Praise Bee

After a cool morning yesterday, it came to be a warm sunny day. Lib and I went to the Gembrook market where we browsed stalls and talked to people. We lunched as we walked. Lib had a corn cob and I broke my boycott of the sausage stall, having one in bread with onion. I'd stopped buying them because the RSL that ran the stall sold them for $2.50, an outrageous price. The CFA now runs the stall and charges $2.00. Mind you when I go to Pakenham you can get one from the fund raising sausage sizzle in front of the supermarket for $1.50. The sausage was entree, I progressed to a hamburger from the beef stall and was disappointed with the value at $6.50. I will now boycott the hamburger stall.
We were impressed by the market. There was lots of interesting stuff. We made a few purchases including some home made pasta and pesto, some bottles of sauce for presents at Christmas, and some fresh asparagus. Lib's doing voul-a-vents today, with the twin small chickens I cooked in the crockpot on Saturday. We had to do a bit of cooking up as I left the freezer door ajar slightly Friday night and some things thawed partly. We would have bought more at the market, but we thought generally the prices were too high. I may be a miser but my expectations of street markets is prices better than shop prices. Often the reverse is the case.
Before I started up the whippy snipper and got into some overdue grass and weed control, I wanted to have a quick look at the bees, especially the queenlees hive that had swarmed. Last Saturday, before we went to Melbourne for the weekend, I'd put the sticky combs back on the bees and gave that queenless one a frame of young brood from another hive. I was curious as to whether they would be raising a new queen from the larvae I gave them or whether in fact there had been a virgin present that was now laying.
I lit the smoker, always a pleasant little task, the smell of the smoke evoking memories. I carefully put a small ball of messmate bark onto the burning paper in the bottom while gently squeezing and releasing the belows to blow air into the hole beneath the fire. I thought old Jack Tonkin who died this year aged 84. He said to me once, "Messmate bark is the best smoker fuel in the world. It can be a bit hard to get going but it lasts better than anything else and has wonderful cool white smoke." I spent most of the summer of 1974/5 camped in the South Australian mallee with Jack, in a caravan parked in a sandy lane, the stunted mallees giving scant shade, with every day above 35C and many into the 40's. We'd talk on and off all day, there was no one else, about bees, trees, honey, smoker fuel, ants, wasps, emus, rabbits, old bottles, anything. After lunch, which was nearly always cold lamb and chutney with bread followed by bread and jam and a cup of tea, Jack, a big man, almost too big for the caravan, would sit with his elbows on the table and his chin resting in his hands.
"Who would be a beekeeper?", he'd say.
When the flames puffed out the top of the smoker I put in more scrunched up bark, filling the barrell, careful not to pack it too tight and so choke it, then put the lid down and walked to the bees. I looked into the biggest one first, a five decker standing nearly as tall as me. I'd put two boxes of stickies on it 8 days earlier and could hardly believe the amount of honey the bees had gathered in that time. There was not much sealed honey yet but even the outside combs had honey in them. Another week of good weather and this hive would have 3 boxes chockas full.
The next hive was a four decker with a similar story. The hive that didn't have a laying queen last week now did have, a sturdy looking beauty with plenty of leather yellow colour, or Italian, in her abdomen. This was a single box of bees last week but it had cleaned up the box of stickies I put on it and started filling it. It may have close to a full box of honey next week. The fourth hive, a triple with the third box above a plastic queen excluder, had not put so much honey above the excluder, but was a bit honey bound underneath, so I removed the excluder and put a couple of the more empty outside frames down and lifted two full combs up to the top box.
The honey coming in must be blackberry. It tastes like blackberry honey and I've watched bees working busily on blackberry flowers. The peppermint trees are flowering heavily but despite watching closely the lower flowers with the naked eye, and looking higher up with the binoculars, I have not seen one honeybee working it, only a few native bees. I've never seen blackberry yield honey as heavy as this. Must be that the big freeze we had two weeks ago and the 75ml of rain and the hail and snow has triggered it. Let's hope the weather remains stable this week. Perhaps some rain one night to keep the blackberry going.
It looks like a clear sunny day today. I'll be extracting again next weekend, for sure. That'll be time better spent than last Saturday when I handed out 'How to vote' pamphlets for the Greens in the state elections. I spent most of the time talking to my 'Family First' counterpart who was good bloke. The parties we were working for are strongly opposed but he and I saw eye to eye on most things. Funny that. Perhaps we didn't touch on the area of major difference.