IPM

Integrated Pest Management. This grid comes with a screened IPM bottom board. It allows you to count the aptly named Varroa destructor mites, a serious pest to bee hives, which fall through the screen onto this grid. We're going to be sugaring the frames to take care of the mites. This is a labor intensive method, but with only one hive to care for, not really a problem. Sugaring means that you sprinkle powdered sugar onto all the frames in the hive, covering the bees. The sugar helps to dislodge the mites and makes the bees clean each other extra hard (they'll eat the sugar), which may dislodge even more mites.

Bee-Based

If you're reading this delightful piece by Alicia Kachmar in Brooklyn Based, which I understand is read even by people across the big puddle, then welcome to this blog about bee-keeping to be in the big but not so bad city.

We intrepid Brooklyn-based bee keepers are actually planning to hive this weekend. That means we'll be pouring the bees into their new hive. That's right, pouring them in. Stay tuned! Although no two beekeepers seem to do it exactly the same way, this should give you a pretty idea of how some of them do it on the west coast:

Prep for painting

I've taped the edges of the hive boxes, outer cover, and bottom, all sections which won't be needing paint, which only goes on the exterior surface. The taping maybe overkill, but I'm not much of a housepainter.

The hive

has arrived.

R makes a deep. A rainy back yard kept us inside, so now the apartment smells of lumber.

A deep or brood box with cover. This is how the hive will start out. After several weeks, we will add

another deep, and a shallow or medium (those are actually different sizes). The smaller box is where our honey will come from if the bees have a productive first season. We will prime and paint these before exposing them to the elements.

It's getting closer and closer....

Skeps

A skep is an upturned woven basket most everyone recognizes as a beehive even though very few of us have ever seen an actual one. This is probably because this type of European hive has saturated our symbolic culture. It’s been used to represent the first French Republic, thrift, industry, and Utah, among other things. Skeps were once very popular in the iconography of banks. Old school banks, that is, not the loan-sharking and gambling operations of our era.

At the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street stands one of those old banks, the former South Brooklyn Savings Institution. It’s now a Trader’s Joe's. Over the Court Street entrance, there’s a nice stone skep as part of the decoration. Inside, and this is something I’ve never noticed before today, there’s a large metallic plaque with Justice and Prudence separated by another skep. I said to the friendly (clerk, associate, trader?) at the cash register that I wanted to come back and take a picture. Still unabsorbed by the Borg, he warned me, sotto voce, that I should be subtle about it, since they didn’t want people taking unauthorized pictures inside the building. Alert, alert, amateur photographer in aisle three! Evidently Trader Joe’s last name is Stalin. Stay tuned. I'll be shooting from the mocha-macadamia nut snack pile.