You are quickly going to be able to see that I have really enjoyed having bees. As I have dabbled in the various aspects of farming our new land, I have figured out what I am good at and what I am not good at.  Sometimes, it pays to be self-aware.  I admit it…I hate weeding.

We planted this huge garden a little late.  I put many hours of really hard work into it and cultivated it as best I knew how.  Michelle spent countless hours out there weeding, watering, and caring for the plants. Even with all of this intensely difficult work, we ended up with a less than stellar result. I can deal with that pesky deer eating the buds off the tops of my plants (although it doesn’t seem to like kale).  I can deal with the bugs and the gophers.  I can even deal with having to do thirty minutes or so each day of weeding.  I cannot, however, deal with spending hours and hours and weekends weeding only to have them sprout up bigger the next day!  It is infuriating!  I will grant you that I am not using any commercially produced fertilizers, insecticides, or herbicides.  We decided to go totally organic and that makes things more difficult.  Growing a large garden taught me several things.  I noted above how I learned how much I hate weeding, but I also learned several other things.  I learned that I actually can grow stuff.  Sometimes you think you have the opposite of a green thumb.  That is not the case for Michelle and I.  We have corn that is ready to pick, tomatoes that are almost ready to pick, broccoli that is ready to pick, lettuce (whats left of it) that is ready to pick, melons (what are left of them) that are going strong, and many other things that are growing really well.  We CAN grow stuff!  I will have a garden again next year, but I think Michelle and I will be much more selective about what we plant.  We will also be more methodical about how/when we plant, put up a deer fence, and position some of our implements in such a way as to make it easier to use. Hopefully, I can grow to like being out in the garden more, but for the time being I look upon it with resentful appreciation.  The bees are another story.

With the bees, most of the difficulty has been in obtaining concrete information about how to do it.  Most of the sites I have found have little to no basis on how it “should” be done, just a loose amalgamation of tribal knowledge (which is often conflicting) that is poorly documented.  As the industry seems to go on this relatively weak technique for transfer of knowledge, I have tried to document what I have learned here in hopes that anyone looking for that kind of information will be able to find it and use it.  This is not to say that these people are all wrong for doing it that way, it just isn’t how I prefer to learn.  That stuff is for you philosophy majors…this guy wants hard science! The funny thing is, I understand why they do it that way.  Beekeeping is part science and part art.  You learn nuance from actually keeping bees that you cannot learn from reading something.  You learn to read your hives by observation and interaction with them.  They become like friends that you have to learn everything about.  You are basically a “prospective member” of the hive and you need to learn how to do what is best for them and every hive is different.  All of that being said, I found it extremely enjoyable to observe my bees this year and to watch them grow from a single box into a four box hive that is strong and thriving.  I wasn’t expecting much out of them as far as honey production, but they worked hard and provided us with some great tasting honey.  I am currently working on a design for a large bee hive structure which will make it easier for me to inspect and work with the hive when I have to open one up.  I think the most difficult part will be getting the damn thing level (since our property is on a slope), but I think I can get it figured out. Then there is the blacksmithing.

I have thoroughly enjoyed going out to the shop and working with the metal.  I find it extremely therapeutic and the end result of having a useful tool that I can use is very rewarding.  The only part that I am really frustrated with is the whole forge welding thing.  Waterboard and I heated up the forge to a temperature where we knew the steel would be hot enough and tried again, to no avail.  We thought we weren’t getting it hot enough, but it seems that is not the case because as I looked into the forge I could see the steel bubbling on the surface of our practice metal (3/8” round bars).  Furthermore, when I touched the two rods together in the forge, they stuck.  That is a clear indicator that we are at roughly the right temperature.  We heated the anvil a little to make sure it wasn’t sucking the heat out of the metal too fast and put the anvil in a position that would reduce the time it took to first striking the heated metal.  We tried it with flux (borax) and without, but each time the metal easily separated.  It has been a really frustrating journey.  We have, however, learned a lot about the whole process and have gotten pretty good at, using the tools we have gathered and/or made, forming the metal into the shape we want it.  We have also gotten good at working together to shape and bend the metal.  We are left with two things we need to learn before we can really get going with it: forge welding and riveting.  We made some tongs last week and they looked really good, but we couldn’t get them riveted together.  We contemplated just using a nut and bolt, but we are dedicated to doing this the “old school way”.  I know we are just making it harder on ourselves, but valuable learning/education doesn’t come (much like all good things…Michelle disagrees with me on this) without sacrifice.  Blacksmithing takes an immense amount of patience and precision. Right now, we are focusing on patience.