Soon to be pouring...

Sorry it has been a while since I posted about the house but things are moving surely if a little slowly. Since we decided to use the extra space excavated, our concrete guy has been working six days a week to get the forms up for the monstrous concrete walls that will enclose our basement, root cellar, and part of the bedroom floor. Saturday the last of the exterior forms went up so now the only way in or out of the structure is using the scaffolds that Jon spent days constructing. Anyway, the walls should get poured Thursday or Friday.

We've also spent 'a few' hours digging trenches around the outside of the foundations so the water drains without undermining the concrete, and which will hold drain pipe once all of the dirt gets filled in around the house again. Once the walls are poured the dirt will get filled in again up to the current ground level. Then Jon will breath a huge sigh of relief that we're to the framing and processes he is more familiar with. And maybe he'll get to take a day off and relax ;) You know it's serious when he has to turn down an arduous backcountry rescue mission...

The bees are building!

Yay! After weeks of peeking in on them, only to see them clustered up like I'd brought them to the coldest, wettest place on earth, lo and behold what did I see the other day but beautiful homemade honeycomb! Most beekeepers use frames that already have comb but to avoid pesticide residue and some other issues I wanted to let my bees produce their own, and they've been busy...

Click on the picture to see it larger... They have five full-size combs going here and a sixth started, and they're loving the sun today. This is looking in the window of my African Top Bar Hive, you can see the entrance holes to the bottom left on the other side of the hive. 

Nothing is constant in life but change, right?

So after digging out a lot of lovely fill dirt from the previous owner, we decided to use the extra 8 feet dug out to solid footing soil to build a basement under the garage, move the root cellar around to under the entry way and I don't think we can say any longer that our square footage is under 3000'... Oh well, I'm sure we'll appreciate the extra storage space and opportunities for a finished basement later on, but it's meant more work with the engineer and Jon out here digging into darkness with a jackhammer to get things ready for the inspector.

The cement footings started going in today!

And the digging begins...

Don't ask about the extra eight feet of dirt dug out of the entire layout... Yay extra concrete and our own private stream running through the foundation! All will be well though, just a few thousand extra in concrete walls and some nice sink-hole mud to play in until then. Here's Jon filling 100 sand bags to hold down our 20,000 square feet of plastic over the dirt piles. 

A Cause for Champagne!

Well, it's official, because we decided it was about time! We opened our 2.5 year old champagne at the farm, after a few obligatory digs with the golden shovel, and to calm the adrenaline of me hiving my two colonies of bees today!


It was a busy morning, as I got last-minute word that my bees were in and impatient to be in a hive, so I dug out a platform for the hives (so many fat worms in our soil, yay!), got all of the last things ready, and then sat in the shop with my mom and the bees as a hail squall swept through the valley. Once it slowed to a slight drizzle, out we went, with Jon taking so many pictures it's like a flip-book, and my mom fearlessly helping. Thankfully it is supposed to be sunnier tomorrow, though not above 60 (so excited for summer!).

Click here to see more pictures of the hiving...

Spring has sprung!

Yes, this is the first day of spring in Washington... What you can't see are the 30+ mph winds that kept us hunched as we headed for the summit of McCausland, a peak near Stevens Pass. Thanks to Lisa for the pic...

In other news, our permits for the house came through, and we're planning on breaking ground April 4th! Already spring seems to be racing by, with too many things to do in too short a time. The bees are to come shortly after, any volunteers to come take pictures as I dump them in the hives?

Hope you're all enjoying spring!

The buzzing of bees (in my head)...

Any guesses what this is?

I really had no idea how much of a world beekeeping is, populated with many new enthusiasts, a few old beekeepers, many conflicting theories, burgeoning new research... Knowing that CCD has demolished most feral bees and many hobby and commercial hives and in keeping with the permaculture philosophy of a sustainable homestead, I want to keep bees for pollination and some honey. After sitting through a local beekeeper's meeting, talking with a couple of family friends with varying views of conventional beekeeping with Langstroth hives, and reading oh-so-many blogs and forums about bees, there is about an entire hive buzzing in my head...

A few interesting things about bees:

• A busy summer hive can have as many as 60,000 bees
• A hive will only have a few hundred male 'drone' bees, and they get kicked out of the hive in autumn, no dead weight to drag the hive down in the winter
• Hives used to survive basically on their own, my friend's hive producing 160lbs of surplus honey each summer
• Bee hives now have to be nursed along, many producing only 20-40lbs of surplus honey and many dying in the winter.

Anyway, we'll see what I've decided after my beginning beekeeping class tomorrow, but I'm thinking now that I will go with an alternative hive setup, the top bar hive, originally from Greece and used in many developing countries because of their low cost and self-containment. The benefits of this hive over conventional Langstroth hives is they allow for a more organic experience for the bees (no drugs or medicinal treatments), they don't require storage of the many boxes and extra tools required for the life cycle of bees in Langstroth hives, and they allow bees to more naturally create their own combs. Hopefully they will lead a life less stressed by chemicals and pesticides, pests, and disruption than those in conventional hives. They do require more regular intervention from the beekeeper in keeping the free-hanging combs straight and don't usually produce as much honey. If you're interested in this, check out these links: http://www.biobees.com/ and www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm. So, we'll see how it all works out, stay tuned for pics of me hiving bees for the first time in April!