The Victorious Almondo!

Long suffering followers of these annals may recall that last year, on the brink of their first ever major almondification, my two almond trees were devastated by a tribe of brigands. This time round, thanks to a combination of my mother's generosity and my own spendthriftery, I secured a set of A-grade fancy-pants bird-exclusion nets for trees, which have done time on various stone-fruits as various stone-fruits approach peak parrot-attractiveness. And therefore, despite a few days of this –

– we are verily with almonds! Yes indeedio, the unprecedented joy of an almond glut (not that almond + glut makes any kind of sense).

Prunus dulcis "Nonpareil". Barely visible fossilised ammonite for scale (my pleasure).

Only the nuts on the Nonpareil almond are ripe; its friend, the Carmel, is biding its time, which means that what you see in the basket above is a mere half of our first proper almond harvest (insh'allah). The Nonpareil gets the full force of the Western sun, whereas the Carmel catches a patch of afternoon shadow, and it's to this that I attribute the variation in ripening time, although I do note, having consulted the University of California's pamphlet on "Harvesting and Storing Your Home Orchard's Nut Crop" (essential reading, a tour de force), that "depending on variety, almonds are ready for harvest between early August [that would be early February to me] to late September [i.e., March]". So it may be that all Carmels will prove slower than all Nonpareils.

Never having had much to do with almond harvesting before (thanks, cockies), I'm relying fairly heavily on the good almond commentators at the U of California. They advise that harvest "should begin when 95% of the nuts have hulls that have split open to expose the in-shell almond inside", although they also say that you can proceed when only 75% have split, to save your almonds from North American equivalents to the cockatoo, though frankly I don't think that would work with the cockatoos round here.

After harvest, I'm supposed to remove the hulls while watching Barnaby Joyce on last night's recording of Q and A. Gosh he's a weirdo.

And then the nuts in their shells need additional drying to prevent mold. In the midst of this drying process, which I have trusted to my Fowlers' Vacola Dehydrator, I'm meant to unshell a nut periodically and check whether it's dry and brittle. Once they are - dry and brittle - they're good for 8 months at room temperature, and longer if frozen. So, tra la!, almonds!

Almond redivivus

The bees in the almond blossom this week, my happiness levels; there's definitely some kind of correlation. Serious noxiousness has been going down at work (not directly affecting me for now, thank goodness, but affecting people I respect and love and an institution I care about), and while obviously the presence of bees in almond blossom has no impact whatsoever on that situation, it's been palpably good for my coping capacity. I watch those bees in that blossom -- they're like pigs who've happened upon troughs full of strawberry sponge cake, you can almost see them growing fatter -- and it's instantly clear that despite Christopher Pyne and shitsome redundancies and friends having to take stress leave, life goes on, in all its blossoming flower-pillaging superorganismic splendour. (While I'm acknowledging my animal-companions-cum-psychotherapists: a special thanks to euphoriator-in-chief, Beatrice Cat, who celebrates the new dawn by sprawling across my torso, putting her arms on either side of my neck, and kneading my pillow. Truly, there's nothing more life-affirming that a loving whisker up the nostril.)

So I paid a twilit visit today to the almond trees, for the health of my heart. There were no bees, of course (bees are sensible people who go to bed at sunset, and earlier still on chilly Winter afternoons), but I did spy sprouting out of the ground underneath one of the trees a small horde of what I thought were almond suckers. I don't need almond suckers, so I tugged one up, and lo!, it wasn't a sucker at all, but a seedling.

Almond seedling with almond still attached.

I'm guessing that when the cockatoos ransacked the perfectly just ripe almonds late last January, they dropped a few on the ground, as they do. The Winter came, the rain rained (not much, grr), the soil got cold and then warmed up a little bit, and hey sprongo!, six little almond seedlings all beneath the canopy of Messrs. Almondo Nonpareil and Carmel. (While we're on the subject of birds and seedlings, one thing I do so love about herbivorous birds is the way they farm their preferred crops by sowing the seeds - usually in a nice packet of highly nitrogenous fertiliser - all around their habitats. Farming doesn't require tractors and pesticides; we just need to eat the fruit we like and then fly around pooing out the seeds. While this is not yet our national agricultural policy, I am planning to illustrate my theory with flowcharts and send it to the Hon Barnaby Joyce, MP, whom I'm sure will appreciate its elegance.)

Six little almonds, or only five, now that I've torn the taproot on the little 'un in the photo. That's five potential almond trees more than I have room for, but I'm nonetheless contemplating a pretty darn thrilling experiment in almond-rearing. Seedling almonds are risky as food plants – their fruit might have a higher cyanide content than grafted almond varieties – but if all goes well and my seedlings survive in pots, I'll be able to graft scions from my two trees (next Winter, I suppose) and then rehome these almond babies in someone else's garden and/or in an inconspicuous spot on public land (hoorah!). 

This also makes me happy. Thanks be to last year's bees who pollinated the flowers that brought these seeds into being, to this year's cockatoos who so generously dropped them on the ground, and to all the lovely microbes in our good Lalor earth who tended to the seeds in their ineffable microbial way.

Bees and the beginning of spring

The number one beekeeping principle around Chateau Lalor is minimal interference. There are a few reasons for this:

1. I have been living with bees for less than three years. The bees, on the other hand, have been living with bees since the Cenozoic era. Even drawing on as much of my species' bee-lore as I have been able to glean in less than three years, the chances of me knowing better than the bees what's good for them is slim tapering to non-existent.

2. Interference risks compromising their health. As for all good things (Schwarzwälderkirschtorte, Pilzdorfpuppenhaus*), the lingua Germanica is on top of this issue, having coined the untenably lovely word, Nestduftwärmebindung. It describes the bees' capacity to keep their nest at a cosy, brood-supporting temperature, more or less irregardless (as they say) of external temperature fluctuations. If we pull open the hive, the warmth disperses and the bees have to work harder to get their babies warm again. The "duft" bit of Nestduftwärmebindung refers to scent, and that gets dispersed too, so hello endemic wax moths, small hive beetles, European wasps, and other bees looking to nick some tasty honey, who all get an extra good whiff of wide open beehive. And finally (or probably not finally, but enough for now), there's a range of bee diseases that are best understood as diseases caused by beekeepers. If there isn't a word for that, then German really needs to get onto it. The truly revolting American foul brood, for instance, is most often introduced to a hive by a beekeeper who picked up infected wax from one hive, didn't clean her tools, and then brought those tools to another hive.

3. It's better for me. Despite there being fifty thousand stinging insects living not ten metres from my back door, I haven't been stung for a year (and when I have been stung in my short beekeeping past, it's because I've been poking around in the hive). Mellow bees make for unstung mammals, which, given the density of mammals (esp. humans) in this here supurbia, seems a good combination.

There are, though, about four times a year when we do need to interfere. And one of them is when this happens:

 a bee with her pannier-bags already swollen is contracting polyamorous marriages between almond-blossoms like there's no tomorrow;

 the lavender and the rosemary throw an early party;

the tagasaste in the park is indecently floral.

When these chaps start flowering, and the peaches and plums are all on the cusp of budburst, the apricots not far behind, the pears and apples ready to bring up spring's rear (sotospeak), we know that the bees are perhaps a week or two away from bursting the seams of their accommodations -- and if that happens, they'll accelerate their spring swarm (where the queen takes off with half the workers to find more commodious digs). Swarming is mostly a good thing - it's the way the superorganism reproduces itself - but when our bees swarm, we want it to be because they're happy and healthy, not because they're out of room.

So, yesterday, in the rare late August warmth, we added an extra empty box to their stack. We put it underneath the existing boxes. Bees prefer to store honey high in the hive, and keep their brood lower down - this, I guess, something to do with temperature control. Putting the empty box underneath the existing ones encourages the bees to expand their brood-rearing downwards, thereby vacating the existing brood cells, so these can be filled with honey. As the formerly-brood-now-honey-cells move to the top of the hive, we can harvest spare honey, and that way we take away the scungy wax that the brood was reared in twelve months earlier. The comb that's been used for brood at some stage always has cocoons in it, which we render and filter out of the wax (and a delightful process that is, too). When beekeepers keep adding boxes to the top of the hive, and not to the bottom, they get gorgeous pristine honeycomb, cocoon-free, but the bees are forced to keep laying eggs in the same cocoon-lined cells, and as successive cocoons accumulate, the cells shrink.

So. In short. The bees now have plenty of room, just in time for the imminent Spring nectar-flow; their hive is right underneath our generous Japanese plum, and I can imagine them eyeing it off as lasciviously as I am; and I've had my spying-inside-their-home fix for the quarter, much to their collective exasperation. There was, you'll be perhaps horrified to learn, a minor plague of earwigs living in their roof and a small slug in the uppermost box. These guys aren't really problems for the bees, but I violated my own the-bees-can-sort-themselves-out rule, and de-slugged and ex-earwigged their house for them. Which is more than I've done for my own house lately.

* possibly not a word

Why I am going to acquire some posh tree-nets before next Summer

We have two almond trees, each procured, for an impossibly measly $5, from the rootbound-plants-for-cheap area at Epping Bunnings. They're good trees. They've grown well. They survive on nothing but rainwater and free range chook poo (poo of free-range chooks, that is, as opposed to free-range poo of chooks). They provide shade. They seem immune to the leafcurl virus that sabotages our peaches and nectarine. All they don't do - and I hasten to note that it's not their fault - is give us almonds.

Things in the Lalor almond department were looking pretty promising back in early August, as the almond trees came into flower.

The bees, who hadn't bothered going into any sort of hibernation whatsoever, on account of our sex-crazed rosemary and our nymphomaniac dandelions, giddily pollinated Every Single Almond Blossom in town.

The humans were cracking open their first bottle of feijoa wine and for mysterious reasons quaffing it beneath the petal confetti of the great god Prunus.

The chooks were pooing their darnedest.

The cats held off using the almond trunks as scratching posts.

All was well in the almondy world as hundreds and hundreds of tiny green almonds began growing from the spurs of the almond trees.

Things were still looking pretty good in early January:

Some of the fruit had fallen by the wayside, but that's entirely necessary when the bees have gone into pollination overkill and the tree risks dying trying to provide for all its potential offspring. The fruit that were left, though, were ripening beautifully. An almond harvest was thrillingly imminent.

And then a herd of two-footed berserkers with yellow caps and white capes flew into town. "Scrawp!" they said, "Scrawp! Scrawp!", which was the signal to start ripping open almonds and eating the kernels.

Leading to (a) no almonds for us, (b) very happy fat cockies, and (c) a deluxe mulch of almond shells.

It turns out that there is a reason why T and V two houses down have veiled their almond like a 1940s bride. Look at her go, almond-a-rama.

So, lesson learned. Next year, there will be nets, disappointed cockatoos, and almonds for me. Insha'Allah.