were looking great. We added a second level on July 4th, covering up the lower portions of the plants with a mixture of composted soil and peat from Traverse Gardens. (We bought several bags of this soil throughout the summer as the plants and the tower grew.) The plants looked half-dead every time we built up the soil around them, but would bounce back to life almost overnight. We saw our first blossoms on July 18th. We trimmed the stems on the 3rd level thinking maybe it would provide more room for roots to grow. On August 27th, 3 months after planting, we harvested a few potatoes from the first level and they looked great. Then we left things alone until the first week of October and did our final harvest. We got some beautiful big red potatoes out of the first level. And not a single potato on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th level (each level was about 10 inches high). The potato plants had long stems. We saw blossoms only once — in July for about a week. A couple times we watered the potatoes with water that may have had some tomato plant food in them, but that was minimal and only once or twice. The plants were watered regularly and were healthy all summer long. They grew through at least 40 inches of soil to the top of the tower. That’s all I can think of it. What did we do wrong?

These are my best guesses:

— We had the wrong variety of potatoes, a red variety (Yorklands — I still can’t remember the name). Rob over at One Straw says:

Supposedly late varieties do better in towers — so look for Late, High Yeilding varities like Burbank Russet, Bintje, Romanze, Desiree, etc.

Rob uses words like “cultivar” when talking about potatoes. I don’t even know what that is, but he seems to know a lot more than I do, so I’ll take his word on it. Greg Lutovsky in the Seattle Times article recommends Yellow Finn, Yukon Gold, Caribe, Red Pontiac and Red Lasoda (at least for the Western Washington area).

— Maybe we used the wrong kind of soil. There can’t be anything wrong with our first level of 100% composted soil, but the subsequent levels were a mixture of composted soil and peat, and there may be some mild fertilizer in the mix too (I’ll have to ask Ross Traverse specifically what he puts in his all-in-one soil). Perhaps we should have added straw with more raw, loose compost. I’m not sure. I thought Ross’s soil was pretty much good for everything. Maybe not.

— We may have over-planted. 9 small potato seeds in a 3 x 3 bed. Is that too crowded? The plants certainly seemed to grow vigorously. They were healthy plants, that’s for sure. But maybe there were too many of them. Maybe there wasn’t enough room for roots to grow out from the buried stems. I don’t know (but I doubt it).

— Did we harvest too early? I doubt that too. We could have waited a few more weeks, but I can’t see that short bit of time making much difference.

— Did our initial test harvest from the first level damage the root system? I don’t know. Even if it did, it shouldn’t have made any difference to what grew above the first level.

So in the end, I don’t really know why the potato tower didn’t yield a bountiful harvest of potatoes. I think the whole thing might be a bunch of hype. I’d like to see proof from Greg Lutovsky, who may be the originator of the potato tower idea, that it actually works.

The folks over at LandShare Colorado did exactly what we did. They built a 3×3 potato tower and planted red potatoes. Everything looked great until harvest time. The potatoes on their first level were plentiful and delicious just like ours, but that was pretty much it. I have yet to find evidence that potato towers work.

Rob at One Straw says the Carola and Purple Viking varieties may do well with the potato tower method of growing — that is, roots and subsequently potatoes might grow out of all the buried portions of the plant as it grows up — but I’ll wait to see how well it turns out for him in 2010 before I take another crack at it. I would love to see it work, but I’m just not sold on it yet.

UPDATE: I think I know why most people aren’t having the greatest success with their potato towers. See How a Potato Tower Might Work.

We planted our potatoes around May 17th. We did our first test harvest 3 months later on August 17th. It looked like this:

Not too shabby. So we left it alone and let the potatoes grow until the first week of October when we just couldn’t wait any longer. This was the moment of truth for the potato tower.

We got a nice large bucket of potatoes from the first level of the potato tower. We had high hopes for the second level. And…

Not a single potato above the first level. I didn’t take any photos, because what’s there to see besides a big pile of dirt?

Rob over at One Straw (who knows a lot more about growing veggies than we do right now) had a similar experience with his potato towers. He had high hopes just like us, and like us, instead of 100 pounds of potatoes per tower, he got about 3 pounds. (Yup, it was disappointing for us too.) He had some problems with heavy rain and grew a different variety than us, but at least he got some growth above the second level (we got zilch). Rob said:

My strong suspicion… is that all the aggressive hilling perpetually knocks back the leaf growth and the plants never develop a lush canopy of sugar producing leaves to build the starch needed for a good harvest.

We didn’t have that problem. We kept hilling as the plants grew — that is, we kept burying the lower parts of the plants in soil as they grew up and up — and even though they looked pretty darn bedraggled afterwards, they’d bounced back into a rain forest of leaves within 24 hours. Our potato plants (a red variety I can’t remember the exact name of) had no difficulty growing through an extra few feet of soil and staying healthy the whole time.

The problem was that the roots didn’t grow out from the submerged branches. The original Seattle Times article quotes potato seed grower, Greg Lutovsky:

A lot of people think you plant a potato and that the new ones grow below it, but that’s not so… Potatoes grow between the seed piece and the above-ground plant.

That didn’t happen with our plants at all. After we tore down the tower, all we had was a bunch of potato plants with really long submerged stocks. They looked exactly like the plant on the right (photo borrowed from Rob at One Straw who said: “Buried ‘Stem’ had ZERO roots developed after 3 months beneath the soil”). With the exception of the first level, nowhere between the seed piece and the above-ground plant were there any potatoes in our potato tower.

The potatoes we got from the first level were beautiful, though, the most flavourful potatoes I’ve ever had. Baking them on the BBQ in tinfoil with a bit of butter and pepper — we loved every minute of it. So the potatoes did their job, but the potato tower — which was supposed to fill up with potatoes — did nothing. We would have got just as many potatoes in a 3×3-foot raised garden bed.

So what did we do wrong? I’ll try to answer that question in the next post.

Continued in: Potato Tower Failure (Part 2).

I DECIDED TO REMOVE THE VIDEO BECAUSE IT CONTAINS SOME PHILIP GLASS MUSIC AND I DON’T WANT TO GET SUED BY SONY MUSIC OR WHATEVER MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATION THAT HAPPENS TO OWN THE RIGHTS TO THE MUSIC.

To fill these boxes, and to have enough soil for the next few levels of the potato tower, we bought a huge industrial-strength garbage bag full of soil from Ross Traverse. Ross is a well-known local horticulturist and his soil is his own special mix of compost, topsoil, peat and lime. I don’t know how large the bag is, but it’s huge and it has to be the best deal in town: $11. If you live around St. John’s, Newfoundland, and you need some good gardening soil, don’t go to any of the big stores — just visit Traverse Gardens because. We plan to go back to buy 3 or 4 more bags at least.

The concept is simple and very cool: plant the potatoes in a small raised bed. As the plants grow, keep adding soil, slowly burying the plants and forcing them to grow up even higher.

Meanwhile, everything that gets buried develops roots. Just keep adding boards around the raised bed until it’s 4 feet high. All the roots beneath the 4 feet of soil turn into potatoes.

In theory.

The potatoes are harvested by removing the lower planks of the tower first and working your way up.

The construction of the tower was easy: 4 square poles screwed together by 4 planks. The corner pegs or poles are about 5 feet tall. The original blueprint for the tower calls for 2-inch thick lumber covering a 4 x 4 area, but we passed on that and made due with 1-inch planks and a 3 x 3 area. We bought two 6-foot long planks (untreated, cheap knotty pine, $5.50 each), 1-inch thick, 10 inches high, and cut them into 3-foot lengths. I found four 5-foot long poles in my shed, 2 inches by 3 inches. We screwed the four sides together around the poles — nothing to it. Done. (Note: I would hate to do this without a powered screwdriver, or in our case, a drill jury-rigged with a screwdriver bit.) We placed the tower on the ground over some cardboard boxes. The boxes will eventually rot, but the tower has to be rebuilt every year, removing the soil each time, so we’ll just replace the cardboard every year. The total cost of all the materials if you had to buy them from scratch is about $25 or $30. But making due with what we already had on hand: $11.

NOTE (Oct. 25/09): The slideshow now shows the entire progression of our potato tower for the whole season.

Continued in: Potato Tower Failure (Part 1).

We won’t go into the planting process. It’s pretty basic. You draw a map (photo), put some seeds in the ground, cover them with soil and add water. We’ll post a more detailed but concise summary of the entire process, including dates for planting and harvesting some time in the fall. Until then, just check out our photo album once in a while.

UPDATE: Photos were added to the slideshow as the season progressed. There are now almost 200 photos in the our Garden (2009) photo album, most of them with descriptive captions, beginning on April 25th when we built the garden bed frame, ending 6 months later on October 24th when we sprinkled some lime over the soil and goodbye until next year.

We bought 4 planks of untreated knotty pine, 1 inch thick, 12 inches high, 8 feet long. $12 per plank. (2-inch planks are better, but at more than twice the cost, we said no thanks.) We found a piece of 2 x 2 lumber in the shed (basically a square pole) and cut it into 4 pieces, each piece about 14 inches long — they would become the corner posts. We bought a 100-pack of untreated screws (photo). Then using a power drill with a screw driver attachment instead of a drill (our drill isn’t designed for this), we screwed together the garden bed frame one corner at a time. We had no drawings, no measurements. We pieced it all together first, then carefully held each piece in place as we drilled in each screw, 2 screws for every plank end we had to attached to the little poles in the corner. It’s the first thing either of us has ever built. It took about 90 minutes. (We haven’t included blueprints for the raised bed because we didn’t use any, and it’s easy to see what we did by looking at the photos.)

Click image to view all photos of our raised vegetable garden bed from 2009.

We then cut up some thick plastic that was left over from when we had a couch delivered a while back and spread it down on the ground and placed the frame over the plastic. We could have used cardboard boxes, too, but cardboard eventually rots and we want to keep whatever lead may be in the soil down in the soil, away from the veggies. (Not necessary if you know you have safe soil underneath.)

Total cost: About a $50 (Canadian).

Next up: Filling a Raised Garden Bed with some good composted soil.

Why build a raised vegetable garden bed? With a field full of lead, what else can we do?

And so it all begins with a field full of lead…

NOTE: This is our old backyard, but our friend who still lives there let’s us use his greenhouse from time to time.

The tomato plants have been in our greenhouse for 6 weeks (since about the end of May). Before that they were tiny transplants we put out in the greenhouse during the day and brought in at night for two weeks. We didn’t take photographs of our tomatoes this year, but we’ll come back in a month and record another stimulating video to document their growth (if we don’t forget). In the meantime, here’s another video recorded a few days later with a video camera. The quality still isn’t the best, but around the 2:50 minute mark there’s a good demonstration of how to prune a tomato plant.

NOTE: This is our old backyard, but our friend who still lives there let’s us use his greenhouse from time to time.