Sink Bee Bridge

Visited Centerton Bridge again today to check on progress. A dad and two sons were taking their opportunity to fish for bass off the span. Usually it is too busy with traffic. We walked across, the geese had failed and given up nesting. Too much goings on likely. Low tide this time provided a look at creek bottom topography. Bits which had been removed showed a lot of metal corrosion. Interesting that there are two layers of the Armco guardrail. I would think that it would deform less and transmit more of an impact to the bridge structure. Love bridges. Inventoried the greenery on the upper banks & roadside. Amazing how many invasive species there are. Poison Ivy, Catbrier, Virginia creeper, English Ivy, running bamboo, crown vetch, etc. Opening this bridge requires 8 hours prior arrangement.

Created a panel for the sink toady at the shop and paid rent-mowed the front. The grass is growing like gangbusters now. Got two bee stings today. One is swelling my eye. Read some more very funny pieces in Flotsam and Jetsom. Laughing is so good for the soul. Specially when it involves boats. Next on the reading list Bailey White.

TSCA Redeemed

WOW had a busy night. Ed worked on the false stem. Tahiti John, Tom, Mike B, and Paul G. worked on the side planking. MikeW. and Pete worked on bunging knots, Carl made a shim for deckbeam 13.
Paul and I worked on the center planks forward.

We stopped for an hour or so to do the math for the spars.
I got 19/32, 14/32, and 9/32 for the taper for the FISH STIXs mast between the truck and partners. More fuzzy pictures at facebook


Put fondant on both hives. Colonies still going so far. Tom brought me some pollen substitute.

Composite Rudder

The Sharpie Rudder has a core cut from fir plywood. It was shaped to a foil profile , first with a plane, and then with a long board (36 grit). Surface imperfections were filled with epoxy with phenolic microballoons.
Next, each side will get a lamination of carbon fiber & Kevlar, and the leading edge will be banded with glass fiber.

Painted the front room today and made fondant (sugar cake) for the hungry bees. Fondant is just sugar and water, cooked to 238ºF, poured out on stone to cool quick and then scraped and kneaded like taffy. Then chunks are rolled out between wax paper so it can be placed on top of the inner cover. The SJBA Beekeepers association has two other boat building/sailing friends in it. The winter meeting was about making home beeswax and honey cosmetics.

New Door

Fifty year old cardboard Levitt house.





Replacing the window with a rotted sill

with a door. put a floor in the bee hive for winter and restricted their access so they can put their little bee feet up against their fire and keep warm.

Decking

Both the sneakbox and Silent Maid were getting Decking today. In my absence last week the ducker was painted and dumped in the river to take up. I was painting primer a bit using a mirror to check the underside of the deckbeams of the sneakbox. Rained all day today. Been a rainy week.



My bees swarmed on Thursday last, so I dumped them into a new box. Came home from the cape, they were still there. Got to move them a little each night to get the new hive back with the other one.

Smoke

Cool smoke makes the bees settle down, but at first it makes them buzz really loud. By now the queen should have been laying eggs, but I can't see any yet. Lots of capped honey though. I am amazed at how much comb they have made in two weeks. They have filled out about six and a half, seven frames both sides. The two mason jars on the front of the hive are feeders for the bees. It takes about six pounds of sugar to make one pound of wax.







Beeswax has many uses in furniture making.A lot of people make cosmetics and remedies from it, some make ornaments, one friend of mine makes candles from it. It smells wonderful. I did not know about cleaning products. Did you have anything specific in mind?
I am not expecting honey this year. Usually you leave the honey for the bees to winter over on in the first year, unless you have an especially long nectar flow that year. After that you can get anywhere from 50-100 pounds of honey per hive.

April Showers Not

The beets are up and trees are blooming wildly. Maple & apple here with a late jonquil. The bees have multiple flight paths. I opened the hive today to remove the spacer and queen cage. The queen was out of her cage and all the candy is gone. I had to scrape burr comb off the inner cover. The burr comb was full of fresh honey, yum. It is truly amazing how the bees build comb without any foundation. The edges are irregular and yet they completely cover the surface with small interlocking polygons which exactly mesh with those on the reverse and are all the same size. They build with a substance their bodies produce. Architecturally marvelous.

Spring

The magnolia is blooming, we had what I hope is our last frost last night. The peas are up, lettuce & spinach in the garden. Beets & onions are slowly coming round. Transplanted the lilies to make room for cole crops. I like broccoli, bok choy, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower. The bees are flying and have found the sugar water feeder.


I began gardening when my children were small. In part to share my heritage and love of the outdoors with them, but mostly because it is something I could do in small chunks of time. Before kids, I would spend hours in the studio making art. Hours and kids are not compatible, so I found an outlet that released creativity, but in metered doses and my kids could follow me out there. Being outdoors helps forestall depression, gives you age spots when you forget sunscreen, and makes you appreciate being alive. My parents are gardeners, and so are my children. It is an item of discussion on Sunday afternoon phone calls. "Are your peas up yet?" " My tulips just blew open today!" Keeps the family together.

Ouch

Put my bees in their home tonite. One of them got me on my knuckle. The rest seemed to settle in and go to sleep. The queen is still in her cage with a sugar plug in the end. We'll see tomorrow if they find the sugar water I put out for them. They need to be fed at first so they can make wax to build out the comb.

Million Bees

Bee update. Today, I helped Tom in his bee yard. More like he helped me actually. The bees are really amazing creatures. They caulk all the seams in their hives like boat seams. You have to pry the sections apart with a tool. We checked a bunch of hives, looking for healthy ones. He rents his hives to local farmers for pollination. Four were needed for a strawberry field.
If they had a lot of brood frames, Tom added a honey super. Eggs look like tiny rice grains in the bottom of cells, larva are white and shiny, capped brood are dusky brown.
Tom recycles honey supers and drawn out comb. The bees will clean it out for you and refill it with more honey.

Bee Boxes

Put together the boxes for the hive. Bees arrive 4/12.

Honeybees in America have always been assisted. They are not native. They are European or Asian or African. The bees that I am starting the hive with are coming from a colony split. Beekeeping is a lot like animal husbandry with insects instead of animals. Different kingdom. Farming on a small scale. I have 18 years experience in New Jersey horticulture - farming on a wholesale level. Many growers rent hives to pollinate their crops. Otherwise the smaller harvest makes growing unsustainable, farmers don't recoup their investment of labor and seed.
On another thread, there is no stopping evolution. Things are going to change no matter what. Entropy is part of the physical system we inhabit, we adapt to change. Here is the sailing analogy, seldom is the breeze constant, it comes in puffs and gusts. Sailors must shift to accomodate the changes because more or less pressure on the sail affects the stability of the boat. There are subtitle shifts happening all the time, you lean out a bit, put a little more or less pressure on the tiller, change course, head up, fall off, pull up the board. A rash or dramatic shift in mass or force will upset the system entirely and you'll be in the drink. Sailors try to predict what wind is coming by watching the sky & water. Cats paws will leave little ripple dimples while force five drives combers smothered in foam. I stay shoreside when the tops blow off the whitecaps.

Green Bees

Here is my contribution to the honeybee population crash. I am starting a hive of honeybees to counter the colony decline statistics. Last Saturday I assembled fifty frames for comb foundation. The Saturday before that I spent at a beginner beekeeping course taught by the famous Jim Bobb. My local beekeepers knew who he was. All of my friends who are beekeepers are also sailors and boatbuilders. Maybe it is because they like woodworking. Did you know that over one third of our food crops are pollinated by bees?

Something much deeper is at work here. The wikopedia description is fairly good for Colony Collapse Disorder. My apian friends have all had declines and my county is recruiting beekeepers with cash. (of course the article in the paper came out after I had paid for my class.)
“Colony Collapse Disorder (or CCD) is a little-understood phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or Western honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearance has a long-standing history of occurring, the term Colony Collapse Disorder was originally applied to perceived disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in a minority of regions of North America in late 2006.
“European beekeepers observed a similar phenomenon in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, and initial reports have also come in from Switzerland and Germany, albeit to a lesser degree. Possible cases of CCD have also been reported in Taiwan since April 2007.
“The cause or causes of the syndrome are not yet well understood. Theories include environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, pathogens (i.e., disease including Israel acute paralysis virus), mites, pesticides such as neonicotinoids or imidacloprid, radiation from cellular phones or other man-made devices, and genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics such as transgenic maize.”

So I see a wider issue, another global indicator for a disrupted ecosystem. I garden and have been watching the bee populations for the last thirty years. When I began raising food in earnest, there were so many bees, I often would get stung at least once a summer from stepping on them in the clover. When the Varroa mites came out there was a large population crash in wild bees. I began seeing a few bees again until last year when there were none but bumbles and carpenter bees. Smithsonian magazine had an article supposing a theory that cell phones might have interferred with the bees GPS.