Creamed Honey and a Freezer Spreadsheet

13th August 2016
Preparing for winter
Sue was with the West Norfolk Bee-keepers today, focusing on preparations for winter! Taking the advice of people with years and years of experience, she is going to combine the two weaker colonies. Between them they probably have one laying queen and hopefully they will unite and get strong enough to make it through the winter. After a difficult year, if we can get two colonies through the winter it will be considered a satisfactory outcome.

Outdoor Toms a Losing Battle with Blight
While Sue was busy doing that, I was doing my best to save a few outdoor tomatoes. Despite my best efforts to remove leaves and whole plants if necessary at the first signs of blight, I continue to have to chop the plants smaller and smaller. Blight just keeps creeping steadily forward. I'm taking tomatoes off the plants as soon as they show any signs of blush and ripening them on the kitchen windowsill. This saves them from the unwanted attentions of mice and the turkeys too! Growing tomatoes outside is a bit of a lottery. Several years ago we had pounds and pounds of outdoor tomatoes, but since then we have had very little harvest. I really must get the greenhouse up this winter so I can grow the vast majority indoors from now on.

Sow Thistles for the Sheep
Once I'd done this I moved the sheep down to the very bottom section of field where the grass is waist high and the sow thistles grow thick. The sheep love sow thistle, even if it means their fleece gets wallpapered with the prickly stems and leaves. They will knock it back in no time.
One didn't want to go and was a complete pain. At least it gave me some exercise.

Freezer Spreadsheet
Best job of the day though went to Sue, who compiled a list of all the food in our many freezers. I then put this on a spreadsheet. Now this may sound more than a bit OCD, but it's easy to lose food at the bottom of the freezers. Despite pickling, dehydrating, vacuum-packing and making preserves, many of our fruit and vegetables and most of our meat still ends up going into the freezer. At this time of year there is more going in than coming out, despite our best efforts. The spreadsheet means we can keep track of what's in there and make sure our cooking is planned around using up the oldest food first.

14th August 2016
Creaming Honey
The first honey of the year is always rape honey. It sets absolutely concrete solid. This year Sue siphoned it into large buckets with a plan to turn it into creamed honey, a much more versatile product. To achieve this, the set honey needs to be very gently warmed, so as not to destroy all its health-giving properties. The dehydrator works perfectly for this. Then it is just a matter of attaching the honey creamer to the drill and agitating for at least five minutes.

Softened rape honey

The resulting product tasted delicious. We're just hoping that it has worked and it does not reset.

15th August 2016
An Excursion into the Modern World
A trip into Wisbech. I don't get off the farm very much and a couple of pieces of modern technology caught my attention. Firstly, new gizmos at the pedestrian crossings and secondly a machine in the bank which automatically reads cheques, adds them up and issues a receipt including a copy of the cheques. It seems the modern world advances a little more each time I leave it for a while!
One thing about living in a fairly remote setting is that you can't pop into town every time you need one thing, otherwise the petrol cost would often be significantly more than the cost of whatever you are buying. So we tend to save up a list of things to do in town.
We were also meeting up with someone near Wisbech to sell all of this year's honey! (we just kept a couple of jars back for ourselves). Unfortunately Sue only collected about 50 jars this year as only one hive was consistent enough to collect from.

16th August 2016
Most of the day was spent making the place look spick and span for tomorrow's gathering of the Grow Your Own group. The grass got a cut as did my hair, for the first time in a long while. It has gone from a weedy patch of overgrown grass and sow thistles to a neatly mown lawn, without the lines - I'm talking about my hair. I don't really do things in half measures.

Royal Tern Dip still hurts
It seems that every day I get the ride-on mower out, there is a MEGA bird to interrupt proceedings. Today's news was of a Royal Tern on the west coast of Ireland. I have bad memories of Royal Tern. There has only been one record since I have been seriously twitching. It appeared at several sites in North Wales on 15th June 2009, ending up sat on Black Rock Sands beach from 8:47pm until dark, last reported at 10:32pm. I turned up in the very early hours of the morning and slept in the car. In the morning it was gone, only to reappear four days later off Llandudno beach, where it flew up and down, occasionally disappearing round the corner for short periods, from 3:25pm till 6pm, five minutes before I arrived! When I turned up I was told "It's just gone round the corner, but don't worry, it's done that a few times. It'll be back soon." Well it didn't come back. Apart from one brief apparent sighting late in the evening, that was it. Gone. That dip hurt.

So, back to today's sighting. Should I get in the car and head for the ferry to Ireland, letting down the whole Grow Your Own group, or should I be patient and see what the bird gets up to in the next day or two? Had it been this side of the water, I would have been straight in the car without hesitation, but as it was I decided to hang on. After all, I had just spent the whole day getting the place looking nice for my visitors.
The rest of the evening was a nervy one though.

17th August 2016
Well, the Royal Tern was briefly seen for a couple of minutes early in the morning and then disappeared. I wouldn't have seen it had I gone last night, so I got lucky on this occasion.

Back on the farm, there were six buzzards in the air at once today, making use of the sunny weather and the light breeze to soar and hunt the freshly harvested fields.
There were four Grey Partridges (aka English Partridges) in the field at the back of me today. These are getting very scarce indeed now, just another of our farmland birds which is in steep decline.

Grow Your Own group
In the evening I had the Grow Your Own group round. The discussion subject for today was Flowers In The Veg Garden. Top Of The Crops was Potatoes. For this, we focus on one crop, looking at how to grow it, best varieties, pests and diseases and what to do with it when it is harvested. Everybody is encouraged to bring along a dish to share and I was trying my hand at Bombay Potatoes. They turned out very nice indeed and I will certainly be making them again. I'll probably make a big batch and freeze some ... if there is ever spare space in the freezers! Others brought along an Irish Colcannon type dish, a potato, ham and cheese bake and there was even a cake which contained potatoes. All very tasty and a great evening was had by all. We even managed to sit outside and my redcurrant and raspberry sparkling cordial was enjoyed by all.

18th August 2016
Rain At Last!
A rest day today but the rain was very, very welcome indeed, much needed outside. The wind that came with it was not quite so welcome.

Harvesting - A Mixed Bag

9th July
Rainwater harvesting for the polytunnel
Heavy rain when I woke up, so I hastily hooked up a hosepipe to the overflowing water butts, channelling the rain into a couple of watering cans in the polytunnel. While I wait for each watering can to fill in turn I weed, harvest and thin foliage. The rain water is much appreciated by the plants.

It can get very sticky in the polytunnel so it is important to  remove foliage from ground level. To reduce humidity the courgettes got heavily trimmed and the rampant squash plants cut back.

I harvested and thinned out the kohl rabi and turnips. I've only left a few. They are very susceptible to rot once the other plants get going and temperatures warm up. Turnip fly becomes a problem too. The Purple Top Milans seem to have a harder flesh and to be more resistant to rot and fly than the Snowball and Goldenball. Next year I'll reserve the latter two for outside. Straight into the newly available space went peppers and aubergines.
Where I removed the kohl rabi plants, the sweetcorn growing in amongst them is about a foot tall. The plants growing without any competition are up to the polytunnel roof - what a difference! It's planned though. Now I've removed the kohl rabi the sweetcorn will prosper and will come ready later than the rest.
Once the rain stopped I harvested more beetroots to be processed.

Beetroots laid out ready for baking

Not going round the bend
A walk along the roadside revealed the extent of the damage to next door's field gate caused by yet another car coming off at the bend. The car must have been in quite a state as that wooden gate post has lifted a massive lump of concrete from the ground.

10th July
A lay in, a Wimbledon final and a European Cup final in which Ronaldo got floored by a Silver-Y moth
Young swallows and tree sparrows
In between all this the swallows fledged. I opened the chicken feed shed to find one fluttering against the window so I caught it and placed it back on its nest but there was only one other. They both promptly flew off the nest, one again fluttering against the window, so I caught it and released it for its first flight. A very special moment. Fortunately the hobby's daily speculative fly through the garden had already happened today.

More excitement on the wild birds front. I've planted a branch of twisted willow in the border near the bird feeding station in the hope that birds will use it as a perch coming to and from the feeders. Well, the first birds to do this were the tree sparrow family, two fledged young and their parents. Excellent.

Squishy strawberries
A much anticipated strawberry harvest was very disappointing indeed - virtually all of them had rotted before they even ripened properly. Those that had escaped this had mostly been munched by something. I'm not sure how much the straw has helped.

I checked the weather forecast before pruning the plum trees. Dry all day. Ten minutes of pruning soon changed that, precipitating a cloudburst!
I gave up.



This was also the cue to get the Ixworth chicks back inside before they caught a chill. They've been going outside for a couple of days to get them ready for a move into the stables. It means they leave their mess and smells outside too. They also get to eat grass, scratch around and peck at insects. They seem to find the outside world quite scary at the moment.


11th July
Failed Wurzels and an Injury to Mr Rotavator
I spent the morning trying to track down a spare belt for Mr Rotavator who had a rather unfortunate mishap yesterday. Hopefully he'll be back to his wonderful best soon.
In readiness for his return to good health, I got out the slasher and hacked back all the fat hen which has grown up in what was supposed to be the mangel wurzel patch. The slugs and/or rabbits did for this crop before it ever got going. Next year I'll be growing each plant in modules before planting out. This has worked brilliantly over in the main veg patch where I'm growing the mangels which will, I'm sure, help me retain the Jeff Yates Mangel Wurzel Trophy!

Poor Honey
After all the work I'd put into the strawberry beds, yesterday's failed harvest was a big let down. Today it was Sue's turn. This has been a testing year so far for the honey bees and for beekeepers. But Sue had at least managed to take off enough frames of honey to fill about 16 jars. But when she came to spin it, some wasn't yet ready to be spun and the rest surprisingly contained rape honey that had set in the combs. All Sue's hard work for just three jars of honey and if this year continues in the same vein that could be it for honey for the year.

First Broad Beans
Fortunately my harvesting today was more productive. The broad beans have survived a bit of a bashing from the weather and today I was able to gather the first few. You can tell when they are ready when the pod hang downwards. There were carrots from the polytunnel along with more mangetout and the first Swiss chard leaves of the year, which came from self-seeded plants rather than those I've planted.
Sue worked her magic in the kitchen combining these with some pork mince from the freezer. Just a little of everything always seems to make so much lovely food!

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we head into the gooseberry patch.

Collecting honey and splitting the colony

The thief leaving the scene with her swag.

Sorry, but you'll have to wait a while longer if you're tuning in to find out who comes second in the cuteness competition. I'll tell you one thing, it's not these girls!
For now, I've been working hard in the garden this morning but I've been driven inside while Sue upsets the bees!

One of our hives is an absolute monster. In fact, both hives went into the winter very strong, but one has, for some reason, lost its queen. When Sue inspected the hive a couple of weeks ago she found no eggs and no young brood. Furthermore, there were supercedure / emergency queen cells in the middle of the frame. I'm not the expert here, but Sue is rapidly becoming so.

Sue transferred some brood along with pollen and honey to the hive and is hoping that the bees get on with things and replace their queen.

Monster hive.
A tactical retreat to the house was in order.

As for the other hive, the rape pollen is coming in and, as we all know to our cost, leave that in the hive for too long and it sets like concrete. So today Sue took off a super of honey to extract. At the same time she has attempted to split some of the colony into a third hive. Otherwise a hive that full would be sure to swarm at some point. (They probably will anyway, but might as well make the best of things and increase our number of colonies. After all, these days it seems inevitable that there will be winter losses.)

Here's what it's all about.
Cells waiting to be uncapped. There's honey in there!

Changes Afoot

The last ten days have just been a whirlwind, hence the lack of posts on here. So for now I'll give a quick resume, then I'll come back to some of this in future posts.

Most importantly, Daisy has gone.

She went on Sunday morning. She almost cost me a bird too! For those who don't know me, I'm an obsessive twitcher. Seeing new birds in Britain takes precedence over almost everything else in my life. This completely obsessive, irrational behaviour helps me put the rest of my life into perspective.


Twitch on!

Last seen out there somewhere

Fortunately I took "Eagle-Eyed" Mick with me.

Anyway, I eventually saw the Short-toed Eagle.
Sue went off on her cheese-making course which I too was supposed to be attending, and we left Daisy at the abattoir.
It seems strange going down to feed the chickens and not hearing a welcome grunt or snort from the pig pen.


Yesterday I picked Daisy up - more on this later - and spent the day with Paul, the butcher from the Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group, turning her into gammon joints, eight varieties of sausage, diced and minced pork, kebabs... In the evening the rest of the group turned up for a sausage making demonstration and a barbecue. Daisy went down very well! As did the bunny burgers provided by Mick.

I'm spending today getting everything into the freezers, rendering down some of the fat and making stock from the skin and bones.

Changes for the other animals too.
The nine lambs have moved into the long grass and started the gargantuan task of grazing it short. I'm hoping to get four more soon to help them out.
Both sets of geese have failed to hatch a single egg. Yesterday I finally turfed them off their nests and destroyed the eggs. If you want to know what a foul smell is like, crack open a rotten goose egg. It was enough to actually make me sick!

Goliath, the lone goose who we hatched in the incubator,  follows us around everywhere but he's grown even bigger. Still doubling in size every week. The other geese are back together, grey and white united, but they continue to take an unhealthy interest in Golly and he sticks close by when they're near.


Exciting news on the bee front. Sue has taken our first ever significant honey harvest. One super from each of the healthy hives, so about 40lb of honey, but there's more waiting to be collected.
The third hive, which is a newly created colony as the old one failed to come through the winter, have made themselves a queen. Sue saw her emerging from her queen cell the other day, so hopefully she will get mated and start laying soon.

And finally, we have three new inhabitants on the farm, a new species for us. For on Monday evening we picked up three turkey chicks. We intend to grow them on slowly so they'll probably make it past Christmas, but they'll end up on the plate at some time. Meanwhile they are very welcome to stay on our farm.

Our first honey - a very special day.

Honey!

I've not blogged about the bees for a while.

We are still novices to beekeeping and Sue has taken over the mantle of head beekeeper. We had our first bees while we still lived in South-East London. Surprisingly the patchwork of urban gardens there is actually a very good place to keep bees. We did rather well for a while, but our hive failed to come through its first winter and got robbed and finally killed off by robber bees from another colony.

We kept all the gear, sure that we would start up again one day. Last year, now in The Fens of South-East Lincolnshire, we embarked on our beekeeping career again. The first year was an interesting one - very hot early spring during which bee colonies everywhere quickly became strong, followed by half a year of rain. Everybody's bees were swarming all over the place, including ours.

It was a fast learning curve and, although we collected no honey, we did end the year with two healthy colonies of honey bees.

Early on in this year's spring, both hives looked OK, but spring never really warmed up and ended up being the coldest in 50 years. Unfortunately we lost one of the colonies, but the second was (and is) still looking very strong.

So strong, in fact, that they have started building queen cells again, a sure sign that the colony is filling up and planning on splitting. This is  the bees' way of spreading and sending out new colonies. But it is not great news for the beekeeper. Effectively you face losing half your bees (more if subsidiary swarms occur) and won't be able to take honey from them this year.

But it also creates the opportunity to anticipate the departure of half your bees and to set up a new colony. I won't go into the ins and outs of how to do this, but Sue has attempted to achieve it and we have our fingers crossed.

This is all very exciting (and slightly worrying) but even more exciting action came on Sunday when Sue decided there were enough supers of capped honey to try spinning some off.

The way a hive works is that at the bottom lives the queen and there she lays her eggs which develop and hatch. Other bees tend the larvae and the foragers go out everyday to collect pollen and nectar. In the cells around the brood they store this food in the form of honey.

Above this brood box the beekeeper places more frames of hexagonal foundation cells, which the bees build up into storage larders for more honey. But there is one very important difference with this part of the hive. For the queen is excluded from here, which means there are no eggs and no larvae. This honey is there for the taking!

Once the honey has reached the correct consistency, the bees cap it with a thin layer of wax.  So the first step is to scrape this off. We have a comb for this purpose, though a special knife can be used too.



Uncapping the honey.



This was amazing as the honey just started oozing out. Next the frames go into a spinner where centrifugal force sends the honey flying out of the cells and against the side walls, whereupon it trickles down to the bottom of the spinner. At this stage, there will be wax mixed in too.

I was  a bit enthusiastic with the spinning and one of the frames disintegrated a little bit. Not a total disaster, as the frames go back in with the bees to be cleaned and repaired by them.



Draining the honey from the spinner.





A tap at the bottom of the spinner allows the honey to be drained out through a double spinner. At this stage we could really see how our honey was going to turn out. Of course, we couldn't resist dipping our fingers in either.

The honey was surprisingly delicate and light. None of it seemed to have crystallised in the cells and we are hoping that the influence of oil seed rape is not too great, as this causes honey to set rock hard.

In all we got nine jars of honey. Some beekeepers don't get this much in their first few years, but with a bit of luck it will just be the start of a very successful honey year this year.

Now to go find some honey recipes.