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Lady_Grey
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Name: Alyssa
Country: United States
State: Idaho
Metro: Moscow
Birthday: 1/9/1987
Gender: Female
Interests: Cooking, apiculture, horticulture, classic languages, Church History and architecture, Roman History, astronomy, theology, philosophy, needlework, baseball, hunting, fishing, phonographs, mechanical typewriters, tube radios, old books, old hymns and psalms, tea, and all things English.
Expertise: Mediocre at a lot of stuff, but I do have a B.A. in Classics
Occupation: Various and sundry
Industry: Wifery
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
7/26/2005
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The Author Does It Again
Speaking of creepy crawlies, it's time for another (and long overdue) edition of...
GOOD IDEA!
BAD IDEA!
Ahem.
#1!
Good Idea: Keeping extra worms in the frig so they stay fresh for another fishing trip.
Bad Idea: Keeping extra worms in the frig without a lid on the container.
Well, how were we poor Wills to know they'd start crawling about when it's that cold? It wasn't until a few days later - after I'd gone fishing and been surprised at how few worms were left in the container - that Kent commented on "a funny smell" in the refrigerator. His sense of smell could rival that of a basset hound, and his assessments of something gone funky are usually accurate, so I got up to take a look. Then he said, "oh... that would explain it", and forked a worm off the bottom shelf of the frig.
eHEH.
I'd meant to clean the frig that week. It got bumped up to Right Then and There. I cleaned dirt off the shelves and dragged a second worm kicking and screaming out from between the plastic of the inner door and the seal that keeps the cold air in.
Believe me, before you become hesitant about coming over for dinner lest it be prepared with worm-infested ingredients, I am NOT that careless about the frig. I clean it when it gets dirty, I make sure leftovers get eaten promptly, and I keep lids or other coverings on all items.
Except, this time, the worms.
I found a third in the lettuce last week. I do not know if it's a leftover from the Great Escape or if it came with the lettuce.
Yum yum.
#2!
Good Idea: Raising healthy, prolific bees!
Bad Idea: Not noticing quite how prolific they're getting.
I claim Inexperience on this one (as opposed to Stupidity on the previous): I wasn't doing any swarm prevention, because all the books said that package bees will not swarm the first year.
They did.
And they settled forty feet up a tree, on a two-inch branch twenty feet over our neighbour's roof.
Weeeeeeeell, that was a little out of my alley (I'm 5' 2" and mildly acrophobic), so I called two men from church who specialise in this kind of thing. It was a three-ring circus for two hours, culminating with Mr. Leidenfrost up a tree with a saw (he was raised in Africa, so he knows the ropes - good thing, too, because a branch broke under him, and long habit had taught him to have a solid grip on more than one branch), Mr. Glasebrook on the neighbour's roof with a grabber on a pole, and the entire block out drinking beer, calling out unhelpful advice, and revelling in the fun. This is Moscow, Idaho. We must get our kicks somehow.
Mr. Glasebrook grabbed the branch with the swarm on it with his grabber pole, so the branch wouldn't come crashing down on the roof when Mr. Leidenfrost sawed it off. Mr. Leidenfrost sawed it off and the branch came crashing down on the roof. 30,000 bees shot into the air, and Mr. Glasebrook, in his full HazMat bee suit, had to sit down on the roof and wait until they calmed down. Fortunately the queen had evidently landed right in the waiting hive body, so as the bees landed on the roof, they marched straight into the hive in long rows to join her. In twenty minutes all the bees were in the box, so they strapped it shut and Mr. Leidenfrost balanced it on his head to bring it down from the yard while Mr. Glasebrook cleaned the neighbour's roof and gutters and the rest of us swept up the leaves and branches from their back porch.
In all seriousness, that's a great ministry those two men have, no? Spreading God's love with bees.
And that wraps up this edition of...
GOOD IDEA!
BAD IDEA!
Perhaps one of these days I'll make a post that DOESN'T involve invertebrates.
"That's the trouble with nature. Something's always either stinging you or oozing mucus on you."
- Calvin & Hobbes
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The Author Drowns Her Sorrows in Drink
(in a sense)
Slugs are slow-moving creatures. It would take hours for one to cross the street. That is why I am blown away when they somehow manage to be on site - from which they weren't within hailing distance a few minutes earlier - the instant a plant pokes its head above the ground, and raze the poor thing to its foundations. Every time. I went through three attempts at growing cucumbers last year and each time the sprout was munched to the root very shortly after germination (that's why I started them indoors this time). This year they're punching holes in ground-level pea leaves and making inroads on newly-sprouted beans. My garden after a spring rain is a slug smorgasbord.
But then I read that slugs are attracted to - of all things - beer. It can be any kind of beer; evidently slugs have the mentality of college students just turned twenty-one*: "anything as long as it's alcoholic!" The cheapest beer is less expensive than a packet of gastropod bait by about a dollar, and you get more of it for your money. So my husband, bless his heart, risked the humiliation of being seen purchasing the most putrid swill of a lager (henceforth called "b33r") he could lay his hands on, so I could add some sparkle to the slug garden orgy. According to the article's instructions I put a couple shallow-ish containers flush with the soil in the main slug byways through my garden and split a can of b33r between them, leaving a good space from the surface to the top of the container. The idea is that the slug, dissipated creature, will crawl over the rim of the container to get the b33r, fall in, and drown**. And guess what?
It works.
Heh heh heh.
* It just occurred to me that this particular analogy has more applications than the one mentioned here. I'll leave the details up to your imagination.
** Supposedly this, in addition to being cheaper, is also better for the environment and for your own health, since you don't have pesticides leaching into your soil and the dust thereof getting into your lungs. On the other hand, considering the booze involved, I may still be on the Green-Party Hit List for use of noxious substances.
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The Author Checks to See if Her Apiary is Bugged
...well, naturally it's bugged; it's full of bees. But really. It is twice now that the weather has remained nice so long that I decided the sugar water could come off the hives, only to be hit the next day by a cold, rainy, stormy weather front that lasted nearly a week, so that my bees couldn't go out to forage and could have used the sugar water. And I can guarantee you that this time, as last, as soon as I put the feeders back on, it'll get all sunny and hot again and the bees can go about their business outside. Until I take the feeders off again.
Murphy's Law. Or a Communist conspiracy. It's got to be one of those.
But then, maybe if I leave the feeders on permanently, winter will never come! I may be on to something here.
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The Author Talks About Food Some More
I don't know if it's my sliver of Irish heritage claiming dominance, or if it's because I was born in and had home base in Idaho, but I crave potatoes on a regular basis. My wonderful Kizer grandparents gave me a little bag thing that lets you cook spuds in the microwave and makes them come out almost like baked in a fraction of the time. No, it's not as good as baked, and a few people I know would start pointing at the free radical thing that a microwave uses to cook food, but it's convenient and only takes four minutes.
Anyway, I've just finished a lunch of a salted baked potato (with skin. always eat the skin!) and a glass of milk. Yum yum. Did you know that a potato weighing half a pound has twice the potassium of a banana, and just a little under half the vitamin C of an orange? It also has a little bit of calcium (20 mg) and 5 g of protein (as much as a serving of oatmeal). No vitamin A at all, though. So if you consumed a potato, a carrot or a spinach salad, an orange, and a glass of milk for lunch, you'd pretty much be set. Awesome.
If you make soup with baked potato in it, it'll make it thicker. If you oversalt your soup, cut up a raw potato and fling it in - it'll absorb the salt (of course, if it's already potato soup... sorry). You can use mashed potato in place of flour and liquid in some recipes. Potato water makes a tender bread loaf. I've seen potato fudge and potato doughnuts ("spudnuts"). You can do almost anything to a potato to make a tasty side or main dish. The Russians make vodka with them. Biofuel researchers also make vodka with potatoes, but they call it ethanol and put it in your car. There is also potato flour and potato starch for people who have gluten or wheat allergies. And I don't know what-all.
Found out the other day that the word "spud" comes from the name of a tool used to dig potatoes. Any relation to 'spade'?
Know what else has everything? Baking soda. So far I've learned that you can do the following with baking soda:
* Brush your teeth
* Clean your bathroom fixtures
* Clean your kitchen fixtures (including the stove)
* Absorb odours
* In conjunction with a scrubbie, get tea stains off ceramic, porcelain, and enamel (your mug, your teacup, and your teeth.)
* Dump it into your bathtub or make a foot soak
* In paste form with water, ease the pain of an insect sting. May even draw out the poison.
* Make baking powder. 1 part cornstarch, 1 part cream of tartar, 1/2 part baking soda.
* You can even bake with it. Srsly.
Potatoes and Baking Soda For The Win!
If any of you know other uses for potatoes or baking soda, please share!
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The Author Caves In
So I broke down and joined Facebook. Actually, as a forum it's not all that interesting. I can't say much and neither can my friends. Rather than permitting people to post about things they think about, it's more an outlet for voicing the little things that flit through your brain at odd moments. I seem to remember being chided for that a few times in my youth. But hey, a place for everything, you know. And I can keep up with people I haven't been able to talk to in a long time. So that's good.
The second storey is on the hive now! And I got stung again. The funny thing was, it wasn't while I was doing anything to the hives. I'd spent quite some time that afternoon manipulating the frames in the first story - see, the Langstroth hive (the standard square "bee box") is not ideal in the bees' world because it imposes a square design on what would naturally be an egg-shaped nest, and forces building regularised comb on frames rather than Wherever It Fits like they would in, say, a hollow tree. But their built-in instinct for the egg-shaped nest prompts them to build from the centre UP than the centre OUT and then UP. So the bees would insist on building what looked like vertical pancakes of drone comb atop the centre frames while completely ignoring the outer foundation. When there was one storey, this meant that they nailed the cover to the frames with wax, which had some near-disastrous results one day when I tried to open the hive. Later I put an empty storey on top of the first to contain some jars of sugar syrup for them to drink, and that's when the pancakes started to appear and the queen would lay eggs in the pancakes, and then I'd have to scrape off the pancakes and pulverise a bunch of brood... sigh. It was drone brood, so it doesn't matter, but still. And hey, it means I have oodles of wax to render later. So to draw this tangent slowly back to my original point, I was shuffling the frames to ensure complete coverage of the foundation, and trying to do so without battering the bees around, but of course with all the extra 'bridge' comb they build between the frames, it was like taking a jigsaw apart and putting the pieces back in the wrong order. And you have to do this without breaking anything. Or crushing bees. And of course you have to assume the queen is on each frame just like you have to assume that every gun you pick up is loaded, for safety's sake. But I managed it after a deal of bother and the bees didn't seem as put out as I would have been in their situation.
Then later I was sitting out by the hives reading Dante and a worker came along and zapped me. She probably landed on my arm without my noticing and I shifted my arm so that she got squeezed and lashed out in self-defence. YOW! A note: there is a legend that pressing a penny on a bee sting will make the sting go away. It doesn't. Flick the stinger (do NOT grab and pull) out of the wound and slap on a thick paste of baking soda and water. It turns out that if you get stung a lot, the reaction to each sting will increase for the first 5-10 stings and then gradually decrease until you don't react at all. So this one hurt a lot more and swelled a lot bigger and lasted a lot longer than the first one, and the next will likely be worse. But I consider that progress. 
Meanwhile, the bees appreciate the extra room, I think. They were getting pretty crowded in there, and it's gotten quite hot during the day lately. You should see them all out on their landing pad, fanning their wings to circulate the air inside the hive while foragers continue to come and go with their loads of pollen. Bees are fascinating to watch. When I'm out there in the apiary with bees buzzing around my head, and the smell of green grass and chestnut blossom, all seems well with the world.
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