Time to Tap the Trees

It's just about that time again.   Time to tap the maple trees and start gathering sap for syrup.   And syrup means SPRING.  

Spring is good.   So is homegrown, home made, maple syrup.   We finished our last bit this week and there was much sadness in Mudville.  

Our old blue sap bags wore out last year and we moved to a tube and bucket system.   Behind the bag in the pic, you can see what I'm talking about.   That's what we'll be putting in in the next day or so.    I'll try to get some pics of how exactly this works.

For more links about how we do this, check out this post.

Another Hive Down

I checked the hives on Wednesday when the sun was out and the temps near 50.  The pink hive was actively housecleaning and doing cleansing flights but the other was silent.    I waited a few hours because the smaller hive often takes a bit more coaxing to break cluster and come out, but never saw a single bee. 

So.   The next day I waited until it was warm again and lifted the lid on the quiet hive for a quick look and found a completely silent hive.   I lifted some of the candy I'd put in during the fall and found the dead cluster up high, tucked right under the food source, barely fist sized.   They didn't make it through the couple nights of 0 degrees early last week.  Just not enough bees.

It's very discouraging.    That's 3 out of 4 hives down this year. 

I put some tar paper around the pink hive, checked the quilt box for good ventilation and tucked another giant bag of leaves up next to the bottom of the hive on the east.   It has excellent wind block on the west and north, with sun exposure to the east and south.   Assuming the sun shines again, that will help.    However, it's going to get near 0 again for the next couple of days.   Let's hope these ladies are tough enough to make it.  

Editing a Painting

I have finished my first watercolor class on Craftsy.  [Yay!] The last project was to take a painting you had previously done and work on it.    I decided to work on the large boat I had painted before.

Boat 12x18.  Watercolor.  January 2016

Goal:  Identify problem areas and fix them.  Put paint in, take paint out, etc.

Execution:  I added color and detail to the background trees, the water, the orange grass behind the boat and the interior of the boat.   I darkened the shadows inside the boat and under the boat on the grass. 

Learned:  Editing was very enjoyable.  Increasing the contrast between lights/darks really makes a difference in how a painting reads.  

Although I could keep working and re-working the painting forever, I think I can stop with it here.   I like it the way it is.    [I think things can always be different, but not necessarily better.   I don't buy into the 'You can always make it better' philosophy.]

Next up:   A watercolor/pen landscape class.   Should be interesting.

Winter Bees

No pic for you today because the bees are under a bit of snow, but we saw them flying earlier this week so fingers crossed they'll make it the rest of the winter.

Since hope springs eternal around here, Eric and I went to a class yesterday on Queen Rearing and Nuc* Overwintering in the Michael Palmer style.   It was really interesting.  We hope these bees make it through and we can grow the yard a bit this year for real.   I ordered 2 more nucs from the instructor, who raises local genetics and doesn't treat.   They're more expensive than ever this year [$175 each] but the local, disease resistant bees would be worth it if I can grow the yard.  

We took the class at Stuart Ratcliff's apiary in Bedford, Indiana.   He's on facebook:  Ratcliff Beekeeping.    He taught us all about grafting and raising queens and then overwintering the nucs.   Grafting doesn't interest me much, but there are graft free ways of making your own queens and I'll be trying some of those this year if we come out of the winter with live hives. 

In class, Stuart asked us what our goals for the yard are and I realized that I've been so focused on getting the bees through the winter that I hadn't really thought about anything beyond March.  So we've all been talking about it.  This will be our 5th year with bees.   If these hives make it, then we'll grow them for honey.  We'll be converting the long hive into nuc spaces - a quadruplex with a window in the back.   The screened bottom will have to be replaced with a solid bottom.  We'll have to make tiny inner covers for each section and tighten up the dividers between nucs.   It's likely we'll cut it down to a medium, but we can always put mediums in a deep and not the other way around.  

This is one of the problems with having to buy nucs [and typical starter kits that have those discounts on equipment].   Nucs are deeps and perpetuate the need for at least some deep boxes in the yard. Starter kits almost always have 2 deeps per hive.    We'd really like to go to all mediums.   I think we'll be able to do that eventually by only using deeps for the very bottom boxes, when we have to.  If we use mediums for all of the rest of the boxes, then in the spring when it's time to reverse the boxes, we'll have a medium on the bottom, can take the deep away [cut it down or save it] and can use mediums only on that hive from there on out.  

There are a lot of options for us.   We'll see what the rest of the winter brings.  

* For definitions of many bee terms, see my bee page tab above.

An Apple a Day

Apples.  4x6 each.  Watercolor.  January 2016.

This was a homework assignment for the Craftsy class by Mary Murphy on Watercolor Techniques.

Goals:  Practice glazes [multiple layers of colors].  Use gouache for highlights.  Practice using masking fluid.

Execution:  Used many glazes to achieve the colors on the apples. Start light, work darker.  Used white gouache for the reflections on the apples.  Used masking fluid for spots on apples.

Learned: It's OK to start dark with some layers.   I think I got the best color on the top left apple, and that was the one where my first glaze was 'way too dark' on the bottom of the apple.  Also, masking fluid takes a long time to dry so have a hair dryer close by when you use it or wait for hours. 

Another thing I learned was that I'm good at thinking in terms of subject and shadow, but I have a big empty space where 'backgrounds' is supposed to be in my art brain.    If anyone can point me to a resource that specifically teaches how to think about backgrounds [not just composition in general], I'd be grateful.