Far Lands

Following on from the previous blog . . . We returned to the hive a few days later and looked in at the heavy super. Only about 50 bees remained so the porter escapes had done their job. I removed the super, brushed off the bees and went into the house to find some scales. The super weighed 18.5 kilos which accounting for the box and the frames meant 15 kilos of honey. We have decided to use it all as comb honey - rather than have the very messy experience of extraction in a centrifuge. Of course, cutting it up is also very messy! But this is the result. We checked on colony again yesterday and found that the brood box has plenty of stores, a laying queen and also the half-filled super that I gave back to them. Somehow, we have achieved a honey harvest and a happy colony!

Much to our surprise when we looked at the bees a few days ago we discovered a very heavy super. A quick look at the frames showed that much of the honey was capped ie ready to harvest. Although we are mindful that the bees will need about 25kg of honey to take them through the Winter, we decided to add a second super with a mixture of bare frames and frames with plenty of uncapped honey. We put the new super just above the brood box and the heavy-with-capped-honey super at the top. Between the two we put a clearing board which is a crown board with two porter escapes. The porter escapes allow bees to exit downwards but not return into the honey-filled super. Photos below show how a porter escape works and a crown board with two of them in place. We have now left the bees for a couple of days, the idea being that when we return no bees will remain in the super we want to remove. That's the idea, anyway. We shall see!

If you didn't know I run smallholding tours - see the orchard, bees, chickens, veg garden etc whilst I wax lyrical on grafting fruit trees, trying to be self-sufficient in fruit and veg, permaculture, seeing ourselves as stewards of the land  (as opposed to property owners), attuning to the seasons and the simple joy of being outside . . . See sister blog for details http://farlandsholidaycottagepeakdistrict.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-cottage-is-part-of-smallholding-of.html Recently, anticipating a Summer rush, I put a notice in the village shop. Which to my surprise quite a few people have seen. Yesterday I did a tour for a five year-old and her grandmother. And it went quite well . . . she collected eggs, sampled snap peas, tomatoes and purple podded peas. She (the five year-old / 'nearly six') told me she liked mint tea so we picked mint and black peppermint too. We explored the veg garden, the greenhouse and the fruit trees. To finish I put her in Sarah's bee suit

. . . even if no-one else has. One of the implications of much of an apple's goodness (minerals and vitamins) being in its seeds is that to benefit they have to be eaten. And not just eaten but chewed up as apple seeds tend simply to be passed. I then remembered something about apple pips containing cyanide. I began to look into all this . . . There are hundreds and hundreds of web snippets on the benefits of eating apples, an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that. But quite difficult to shore it up with trusted sources. A medium-sized apple weighs 150g - 200g and contains half that number of calories. 80% is water, 10% is carbohydrate, 0.5% protein and 4% minerals and vitamins. Half the minerals and vitamins and fibre are in the peel and the core. Apple pips contain amygdalin which can release cyanide when coming contact with digestive enzymes. According to the http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/contact-us/about-us/  (Cambridge University group) about

It's a bit late for thinning fruit even up here in the North of England; late June / early July after the 'June-drop' is better. But I came across the reason for thinning (the underlying reason) and I thought it was so interesting I wanted to blog it. Thinning involves removing some of the excess fruit; for apples, the advice is usually to thin to one per cluster and 1 or 2 fruit every 10 cm apart. More space for culinary apples which grow larger. Less space for pears. The reasons for thinning include:- the remaining fruit should be larger and better quality to lessen the chance of biennial cropping by saving the tree some energy to reduce the risk of branches breaking to reduce the risk of some diseases, including brown rot to allow more sunlight to reach fruit and improve ripening and taste Now to the underlying reason! The reason (thanks to Bob Flowerdew) is that the tree produces fruit for different reasons to us. The tree produces fruit for the seeds and