Personal Blog for Ray Andrick

Se non è vero, è ben trovato.
(Even if it’s not true, it’s well-conceived.)
— An Italian Renaissance saying

Category: Hobbies

  • Racking day

    I took a chance on wild yeast with the cider that we pressed from neighborhood apples. Big mistake Indy. It smelled nasty and I dumped it in the back yard.

    Note to self: Although, I found it nasty, white faced hornets disagreed. For two days, they crawled around my lawn by the hundreds. Next time, I’ll dump it down the drain.

    Anyway, since that didn’t work, I went to McConnell’s farm and bought five gallons of cider. I added brewers yeast and started primary fermentation in a 5-gallon pail. Fermentation had slowed, so today I racked (transferred) the fermenting cider to a 5-gallon glass carboy. This leaves much of the dead yeast behind so that the cider will taste better. The carboy (think water cooler jug), has a narrow neck which can be closed with a stopper and an airlock. This way the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast will fill the space above the liquid. This keeps out oxygen and therefore the bacteria that turns hard cider into vinegar.

  • Getting the hive ready for cool weather

    I’ve been feeding the bees since August to make sure that they have enough honey for the winter. Today I started getting the hive ready for cool weather. I replaced the screened bottom board with a solid bottom board and installed an entrance reducer on the front of the hive.

    The bottom board

    During the summer, the hive gets very warm and humid. Bees turn nectar into honey by evaporating the water, until it’s, well, thick as honey. All that water vapor has to be vented from the hive. Bees do this by fanning their wings to circulate air. To make their job easier, the bottom of the hive (called the bottom board) is a screen. This lets air in but keeps bugs out. The weather is cooling but the queen will continue to lay eggs through most of the fall. This means that the internal hive temperature has to remain between 90 and 93 degrees at all times. Last night the temperature was 44 degrees outside. To make it easier for the bees to keep warm, the cool weather bottom board is solid. While it helps the hive keep warm, it does reduce ventilation so it will be harder for the colony to cure additional honey. For this reason, you want to keep the screen bottom board in place as long as you can.

    Entrance reducer

    During the summer, the entrance runs the entire width of the front of the hive box. The entrance reducer is a cleat that can be turned to reduce the entrance by either 75% or 95%. The smaller entrance is easier to guard as the colony population starts to drop. It also helps keep heat in. It does, however, make for quite the bee traffic jam. On the warm sunny day, hundreds of bees hover feet from the hive, waiting their turn to land.

    Stop feeding

    As I mentioned, I have fed the bees since early August. There’s now 70-80# of honey in the hive. Since it’s now harder to feed the hive, and there are sufficient winter stores, I removed the top feeder. If spring is slow arriving next year, I will start feeding again in March.

    Next steps

    When it gets really cold, I will turn the reducer so the entrance is 95% reduced, cover the outside with tar paper to reduce drafts and to absorb sunlight. I will also drill a second entrance hole in the top of the hive box. This serves as a second-floor entrance/exit. During winter snow can block the main entrance from the outside, or a layer of dead bees can block the entrance from the inside. The axillary entrance will let the bees get out on warm (above 54F ) winter days. Bees don’t eliminate waste inside the hive. They hold it!

  • More cider

    My daughter and I gathered apples today so that we could make even more cider. We started with the apple tree in the neighbor’s yard and ended up gathering apples from the neighboring orchard. It has been a long time since the orchard was operated commercially. We asked the farmer if we could pick a few bushels of apples to make cider and he told us that we could pick all the apples we wanted. He also let us know that good cider requires a variety of apples, and then explained where on the orchard we would find different varieties.

    We picked about 3 1/2 bushels total but ended up grinding only half. My wife, my parents, both daughters, the neighbor’s child, and even my niece helped. My homemade apple grinder isn’t finished and even with lots of help, using a food processor to grind apples is slow.

    We pressed 5 gallons of cider. It seemed sweet so I am fermenting it without adding sugar. I also turned two quarts into spiced cider that we drank warm that night. It was very good.

  • Cider experiment update

    The yeast did start in the 1 1/2 gallons of cider without resorting to the baker’s yeast starter. That’s probably a good thing, since the cider in the mason jar has a strong yeast taste. It’s strong in the other sense too. I doubt one could drink the pint without feeling its effect. It is as strong as a white wine.

  • Hard cider experiment

    One fall thirty-five years ago, my dad made a cider press. We used it once or twice. The press has sat in my parent’s attic ever since. Then two years ago, when my parents moved to West Virginia, so they asked me if I wanted the press. I did, so the press was moved from their attic to my shed where it has sat ever since.

    For no particular reason, I decided to try it out today. I collected about 15# of apples from the neighbor’s tree and ground them in a food processor. I then ran the ground up apples through the cider press and got 1 1/2 gallons (plus 1 pint) of cider. The press worked well but grinding apples in a food processor won’t scale.

    I added 9 cups of sugar to the cider and stored it in a 1-gallon jug, a half gallon jug, and put the remaining pint into a 1-quart mason jar. To the cider in the mason jar, I added about 1/4 of a package of baker’s yeast. My plan is to use the cider in the mason jar as a starter if the natural yeast doesn’t take in the jugs.

  • Watching the hive

    This morning at 6:00 am, I set up a water dish for the hive. Bees need water and I was concerned that they would start using the neighbor's pool. That seemed like bad PR at the very least. There were about 50 dead bees on the ground in front of the hive. Those were the only bees I saw but I put my ear to the hive box and could hear lots of buzzing.

    That afternoon, I checked again. It was amazing to see all the commotion. Man do those bees work hard. Now I know where the expressions "busy as a bee," and "hive of activity" come from. They have even removed all the dead bees from the ground in front of the hive.

    Other than a quick check to make sure the queen is released, you leave the hive undisturbed for 15 days so that they get established. Otherwise, they might abandon the hive box and go live somewhere else.

  • Hiving Time

    At 7:45 pm, I started the process of convincing 14,000 bees to get out of the screen box that contained them and into the bee hive box that I had set up that morning.

    There are basically three ways to hive a package of bees:

    • Dump the bees out in front of the hive and let them crawl in,
    • Set the open package box inside the hive and leave it, or
    • Dump the bees out of the package onto the top of the open hive.

    It was 54 degrees and nearly dark, so dumping the bees out in front of the hive was out. Placing the package box inside the hive seemed really easy but it would need to be retrieved later and the bees might start making comb inside the package box. It seemed that shaking the bees out onto the hive box was the way to go.

    These bees were packaged in Georgia less than 24 hours earlier. They were in great shape. I don’t think that there were 10 dead bees in the whole package. I sprayed the bees with sugar water several times before I opened the top to get the queen. The queen lives in a little cage inside the package box. The queen cage has a cork that covers a candy plug on the bottom. You remove the cork, then place the queen cage between the two center frames of the hive. Next, you shake all the bees out on top of the frames, covering the queen.

    It went smoothly — no stings. Since it was cold, I didn’t bother with the veil. One bee did get her stinger stuck in my shirt while I was trying to shake her off.

    Ironically, 30 minutes later and too dark to see well, I go back to the hive to show my brother-in-law. I picked up the empty package box to show him but it wasn’t exactly empty. I pinched a pair of bees when I grabbed the package box and got stung twice. If you plan to keep bees, then it’s not a question of if you get stung — just a question of when. At least I didn’t have to wonder about “when” for very long.

  • Bee Day

    I am ready to pick up my package of bees. I ordered a 4-pound package of bees. At 3500 bees per pound, that’s 14,000 bees.

    Sue and I took Alex out of school for the day and the three of drove to Forrest, OH to pick them up. We left the house at 9:30. It was cold. It was rainy. It was four hours each way without getting lost. I got lost both ways. (Aside: Sue bought a new GPS today)

    The husband and wife team at Parsons’ Gold Apiaries were great. They had an empty package box and hive set up so that they could walk me through hiving the bees.

    It was 7:30 when we got home. I needed to hurry to get the bees hived before dark.

  • Honeybee hobby

    Two Februaries in a row I schlepped maple sap to make maple syrup. Two Februaries in a row, I was hospitalized with kidney stones. Ouch. I did not collect maple syrup this year. I got honey bees instead.

    I tried to order honey bees in April. It turns out that orders are typically placed in December. And since winter was particularly harsh Honeybees were in short supply. All the apiaries had big “sold-out” notices on their websites. Finally, I found Parsons-gold bees, an apiary in Forrest, OH. They were very helpful. All the packages of bees they were receiving in April were committed. However, they were making one last bee run (to Georgia) and could add me to the 12-May order.

    I spent April reading about bees, watching youtube videos about bees, and ordering equipment and hive parts. The hive arrives in parts which need glued and nailed together. They also need to be painted. There were more than 100 pieces to put together. It took longer that I anticipated. It’s a good thing I couldn’t get bees in April, they would have been homeless.

  • Making Maple Syrup

    Late February through mid-March is sugaring season in Western Pennsylvania. I may live on the only one acre in the entire township that does not have a single maple tree. Instead, I tapped several trees near my parent’s house. I used plastic tubing and brass compression fittings. I think as much sap dripped onto the ground as into my gallon water cooler bottles.

    During the entire season, I made about a gallon of syrup but turned approximately half of that into maple sugar candy. To make syrup from sap, you boil, and boil, and boil. The reduction is 40:1. Last year I made syrup on the kitchen stove in an aluminum foil turkey roasting pan. It was a bad idea — 39 gallons of water boiled into my house.

    Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the process plus the whole family loved the results. So this year I tried to do a better job of planning. First order of business was to find an evaporator (fancy name for a pan) that would hold up and be the right size. Evaporation is a function of surface area so you want a shallow pan that is as big as possible. Practically speaking you can let the sap boil off until it’s about 1″ deep (1/2″ if you are very careful). After that, it can scorch quickly. If your pan requires 10 gallons of sap to cover the pan 1″ deep but you only process batches of 10 gallons, then you have a problem. I figured that I would collect during the week and boil on the weekend. Based on last year’s experience, I knew that I would have between 10 gallons and 30 gallons of sap on any given weekend.

    I decided that a pan 6″ deep and 12″ X 24″ would be ideal. A gallon of liquid is 231 cubic inches and my pan would be 288 square inches which works out to 1.25 gallons per inch or 7.5 gallons completely full. My approach is to boil 80% to 90% of the way outside, then finish the syrup on the stove where I have much better control over the temperature. While searching for stainless steel sheet stock on eBay, I found a company that specializes in stainless steel fabrication of kitchens. They sell scrap pieces of stainless steel sheet and even noted that they would fabricate. I called them and they built my pan from 18 gauge 304 stainless steel for $110.

    Now that I knew the dimensions of my pan, I could plan the firebox to place it upon. I didn’t want to just have an open flame as I figured too much ash would get into the sap. I also wanted better efficiency. I’m not sure I have a recommendation on how to go about this. In my case, I am very fortunate. My dad is an excellent welder. He welded a steel box 12″ x 12″ X 24″ that sits on a grate. The grate, in turn, sits on a pair of rails with a pan underneath to catch coals. There’s a 4″ diameter opening on the rear to accommodate a stove pipe.

    I wanted to tap more trees this year, so I ordered actual 7/16″ taps from www.themapleguys.com. I also I ordered a thermometer, a hydrometer, and a stainless steel tube for use with the hydrometer. In mid-February, we had a warm spell and I got the sugaring bug. I tapped the three trees that I tapped last year, plus 4 additional large black / sugar maples.

    I spent several weekends standing out in the cold, boiling down sap into syrup. One Saturday, in particular, it was bitterly cold. It takes a lot of wood to boil down the sap. It takes more when it is bitterly cold.