There is a reason why humans began to cultivate food. Cultivated food is within human reach. It comes at predictable times. And you know exactly where it will be—right where you planted it.
Foraging for food requires eyes constantly alert because you can never be sure when or where you will find an edible treasure. My husband, Forager Man, starts his search for wild grapes in the spring. He identifies a vine and watches it all season to see if and how much it will bear fruit.
There are grape vines all over the place. Most of them never yield grapes. But that does not keep Forager Man from looking.
“We’ve had them here before. There must be some around here somewhere.”
He says this a lot. About grapes. And watercress. And morels. And hen of the woods mushrooms.
And he’s probably right. There are all those things growing at Maywood. But Maywood is a large enough area that we are not going to search every square foot of it.
Well, I’m not. He can wander the woods all he likes. And report back.
Finding foraged food on the kitchen counter works for me (unless it requires me to drop everything else I was doing to process it).
If I’m going to eat it, I have to be able to find it.
Without getting maimed by thorns or attacked by insects and wild animals.
This year, he discovered a fruitful vine a short way behind the tool house. And it is loaded with big purple grapes.
Big purple grapes
I stand at the edge of the woods in an area mercifully cleared recently by the tractor. Forager Man physically hauls the ladder from the house to the foraging area only to realize that there is no way to safely stabilize the ladder.
He tries leaning the ladder directly against the vine. I try to figure out how to direct paramedics to this precise location on our property.
He decides, after some wifely input, to go back to the house for the truck and kitchen step ladder, which worked pretty well for gathering the wild black cherries. No guarantees that we won’t topple the stepladder off the truck this time, but our prior success emboldens us.
I wait. Sweat oozes from every pore because the humidity today is literally 100%. I am not even doing anything and I am standing in the shade.
There are a few grapes at ground level that short little me can reach. More can be found at truck-bed ladder height. But, of course, the best grapes are way up high—gorgeous clusters worthy of display in an organic market. God has reserved the best for the birds of the air. (At least until someone invents a grape picking drone.)
Fortunately, grapes are larger than wild black cherries, so it does not take too long to fill our bags with enough to make jelly. We don’t even fall off the ladder.
We collected 2 colanders-full of grapes
I make two batches of grape jelly and have some juice leftover for drinking. Forager Man like his fresh grape juice straight up. I prefer mine with seltzer and fresh lime. And, as a public service FYI, since wine-making takes time and I like instant gratification— gin really perks up a grape spritzer.
So now I have a pantry stocked with jam and jelly from the bounty of Maywood—much of which I will gift because we don’t actually eat much jelly! It would be easier to buy grape jelly at the store. But it wouldn’t be tastier.
And I wouldn’t have a story to tell.
P.S. In case you were looking for actual useful information here, I used the Sure-Jell grape jelly recipe. One batch was regular. The other was low-sugar. Definitely prefer the low-sugar.
How am I supposed to get anything done today if it is going to be such a glorious sit-on-the-porch rainy day?
I can count on one hand the number of days before I report back for the new school year. I have a to-do list of to-do lists and I have been dutifully checking my way through them. I am. I am not in a panic (meds are so helpful!) but I have “set my face toward Jerusalem” and acknowledge that summer ends for me next week.
Next week, there will be no more coffee hours on the porch and lengthy sessions with my journal. In fact, there will be little coffee consumption because I won’t have time to drink it or empty my bladder afterwards.
Next week, I will resume my vitamin D supplements as I wake up in the dark to spend the bulk of daylight hours indoors with my classroom air purifier humming by my desk.
Next week, my days will be divided into minutes and even my peeing will be regulated by a bell. In contrast, this week my time is divided into chunks roughly corresponding to morning, afternoon, and evening, but more accurately designated as unproductive me-time, productive me-time, and binge-watching me-time.
Don’t get me wrong. I am quite ready to be back at work. I need the stimulation and the structure and the purpose. I need the schedule. The responsibility of deciding what to do everyday in summer when the possibilities are endless—it is getting to be too big of a burden.
And so, in the spirit of returning to work, I turn to my to-do lists.
But there are few things more precious than a rainy day on the screen porch rocking in my glider. My only hope for today is for the sun to come out.
And, for the moment, it has.
But a most beautiful, puffy, ginormous cumulous cloud is sailing by in an azure sky…
Weather bulletin:a tornado watch is in effect until 8 p.m. A tornado might just get me off this porch.
There is a tree overhanging the parking area of our driveway at an awkward, ugly angle, and it really looks like it should be cut down.
Except…
Every once in a random year it blesses us with enough fruit to make a most scrumptious jam.
For years I have called it chokecherry jam because my husband said they were chokecherries because his grandfather said they were chokecherries. And who is going to dispute Maynard on the provenance of the trees on his own property?
The fruit looks like a chokecherry. It grows in a cluster like a chokecherry. It tastes very tart like a chokecherry (hence the name chokecherry). And it works perfectly in chokecherry jam recipes.
Black chokecherry–Bing images
But chokecherries grow as a bush, low to the ground where raccoons and bears feast upon them. The fruit-bearing thing in my driveway is most definitely a tree.
A wild black cherry tree. Prunus serotina, if you really want to know. Honey bees love the flowers in spring. We love the fruit in summer.
Prunis serotina–Bing images
Saturday, my husband decided it was time to pick them. It wasn’t on my agenda at all. I was just emerging from my annual Sloth Week and had housework to do. Suddenly, vacuuming gave way to counting jam jars and lids. Then, of course, the trip to the store for fresh jam jars and lids. And pectin. And sugar. (And ice cream. Because ice cream.)
We weighed what Forager Man had already gathered. It did not seem to be enough. So we both went out to resume picking.
I kind of wish the tree were a chokecherry. A chokecherry bush would be low and easier to pick. John had already picked the low-hanging black cherries. The rest of the cherries were up out of reach. If only we had a cherrypicker.
But we don’t.
For lack of a cherrypicker, we picked what we could by standing in the bed of the pickup truck. But even more fruit hung tantalizingly just out of reach. So, we put the kitchen step ladder in the back of the pickup truck, and took turns climbing up the step ladder, pulling the already arching branches down as far as we could, hoping that the branch would not suddenly fling back and send us flying.
The branches did not fling, but one did snap. Then it was really easy to pick. I just sat in the truck bed, with the branch across my lap, plunking cherries into my bucket while trying not to sit on any escapees rolling around the truck.
We collected over four pounds of cherries. Two half gallon containers. That equals about a bazillion cherries. They are smaller than blueberries, about the size of baby peas, with most of the size being the pit. Filling a container cherry by cherry reminded me of trying to pick two cups of violet blossoms last spring. It just seemed like the container would never be full!
After simmering the cherries and passing them through the food mill, the four pounds yielded about six cups of pulpy cherry juice, enough to make two batches of jam.
I don’t expect the grandkids to be big fans of this jam, although I think it makes a wonderful PBJ. And it is pretty darn yummy just licked off a spoon. But, it is a grown-up sweet-tart. It wants to grace a Brie or glaze a pork tenderloin. Hmm, that sounds like a menu idea for the weekend.
I used the chokecherry jam recipe from Miles Away Farm. She added almond extract to the jam, which is always a good way to win me over! She used 1 tsp of almond extract, which was a smidge overwhelming. I cut it back to 1/2 tsp to not overpower the cherry. Here are my notes for the jam, so I can remember the next random year we are blessed with wild black cherries:
Pick enough cherries to fill a half-gallon container.
Rinse cherries.
Add cherries and 1 cup water to large pot. Bring to a simmer and let simmer for 15 minutes, mashing the cherries with a potato masher.
Process the simmered cherries through a food mill. It should yield about 3 cups.
Add cherries, 1 packet of Sure-Jell, 1 tsp of butter to pot. Bring to a boil.
Add 4 1/2 cups of sugar and stir until it boils for 2 minutes.
Remove from heat. Stir in 1/2 tsp almond extract.
Pour into jam jars and process in water bath for 10 minutes. (The jam thickened very quickly, so do not use the inverted jar method to seal lids or you will end up with large air bubbles.)
It’s the end of July and–right on schedule–I have hit Sloth Week.
Sloth Week is when I do absolutely nothing but lie around and read books. It usually coincides with hot, humid weather that, all by itself, induces lethargy. I believe it is part of my circadian rhythm. Brood X cicadas emerge every seventeen years, and I have a sloth week every July.
Sloth Week is not the same as “Crash From the End of School Year” Week. That is a finish line collapse which often manifests as a manic launch into summer projects in an attempt to burn off excess adrenaline.
Sloth Week is also not the same as Beach Week, when I basically do the same thing as Sloth Week but on the beach. Beach Week is a smidge more productive. There are walks on the sand, dips in the ocean, long chats with family, intense people watching, excessive drinking.
Beach Week is an excellent primer for Sloth Week. With no deadlines, no expectations, no chores, I can just BE. But all that sunshine, fresh sea air, chit-chat and drinking can be pretty exhausting.
Sloth Week is when everything comes to a halt.
Sloth Week is when I sleep late in the morning after staying up late binge-watching episodes on Netflix. I sip coffee on the porch all morning and then rest with a book all afternoon. And I feel no guilt.
It is a pause between my end of school year summer projects and my back to school summer projects. I have set aside To-Do lists. There is nothing that I have to do right this minute. Sloth Week indicates that I have reached total relaxation. My internal battery reaches a full charge and the light is blinking green for “go.”
Next week, the To-Do lists will resume.
Next week, I will tackle the weeds and the spider webs.
Next week, I will resume a semblance of discipline.
But today? Whatever happens happens. It’s Sloth Week. Right on schedule.
The best way to pick wild violets is sitting in the grass with a granddaughter on a sunny Sunday morning.
The best reason to pick wild violets is to make violet jelly.
And the best thing to do with violet jelly is to have a fairy tea party with lady finger sandwiches.
So far, I have pulled off the first two. But if I wait too long to post this, you will run out of time to pick your own wild violets.
On a recent Sunday morning, a friend posted pictures of her violet jelly, and I said to my granddaughter Emily, who had spent the night, “Let’s do this!” While her cousins frolicked around like woodland nymphs, Emily and I sat in the sunny yard picking violets.
And we talked. About this and that and nothing whatsoever.
Picking violets was easy. Violets were all around us, so we didn’t even have to move around much.
But we needed two cups of flowers. No stems. And violet flowers are pretty tiny. It takes a lot of flowers to fill a little two cup container. And then they start to pack down, so it seems like the container is never going to fill up. Eventually Emily got tired of picking, but fortunately did not get tired of sitting with me on the grass. After a while, we had two cups of violet blossoms.
The next step toward making jelly was to make a tea with the violets. I packed the flowers into a quart mason jar and filled the jar with boiling water. As the flowers steeped, the water turned a lovely blue.
Emily went home and the violets continued to steep in the fridge. It was Wednesday before I had time to continue with the jelly. By then the tea was a stunning purple.
I strained the tea.
Into a pot on the stove, I put the tea, the juice of one lemon, and a packet of powdered Sure-Jell. I let it boil a couple of minutes and then added four cups of sugar. After it all boiled again for a couple of minutes , I skimmed and stirred the jelly for about five more minutes. Then I poured the jelly into jars and water processed them for a good jar seal.
Easy peasy.
So I had this very beautiful pinky-purply-colored jelly, perfectly jelled, and no idea if it even tasted good!
Ah, but it does.
It tastes a little like flowers. It is a little lemony. It is hard to say exactly. Some say it tastes like spring. Personally, I think it tastes like a unicorn’s lollipop. It definitely wants to be served on a light spongy lady finger to a granddaughter.
I bought some lady fingers, but they were not spongy. They were crispy, the kind you want for making a trifle or tiramisu. I need the spongy kind, so I am now on a hunt for soft spongy lady fingers.
Once I have lady fingers, we will have a fairy tea party with unicorn jelly sandwiches and fairy tea in pretty cups on the porch. The cousins can all join in.
I swore to my husband a couple of years ago that I would never again promise to make deviled eggs for Easter. I reminded him of that today as I swore over the hard-boiled eggs that refused to peel. Eggs that were destined for deviling for tomorrow’s Easter festivities.
He reminded me that I swear that every year.
This year, the festivities have moved from a large family gathering at my sister’s to a smaller, more pandemic-friendly event at my daughter’s. In an overly optimistic overture, I offered to bring deviled eggs. Dear son-in-law quipped that I couldn’t come unless I did.
I only have to cook—and peel—a dozen eggs.
Now, you must know that I can cook and easily peel a hard-boiled egg any day of the year except right before Easter. There is a reason for that. The eggs are fresher at Easter time. Everyone is buying eggs. Lots of eggs. The turnover of eggs at the supermarket is quick. Any chicken owner will tell you fresh eggs are not for boiling. Boiling is for eggs that have been sitting around awhile. Fresh eggs do not peel well.
If I actually used all the knowledge I have stuffed into my head, it would be astounding what I could accomplish. For example, I could have bought my eggs a week or two ago. And saved them just for Easter. After I cooked them and plunged them into an ice bath, I could have—should have—peeled them right away.
That was my intention last night as the eggs sat in their icy bath. But then I got sucked into a book and then it was bedtime and I didn’t feel like doing it at 11:00 at night.
“It will be alright,” I said to myself with a feeling in my gut that reminded me of Eve promising Adam that they could eat that apple.
So I took the eggs out of the icy water, placed them back into their carton, and stored the carton in the fridge.
And today I have a hard scrambled mess. I soaked them in icy water. I ran them under running water while I peeled. I tried scooping them out with a spoon, like an avocado. To no avail. To make matters worse, I was a little hyper-caffeinated so my hands weren’t super steady. Which made me anxious, so I wasn’t being very patient. And—you have to be past a certain age to understand this— I couldn’t see the fine difference between the membrane and the white of the egg. I had to take my glasses off and hold the eggs at just the right distance to get a good look.
It was a lost cause.
While I vacuumed the house to burn off nasty adrenaline, my husband zipped off to the store for more eggs. And then he made a hasty exit to do yardwork. He has survival skills. He knows when to retreat to someplace safe.
I googled “fail-safe instructions for hard-boiled eggs that will peel.” I searched for “fail-safe” that I haven’t tried before. Because those other “fail-safe” methods failed.
This time, instead of putting the eggs into cold water and bringing to a boil, I plunged the eggs directly into boiling water, adding a teaspoon of baking soda. Four of them immediately cracked, sending a trail of albumen into the water. This did not bode well.
The eggs are now sitting in their cold water bath. I will give them the prescribed hour and then I will peel them.
And we have success! The shells slipped right off. A dozen beautiful, peeled eggs. Well, except for the seam where four of the them cracked. No worries, I will try to cut the egg at the wobbly seam.
Now, after a devil of a time with the shells, comes the easy part—deviling the actual eggs. To the perfectly golden-yellow flaky yolks I add some mayo, a generous dollop of Dijon mustard, a splash of Tabasco, and a sprinkle of salt and pepper—all to my taste, of course. I will assemble them on site tomorrow.
I have had victory over the deviled eggs. And, in spite of all the vows I muttered, I did not actually use any bad words or even yell at my husband. I would feel really bad to have had Jesus die for the sins I committed while trying to celebrate his resurrection, his victory over the actual devil.
I came across an article promising to make me an expert. According to a Tedx Talk expert on expertise, David Mitroff, I only have to do three things to be considered an expert:
Spend three years learning about my area of expertise.
Build my confidence.
Take action. (This can be as simple as nominating yourself for awards.)
That got me thinking. At my age, there are lots of things that I have spent way more than three years learning. Heck, I should make a list of the topics that I have spent more than three years on.
For instance…
I am an expert at telling my husband what he is doing wrong. This topic includes a host of subtopics: beekeeping, house maintenance, small machine repair, gardening, finance, fashion. He could add to this list, I am sure. I have spent decades on this topic and I have full confidence in my ability to tell him where he is wrong. And I do not hestitate to tell him so. That’s taking action, right?
I am an expert at demonstrating what not to do in airports. I have demonstrated to my student travelers how one must sort one’s souvenirs before the flight home because the Florentine letter opener that ressembles a wicked dagger in the x-ray machine will most certainly be tossed in the trash. Same thing with a kilo of nougat that scans like a block of plastic explosives. And one should really use caution when borrowing a backpack from an ex-military dad—in case he forgot to remove all the bullets from hidden pockets. Object lessons like this are what make me such an effective teacher. An expert, really.
I am an expert at determining exactly how late the rush hour traffic will make me. When I call in with an accident report, I know exactly how many extra minutes to add to my travel so that when I walk in earlier than expected, I am told, “Wow, you made great time!”
I am an expert at reading handwriting. This skill increasingly amazes my students, who cannot read any handwriting at all. Once in awhile, textbook materials will include readings “written” in italicized script or some other cursive-like font. I have to read those selections out loud. Piece of cake. The true challenge for me is the dysgraphic, dyslexic student. The letters are not just poorly formed, they are in random order. In a second language. I am that good.
A corollary to reading handwriting is deciphering spelling. This is where a colleague keeps me sharp. She sends me puzzles from actual student work and challenges me to figure it out. Sometimes I can guess it outright. Other times, I need context clues. My all-time favorite was from the student who wrote about things “on a day-lily basis.”
I am an expert at doing all the laundry in one day—except for that last load that I forget about in the washer until I try to reach for an item in the closet and find it not there. And then I have to re-wash the load. Sometimes more than once. Because here’s the thing, my expertise is limited to Saturdays. If a load goes in on Sunday, it is doomed to dark dampness until next Saturday.
Speaking of dark and damp, I am also an expert on the rates of mold production inside refrigerators. Most of the time, I can even identify the original host of the mold. Decades of experience. What can I say? Plus, usually I am the one who put the host container in the fridge in the first place. But I am the undisputed expert. That’s why my husband comes to me to ask, “Dear, what was this?”
Wow, this small sampling of my areas of expertise has already built my confidence. I deserve some awards! The Science Award for refrigerator experiments. The Almost Finished Award for weekly laundry loads. The Cipher Award for spelling and handwriting decoding. The Airport Security Award for modeling dumb things not to do. And last but not least, The Lifetime Achievement Award for instructing my husband in so many different specialty areas.
If I read the expertise article correctly, being an expert does not necessarily mean you have to be successful at the topic. You just have to know a lot about it. Hmm, that may explain why there are so many so-called experts everywhere. But, that boosts my confidence even more. By that definition, my husband and I are expert beekeepers. More years than not, our bees fail to survive the winter. Some years, they haven’t even survived the summer. We have done countless dumb things as beekeepers. But we have a wealth of knowledge.
I am going to keep working on my list. And then, when I am sufficiently impressed with myself, I will share more of my expertise with you all. Feel free to award me for my expertise.
What are you an expert at? Take some action and share in the comment section below.
Who knew, in the spring of 2020, that the battle to find toilet paper was just training for getting a Covid vaccine? Who knew that our lives would begin to ressemble the Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies as we scrambled to get a vaccine appointment? Who could have imagined that we would even have a vaccine, or that, as we competed for available appointments, we would compare vaccine brands like we compare cell phones?
When vaccines opened up for school employees, my husband immediately received a link via his employer. Our demographic group opened on Friday, and Saturday he had an email. He clicked the link and —boom!— he made an appointment for the following week. Score one for him.
The link was unique to him and he could not share it with me. I had to wait for my own link. I was optimistic that by Monday or Tuesday, I would receive my own link via my own employer.
It did not come.
I signed up on three different lists, hopeful that one of them would come through before the county where I work.
Nuthin.
Finally, a link came to the employees at my school. But when we opened the link, all the appointments were already taken. This happened several times. We learned that our link had been leaked. Other people were taking our slots. And our shots. Points for them. We were losing.
Oh, how quickly the darkness of human hearts reveals its sinister presence. As I gnashed my teeth over the evil vaccine stealers robbing my of my vaccine, I gave nary a thought to my 88 year old mother or my 93 and 95 year old in-laws. Hey, they don’t go anywhere anyway. I have to actually teach live children, who are germ factories even on a good day.
The county I teach in eventually wised up to the breach in the link. They sent out a new link in which they came close to threatening bodily harm to anyone outside of the intended group using the link. My colleagues and I signed up for appointments. Armed with a file folder of documents proving our identities as private school teachers, we successfully received our first shot. Score for each one of us.
Meanwhile, social media announced the vaccine panic to the world. A vaccine hunter group was formed on Facebook. People were willing to drive halfway across the state to get an appointment. When Walgreens opened a drive-through vaccine near us, the NextDoor Digest was flooded with queries about why the appointment scheduler was not working. What to do???? Wait? A whole six months?
I read all the social media posts with mild interest. I had my first shot and an appointment for my second. My niece found an appointment for her grandmother, my mom, in another county. My brother took her for her first shot. I was happy. Score one for Mom.
My daughter, also an educator, announced her vaccine appointment. Score.
I asked, “Which one are you getting?”
Another daughter asked, “Why is everyone comparing vaccines?”
Because they are different, silly girl. Although, really, what does it matter? Getting a vaccine is like when I was served dinner as a kid. You get what you get. You will eat it. And you will be grateful to have it. No whining to Mom that you got served more disgusting lima beans than your brother. Or that the puddle of butter on your mashed potatoes broke.
My husband got the Pfizer. He had one symptom after his vaccine. He immediately felt weird. I asked him to define weird as different from his usual self. He was unable to articulate the difference except to say that a trip to McDonald’s for a quarter pounder with cheese cured it. Score.
A couple of my colleagues also felt weird after their shots, but they survived without going to McDonalds. My husband’s boss, though, took his advice and got two quarter pounders with cheese after his vaccine. He reported no side effects. From the quarter pounders or the vaccine.
My colleagues and I got the Moderna vaccine. Moderna has more reported side effects. Most of us had sore arms and fatigue after the first shot. My son-in-law had gotten his first Moderna shot a few days before me, so I knew to plan for a day of doing nothing. Sure enough, I spent that Saturday doing absolutely nothing. It was so effective that I did it again on Sunday, even thought I felt perfectly fine. I am very good at doing nothing. Score two points for pulling off two days of doing nothing.
My daughter will be getting the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine. She gets an extra point because she only has to get one shot. The Johnson & Johnson is rumored to have the least side effects, so it remains to be seen if she will get points for McDonald’s or a free day to do nothing.
Yesterday, my colleagues and I got our second Moderna shot. This morning, my younger colleagues reported fever, chills, aches, and the sore arm. I awoke to nothing more than a sore arm. Score one for me—being older has its perks! But as morning moves to afternoon, my temperature is rising and my head feels fuzzy and a nap is looming. Score one for me! I am young enough to have symptoms!
Mom got her first Moderna shot recently. She is old. In spite of nearly passing out from her flu shot this year, she had absolutely zero symptoms from the Covid vaccine. I am scheduled to spend the night with her after her second shot. I anticipate that she will have absolutely zero symptoms again. And she will win the entire Lord of the Covid Vaccine Game.
Why?
Because she will have gotten her vaccine and a sleepover with her daughter.
We picked them up Monday evening, having made an appointment for pick-up and advised to arrive with protective gear—not to protect us from the bees, but to protect humans from each other. So, with our corona masks in place and our hands in thin vinyl gloves, we exited the truck. A solitary human stood about twenty feet away and told us to select two boxes from the many that were set up in the yard. We grabbed our two boxes, placed them into the truck (friendly human had disappeared), and drove home.
Note the rubber band to keep the lid on!
Safely back home, we took the bees to the bee yard. Since it was now about 8:00 p.m. and dark, we lay the boxes in their spots, checked to make sure the electric fence was turned on, and left them for the night.
Early in the morning Mr. BeeMan visited the bees to unplug the boxes so the bees could come and go. He also took the cleaned and freshly painted hives to the yard and put them in place. We had a narrow window between sunrise and morning rain to install the bees into the hives.
The brood box goes on the landing board.
The boxes of bees that we bought are nucs, that is, the nucleus of a hive. Each nuc contains five frames with a laying queen, brood, honey, and lots of worker bees. Those frames are placed into the brood box. Then we add five empty frames to complete the box. The hive has room to grow.
Five frames from the nuc go into the brood box. This frame has capped honey on it.
Five empty frames are added to fill the box.
As we transfer the bees to the brood box, we take a good look. We would love to see the queen, but she is often protected and hidden. In place of seeing the queen, we look for evidence of a queen—brood. In the frames we find honey, capped brood, and uncapped brood. Uncapped brood was most recently laid, so that is a good sign that there is (or very recently was) a laying queen. In subsequent hive inspections we will continue to look for the queen and fresh brood.
You can see the bee larva in the uncapped cells. You can also see that I need a better camera if I’m going to try macro shots like this!
Lots of capped brood. Baby bees coming soon!
After inserting the frames, Mr. BeeMan closes up the hives. We get this done just as the first drops of rain begin to fall. The bees are tucked in to their new home.
The inner cover goes on.Finally, the lid goes on.
The next day, in a break from the rain, I visited the bees and watched as they circled the hives in orienting flights. Somehow, this sets their internal GPS so they know how to find their way home. It wasn’t long before we began seeing our girls around. They arrived just in time to pollinate our blueberries!
Good news! A month of teaching from home has not killed me. It came close in Week Three, with my resting heart rate mounting from stress and an allergy medication contributing side effects of anxiety and depression. But the doc released me from the allergy med and we got –dramatic pause– Spring Break!
I don’t know that I have ever so much needed to step back from the craziness and unplug. Oh, I did a little schoolwork, but it was good to stop running at full speed and recharge for what will most likely be the long haul to the end of the school year.
One weird result of the break from teaching during Coronapocalypse was that I actually missed the structure and busy-ness of the teaching week. An unending list of potential indoor and outdoor projects did not disguise the fact that I was stuck at home. Other than a grocery run and a disguised outing as the Easter Bunny (complete with mask and gloves), I had a lot of time to be with myself. And I was pretty boring.
When school resumed this week, my students felt the same way. They had to admit that without anything else to do, they missed the structure of the school day and the strange disconnected connectedness of meeting online. And so, in the absence of our old normal, we tentatively begin to accept the new situation.
Here are a few things that are making life doable:
Orderly work space
A critical project during the break was to deep clean and organize my office. Windows and curtains are clean. New blinds hung. A huge bag of clutter went out in the trash. All my curriculum materials sit in organized stacks on the shelf. A new microphone headset arrived. The command post is in truly functional order. The room looks good. I actually like being in it. And guess what? After a week of teaching it is still in functional order! Order in my space does wonders for keeping the craziness at bay.
Plan for the week
The worst part of the first week of Corona Teaching was reworking each of my five lessons every night for the next day. My normal routine had been to work out the week’s road map by the Friday before. The last thing I did every Friday before leaving school was to post the week sheet on the class page. Then I left the building, drove an hour home, and enjoyed my weekend. Now, teaching from home, it is not sustainable to spend every waking minute thinking about school when the “classroom” is just behind a closed door.
A major Corona Teaching Victory came when I posted my week sheets on the class pages at the end of the day before spring break. It was a huge relief to resume that normal rhythm. My students and I are used to that. It saves all of us time and frustration–one document is posted and we all know where to find it. Of course, we can get derailed during the week. But we can address the changes the way we always did– in (online) class and by posting announcements.
Plan for the new reality
I teach foreign language. I can’t just assign pages of reading and comprehension exercises followed by a quiz. Language learning is a skill. While the students have access to technology to enable them to read and write and listen and speak assignments to me, it cannot really replicate what goes on in class.
Even with live online class meetings, we are not physically in class. The give and take online is not the same as in the classroom. So, the regular lesson has to morph into a new thing.
Mini-lessons
My lessons are morphing into a simple pattern:
Things we need to do together
Things they can do on their own
Live classes start with a mini-lesson where I present or explain material that is new or challenging. That will segue to an oral activity. I assign each student an example in an exercise, give them think time, and then call on them just as I would in class. If it would have been a partner activity in class, I play the role of the partner when I call on them. Not ideal, but at least, I can hear where the problems are. Then, that activity is often assigned again as a written activity.
Live classes end with everyone understanding their marching orders. If students have no questions, they are free to leave. Students who want answers to questions hang around.
Connecting students to my homescreen
I felt like a magician when I figured out how to display my homescreen on the students’ screens during a live meet. It opened up all sorts of possibilities! So far, I have tried the following:
Displaying the online textbook page while I explain a topic. It is so much better to have them staring at the page while my cursor squiggles around pointing to things than for them to stare at my face talking about it. And when we work on an exercise in the book, I can point to the words the student is struggling with.
PowerPoints. It is so much better to move the slides for them, than to talk at them and tell them to move to the next slide on their device.
Kahoot! I use Kahoot a lot in class and immediately began using it as a self-paced non-timed comprehension activity. But now! Now, we can play a Kahoot together. It doesn’t have quite the same rowdy effect when everyone is sitting in their own homes, but it is still interactive.
Online video/YouTube. I successfully showed students a video from the curriculum, just to start a lesson. They could have watched it on their own, but I wanted to “watch” it with them. In another class, I had a epic fail trying to watch a YouTube video. I watched it fine on my end, but they saw and heard absolutely nothing. I’m pretty sure I clicked the wrong screen when I did that. Oops.
Tossing redundant activities
Once upon a time, during normal teaching, there was classwork and there was homework. Homework generally replicated what was done in class. Now, there is no classwork vs homework. There is just work. As lessons morph, I look at each activity and remind myself:
Do not cram too many new ideas into one day.
Do not assign the same type of activity twice in a lesson.
Assign only activities that actively advance mastery of the topic.
Less is more–choose quality over quantity.
Let go of the expectation that you will cover everything this year.
Respecting and managing time–theirs and mine
A few ideas are guiding me in respecting and managing time:
Set a reasonable workload. Live class plus written activities should not exceed normal class time plus normal homework. Ideally, if redundant activities have been pulled, students should spend less time on my class.
Have firm expectations for students. Students should respect our class time and assignment deadlines. I am not teaching an open-ended correspondance course.
But be flexible. Some students will struggle with doing school this way. At this point in the year, I know who the most likely strugglers are. And I know who the lazy bums are, too. Grace to the strugglers. Zeros to lazy bums.
We are figuring this out. It is not at all perfect. Some students are still very casual about attending live class and meeting assignment deadlines. Tech challenges are real. Family demands are real. Teenage attitudes are just as real as they ever were.
What am I missing right now?
This crazy 2020 has become the year of the essential. The essential worker. The essential work. Right now, I am missing the fluff and fun of class. Movie days. April Fool’s fish. French restaurant field trip. I may very well end the year covering most of what I normally teach. Why? Because I have cut out anything that is not essential.
And that is going to get boring. I’ll have to think about that.
What am I happy about?
So far, the students are scoring as well from home as they did in class. (Or as bad, depending on the student.) So I do not see anyone suffering academically because of this change.
Because I am giving points for everything they do (which would not have happened with spot checks in class), the less-than-stellar students are probably doing more work than they ever did before! There is nothing so motivating to these kids (or their parents!) as a zero.
Distance learning has taken on real meaning as several of my international students went back home and are now checking in to class every day from South Korea!
I am not one of them. I walk. But I still know the difference between a sprint and a marathon. This COVID-19 teaching experience is a marathon like no other. And we don’t even know where the finish line is.
The first week of online teaching nearly killed me. Or to be more precise, it became quickly apparent that it would kill me if I did not make changes. The first week, I charged off at full speed at the sound of the starter’s pistol—without knowing what race we were running.
Week Two was about finding survival techniques for what we now realize is a marathon. To survive teaching in the coronapocalypse, I am looking at three things: pacing, boundaries, and personal health.
Pacing
Online teaching is taking much more prep time. This is frustrating for someone like me, with decades of teaching experience and who was in a happy routine of tweaking things. Now, it is like starting a brand new job. I need more think time.
This past week, I gave my students and myself some breathing room. For my classes that do independent reading, I gave them all reading day on Wednesday. For my lower level French students, I gave them a link to take a walk in Paris. It was a rainy day and the three hour YouTube video was great for putting in some treadmill time. (No, I did not assign three hours of walking.) The benefit to me was a day without students checking in. My devices did not ding at me all day long. I had bigger stretches of uninterrupted time to think.
And so, a conundrum emerged this week. At the same time that I am increasing face-to-face meetings with my students, I am also pondering ways to give them longer stretches to get work done. This, realistically, is not going to happen much in my French 1 and 2 classes, where they can only handle one new concept at a time and need daily feedback. But French 3 and 4/5 can handle two day stretches. The Advanced ESL English class, starting their first research project ever…..well, yeah, still pondering that.
Mercifully, my amazing, awesome, best-ever boss has heard the cries of students and teachers. Effective this week, we will be teaching four days a week, with Friday as a catch-up day to plan or just to breathe. I have often told my students that I would gladly put in a longer day four days a week in order to have three day weekends every week. Who knew it would take a pandemic to make that happen?
So, pacing involves slowing down for the long haul. Assign smaller, manageable chunks of material. Give myself necessary think time. And give the students space. The students are not only being expected to keep up with their school work, but they need time to process this whole crazy life change, too. And they have to do it at home, with whatever dysfunctions come along with that.
Boundaries
I am a firm believer in setting boundaries. Up until now, I had a great work routine in which I did all my work at home, drove my thirty mile commute, and arrived home with my day tucked behind me. Now it is here in the house with me. All. The. Time. I never thought I would miss that thirty mile commute.
Boundary #1: The Office
I am fortunate to have an empty nest. Oh. So. Fortunate. Not only are there not little people in my face all day with their little needs and demands, but I have whole rooms of the house I have reclaimed for other purposes! One of those rooms is my office.
I do my schoolwork in my office. Only in the office. Not in the kitchen. Not on the sofa in the family room. Most definitely not in the bedroom. When I am working, I am in the office. When I am not in the office, I am not working.
The little glitch with this scenario is that I have not actively worked in the office in a while. So it is a bit disorganized. And not as clean as I would like. In fact, the mini-blinds are really gross. I have been meaning to replace them with the same blinds as in my bedroom, but never got around to it because, well, I just wasn’t sitting in there that much. So last night I went online and ordered the blinds—at 30% off! Woo hoo!
Boundary #2: Office hours.
I am available to my students during their normal class hours. If they contact me during another class period, I ignore them. Likewise, I expect them to be available to me during their normal class hours. This one has been a little trickier. A few have had internet glitches during our face-to-face meetings. How do I know it is a real glitch and not a lame excuse? A student with a real glitch contacts me ASAP in a panic saying he cannot get on. A lame excuse dribbles in many hours later with a “Sorry, I couldn’t get on.” A true hours-later tech glitch comes with a parent email verifying the problem. See? I know teenagers.
Boundary #3: Calling it a Day
While this new teaching day is taking me longer than my normal teaching day, it cannot consume every waking hour of the day. I need to call it quits at some point. My goal is to finish by dinnertime. My goal is to relax with my husband in the evening—even if it is our usual goofy scenario where we sit in the same room watching different movies on different devices! I did not quite meet that goal this week, but I did a whole lot better than in Week One!
Boundary #4: Reclaiming the Sabbath
In my old normal, I worked really hard during the week to get all my work done before I left school on Friday. The past two weeks, I have spent most of the weekend planning. (It did not help that I sort of forgot that third quarter ended this week and that grades were due Friday morning!) After only two weeks, I am desperately feeling the need for the day of rest. I need to power off.
Personal Health
Pacing and boundaries were immediate needs for my physical and mental health. But there are other things I am doing to keep myself from falling apart. The last thing I want is to get sick now. And the very, very last thing I want to do is to stand in the prescription line at Target. The. Worst. Thing. Ever.
1. I take a shower, do my hair, and put on make-up. To a certain extent, I have to. There is no way I am facing my students online looking like Saturday morning! But I did so even on Saturday. Why? Because even I don’t want to look at Saturday morning me.
2. I take mini-breaks between online classes to do mini-laps around the house. In the normal classroom, I am on my feet and moving around a lot. Now I find I am glued to the chair at the computer. I have to move! I also need the little mental break.
3. Weather permitting, I eat my lunch outside. Last week, I sat on the side porch in a sweatshirt with a scarf wrapped around my neck. With the exception of the sweatshirt, it was trèsfrançais. The sunshine felt so good and I need all the vitamin D I can get. Plus, it was a mental break from my office.
4. I do something more physical at the end of the school day. This is where the lack of a commute is really helping me. At 3:00 I charge outside to do gardening or take a walk. On the rainy days, I have a lovely Paris Walking Tour to perk up a walk on the treadmill. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xE3lpCIgeI)
5. I allow myself rest. All that charging and mini-lapping is to manage the stress and all the adrenaline flooding my body. The fact is, I am tired. And I need a break from technology. A nap is good. And a paper book to read is really good.
Heading into Week Three
My goals for this week ?
Rest more. To quote the eminent philosopher Winnie the Pooh: “Let’s begin with a smallish nap or two.”
But also, grade the work I ignored this week because I was frantically wrapping up third quarter!
Because of the sprint we all did last week at our school, we can have our regularly scheduled Spring Break next week. Only four days to go. Easter break has never looked so good!
We did it—my students and I got through our first week of school from home! The learning curve has been steep but, with the weekend’s respite from students, I may get beyond the feeling of treading water to actual swimming.
THE KICK-OFF
Half the stress of this week was due to the shock of implementing it so quickly. A day after our faculty meeting where we were told to be thinking how to teach remotely, the governor announced that schools would be closed effective Monday. That gave us Friday to put a plan in place.
Fortunately, much of the plan was already in place:
Online class pages. Our school uses PowerSchool. Now, did students ever actually use the class pages? Of course not! That is why PowerSchool class pages had a melt-down this week. I doesn’t take a tech genius to figure out that, if a site user goes from zero views a week to over 7 views a day, things will crash. Which is why I had built in redundancy…
Online Assignment Submission. I use Showbie. My students have been submitting documents, audio and video files, and photos regularly via Showbie for a long time. If the class page goes down, they can still look on Showbie to see what is due and when. And I can grade their work right there. Showbie is a normal routine for them.
Online curriculum. Three of my French classes have online resources through my.hrw.com, which includes the text, audio files and videos for the students, and all my teacher supplements–which I can copy to Showbie! Without this, I can not even imagine trying to teach my French classes from home. The my.hrw.com site is supposed to be a normal routine for them, but since each student also has a hard-copy text at home, we had to reset three student passwords last Friday for students who could not log in.
I had to add one more component to my online classroom, but it was actually already in place:
Microsoft Teams. Every class became a Team. Our tech guy, Eddie, has been telling us for years how wonderful the Microsoft Office tools were and how all our students had access to all this stuff via their school email. For the most part, we smiled and nodded while Eddie shook his head and sighed. He does that a lot.
JUMPING IN
It only took three days for Wine-free Lent to get tossed by the wayside. Two-days, really, but Day 2 was St. Patrick’s Day which has always been a feast day from fasting in my family. All the sunshine and yard work I can do is not enough to handle the stress of this new routine this week.
One colleague said she feels like an octopus, with eight arms flailing in all directions. Another feels like she is playing Whack-a-Mole with all the messages coming at her from students. Setting up completely new routines and reformatting lessons has been overwhelming. Was it just a week ago that Maryland’s Governor Hogan announced the school closures? Have we stepped into an alternate universe? Um, yes to both.
By the end of the week I look back on the following successes:
I have a routine–I follow the class bell schedule. During any given class period, I focus my attention on that class only. I interact with those students and their work.
My students have caught on to the routine. They check in with the Team at the start of their class period and answer at least the following questions:
Have you posted your work?
Have you read the instructions for what to do today?
Do you have any questions?
They may have also have a discussion question to post and reply to. It’s like a warm-up to review what they learned yesterday.
I have been able to supply pretty much all resources I would have given the students in class. Except in-person me. More on that later.
Most–not all–students are keeping up with the schedule of work. It took a bit of nudging for some. One student, who was being lackadaisical about posting his work, explained, “This was why I stopped home-schooling.” My retort to him: “This is not home-school. This is SCHOOL –from home.” One of his classmates commented with a heart. The student, I am proud to say, has been most diligent since then!
Students are letting me know what is not working for them.
Kahoot activities need to be done without a timer so students can think before answering. Thanks to the free upgrade to pro, I can give them untimed activities.
Internet and wi-fi problems are making it difficult for some to post by deadlines. I need to set longer deadlines and be gracious with students who have tech problems.
Audio and video resources are great, but there is no substitute from hearing things straight from the teacher, hence…
LOOKING TO NEXT WEEK
Team Meetings. The math teachers jumped into this almost immediately, but it took me the week and a student plea for help to realize that face-to-face interaction has to happen. A colleague and I practiced a Team Meeting on Friday and discovered that it was actually ok! I’ve scheduled my first one for 10:15 Monday. The biggest glitch I am fearing is the formatting difference I see between the laptop and the ipad.
More time to think and less stress in lesson planning. As I get my plans organized for this coming week, I am planning them for the online platform. Last week, I was reworking the plans that I had already organized for the classroom. I was working minute-by-minute, flying by the seat of my pants. (By the way, what does that metaphor actually refer to?) This week, my posted week sheet will contain exactly what I will post for the daily announcements. Copy and paste daily. Woo hoo.
Reminders to self to give breathing room to myself and to the students. I asked French 1 what they were “going to do” or “not going to do” this weekend, since they learned that this week. Several said that they were going to study. I was totally fried by Friday. This was a rough week. Successful, but intense. I don’t want my students to spend the weekend doing schoolwork. So, here’s my list to myself to help us have breathing room and not burn out:
Independent reading days for my upper level students. I may plan them all for the same day to give ME some space.
Virtual field trips. I want to give space between hard lessons with something fun yet interesting. Versailles and Monet’s Gardens are offering virtual tours, for example. The Louvre tour might actually be better than the crowd-crushing experience of trying to see the Mona Lisa in person! Really, though, I’d like to find something more fun than a museum tour.
Let go of the expectation of covering all the material I would normally cover in class.
Don’t introduce too many new things at once. I can’t handle it. The students can’t either.
This week, I felt very much like a rabbit leaping off into a race. It is hard to think like the tortoise, slow and steady, when there’s COVIC-19 nipping at your heels. I recall my pet name for my students –squirrels. My students are like squirrels–all over the place in any given minute. I have to stay slow and steady because many of them haven’t a clue how to do it. This week I had only half a clue. Next week? I am aiming for one clue.
There are many things that set me off on a rant but the worst ones involve Any Other Person messing up My Stuff. It doesn’t have to technically be my stuff. If I use it and/or clean it, it counts as mine.
Any beekeeper wife will agree that beekeeping presents some challenges with protecting stuff. For instance, you can not melt wax using any pots or utensils you ever again would want to use for food prep. And even then, there are better and not better ways to clean up the wax tools. But the worst offender by far is propolis, the sticky stuff that bees use to seal up nooks, cracks, and crannies in the hive. It is all over the top and bottom edges of the honey boxes. And then it gets on everything else.
And it won’t come off. Clothing, countertops, floor, you name it, if propolis was there it will stick there.
Sunday, our newest junior beekeeper donned the junior-sized bee-suit to watch PopPop BeeMan pull a honey box from Hive 2. His sister stayed back at the house and joined in to watch the honey spin and be bottled. They learned quite a bit about the honey harvesting process.
Seth uses the smoker
They also learned that MomMom does not like to share.
BeeMan had used a bee escape to minimize the number of bees in the honey box. It’s a clever contraption that allows bees to go down to the hive box at night but then they can’t figure out how to get back upstairs. It’s a great way to bring the honey home without a couple thousand accompanying bees. Nevertheless, there were still some bees that made it back to the house with the honey. BeeMan blew off those he could with my new leaf blower but, still, a few made it into the mudroom where we process the honey and they were buzzing around the room.
Checking out the bees on the bee escape
What to do with buzzing bees inside? Vacuum them. BeeMan got the hand vac, but it was not sufficiently charged. So he asked for the vacuum.
Oh. No. Absolutely Not.
I explained to the children that I just bought a wonderful new Shark vacuum and have used it only two weeks. BeeMan may not get sticky bee glop on My Brand New Vacuum.
There is, however, a fully functioning old vacuum in the basement for BeeMan to use for any vacuuming needs he might have. So he sucked up the stray bees who continued to buzz in the dust bin while the children worried for their health.
Fast forward to today. The old vacuum still sits in the mudroom, the captive bees now dead. (Don’t tell the kids.) I have moved on to another project– cleaning out bathroom cabinets in preparation for painting them. I grab the hand vac from the charger. You know, the hand vac that BeeMan didn’t use because it wasn’t fully charged?
He didn’t use it.
He touched it.
The handle is all gooped up with propolis.
Arrrrghhh!
Propolis on My Stuff
But the internet is a wonderful thing. Rusty at Honey Bee Suite discovered that propolis can be removed from a camera with isopropyl alcohol. Well, having just emptied all the contents of the bathroom cabinet, I happen to know that I have isopropyl alcohol (and two bottles of witch hazel and more bottles of lotions, creams, and ointments than I know what to do with). Right at my feet. In one of these eight bags of stuff. Oh, there’s a whole bag of cotton balls, too.
Three cotton balls later, the hand vac is sparkly clean– and sanitized, too. It was super easy. This is great! Now, after we are done harvesting honey, I can use alcohol to de-goop the counters and floor. Despair is lifted. I can return to the bathroom project.
We pulled four frames of honey today. They were capped and we are so afraid that the local bear will defeat our electric fence and get to the hives again that we decided to pull some honey as soon as possible.
Those of you familiar with our bear escapades will remember that last year the bear came by three times, knocking the hives over without managing to procure any honey. The bees were pretty traumatized, though, and took out their anxiety on Mr. Beeman, buzzing at him with a ferocity he had never seen.
Beeman, understandably, does not want to lose any honey to this bear.
Early this week, we noticed that one hive had some frames that were capped. Yesterday, Beeman put a bee escape on that hive to prepare for taking the frames. A bee escape is a maze-like board that goes between the top box and the next box down in the hive. At night, the bees go “downstairs” where the queen is. With the bee escape, the bees can go down, but they can’t figure out how to get back up. That leaves the top box relatively bee-free, which makes it a whole lot easier to take the box. Ha! We are smarter than the average bear.
Bee escape
Well, mostly smarter than the average bear. Beeman forgot to plug the electric fence back in after adding the bee escape. He remembered at 3 a.m. Talk about an electric jolt! He jumped out of bed to plug in the cord and then made his way by cellphone light to the bee yard to make sure the hives were still intact. If any bear were in the vicinity, the sight of Beeman in the woods in his underwear at 3 a.m. would have scared him away, for sure!
We spun the frames in our new-last-year electric spinner. It is much more efficient than hand-cranking, although it doesn’t provide quite the same upper arm workout.
Today’s honey is much lighter than last year’s. Last year’s honey had the strong molasses-like taste of tulip poplar. This year, the honey is lighter and more delicate with definite wild berry overtones. No surprise, since we have been picking blueberries by the bucket and tons of wild raspberries are just now ripening. (I just have to figure out how to beat the deer to those berries!)
The air has also been aromatic with wild rose, honeysuckle, and, recently, the oak leaf hydrangea, which is evidently a pollen feast for every pollinator in the area. They have been all over it!
So, 2018 was robust and 2019 is more delicate. Yum to both!
A few weeks ago, in the midst of the spring nectar flow, with queen cells popping up everywhere, BeeMan decided to split a hive using some of the unwanted queen cells. The three other hives, with more room to grow and no longer honey-bound, resumed laying eggs and all is well.
Honey-bound is when the bees are so busy bringing nectar and pollen to the hive that there is no room for baby bees. The solution for the bees is to swarm. BeeMan averted the swarm by adding more boxes with frames and by providing empty frames in the queen box for the queen to lay eggs.. Having no longer a need to swarm, the queen would kill off any pretenders to the throne. And then, she would resume laying.
And that is what happened. The three original hives are busily filling the frames with brood and honey.
The split, however, never managed to produce a queen. BeeMan surmises that the queen cells he gave them were not viable. The queen from the original hive may have stung them before he created new hive. Why does he think this? He had taken a couple of queen cells back to the house and opened them. They were not alive.
Today’s mission in the bee yard was two-fold: recombine the split with its original hive and check to see if honey is ready to be harvested.
Combining the hives was pretty simple. Put the queen-less box on top of the original hive. Ah, but not that simple. The new bees in the original hive will not recognize the bees that had left. To make for a happy transition, a layer of newspaper goes between the two boxes. The bees will get used to their smells as they eat through the paper and become one big family.
And what about the bees who were out foraging when the hives were combined? They come back home to discover that home is not where they left it!
BeeMan says they hopefully will smell their group and find their way to the right hive. I certainly hope so!
As for the honey harvest, one large honey box on the third hive is ready to go! The other two hives have filled out frames but have not capped all the honey cells yet. We plan to go back into the third hive later this week for the first box of honey.
What’s the rush? Usually we wait until the end of July, but with a bear lurking in the area, we want to be sure the honey ends up in our tummies, not his!
Bear print on our property. Photo by Rich DeMarco.
Maywood is in its glory as the May woods blossom with tulip poplars, black locust, and wild roses. The bees have already had their fill of red maple and skunk cabbage and purple dead nettle, a pretty purple-flowering ground cover that brought in bright red pollen.
Yesterday we went in to the bees for the first time in a month and discovered exactly what we found this time a year ago–queen cells, drone cells, capped brood but no larva, and no visible queen.
A year ago, at the beginning of the rainiest year ever in Maryland, the condition of the hives sent us into a near panic. These were brand new nucs. Had we gotten poor queens–again? We did some quick research and managed to avoid two swarms while getting, in the process, a third hive by creating a split with some frames containing queen cells. What the heck, if it didn’t work, we would still have our two hives. But it did work, and the three hives made it not only through the summer, but through the winter, too! This was the first winter in years that we brought all the hives through the winter.
Last year, the rainy weekends kept us from keeping a closer check on the hives. This year it was a combination of rain, cold, and Mother’s Day that kept us away. At our April check, BeeMan put queen excluders and honey boxes on the three hives, happy that the bees had plenty of room to expand.
Hive A, the only hive with its original queen, had been thriving the least of the three. In April we saw the queen (that I had beautifully marked in green last year!) and lots of active laying, but they had done the least to fill up the hive. So, yesterday, we were dismayed to not find her. Hives B and C had lots of baby bees in progress last month, even though we did not see their (as yet unmarked) queens.
Green dot marks last year’s queen
While we inspected Hive A, a queen cell broke as BeeMan pulled out a frame. Out emerged a brand new queen, not that we recognized her at first. She ended up with some other bees in my plastic tub with the burr comb I’m saving. We were almost ready to close up the hive when I got a better look at her.
“Hey, I think this is a queen!”
Sure enough, the young virgin queen with her slender abdomen was wandering around the plastic tub. (Kind of like humans, the women are slender until they get fat with babies and stay that way forever. The queen gets one wild fling a mile up in the air with all the drones she can handle, and then she is just an egg-laying machine, confined to the hive to reproduce for the rest of the life. She doesn’t even get a career.)
The young queen was easy to trap and mark and plop back into the hive. Alas, I still only have the one green marking pen, so both the old queen and the new queen wear green dots. The new queen has a more delicate dot, since I did a better job this year. So, are there two queens in the hive about to fight to the death? Or just the new one? Our next hive check may tell.
Peanut shaped thing hanging off the bottom of the frame is a queen cell
Hive B was very active and full and looking more like it wanted to swarm than to replace a queen. The top box was all honey, so we were assured that the queen was in the bottom box when the excluder went on. BeeMan decided to make a split, taking two frames with queen and brood cells, two frames with honey/nectar, and three empty frames to start a new hive. He will add more empty frames soon. There are still queen cells in the original hives but since we did not see the queen, we were afraid to destroy them. He added another honey box so they have more room.
Hive C was also very active and looking more swarm ready. BeeMan, on a hunch that the queen was probably still in there, got rid of all the queen cells and added another honey box.
The advantage of having several hives is being able to try different things and see what works. We learned a lot last year. Let’s hope that we learned enough!
When we were little, my siblings and I used to do hide-and-seek with my mother. It wasn’t a game. She was really hiding. And we were seeking. It was a big house–three floors plus a basement–and as we climbed the stairs calling, “Mom! Mooooooooooooommmmmmm!” we were sure that she must have gone down to one floor while we were ascending to another. Years later, when we were in high school ( and a smaller house), we learned that Mom had been hiding in her walk-in closet. It was her only refuge. We always found her if she tried to sneak a minute of peace in the bathroom.
My cell phone rings. It’s my sister. The one who wasn’t born yet when Mom played hide-and-seek.
“Where’s Mom?”
First thought: How the heck should I know?
Second thought: It’s the day she volunteers at the soup kitchen, but she would have been home hours ago. Maybe she’s napping.
“I’ve been texting and calling her for days and she doesn’t respond.”
First thought: She’s lying on the floor of her condo unresponsive and/ or dead.
Second thought: My sister is calling me because she’s having the same first thought. She could just go over to Mom’s and let herself in, but she’s calling me because she doesn’t want to go over there by herself. She wants me to go with her and call 911 and read the advance directive that Mom has posted on the fridge.
“She was alive on Sunday, ” I say. “She rsvp’d for Thanksgiving.”
“I know,” my sister says, ” I saw that she signed up, but she hasn’t responded to me since.” (We use an online sign up program, so everyone coming to Thanksgiving knows that Mom is bringing shrimp and her famous Vienna Cake.)
Ok. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. I saw her sign up post but haven’t talked to her for a couple of weeks.. Days have passed with no word from her.
Oh wait…was this the week she was going on a bus trip to West Virginia with her church friends? Or did she already go on that trip? I talked to her about a trip…wait…that was the trip to Cape Cod. The trip where none of the other travelers drank and she felt awkward having her vodka at dinner.
More guilt. I should know if this is the week she is going to West Virginia. I should have it marked on all my calendars in bold letters: MOM IN WEST VIRGINIA.
I tell my sister, ” This might be the week she’s on a trip to West Virginia.”
“Why doesn’t she tell people these things?”
“She told me.”
“She should tell more people.”
“I think she doesn’t so that we will have to get worried and call each other.”
“Well, I am nearly hysterical with worry!” says the sister who decades ago called Mom in post-partum distress threatening to harm someone. Mom flew in her car to save the baby from a crazed mother. When she arrived, the baby was quietly settled down for a nap while my sister calmly prepared a cup of tea.
“You do have a history of overreacting.”
“Wait…she’s texting me. She’s in West Virginia. I have to go. I’m going to call her and yell at her for scaring me.”
Poor Mom. She has forgotten the most important part of hide-and-seek….stay hidden.
The mud room is loaded with bees. There are clusters on the door and window. A few bees buzz around the room. A few more linger on the honey boxes in the center of the floor.
Even though Beekeeper Man put a bee escape on the hives to minimize the number of bees clinging to the honey boxes, there are always some that remain.
So, Beekeeper Man dons his protective gear in the kitchen and ventures into the mud room to plug in the vacuum. And he vacuums up the bees.
He has a vacuum dedicated for bees.
He also has a vacuum dedicated to man cave messes. He has the obligatory ShopVac, and he is the primary user of the DustBuster.
My husband has more vacuums than I do. It doesn’t mean he vacuums more than I do. He just has more.
I have a single vacuum. It cleans the house. I like it. A lot. My husband may not use it. He will get it dirty.
Eventually, however, all my vacuums get gross and less efficient and/or stop working, and they sit abandoned in a closet until my husband says, “Can I have that?”
I explain how it doesn’t work very well. And then he cleans it all up and it works great.
His vacuums are my rejects.
The Dirt Devil is his bee vacuum. It’s a cheap vacuum that I bought because I was tired of fighting with the large cumbersome Eureka which was clearly designed by a man clueless as to the vacuuming needs of women. The Dirt Devil was not only inexpensive (aka disposable), it is lightweight. But, alas, not really up to the challenge of a whole house. It eventually went to live in the vacuum graveyard—the closet in the guest bedroom.
Until…
One summer day, Beekeeper Man brought honey boxes into the mud room to harvest honey. There were more than a few straggler bees on the boxes and he wanted to use my brand new Shark vacuum to suck them up.
No way!
So I gifted him with the Dirt Devil.
And now he is Dirt Deviling bees in the mud room. Then he will take the canister outside and set them free.
And we will take the honey.
And my vacuum will remain unscathed by honey bees.
Slightly Off the Grid 