Stink City

I've been in Sydney with my darling sister and her youngker the last two weeks, having abandoned Tim in Lalorland where he's kept Harriet and Bea Cat in the comfortable lapitude to which they've become accustomed.

I moved from Sydney to Melbo eight years ago, in February 2007. At the time I'd been appalled that despite Melbourne's being 900km closer to the Antarctic, its temperature that Summer was regularly 12ºC hotter than Sydney's. "At least it's not humid," people would say as north-west winds sucked at their eyeballs, and I was all like "Bah! Of course it's not humid! You've been in life-endangering drought for the last ten years. There hasn't been a cloud over this city for eighteen months." (Finally Autumn kicked in and everything was lovely, and then – some years later, after the apocalyptic fires of 2009 – the drought broke and everything was even lovelier.) 

But hanging in Synny for two weeks in February, the subtropicalliest month of Sydney's calendar, has made clear to me how much I've come round to the whole Mediterranean climate thingo that Melb's got going on. Because sweat behind the knees, actual puddles gathering in the crook of my arm, really not my thing.

The rainy warm wet warm rainy not-too-warm rainy clime makes for lush green rampant life. And it also makes for rampant abundant glorious multiple-generations-in-one-season fruit fly. Which is perhaps why Sydney is not full of backyard fruit while Melbers is.

Having said that, every day on the walk to my nieceling's school, I've been helping myself to a small handful of these ladies:

The lilly-pillies of loveliness! They're a bit Granny-Smithesque in their sweetness/tartness combo, juicy and abundant and apparently fruit-fly free. 

The lilly-pillies are in the Syzygium genus, part of the Myrtaceae family that includes the eucalypts, feijoas, and other fluffy-flowered indigines of the once and former Gondwanaland:

Much fancied by bees.

And there are these, my old friends the bunyas:

The cockatoos have been systematically dismantling the bunya cones, dropping half nibbled nuts for the brush turkeys of Turramurra to tidy up, and dropping the odd un-nibbled nut for me to gather.

Last year's Festival of Eating My Bodyweight in Bunya Nuts got old well before we'd actually eaten our bodyweights in bunya nuts. We gave bunya nuts to beekeepers and bunya nuts to people in pubs and bunya nuts to colleagues, and still we had bunya nuts. This year I've amassed no more than 12 of these little fellows, which I think may be close to the perfect quantity for a person who already lacks not the carbohydrates.

Finally, on the bounties of Sydney's wild life, check out (if you can) these teeny native stingless bees (Tetragonula carbonaria) living in a terracotta drainage pipe not two metres from the entrance to my niece's school. They're fond of the humidity and warmth, obvs., and thrive up north while they won't survive in Melbers.

That old yarn

I haven't been to an agricultural show for at least a decade, and last time I did I was too old to get excited about showbags, rides on the whizzamagig and foodlike substances on sticks, but, on the other hand, I hadn't yet settled into my early-onset nanna-esque enthusiasm for produce displays and vintage machinery. Thirty-six, it turns out, is the perfect age for enjoying agricultural shows, and the Whittlesea Show today was a delight. I got to witness from afar the latest fairground cuisine (variations on deep-fried fairy-floss). The arts & crafts competition displays were glorious, esp. in the Best Decorated Orange or Potato category, the Fair Isle sock display, the carrot cake competition, and the great Orstrayan backyard dunny division. There were fewer exhibits of baby animals being terrorised by kids than I'd feared, and the weather was on the chilly side of 15ºC (thank you v. much, southerly change), which meant that the handsome, hand-brushed Poll Herefords standing around with no shade or water weren't suffering unduly. And - finally - there was an alpaca display, including a coven of spinsters transforming alpaca fluff into a very respectable yarn.

Which was just what I needed, being myself a struggling novice in the alpaca-yarn spinning department. I made some inroads about a week ago, after watching several bajillion instructional youtube videos on setting up my spinning wheel, carding fleece, making rolags (rolags!), and spinning itself. But even so, this meagre length of yarn -

- was all I could make before I stopped in frustration. The yarn kept breaking, and, uncoordinated at the best of times, I was finding it nigh impossible to pedal with one foot, use both hands to pinch the rolag into something finer and threadlike, not slow my pedalling down so that the wheel started going backwards, deploy my third hand to grab the next rolag and introduce it, scratch behind my ear etc, and remain upright. Hand-foot-eye-machine synchronisation, never my strong suit.

At some point in this dogforsaken initiation into spinning I gave up, grabbed an old ball of  Patons 5-ply and started knitting this bedsock, on which I made tremendous progress at last week's poetry-at-the-pub, with the aid of my trusty book of sock patterns, I Can't Believe I'm Knitting Socks.

If only there were a companion volume, I Can't Believe I'm Spinning Alpaca Fleece.

So, anyway, it was very comforting to speak to the alpaca spinners today and discover a few things: (1) everyone finds spinning hard at first; (2) noone learns to spin from youtube; (3) alpaca wool isn't your optimal beginner's fibre, given its tendency to break, whereas sheep's wool consists of cells that make the wool stick together (or something); and (4) there is such an institution as the Hand Weavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, headquartered in Melbun, and I could take lessons or join a local group and bludge lessons for free. So I think that's now my plan: I will put the gigantic sack of alpaca fleece back in the cupboard, wait until the new year when the next term of Wednesday evening spinning lessons start, and in the meantime, if I'm stricken down with yarn nerdery, I'll use up some of the commercial wool I've been accumulating over the decades in a flurry of sock manufacturing. I might try treadling my spinning wheel at the same time, just to get my foot in.

Meanwhile, in other news: Spring! The season of empinkification in the front yard.

The season of bees in apple-blossom (except for the apple-blossom that didn't eventuate because the earwigs of doom climbed up the trunks in the night and ate the unopened flower buds ... bloody earwigs).

And t'is the season of Esme Australorp deciding to incubate the next generation of chooklings with her whole soul and self. Esme can't be photographed, because she has planted herself in the darkest farthest corner of the coop and will be enormously disaffected if I open the portal that lets light in on her (whirr, fluff, dinosaur impersonation). We procured for her eight fertilised eggs last Sunday, so that the sitting could produce something other than rotten eggs; she broke two by accident on her first day, settling in, but all's gone well ever since, and she's almost a third of the way through the incubation now with six eggs still intact. She is a model of endurance. The whole incubation involves 21 days of sitting, turning the eggs over now and then so the embryos don't stick to the shell, holding in her poos, her thirst, her hunger, her need to stretch, her desperate need for a dustbath, until that brief moment in the afternoon when it's warm enough to leave the eggs and she can dash out and get a day's worth of living compressed into twenty minutes. Puts my frustrations with the alpaca fleece and the spinning wheel of contrariety right in their place.

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

Eggswax

You know those pairs of photos that appear now and then on the internet: the first one depicts an award-winning baby, cooing and gurgling as she leans out of a perfectly chiseled pumpkin; the next one is an attempted replica - a grizzly infant looking like he's just been bottle-fed lemon juice and fish oil, covered in the disintegrating gloop of a mismanaged cucurbit? This kind of thing. The moral is: if you're not a professional baby/pumpkin wrangler with a top-notch camera and a lot of clean cheesecloth wherewith to conceal the less photogenic aspects of your house, do not try citrouille au enfant at home. And if you do try this at home, do not display your attempts on the internet, unless you want to propagate international mirth, which is quite a reasonable desire. (Alternatively, the moral is: do unto babies as you would have done unto your good self on an equivalent scale, which might mean not imprisoning your naked infant within a giant fruit.)

So, this is one of those blog posts. I show you someone's stylish craft project, and then I show you my surely-I-can-do-that attempt, which, of course, falls pretty flat.

Here is the stylish craft project, Easter egg candles, ftw, all the way from Lithuania:

Artful photo of pastel vegetable wax candles in eggshells from here.

I saw these candles in my daily Etsy digest a few weeks ago, and realised immediately that not only did I possess a goodly supply of eggshells (thanks, Shirley Chook, our champion layer of the month), and a goodly supply of wax (thanks, bees), and a goodly supply of devil-may-care crafty can-do pluck, but I also had an Easter coming up, and various dear relations, who would surely appreciate receiving some stylish, handcrafted Easter table decor, made from eggshells and beeswax. Because nothing says hope and resurrection like an ovum membrane filled with stuff from the abdominal glands of insects.

It turns out not to be very easy to hold a bit of wick right in the middle of half an eggshell while pouring molten beeswax around it, so some of my wicks are sort of akimbo. It's also quite hard (given our amateur wax rendering skills) to completely rid beeswax of all the non-wax gunk that comb accumulates, so my wax is not so much golden, as baby-poo brown - caramel, if we're feeling charitable - and it contains bits and pieces of bee residue you'd probably rather not know about.

So them's my candles. They'd probably look a bit better if posed in the presence of cinnamon quills and raffia, and they'd probably look a lot better if I too had used vegetable wax in various alluring shades of pastel rather than beeswax in various unalluring shades of slumgum. In the end, I decided not to impose them on my dear relations, because I want to keep them sweet for the cat hair textiles I'll be knitting them all for Christmas.

Skeps and stitches

One of my favourite books, when I were a wee tacker, was Evelyn Scott's The Fourteen Bears in Summer and Winter. Daddy Bear and Mother Bear live with their improbably large progeny in the woods, where they swim and skate and decorate trees and skip paw-in-paw through the buttercups. The bear cubs (they have gorgeous names like Henrietta and Gloria and Dora and Little Theodore) sleep inside tree trunks, decorated to taste. One is all folksy floral kitsch; another is rocking the 1960s Danish minimalism. I blame this book for the fact that from the age of 4 to ... I dunno ... 27? ... I couldn't look at a Morton Bay fig tree without imagining myself sitting inside it arranging my prize collection of hand-carved spoons.

One of the most exciting things about this book was its depiction of bee-keeping. Flora has a "honey farm with very special bees". She turns the spigot on each skep and out comes vanilla honey, or maple honey, or strawberry honey, or coconut honey, looking remarkably like soft-serve icecream.

This is not, perhaps, an entirely realistic account of bears, or bees, or honey. For one thing, contrary to widespread lore, bears aren't especially interested in honey; rather, they're extremely keen on bee larvae. Delicious, high-protein, pollen-fed grubs. For another thing, there ain't no kind of beehive where the honey flows neatly out of a tap.

When beekeepers used to use skeps - those beautiful conical basket hives - the only way to harvest the honey was to destroy the hive. In autumn, the beekeepers would select the strongest hives, which they'd leave to over-winter, in the hope that come Spring those strong hives would swarm and replenish numbers; but they'd cut open the middling ones, after "tanging" the hives to chase the bees out. They'd remove the honey and (more importantly, in an age of DIY lighting) the wax, and kill a whole lot of bees in the process. It sounds (and I guess was) appallingly violent, and pretty unideal for the beekeeper too, who must have been stung from head to toe by justly disgruntled insects.

Apart from this substantial defect in the skep system, though, skeps are the perfectest human-made bee homes I can imagine. Well, a skep lodged three metres above the ground is the perfectest human-made bee home I can imagine. In the absence of human-made structures, honeybees choose homes inside trees and they choose homes at altitude - out of bear-reach. I've seen comb made in the absence of human interference. It curves; it's built on an angle; it certainly doesn't run east-west in straight parallel lines. The skep mimics the hollow of the tree, and it allows whatever graceful free-form comb-creation the bees choose.

I'm pretty in love with skeps, is what I'm saying, and if you were interested in keeping bees for pollination (or just for the bees' sake), rather than for honey harvesting, I think a skep would be excellent.

On another (but tenuously related) matter, I've just finished sewing my new uniform, which apparently I couldn't manage to iron before taking this photo:

I made the skirt one evening after work. It's a very simple A-line job, made out of a grand total of five pieces of fabric, plus a zip, and a button. My favourite colours are teals and turquoises and greeny-blues, so I'm pretty pleased with the fabric.

But I'm even more pleased with the fabric I've used for the shirt. It's a peach-and-white print of skeps, designed by Bonnie Christine. I stumbled across this material ages ago and knew I would find a use for it.

Then these wooden bee buttons turned up on ebay. Ten for $2, which felt a bit wrong, but I'm not one to say no to el cheapo bee buttons when they throw themselves across my path.

I used my old faithful late-1980s blouse pattern. It's already given me a frog-print shirt with green buttons and a blue polka-dot shirt with little cat's-face buttons. In both cases I experimented with alternative collars (finagling variations on the pussy bow), because I don't love the collar in the pattern and I'm a bit phobic about sunburn of the thoracic epidermis.

This time, I've invented a sort of Mandarin collar, having finally come to appreciate the value of a stiff layer of interfacing.

I'm not a very patient (and therefore not a very good) sewer, and my Aged Singer (picked up for $10 from the Rozelle Markets in Sydney in 2002) is rather given to swallowing bunches of fabric and generating snarls of cotton. But I took this slowly, cutting out the pieces one night, sewing a little bit another night, more again later. The slow and steady approach seems to have averted break-downs in both the machine and the tailor. So, skeps ahoy!

Wild bees

The Victory Women (aka honeybees) living in our apiary (aka back garden) have changed the way I feel my way through the world (aka mostly Melbourne). I notice cape weed and oxalis poking up through the grass around the local oval. I log them in my memory, in a column headed August-September, Subject to Change. Beefood. When I walk past a eucalypt, my eye seeks out gumblossom, those wee cream-coloured tutus, or the green waxed caps over the blossom-to-be, or the brown nuts of blossom that's been and gone. I feel the double usefulness of fruit trees, for the nectar they use to bribe the bees into being their sexy go-betweens and then the fruit that bribes us fructivores into being the trees' devout midwives, au pairs and all-round manure-bearing lackeys. 

I notice bees themselves. The darker ones, Carniolans, and the honey-golden ones, Italians, and the native blue-banded bees, and the occasional teddy bear bee, also native, one of whom I saw today picking her way over a parsnip umbel. I notice things that might hurt them too. Every time I see someone squirting insecticide at a rosebush, I mentally draft the letter I'll write to the local legislature explaining that all the experts concur: squirty stuff designed to destroy insect life generally does, indeed, destroy insect life and then what. Then I mentally play out the scenario in which I run for local council and go to 76 meetings and eventually table a recommendation insisting that all insect mitigation be conducted via the agency of other insects, birds, or thumbs and forefingers. I can see that going down really well.

I don't know if, before the Victory Women came into my life, I would have noticed the aperture in the base of this tree.

I love these bees. They're about five kilometres from our house, and every so often we amble up to watch them. They're living in a wide corridor of rivergums that runs between piles of houses. Beneath the gums there's an understorey of grasses and wild mustard and in the nearby gardens there's the usual garden stuff, so they do well, these bees. You can see them descending through the air to their antechamber, fat yellow pouches of pollen on their legs, and you can imagine the ecstasy of gum nectar when the season comes.

Last September, we found that someone had detonated a fleabomb in the entrance to their home. There was a grisly pile of dead bees that the survivors had carried from their nest out onto a graveyard perhaps a foot from the entrance. We worried that, although clearly some of the workers had survived, the brood would be poisoned, would perhaps not grow or would grow with stunted wings. But five months have passed - that's two or three or four bee lifetimes - and the bees are still coming and going from their rivergum. I want to cheer for them, resilient wild girls.

The six-footed ladies of Camberwell

We've had our bees here in the Lalorium since August 2012. This is long enough for me to have become smitten with them, very pleased with their pollinating, wax-secreting, honey-making ways, and kind of proud of my own bad-asserybottomery in hanging out on a regular basis with tens of thousands of stinging (if usually gentle) insects. It's not so long, though, that I don't still have a lot to learn about ye olde apiculture.

In quest of apicultural learnings, then, we tagged along this morning with friendly bee-meister W. W was removing a youngish hive from above the front door of some peops in Camberwell. These peops included two grown-ups, two small children, a guinea pig, and a dachshund with a fondness for eating bees, and consequently a habit of getting stung somewhere between his muzzle and his houndly equivalent of a uvula. The dachshund was gnawing at a very wet dead bee when we arrived, which was evidence (in case we needed it) that the hive above the front door and the family behind the front door had certain problematic incompatibilities. (And/or that they were perfectly compatible insofar as the dog was providing a free dead bee clean-up service and gleaning his own protein to boot.)

The bees were living in a portico, their entrance a tiny fissure between the portico's masonry cladding and the brick wall of the house proper. Our bee-meister had a cunning plan, which effectively amounted to standing on a ladder, jimmying away the beading that held up the portico's thin (gyprock?) ceiling. When the ceiling fell on cue, it was to reveal this warm beautiful bundle of bee energy.

There were thousands and thousands of bees here, clinging together to conserve warmth for their babies - little pupae tucked into the white waxy cells.

The bees were very, amazingly, gentle with us. Bee-meister W sliced each piece of comb from the wood it was anchored to, and passed it down to one of us. We fitted the pieces of comb into frames, which had been prepared earlier with a hammock of elastic bands to support the comb pieces. The comb had to be fitted so that it was the same way up as it had been in the hive.

The cells capped with orange are full of larvae; the pale capped cells in the top righthand corner of the frame, and on the leftmost piece of comb in the frame, contain honey.

Most of the bees moved with their brood and honey stores into the box, but a few stragglers stayed, confused, in the former location of their hive. We tried brushing these into a dustpan and plonking them in their new box. When that failed, we turned to the smoker, which had been puffing away in a corner, unused, for the main part of the operation. Some of the bees still clung to home, or failed to find the box. These bees will die, sadly, as the hive that warms them at night has been taken away to greener, less Camberwelly, portico-y pastures.

The operation wasn't without casualties (not only these stragglers, but the bee who impaled herself on my glove, and some of the brood who were injured as we cut the comb to fit the frames), but it was vastly less brutal than the gassing of the pest-exterminator, and spared the house people the horror of several kilos of dead bees rotting in their own syrup above their front door.