Brennah's Backyard

Winter Flights

Today was a warm day; in the upper fifties, and the bees were flying. They seem to appreciate a chance to come out during the winter (even if it isn’t technically winter yet, it is for them now). They usually start coming out of their hives at around fifty degrees, but the wind, sun, clouds, and their own level of need all have an effect, so there is no exact temperature that draws them out. If it is a sunny, calm day and they’ve been cooped up for a long time, they may well come out if it is only just above freezing.

Honey bees gathered at a crack between hive boxes in February 2016.

A few days like this, scattered throughout the winter, are definitely beneficial for the bees. Bees are cleanly creatures, and they don’t poop inside their hives. Warm days allow them to leave and make ‘cleansing flights’ which is the term for the flights they make in winter solely to relieve themselves. Warmer days also allow them to clean out any bees that have died while they are in their winter cluster. There are always some bees dying in a normal honey bee colony, but in winter, they almost always die inside the hive, and then have to be removed.

Honey bees at the entrance to their hive in January 2016. The mesh at the entrance is sized so that bees can come and go freely, but mice cannot.

Too many warm days, though, can be a bit of a problem. The bees seem to want to take advantage of any days that are warm enough for flying, but if there aren’t any nectar or pollen sources, there isn’t much for them to do and flying every day can actually shorten their lifespans. The winter bees have to live longer than the summer bees since the colony takes a break, for a month or two, from raising new bees to replace them. Part of the reason the winter bees are able to live longer is that they fly less. Their wings, which wear out eventually, are one of the limits of their lifespans. Another problem is that if the weather is not cold, but still chilly, every bee that ventures out runs a risk of getting chilled and not being able to return. Chilled bees become sluggish, and eventually unable to move. They can be revived easily enough, simply by warming them up, but they usually wind up stuck somewhere where they can’t get warmed up. Sometimes I find a chilled bee somewhere, and breathe on her a bit to warm her up. (They don’t seem to like this; they usually slide their stingers out, but they can’t really do anything since they can’t move.) That usually warms her up just enough to start flexing her flight muscles and eventually revive herself.

I learned about most of this after noticing that my bees seemed to have more trouble with warm winters than cold ones. I knew they had issues with moisture during those winters, but I began to suspect that the warmth itself might have been a factor. This was what I found out when I researched it, but I still wonder if there may be something more to it. The bees that did survive one of those warm winters seemed to have a lot of mites (and the viral diseases associated with them) that following spring. Normally in spring, most of the mites have died off over winter, resetting things for the bees. Then, their numbers gradually increase over the year until winter once again resets their numbers. (Assuming, of course, that they don’t increase too fast, and kill the colony.) So, are warm winters not enough to reset the mite levels for the bees? I don’t have enough winters or colonies worth of experience to say for sure, only enough to notice a pattern that makes me suspicious. In any case, it is enough to make me take the precautions I would take if I knew that to be true.

My very active warré colony in February of 2016 – one of the warm winters

So far this winter, there have been some warm days, but it doesn’t seem to be an overabundance of them. It’s still early, though.

Rose Hips Take the Stage

This time of year is often not the easiest to find good photography opportunities; it is not yet really snowy and there are no interesting icy displays on the creek, and most of the plants and insects are dormant by now. The wild roses provide one exception to that (not the only exception, but it’s the one I’m focusing on today). The fruit of the rose plant, the rose hips, are not only at their most colorful right now, but also at their most flavorful. Like the autumn olive berries, rose hips get tastier after they’ve been through a few freezes. They are also extremely high in vitamin C and other nutrients.

A couple years ago we tried harvesting some of them. There are a couple of different species of wild roses around, and the ones with larger hips (about the size of a blueberry) seemed like they would be more practical to harvest than the tiny ones of the species in the photo. They were more practical, but we soon realized that the tiny ones were the ones that actually tasted good. The larger ones were tasteless in comparison. This was a problem, though, because each of those tiny hips were stuffed with seeds that needed to be removed. There was no way to do that at all quickly, and the results didn’t seem worth it. This year, a better use for them has come to mind. We have been making kombucha (which is a fermented tea) for a while now, and while experimenting with different ingredients to flavor it, one that was particularly popular with us was rose petal. Rose hips have a similar (although I think slightly sweeter) flavor, and using them as a flavoring for kombucha would not require removing the seeds. And if all else fails, at least they are fun to photograph!

Chickens in the Hoophouse

Chickens eating radish tops from the hoophouse

Ever since we got the hoophouse, it has had a connection with our chickens. When we needed compost to add to the soil in the hoophouse, the first place I looked was in the chicken yard. There is a compost pile there made up of the chickens’ old bedding and droppings. When weeding around areas that had been planted (or were about to be planted), the weeds would go into a bucket for the chickens. The chickens would also get any insect pests (mostly caterpillars) that were found on the crops. In the summer, the chickens weren’t too interested in the weeds; there were plenty of greens in their yards to choose from, so they might pick out a few favorite plants to nibble at, but they were more excited when they got caterpillars. Once winter came, though, they were suddenly eager to devour bucketfuls of weeds every day. I started intentionally leaving patches of weeds until they were of good size and pulling leaves off of them without even trying to pull the roots out. Things grow more slowly in the winter. I could hardly keep up with the chickens’ appetite for greens. The leafy parts of crops like carrots and radishes could also go to the chickens, and I even gave them some of the greens I was growing for us to eat (especially when they were most abundant). When chickens are able to eat greens, the yolks of their eggs are a rich yellow orange. When they aren’t they are a very pale yellow. Our eggs had once been very pale in the winter, and the chickens obviously craving greens. The hoophouse helped change that.

Chickens eating radish greens from the hoophouse

This year, we have moved some of our chickens inside the hoophouse for the first time. They are in a section that has not been used yet, really, and the chickens will be helping to prepare that area for growing things. The chickens frequently end up confined to their coops in the winter simply because they don’t much like walking around in the snow. The ‘front yard flock’ (which is the flock we moved into the hoophouse) doesn’t have a particularly large coop, so they will have more room than they would in their coop. On sunny days it can get quite warm in there too.

So far, they seem to be doing quite well in their new home.

Witch Hazel

Back in the woods right now, the witch hazel plants have already shed their leaves for the winter. The plants would be bare now, except for all the flowers on them. Witch hazel is the only plant I know of that does this. The chrysanthemums and wild arugula are still flowering, but they still have leaves, and when they are done, they will die back to the roots for winter. I first noticed the witch hazel in the November after moving here. It was unexpected to see a flowering shrub in the mostly leafless, dormant woods like that, and it caught my attention. I was able to identify it easily and quickly; besides flowering at a very unusual time, its flowers were very unusual and distinctive looking. The only problem was that everything I had identified it by had to do with the flowers. Would I still be able to tell which one it was in the spring? I was curious to see what the leaves looked like, but I would have to wait several months without forgetting where it was. (These days I suppose I would probably just look something like that up, but at the time I wasn’t very experienced with that sort of thing.) I did notice that the tips of the twigs had a sort of zigzag shape where the leaves had been attached and I used that characteristic to identify several more of them in the middle of winter. By spring I still knew which plants were the witch hazels, and got to know what their leaves looked like. Later, when we planted hazelnut bushes, I realized where the ‘hazel’ part of the witch hazel’s name came from: the leaves of the hazelnuts looked almost identical.

The unusual flowering habits of witch hazels do bring up a question, though. What pollinates a plant that routinely flowers in November? Not surprisingly, I am not the first person to wonder about that. It is obviously an insect pollinated plant, but it blooms when there don’t seem to be insects around. And, as it turns out, its pollinator is also nocturnal, so you aren’t likely to see anything pollinating it. It is pollinated by an exceptionally cold hardy moth, which shivers to warm itself on the cold nights when it is active, similarly to the way that honey bees keep each other warm in the winter. Here is a link to an article that explains more about that: https://www.venerabletrees.org/winter-sex-witchhazel/

Patches of Color

As the leaves turn to their autumn colors, it is quite satisfying to see many of the things we planted for some particular function (such as producing edible fruit or nuts) just sitting there looking very pretty. When we first got here, the woods looked magnificent in the fall, but now there are also bright patches of color all around the yard.

Hazelnut bush with catkins and a nut in its husk.

A couple of currant bushes, and some oregano growing around the currant in the foreground.

Aronia bush. Aronias produce nutritious berries, which are sometimes called chokeberries.

Peach tree. This picture is from a couple years ago; it hasn’t reached its peak fall colors yet this year. I suspect it will be even prettier this year though, because the tree is more filled out and the leaves look less chewed on.

Winter Garden Volunteers

I didn’t get to planting greens for winter in the hoophouse this year. Exactly when they need to be planted depends on the specific crop, but even the quickest growing greens (like spinach) shouldn’t be planted later than September in this area. (At least, they shouldn’t be planted later if you want them for harvesting over the winter. They’ll still grow, but they won’t be ready until spring.)

Radish growing on a path in the hoophouse.

Last year, I planted quite a variety of things in the hoophouse to see what would do well over winter. It was our first year having it and was one huge experiment, but it went pretty well for the most part. Some favorites were identified, as were some that seemed more trouble than they were worth. And then there were some that seemed worth a little extra trouble. This year, though, I had to give my bees top priority. For that and various other reasons I didn’t end up planting much in the hoophouse for this winter. But as I was looking around inside it recently, I noticed that there were a few different greens and other vegetables growing amongst the weeds. There were radishes, mizuna, lettuce, Tokyo bekana, chard, maché, mustard greens, leeks, and what appeared to be a Tokyo bekana/mizuna cross. I had left some of the plants we had been eating over the winter go to seed to collect seeds from in the spring. I’m sure some of them ripened and fell early, or late, or just got missed, and wound up on the ground.

Sorrel, a perennial plant, growing in the hoophouse

That accounts for most of what is growing out there. A small amount of it I did plant, and some of it is perennial plants that were planted last year. Eventually, the hoophouse will probably be full of mostly perennials, but some of the very best cold tolerant winter crops are annuals, so there will always be a place for them too.

New Late Bloomer

Yarrow is not a new plant here, but this yellow flowering variety is. It came to us through a plant swap at the local library. I chose to take this plant knowing that it was a different variety than what was already around, but I didn’t realize that its flowering time would be so different. I think it did flower when the other yarrow was flowering (around June) but the other yarrow is long done for the season and this one is flowering again. There are still unopened buds on the plant right now! It has already gone through multiple hard freezes, so I will be interested to see how long it keeps going and if it does this again each year.

Tea for the Bees

The final fall flowers are still in bloom, but the time for the honey bees to be able to collect large enough amounts of nectar to make a significant amount of honey has passed. At this time of year a prosperous honey bee colony should have at least fifty pounds of honey stored away for them to eat over the winter. If not, they may run out of food before spring. For me, most years, making sure my bees have put away enough honey to last them the winter is a relatively minor concern, at least compared to trying to make sure the bees are healthy and will stay dry come winter.

Honey bees bringing pollen back to their colony

This year, though, as I was checking the hives at some point, I noticed that they were too light, which told me that they didn’t have even close to the right amount of honey. At the time there was still one more ‘honey flow’, which is a source of nectar from which they can make a significant amount of honey, but I knew that it wouldn’t be enough. One colony hadn’t even made enough comb to hold that much honey, and comb building takes even more nectar than honey does. That colony had done quite a good job, considering the unlucky start it had. When I was installing the bees, a lot of the bees got confused and most of them wound up in one hive, while the other hive had a very small number of bees. When ‘packages’ of bees are sent through the mail, they aren’t necessarily related to each other or to their queen. Installing the package involves taking the queen in her cage and putting her in the hive and then pouring the rest of the bees in around her. (She is in a cage to protect her from the rest of the bees, who may not have accepted her yet.) A number of bees may take flight when they are being poured, and because they don’t have any strong loyalty to the scent of their fellows yet, they will land at whatever hive they find first and join it. Since I was installing two at once, that gave them two possibilities and a lot of them were in the air. When a bee finds a hive after being lost and confused for a bit, she will often start fanning her scent at the entrance, to help other lost bees find their way. As more find one than the other and start fanning, the remaining bees in the air are more likely to also find that hive before the other. My early attempts to even out this disparity only switched their fates, and the hive that originally had so many now had as few as the other had had before.

This slow start left them with no way to both store away enough honey to feed them over winter and raise enough bees to generate enough body heat to keep them warm. They opted to raise a lot of bees first, which, if they had had enough time, would have given them a large enough workforce to gather plenty of nectar. They were still building comb long after most colonies stop for the year (since they usually don’t want to be stuck with a half finished project when winter arrives).

I was glad that they were able to raise enough bees, since if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to help them. And I was impressed with how healthy the bees they were raising looked, especially compared with the other colony. I decided I needed to start feeding them. Honey is the ideal thing for bees to eat, but I didn’t have enough honey left over to feed them all honey. The next best thing is usually to feed bees sugar syrup. Sugar does not have all the nutrition of honey though, so it isn’t ideal. I have a recipe for a bee tea, which is sugar syrup made with an herbal tea instead of water. I decided to feed them the tea since the herbs make the sugar easier to digest and provide a bit more variety of nutrients for the bees. I made it from herbs growing here, some of them wild, some of them planted on purpose. I can’t remember now where I got the recipe, but it originally comes from Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary. https://spikenardfarm.org

https://spikenardfarm.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Healing-Tea-for-Honeybees-2_15_15.pdf

Honey bee foraging on mint, one of the herbs in the bee tea.

October Flowers

There have been several hard freezes here now, and there aren’t too many flowers still open, but some plants don’t mind the cold. Asters, wild arugula, chrysanthemums, and even a little left over goldenrod are all in bloom right now.

The chrysanthemums are only just starting to open, although it seems that the variety growing here is a particularly late flowering variety. As nice as they are, chrysanthemums are not a favorite of the pollinators. So the chrysanthemums sit there looking pretty when not much else is flowering, but it is the other plants that are still flowering that are offering the last sources of food for the pollinators that aren’t already hibernating or otherwise dormant for the winter.

Honey bee and bug on wild arugula flowers

The wild arugula has already been flowering for several months and won’t be done soon either. In one particularly warm year, I was able to photograph a honey bee getting pollen from wild arugula flowers on December 15th! It isn’t so much the cold that marks the end of the flowering season for the wild arugula, instead it just ends when the whole plant gets buried in snow. I have noticed that the flowers only open on days that are warm enough for the pollinators to come out to forage. As the weather gets really cold, it waits for the warmest parts of the warmest days to open and make itself available for whatever comes.

Honey bee with pollen on wild arugula, 12-15-15

New England asters and one of the white asters in the chicken yard

Asters don’t mind the cold, but they only flower for so long after they first open, so on warmer years they may be done before it really gets that cold. There are a few different varieties of asters around. New England aster is large and purple flowered. Then there are the smaller white ones which all look very similar. I have not been able to identify any of them down to the species. Although I can tell them apart well enough, figuring out which of the many small, white flowered aster species they are would entail looking up all of them to compare. And then there is a rarer light purple one that I would like to figure out how to propagate. It is low growing, so it doesn’t take up as much space as other asters, and the flowers are clustered extra thickly, which makes it especially nice looking. It may also be, since I am mostly going by one plant, that that plant is especially healthy (I have noticed that asters in the chicken yard are especially large and have thickly clustered flowers; the actions of the chickens and their droppings seem to favor the asters). If that is the case, I would still like to collect the seeds of that especially healthy plant and see if I can figure out a place to plant them where they would do equally well.

What’s flowering where you live right now? Do you have a favorite? Let me know!

The Land

The land that is the setting for most of my photos and activities, Crossing Hedgerows Farm, came to us in 2013 covered in about seven acres of woods, and thirteen acres of field. The field had been being conventionally farmed until we bought it, and was planted with a rotation of corn and soybeans. The canopy of the woods was (and still is) composed mainly of oak, maple, sycamore, and hickory. The maples are silver maples, which are also known as ‘swamp maples’, which is fitting, since we are in the Huron river watershed and much of the woods and field area is flooded in the spring. The maples dominate the wettest areas of the woods. There are also elms, muscle-woods, and spicebushes in the understory throughout all but the wettest areas. The spicebushes are probably the most numerous of the larger woody plants in the woods.

Once the field was released from being farmed, it promptly sprouted a thick covering of giant ragweed. This was undoubtedly due to the high amounts of herbicides still in the soil. Giant ragweed, one of the so called ‘superweeds’, has developed resistance to the herbicide used on the field and was one of the only plants that could survive at first. The first year, giant ragweed was about all that grew in that field. It was impressive, standing taller than an average adult. Over the next few years the plants growing in the field slowly changed from pure giant ragweed to a variety of common weeds, to a wildflower meadow, and now it is growing a number of woody plants like autumn olive, cottonwood, willow, and dogwood. The wildflowers are still there, among the shrubs and young trees. The giant ragweed, on the other hand, is almost completely gone, although it is still common in the neighboring fields that are still being farmed.

The woods have not changed much over the time we have been here, but pretty much everything else has, and will likely continue to change, as our farm ecosystem comes together and matures.