extracting the honey

in each of the boxes (or "supers" as they are known among the apiary crowd) on matt's hive, there are ten frames on which the bees build their comb, fill the cells with honey and then seal each cell with a wax cap. this is a picture of the comb with the majority of the cells sealed.

to get the honey out of the comb, matt used a hot knife to slice off the waxy coating while i photo-documented the process.

using an extractor loaned to him by michele and made functional with dad's help last weekend, matt spun the unsealed frames so that the honey flew off into this souped-up trashcan.

the trash can (technical name = honey extractor) has a little spigot at the base so once we had centrifugally forced all the honey out of the combs, matt drained it through a filter and into jars.

honey flows as slow as molasses.

from one super, matt harvested approximately 25 pounds of honey. the best part about honey extracting is that you can put all the sticky, honey-coated tools and surfaces outside and the bees clean everything up!

starting the garden

in years past, i have tried to start a garden from scratch in the spring. this year, i am initiating the whole process in the fall, which should put me well ahead of the game come spring. mom and dad visited this past weekend and mom took this picture of me mowing the grass. in theory, by early spring, this grass will have turned itself into dead organic material to make my garden soil rich and my tomatoes delicious.

my idea was to cover all the grass with a few layers of newspaper, held down my a combination of rotting horse manure and woodchips, but dad found a giant tarp in a pile of debris and we thought it might be easier and less stinky to use this to smother the grass instead. we were dragging it up the driveway right when bill and glorian arrived. i explained to mom that this tarp-dragging, multiple-people-visiting thing was a bloggable moment and she continued with her photographer's duties.

i am sure mom would like it pointed out that she even captured magic the horse in the background.

going back a few days

last wednesday and thursday, i attended the sanctuary director's overnight meeting on cape cod. as i mentioned last year, the good thing about the meeting is it takes place on cape cod, after the busy summer season is over and before the weather gets rotten. the bad thing about the meeting is pretty much the whole meeting part of it. this year, the sanctuary directors went on a field trip to cape cod's south beach (significantly different from miami's south beach), where most of the directors were fixated on birds.

i, however, became fixated on the cases of some kind of invertebrate organism that were all over the beach. they looked like either a delicious yet delicate cookie or a lovely dangly earring (recall, if you will, that i suggested making something else into earrings at last year's SD meeting- which is funny because i have been wearing the same pair of earrings since august 2004- it's not like i am in the market for new earrings and therefore thinking about them constantly- let's see, what can i make into earrings today?)


the cases were one grain of sand thick, making it unlikely that they could be made into earrings in the absence of massive amounts of shellac. but somehow they managed to hold together enough to protect whatever organism fashioned them. i asked bob prescott, sanctuary director at wellfleet, where they came from and he told me it was the case of a "gold tooth worm." he said this with complete confidence and not a moment's hesitation, but i have not yet been able to find any information on gold tooth worms in wikipedia, repository of all the world's knowledge.


so maybe bob was totally making it up. but it doesn't matter. i was delighted to have something to look at while everyone else was watching the birds- getting all excited about some sort of woodpecker with an ivory-colored bill or whatever. i even managed to turn some other folks on to my little obsession.

nina's new trick

horseshoe crab molts

exhausted after a hard day of playing

the dogs came to work with me today. nina likes to collect all the toys she can find before settling down to take her nap as close to jake as possible.

now, whose little puppy dog is that?

matt went up to new hampshire yesterday to help his mom with some computer issues. that means i was on my own this rainy day for the morning dog walk. i took them to the woods behind the back field, where jake stayed close to me, smelling things and peeing on things, and nina sprinted around leaping over obstacles like the little agility dog that i plan on someday training her to be. the dogs were way off to my left as i was leaving the woods, when suddenly, no more than 15 feet in front of me, moving from left to right, just at the edge of the trees, was jake but he was all covered in flour so he looked really pale. that was my first thought. my second was, "oh, who else walks their dog back here?" my third was, "nina is going to get eaten by this coyote."

the coyote and i both held very still for a second, staring at each other, before it continued trotting rather calmly off to my right. i yelled at it to urge it along, hoping against hope that my dogs would not notice this new dog in their neighborhood. when the coyote silently disappeared into the woods, i thought we were out of the woods, so to speak. but somehow, nina picked up the scent (damn those canines and their amazing noses) and what ensued was a lot of barking (by the dogs) and yipping and howling (by the coyote) and desperate screaming (by me- "nina, that thing is going to eat you! nina, this is not a joke! jake, save nina! jake, he'll eat you too!).

much like that one time i told that really long story about chasing a pig, this story has a rather anti-climactic ending. no one was eaten, no one even caught rabies. the dogs are now exhausted from the adrenaline and the chasing and the barking, and i'm exhausted from all those same things. they're sitting on either side of me on the couch now, all wet and dog-stinky and asleep, and i just hope that someone- whether it be me, these dogs, or that coyote- learned a lesson from this morning and that this will never happen again.

stocking up before the big migration

we're getting close to the time of peak migration of monarch butterflies in massachusetts. all monarchs start migrating once the sun drops to about 57 degrees above the southern horizon. the butterflies heading south to mexico now are the great-grandchildren of those that arrived here this past spring. the journey is 4000 miles round trip, which on the way down is accomplished by a single individual; on the way back, it's a tag-team effort of two or three generations.

so this butterfly that i photographed this morning will fly down to mexico, spend the winter there, and head back north in the early spring. she'll really start to feel fatigued at this point and will likely stop somewhere in texas to sow her wild oats (always laying her eggs on a milkweed plant, the exclusive food source for monarch butterfly caterpillars) and die. her daughter, born on the texas prairie, might make it as far north as ohio before she lays eggs on some milkweed there. the granddaughter might return here to massachusetts and yield a great-granddaughter on our milkweed. the question is: come autumn, how does she find her way back to the same grove in mexico that sheltered her great-grandmother?

some scientists think they are following a scent trail left by the rotting corpses of butterflies that didn't survive the journey- a hansel and gretel theory of sorts. others postulate that monarchs are actually tiny robots created by osama bin laden to track our movements and simply take the winters off to download all their data. whatever their methods, it's a fantastic feat. they face many challenges on the trip back, including global warming (which causes wildflowers to bloom and die before the butterflies arrive to sip their delicious and nutritious nectar) and because new herbicide-resistant strains of soybeans and corn are letting farmers kill off more milkweed patches. what can you do to help?

1. stop global warming
2. stop eating corn and soybeans
3. plant some butterfly milkweed in your garden, using plants that matt and i supply to you next spring, which we plan to grow from the abundance of butterfly milkweed seeds in the garden at oak knoll
4. fly to mexico, hike to forest high in the mountains, fill two duffel bags with monarch butterflies, hike back down from mountains, hop flight back to united states (don't mention butterflies to TSA staff), release butterflies in your garden (which should be full of butterfly milkweed)

the brave and sodden climbing crew

looking west

a terrestrial red eft on wachusett mountain

mass audubon's annual staff outing

every year, the entire employee corps of the massachusetts audubon society, less those clever individuals who can think of an excuse, gather at a nature center somewhere in the state and celebrate their employment. based on a sample size of three ('04, '05, and '06), i knew these annual outings to be full of a delicious salad bar, nice people, and lovely weather, which made the sitting-around-and-listening-to-one-person-talk portion of the event more than bearable. however, this year it poured and the sitting-around-and-listening-to-one-person part lasted for just over three hours. but the salad bar was better than ever and we got to go on a hike up wachusett mountain beforehand and then visit animals at overlook farm afterwards. not a bad day. oh, and this year, matthew smith made his rookie appearance at the staff outing, as a current employee of mass audubon. it was extra nice to get to spend the day with him.

because one can never see too many pictures of kids eating cake

funfetti

another year, another sugar-loaded cake! we went to vermont this past weekend to join evie in celebration of her fourth birthday. it was great to have the party at aaron and julie's new house and it was great that we didn't have to ride home from the party with kids in a car, because julie and aaron handed out noisemakers as party favors, thus becoming the least-liked parents at the daycare center until the next kid has a party and gives out face paints as a parting gift.

news from the nyt

Virus Is Seen as Suspect in Death of Honeybees

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: September 7, 2007

Scientists sifting genetic material from thriving and ailing bee colonies say a virus appears to be a prime suspect — but is unlikely to be the only culprit — in the mass die-offs of honeybees reported last fall and winter.

The die-offs, in which adult bees typically vanished without returning to hives, were reported by about a fourth of the nation’s commercial beekeepers. The losses captured public attention as rumors swirled about causes, like climate change, cellphone signals and genetically-modified crops. Scientists have rejected those theories.

Now, one bee disease, called Israeli acute paralysis virus, seems strongly associated with the beekeeping operations that experienced big losses, a large research group has concluded, although members of the team emphasized that they had not proved the virus caused the die-offs.

“I hope no one goes away with the idea that we’ve actually solved the problem,” said Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist with the Department of Agriculture and co-director of a national group working on the puzzle, which has been given the name colony collapse disorder.

The project involved an unusual partnership between entomologists and scientists working at the leading edge of human genetic research. It employed the same technology being used to decode Neanderthal DNA and the personal genome of James Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

The research was described yesterday in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Details are available at eurekalert.org/bees.

Even with the caveats, the possible identification of a virus involved in large bee die-offs is “exceptionally important,” said May Berenbaum, who heads the entomology department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was not involved in the study. “Among other things, figuring out where this one came from will help us prevent future problems.”

Dr. Berenbaum, who led a 2006 National Academies study of problems with bees and other pollinators, said that finding ways to swiftly home in on novel diseases is ever more important in a globally linked economy. She noted that the first reports of the latest bee die-offs in the United States came in 2004, the first year the country allowed the import of honeybees — from Australia in this case — since 1922.

The new study found evidence of the virus in some Australian bee samples, although that country has not reported die-offs like those seen in the United States.

Dr. Pettis said that even if the virus was involved, it was likely that more than one factor had to align for a hive to collapse, with another possible influence being poor nutrition. Most of the colonies that had big losses last winter were in areas that experienced drought a few months beforehand, and thus a lack of nectar in flowers, he said.

Another factor, Dr. Pettis said, could be the stress that comes from the increasingly industrial-style beekeeping operations in the United States, in which truckloads of hives crisscross the country to pollinate California almonds or Florida orchards each season.

But the virus stands out as a top suspect. While seven viruses and a host of bacteria and parasites were identified in the genetic screening, only the Israeli bee virus, first identified in 2004, was strongly tied to the samples taken from keepers who reported the collapse disorder.

While the virus was first identified by scientists in Israel, it appears to exist in many parts of the world, said W. Ian Lipkin, an author of the new study and director of the Center for Infection and Immunology of Columbia University. In Israel, the virus also seems to produce bee symptoms not reported in the United States, including a pattern of finding dead bees near hives.

Dr. Lipkin, whose focus is human disease, became involved because the quest for a cause for the beehive collapses employed new genetic sifting techniques that he said might also prove useful in investigating outbreaks of human diseases.

One hint of the involvement of an infectious agent, he said, was the recent finding that abandoned hives sterilized with radiation could be repopulated with healthy bees.

The study initially examined bees from four beekeepers who reported die-offs, as well as healthy bees from Hawaii and Pennsylvania. Genetic material was extracted and analyzed with a machine from 454 Life Sciences, a company immersed in the race to make gene sequencing a fast, cheap technology.

Statistical analysis showed that a colony with the Israeli virus was 65 times more likely to have had the collapse disorder than one without it. To try to clarify cause and effect, the researchers said they were preparing a new suite of tests in which isolated bee colonies would be intentionally infected with the virus, both with and without possible secondary causes like certain parasites.

lack of water

haying

we've had a pretty dry month here in massachusetts- only 1.5" of rain in all of august. because of that and because no one was living at the farm in walpole and because teenagers had broken all the farm equipment, the hay wasn't cut at the appropriate time and since we moved in, the fields have been full of overly-long, totally dry, and mostly dead grass, which won't make for very healthy or tasty hay. someone finally cut it yesterday and i guess they're going to bale it and sell it as construction hay. fortunately, this will all be taking place the day before school starts, so those very same teenagers who broke all the equipment will now be able to help with the haying, meaning matt and i don't have to.

matt and his pups

the dogs are absolutely loving their new accommodations. they spend their days hanging out together on the screened-in porch and hours frolicking in the fenced-in front yard. plus they get to explore the fields and chase deer on a regular basis. and there is this one rooster that makes a huge fuss every time it sees the dogs, which makes jake and nina feel all empowered and wolfish. matt and i are experiencing many of the same joys. i just wish i could get him to stop antagonizing that rooster.

how i will be spending labor day with no chores