Category Archives: General

Bee swarm!

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Here in Perth, we have had an incredibly slow, cold, wet start to spring…….. but yesterday was a beautiful spring day, and the day one of our hives swarmed. The weather had been so awful, we hadn’t managed to check the hives for a couple of weeks, and we still don’t know which of our three hives may have swarmed (all look full and active).

Swarm in a tree

Swarm in a tree

After some discussion, we decided we would keep it, but locate it down near the orchard and ‘dam’ rather than near the house like the others. We had a spare super, lid and plenty of frames so we just bought a bottom board and we were ready to go!

We placed a white sheet under the swarm, climbed the ladder and trimmed the branches around it. It was good to have the white sheet down as quite a few bees dropped in the process. There were two main ‘clumps’ of bees which we carefully placed in the hive box, with four centre frames removed. When we felt we had as many as we could, we did a quick shake and placed the lid on, then wrapped up the bees on the white sheet, and took the hive (in a wheelbarrow) to the area we had chosen.

It all worked well, fingers crossed the bees like their new home and stay there!

so far so good....

so far so good….

Birdlife

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It is wonderful to see a variety of native birds on our property- and always exciting to see something new, especially when it is a bird we have heard many times but just could not see it! The Fan-tailed Cuckoo is one of those! It has a very distinctive call, so was easily identifiable….. but it always went quiet when we started to get close enough to see it! Well, finally we saw one- and managed a photo!

Fan-tailed cuckoo

Fan-tailed cuckoo

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Trees!

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As mentioned before, we have been particularly busy working on reducing the fire hazards around the house. This has involved endless raking up, fortunately mostly using the big rake on the back of the tractor, plus professional tree loppers. We hired Branching Out, and they did a great job thinning out the trees too tall for us around the ‘snake lake’ mulching and clearing as they went.

When we say tall trees, they really were very tall! The aim was to stop a fire in the leaf litter below getting up into the tree canopy and putting the house at risk.

This height really needs a professional!

This height really needs a professional!

Raking the leaves and twigs

Raking the leaves and twigs

Taking the leaves away from the house

Taking the leaves away from the house

Drop skinks!

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It has been pretty busy here at McCarthy Park lately. We have had one bush fire already and have spent a fair bit of time doing more fire proofing, including getting some tree loppers in to help clear.

An entertaining aspect of the wildlife at present is the King skinks. We have always had a whole community of them in the rockery, and encourage them by giving some food now and then and keeping the dogs out of that area. We often have them in the roof space, and occasionally get quite energetic and run around.

this year, they have added a few kamikaze dives from either the eaves or the grape vines! Quite regularly we here a THUD and look out to see a skink on the ground!

King Skinks in the rockery

King Skinks in the rockery

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Finding its way in!

Finding its way in!

 

Mead

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We have so much honey, and a lot of it crystallised, so we decided to try Sandor Katz T’ej (Ethiopian style honey wine) as described in his book ‘Wild Fermentation’. It is delicious, and so very easy to make! It has helped put the crystallised honey to good use- we just warmed it enough to liquify before mixing with the water.

Naturally fermented mead (T'ej)

Naturally fermented mead (T’ej)

Silver perch…

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Now the weather is warming up and the Silver Perch in the swimming pool are more actively eating (they slow down a fair bit over the colder months), they are easy to catch on a fishing line. They like prawns, but their favourite is worms! The tricky part is catching more than one- it seems that once the first good sized one is caught, the others know and avoid the bait. We have our great net system now though, which means we can hop in and catch a few-selecting the ones to harvest and releasing the others. These two beauties were caught for a lunch with guests- the biggest was 1.2kg!

Silver Perch

Silver Perch

Honey, honey, honey…….

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Well, the hives are going well. We decided to re-queen both hives- we had read a lot of advice on re-queening annually, plus with the billabong hive still behaving aggressively we decided that replacing the queen was the only option. Never having done it before, we did some research and found it surprisingly easy. The hardest part was finding the old queens and removing them!

After re-queening, we left the hive for 10 days and then checked, and sure enough the billabong hive was calmer already, so we knew we had done the right thing. With the weather getting cooler, it was also time to reduce the number of supers again. We had already removed one super from each of the kitchen and billabong hives, and harvested heaps of honey, and we now reduced them further. For winter, each hive has the brood box and one super, which is more than half full of honey. We will keep an eye on them but hopefully this will keep them going over winter. Mind you, it has been amazingly mild so far and the bees are continuing to bring in pollen at a great rate!

Produce room full of honey

Produce room full of honey

Trout season begins!

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As the water temperatures have gone down below 20C now, we took out the perch from the aquaponics fish tank and added them to the swimming pool with the other perch. It is great to be able to have a variety of sizes of fish living together and not eating each other!  We added trout fingerlings to the fish tank for winter, and already they are leaping out of the water to feed! They are so much more exciting than perch, but the perch are certainly tasty and easy to manage. Part of the change over involved a good tidy up of the grow beds, which were looking very sad. Pulling out plants that had finished providing (or were too massacred by caterpillars to keep!), adding some fresh expanded clay and seedlings, and they look so much better.

tidied up and ready to grow!

tidied up and ready to grow!

AP planting 2

It was also time to harvest some yabbies, and it reminded us of how much it hurt our backs to bend over the ibc tanks to clean them out…so, we purchased a grow bed to match the aquaponics system and replaced the ibc tanks with that. Now we have a great yabbie tank that doesn’t involve bending over to clean, and it looks good too as it matches the AP system! Of course, we had to harvest a dozen or so yabbies at the same time!

new yabbie tank

new yabbie tank

Autumn and getting green once more!

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Well, it certainly has been a hot Perth summer, but autumn has finally arrived and with the cooler weather the plants are recovering. We have loads of pears, guava, citrus and apples growing at the moment. This is the first year we have been able to pick guava, and they are delicious!

Strawberry guava- delicious!

Strawberry guava- delicious!

We also have had a huge amount of honey from our busy bees- the shelves were full of jars of honey and we did another harvest a couple of weeks ago. This is a 20 litre bucket!

20 litre bucket of honey- second harvest this year!

20 litre bucket of honey- second harvest this year!

Our olive trees have also fruited this year, much better than the dozen or so olives we harvested last year!! Enough to fill a couple of 2 litre jars. These are soaking in water, changed daily for 2 weeks. Next comes the brine solution which they will sit in for a year- such a long wait!

Olives in water

Olives in water