Taj Mahal

Naming our outhouse began as a stupid Appalachian Trail joke. Plan Bee is rugged and rural to say the least. We have few amenities save water, picnic shelter and an outhouse. My wife said she could forgo most niceties but insisted on a privy. So once we had begun developing the land, an outhouse moved to the top of the list as a project.

While hiking a section of The Appalachian Trail from Iron Master's Mansion Hostel to Duncannon, PA I spent a night in the Darlington Shelter. Someone had a sick sense of humor like me and had named the outhouse the Taj Mahal. As I pondered our privy while enjoying a little Trail comfort on the throne I decided we had to have the same name for our outhouse.

Taj Mahal @ Darlington Shelter

For those interested in a little history, Taj Mahal was named after a princess in India that died giving birth to her 14th child. Her husband made a promise to his dying favorite wife to never remarry and to build her the richest mausoleum over her grave. The name translates to crown of Mahal. Her name was Mumtaz Mahal or "Jewel of the Palace".

The good news is my Princess is doing fine and my promise to her for this project is complete. It took me a lot less than the 22 years it took Shah(Prince) Jahan. Of course our results are substantially different but then he had the help of 22,000 workers while I had 4.

Finally impacting Plan Bee - 1 year

When we visited Treehouse Vineyard to help trim the grapes vines just before spring, we met an extension agent. In addition to being a very nice guy, he was a wealth of information. As we were trimming away the old dead wood, we discussed our philosophy for Plan Bee. We smiled/smirked as we mentioned that we didn't like using pesticides, herbicides or other cides on the land. We also explained that we wanted all of the vegetation serve a purpose other than appearance. So if we planted a cherry tree, it had better produce cherries and not just ornamental blooms.

Our model is an Israeli model where the vegetation either produces or is removed. Israel, according to Wikipedia, produces 95% of its own food. We shared that in a visit years ago we saw the Bedouin placing sheets beneath olive trees and shaking the trees to harvest the olives. This took place in the streets of Jerusalem. He informed us that we wanted to practice permaculture . So as we think about what we are doing on Plan Bee, we think of it like a giant beehive. All aspects of the land are considered as we plant; remove vegetation; add vegetation and introduce other life.

Below is a Google Map version of our front 4 acres. The reason for the big red dot pointer is I used the shared map option in Hive Tracks to get to our map. If you click on the map, it will enlarge a bit so you can read the 6pt text. The black line in the middle that looks like a magnifying glass is what we are using for a road although it is a bit gravel, a real little bit, and mostly a slightly worn path created by our bee mobile. (Our '99 Saturn) For those technologically inclined, I imported the map from Google into MS Visio and then marked it up with our information from paper files. In order to insert it into this posting I did a Save As a .jpg file. (Ah yes I feel better.) Anyhow, below is the map and we found it cathartic to look at what we have done in a year. We are finally starting to see our impact on Plan Bee.

Picture below is of the entire Plan Bee property.

1st Sting T-Shirt contest - Blog Giveaway

We were accosted in parking lots. We were snickered at by friends.
Finally, we were congratulated for joining the ranks of S3BS (Stung by Bee Beekeeper Society)

So by popular request or out of sheer craziness we have decided to hold a 1st Sting T-Shirt contest.

Here are the rules:

Qualifications:
1. You have to bee a beekeeper. Bee observers are ineligible.

2. The story has to be about your 1st sting.

3. You agree to abide by our capricious/whimsical judging in awarding the men's large T-Shirt

Requirements:
Send in your 1st sting story as a comment to this posting. We will read all that are sent in and let you know how things turned out. We will look at your comments for about 2 weeks or, if possible, until we get tired of reading about other people being stung by bees.

Award:
If your story is the winner of our arbitrary and fickle judging, we will provide you a Men’s large, 1st Edition, bee sting black, with a little bee character, T-shirt and official membership into S3BS (Stung by Bee Beekeeper Society). Good luck and go out and get stung just to get into the contest.

Plan Bee Orchard - Bees need Trees

If you read this month's Bee Culture, you learned that bees are viewed as 6 legged canary's of our environment.

Bee Culture Magazine

Funny thing bees, they don't like pesticides, herbicides or most any other kind of cides.

Funny thing people, we are the same way but just not as smart as the insects we are attempting to tame.

So, we at Plan Bee have been busy planting trees. Our motto, trees need bees and bees need trees. We believe by creating a healthy bee environment, we are also creating a healthy people environment.

One might say, our lives depend on it.

Below is a little diagram of our little orchard. It is located on the north side of our property a short bee flight away from our 3 1/2 hives. I have all of the trees listed with the month and year they were planted and the supplier. We will be replacing about 1/4 of the trees since we planted them as bare root trees and they didn't make it. At $7.00 for bare root trees instead of $49.00 for some our potted trees they were quite the bargain.

Our one really interesting tree story is about Sandy's miracle peach. Last year a friend of my wife's gave her some small peach seedlings. One of the three made it through the dry summer weather of 2010. I was going to pluck it out but sensed it had some green life left in it. With a tear in my eye I told my wife it was still alive and as long as there was any chance I was going to water the little tree. We were so pleased when spring came and the little peach tree began putting forth small purplish leaves. We have called the tree a Miracle Peach as it should have died but made it through. We are hoping for more miracles on Plan Bee.

1st Sting, 2nd Sting now it's Spring

We'll get to the stinging in a moment but let's talk about beeeees and their behavior.  Like so many of our friends, we love studying bees.  We have attended numerous bee schools conducted by PhDs that are educated bug people or as some would say, bug educated people.  The bug of choice is, of course, the honeybee.  We sit around restaurants talking about the mystical little creatures and are constantly trying to understand them.

So, before we visited our little six legged vixens, we hatched a game plan.  You see, it was springtime and those silly bees didn't know what they were supposed to be doing.  When we last saw them, they had moved up to the middle box of their three box world and were huddling to stay warm through the winter.  Now that it was springtime, at least according to the Gregorian Calendar, they should move down to the bottom box.  Alas, they didn't know this because afterall, they are only bees.  Of course they needed a beekeeper to "HELP THEM OUT".

Aleph (right) & Gimmel (left) after adding new boxes

So on the first day of  Spring, we decided to visit our bees on Plan Bee and move their world from the middle box to the bottom box.  When we finished, our Aleph hive, the first hive, would have the colony in the bottom deep box with the middle deep box empty and ready for brood building and the top medium box ready for honey.  Our Gimmel hive, our second hive, which was comprised of a deep and two mediums would be shuffled so that the middle medium would contain brood and the top box honey.  We were ready for them and their little world of boxes and frames were about to be shuffled.

A more seasoned beekeeper than my queen bee and I once sagely stated that "BEES WILL BE BEES".

The big day arrived and after a two hour car ride to our little slice of heaven in Liberty, North Carolina we arrived at Plan Bee and were greeted by swirling flying bees.  The obviously hadn't gotten the word that spring had just arrived and they were to be huddled in the middle of their boxes. As we looked into the hives we discovered that our bees were not just in the middle boxes as they had been with our last inspection but were spread throughout all three boxes.  Their numbers had grown dramatically and we saw pollen, brood and honey everywhere.

HERE COMES THE STINGING

So my queen bee and I have often and publicly announced we have never been stung by our bees.  After all only those less experienced, careless beekeepers that weren't paying attention were stung said I smugly.  Well, someone forgot to tell the bees that I alone on the planet was not to be stung.  So as I plied my trade of  scraping burr comb and brood from Gimmel and placing it on a bench nearby, a pesky bee crawled up on my shoe and stung me though my sock.  I winced in disbelief. 

GET THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE

I did remember to pull the stinger immediately and kept on going.  My queen bee was not so fortunate.  She bravely stood where no beekeeper should stand, in front of the hive.  My fault.  To be more exact, with her derrière sideways to incoming bees.  Everyone knows that bees cannot sting through blue jeans right??

SOMEONE FORGOT TO TELL THE BEES

So my poor wife winced at her sting and as we discussed the solution we agreed that dropping trow in front of the hive to remove one stinger was NOT a good solution.  Being a woman, she endured the pain until the appropriate time and removed the stinger from the INSIDE of her blue jeans.

So what did we learn class?

I would suggest the old adage of Bees will be Bees seems to ring true. If you have some other clever adage you feel would apply, please feel free to submit your comment.  Please note we do have to approve them and while our egos have been damaged, we still love our bees and are now officially part of S3BS.

(Stung By Bee Beekeeper Society)

Learning about vineyards and nut trees for Plan Bee & bees

As we ponder what we want to put on Plan Bee for us and the bees, my queen bee thought a vineyard would be great. 

WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT VINEYARDS.

The old expressions goes "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."  We aren't angels so I guess I know what that makes us.  My queen is a wide reading and researching machine and it wasn't long before we were members of the NC Muscadine Grape Association.  Yep, we looked on line and discovered that that a scant week away the NCMGA was holding a meeting at Gregory Vineyards and if we would get up early we could attend the all day event.  So we did.

Beeing Beekeepers we have discovered something interesting about people.  There are horse people, bee people, football people and grape people.  Some of the groups mingle well with others and well, some don't.  If you are a grape person and make wine, most everyone loves you except the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) people.

As we stood in the midst of grape people and thought oh goodie we have bees and surely every plant loving person on the planet felt the same, we were, how shall we say, educated. Grape people are not real fans of bee people as many of their grapes are hermaphrodites, they prefer the term self-polinating.  It also turns out that many grape people spray their grapes with a fungicide every two to six weeks.  Most spray an herbicide below the grapes to keep the grass and weeds down.

Pause--  So let's see.  We spray a grape friendly version of roundup underneath the grapes which is sucked up by the 2 - 6 " deep roots to the leaves, then to the grapes and finally to your glass of wine. Yum!

We also heard about all of the spraying done for insects except near harvest time and the chemical companies are actively working to reduce the window of time between spraying and harvesting.  More time, more spray.  Still liking those grapes?

Cute factoid about grapes -  They should be planted North South so as to maximize the sun on the fruit.
Cute factoid about bees - Hives should face Southeast so they would be roughly lined up with the grape rows/vineyard.

Muscadine grapes are native to the Carolinas and can require no spray depending on how your want to run your vineyard.  Our great Grape orientation will be to worry about bees first and grapes second.  Whatever grape juice/wine we eventually get will be "gravy" or is that grape juice.  Oh, well.

So we will plant our little north south rows of muscadine grapes with clover beneath them to keep the weeds down knowing that some of the vitality of the grapes will be sacrificed to the clover.  Our bees will enjoy the clover and the grape blossoms, we hope.  Sounds like we are creating bee heaven to me.

Above is the first layout proposed by our Land Planner, Brandon Price of Wildland Forestry.

http://www.wildlandforestry.com/

Note that the little grape  vineyard is lined up with a Northwest/Southeast orientation.  In our next pass we will change the proposed layout to reflect our great grape knowledge.

Nuts - A Quick word on this before I end this post.  Turns out that trees like Pecans don't share well with other plants.  At a gardening class, I know we spend too much time in classes on this stuff, we learned that trees like pecans really diminish the growth of other plants underneath them.  It is unwise to use their leaves when composting because of the chemical in the leaves.  When we plant our pecan trees, which have a 30' reach, we will plant them where we don't want anything else to grow.

Sure hope my bees like all of the trouble my wife and I are going through to provide them a nice place to live.

Final thought,

WE KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT VINEYARDS
& NUTS NOW

Planning @ Plan Bee

In January we decided it would be a good month to do some planning.  The name for the month of January comes to us from the Julian Calendar.  January was named after the Roman pagan deity Janus, a two headed deity.  One of its heads looked back and the other looked forward.

LOOKING BACK on 2010 - We decided first to look back at our accomplishments on Plan Bee.

• May 19, 2010 - Purchased 6985 Bowman Dairy Road, Liberty , NC (aka Plan Bee).

• June 6, 2010 - 24' bee stand installed.

• June 10, 2010 - Installed pipes and gravel over culvert allowing us on to the land without breaking an axle.





•  July, 2010 Well - Signed paperwork in July and actually received final paperwork that we could drink the water in December 2010.





• July 18, 2010 - Picnic Shelter started and eventually constructed using cedar poles from the land, some purchased 1"x2" and salvaged aluminum corrogated roofing. 

• July 18, 2010 - Outhouse project started. 


•  August 2010 - Electric installed via Duke Energy to power well pump and to use power tools.
• September 11, 2010 - Moved our 2 hives of bees on to Plan Bee from Charlotte, NC
• October 2010 - Our first deer harvested via a bow.  Nice shooting son.
• November 19, 2010 - Plan Bee fully surveyed.

Most of the work was done by my son and his friends with my wife and I assisting in completing some of the projects that required  continuous follow up such as the well and well inspection.  Yep, my son spent a lot of time in the heat of the summer working and getting things started.

LOOKING FORWARD on 2011
As we think about Plan Bee, we are fortunate to have very low expenses.  We do have to pay for electric and government (taxes)  Therefore as we had planned all along, we need to generate income to at least cover these minimal expenses and yet not lose sight of all of the fun of owning 23.58 acres in a rural community. 

Here are some goals for 2011:

• January 15, 2011 (Begun) - Develop Land Plan that can be used when considering planting trees, herbs and flowers as well as tax implications.
• Timber some of the property to make way for more productive trees and vegetation.  Will hopefully generate revenue.
• Make sure plan will allow us to achieve Present Use Value in 3 years (2014)
• Continue to expand our bee yard. We now have 2 hives and can grow the number up to 25.
• Add at least 2 hives this year.
• Harvest honey from our hives or fire the bees and get a new bunch for next year.
• Complete work on new hive stands pointed to the Southeast (Optimum direction for bees)
• Continue to plant fruit trees for us and the bees. (Bees need trees and Trees need bees)
• Trees we want to plant - PawPaw, apple, fig, peach, Mulberry, others to be named
• Plant 6 grape vines and evaluate if a vineyard is possible. (Attending a NCMGA (North Carolina Muscadine Growers Association) meeting
• Water Improvement:
• Install yard hydrant for year around water.
• Install drip irrigation system for garden, trees, herbs and bees.
• Build tool shed for storage of equipment.
• Plant Moroccan Mint