The Elwha River is Free!

A short road trip to pick up queen bees gave us an excuse to spend the night in Port Angeles and to visit the Elwha River.

Dammed in 1910, the Elwha is now the site of the largest dam removal project on earth. The lower dam has been removed and the upper dam, Glines Canyon, will be removed in 2014. 

We walked around the barriers and took a walk above the river, where Lake Aldwell covered the slope for 100 years. The massive stumps of trees cut before the lake rose seem almost calcified from a century of gray sediments –

but life is bursting through the soil.

The salmon are expected to re-colonize the upper river in the years to come.

Mother salmon, father salmon

Brother salmon, sister salmon

Come back salmon, help us salmon

feed us salmon, leaping salmon!

heya heya heya heya

(Tom Heidelbaugh)

Rehiving the feral Bees. and a duck or 2.

Once upon a time a beekeeper had a big hive at Island Meadow Farm. Time passed, and the colony failed, and the beekeeper had other things to do. The bee boxes stood in an old nut orchard. Once a swarm found them, and for three years the hive flourished, and then the colony died.

The next winter there was a huge storm, and the stack of boxes fell over. They were stuck together with wax and propolis. In the spring, another swarm found them, and since they were dry inside, and smelled of honey and wax and other good things, the swarm moved in.  When the people in the neighborhood saw the huge hive lying on the ground with bees going in and out, they started talking about it. "Isn't it great that the magic hive has bees again?"  

"Yeah, it's great to see them. but what will happen to them in the winter?"

 So the people decided that it was time to open the hive and move the bees.

They cut the comb out of the hive and wired it into new frames.

One of the old boxes was still intact, and full of bees, and it seemed the queen might be in there, so they put it in the middle of the stack.

Gradually the bees got used to the new upright situation and settled in.

 This is an ongoing project -- consolidating the big hive and removing the extra equipment. Next step will be to divide the big hive, and requeen with a Russian/Hygenic queen from OlympicWilderness Apiary next week. More pictures soon.

 On another note, we are thinking about adding ducks to our place. Here's an especially cute, 10-year-old-duck, who lives in the Poultry Palace on Maury Island.   How could you resist?

Ramona really wants that bird

It's right out there, so close...

Honeybees Come Build...

We brought two new packages of bees home -- they're Carniolians, just up from the almond pollination in California, so now we have three hives on the Bee Pavilion.

The quotations are from a bee book that Dierdre gave me (the origin of bees is from Paradise), Emily Dickenson, and W.B. Yeats. The bees are happily exploring their new world. Bees are such a responsibility -- it's exciting to have them and one worries about them too. Worry about the bees serves as a proxy for the big worries (the earth, climate change, the Pacific Garbage gyre, and the whole nightmare of western civ). But the bees are industrious, productive, single-minded, and determined, setting a good example of perseverance. That's why I love the Yeats poem so much -- the bees continuing, bringing sweetness even during a civil war...

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother bird brings grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Bee Pavilion

Spring is coming! We lost our big purple hive over the winter. Now the pink/blue hive, which seemed less impressive last summer, is getting into gear, bringing in alder and dandelion pollen for the young bees.
Bob designed, and Alistair built, this amazing bee pavilion.

At left, the hive with the old roofshed -- the little roof helps keep the entrance dry and reduces moisture inside the hive, which seems to help keep the hive healthy in our wet winter climate. At right, the new bee pavilion, with room for 6 or more hives on the low stand, and a roof over all.

Here's a detail of the construction. The base of both stand and roof is concrete blocks; there's no foundation.

It's since been painted, and bee-friendly plants will be added around the stand. More pictures when the rain quits.

Daniel Thomas Snyder, 1961 - 2013

Daniel died February 4, two months short of his 52nd birthday, at home after a long illness. I found this scrap or draft of a poem in a packet of letters he wrote from Berlin in the mid-90s.

A Song for Central Europe

Darwin, God, Chance

"...what Darwin had done was to relieve God of the awful burden of making the world: of shaping every leaf and snail shell, squeezing out every litter of kittens and every pupating butterfly, building every snowstorm; relieved him both of the labor and the guilt. He had chosen an assistant to do that work, and the assistant was Chance."

John Crowley, Endless Things

With Charity For All

Because ultimately, "we're all in this together" is a higher moral stance than "I got mine, suckers."

Because we ARE going forward; it works better to face that way.

With malice toward none, with charity for all. 

George McGovern

…we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.

From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.

From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.

Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.

Honey and the end of summer

Thanks to these gals, we got over 5 gallons of honey -- most of it off the big purple hive.

The bees are put to bed for the autumn, with boards under the bottom screens and the extra entrances closed up. I've been feeding them, and pink hive has has been enthusiastic about taking syrup, while purple hive mostly ignores it. Both hives have a full box of honey up top, some honey in the brood boxes, and pollen with a little honey in the bottom box or two... these are big hives and we haven't been able to take much out. They've been bringing in pollen up through last week, though I doubt they're finding nectar so dry and so late in the year. They worked the oregano and hyssop and mint and SEDUM as long as they were in bloom.

  I still haven't treated for varroa mites, though Gunther Hauk says that formic acid (sold commercially as mite-away) is nontoxic. Maybe in the spring. The pink hive is Carniolian, the purple is the Russian-wild survivor mix from Olympic Apiaries; both seem fairly mite-tolerant.