30,000+ Pickup

Last Saturday morning at 6am, I was on an express bus on my way to the Union Square Farmer's Market.  Bleary eyed and completely exhausted, I arrived to Union Square around 7:30am. The market was just getting started, vendors were still putting out their goods. And early birds were milling about.  Why was I there so early in the morning... on a weekend no less? 

I walked around for awhile, until I found what I was looking for.  I should have just gravitated towards the large crowd on the Southwest side of the park.  I can't believe I got here early, and I'm already last on line!

What was everyone waiting for, you might ask?  Look in the middle of this photo, do you see it?

Look closer, see it now?  There was much excitement, and camera crews everywhere.  Ahhhh, New York!

Okay, here's a better look.  See it now?  I came to meet our beekeeping teacher, Andrew and the folks at NYCBA.  My other 3 beekeeping partners and I had ordered two packages of bees from them and we were here to pick them up.  My teacher drives down to Georgia to pick up all the Italian honeybees from an apiary there.

Here's a closeup of his truck bed.  Can you imagine driving this truck from Georgia to NYC with a truck full of bees?  He does this trip once a year in the springtime.  Can you imagine what the state police would say if they pulled him over?  LOL.

Here's a photo of some of the bee boxes getting unloaded off the truck.  Each box contains about 10,000 bees.

I love this photo.  My fellow classmate Tom joked that he thought it was pretty funny that the women that was taking the bee boxes out of the truck was not wearing a protective bee suit, yet she was handing the boxes to the guy in the full bee suit.  haha.

The boxes are connected together, so they needed to be cut apart for distribution.

Here's our beekeeping teacher Andrew marking off names off his clipboard as we picked up the bees.  He looked a little stressed out.  There were lots of people there and lots of bees to hand out!

This is what we came to pick up!  Happy, happy bees.  I ended up picking up 3 boxes of bees.  Two packages for us and one box for a friend.  30,000 bees in total!

After we picked up the bees, our teacher and a fellow NYCBA member gave us a demo on how to pour the bees into the beehive.  My next blog post will be about the bee demo.

Wintersowing Update

Ever since I tried wintersowing last year, I have been a convert. It is by far the easiest way to sow seeds, all you need to do is to plant the seeds in soil in a juice or milk jug container, and leave it outdoors all winter long.  That's it.  The process of freezing and unfreezing softens the seed shell, and then when it's warm enough, the seeds will germinate.  You literally let mother nature takes it's course.  This year, I wintersowed a whole bunch of heirloom tomato seeds.  I knew tomato seeds would do well wintersown because last year, there were lots of volunteer tomato plants in the garden.  Yesterday, I saw that one of the tomato plants is doing really well in the juice container "greenhouse".

Look how healthy it is!  Wintersowing rocks!  Here's the thing though.  I made these plastic DIY plant tags out of milk jugs, and wrote on permanent marker what type of tomato plant this was.  However, the marker completely wiped off from the rain, snow, and the elements.  So I have no idea what variety tomato this is now.  Bummer!  I'll have to wait to see what type it is when it's fully mature. Ugh, the wait!

Today, I received an email from one of my favorite stores, Brooklyn Industries.  As part of a celebration for Earth day, they participated in some earth friendly projects.  One of the projects they did to celebrate Earth day was a seed dress made with seeds embedded into the dress.  So you can "bury the dress" and watch it grow.

Another project that they participated in was this Seedbomb bracelet.  Which is a bracelet decorated with seedbombs.  So you can wear it, and when you see an open lot that you want to seed bomb, just take off the bracelet and throw it into the lot.  Cool right??  I so want to buy these!  Lastly, they also have bags made out of recycled coffee burlap bags.  I love the idea of recycling burlap to use as tote bags!  What did you do to celebrate Earth day?

Farming Supplies in the City

Last weekend, we had to pick up our 20,000 Italian honeybees that we ordered from our beekeeping teacher and the folks at NYCBA. I will write about that experience in an upcoming post. Since the bees were on their way, we were suddenly in a rush, we had to get some beekeeping supplies to get ready for their arrival. Even though the four of us involved in our new bee adventure all order our supplies online, none of us received our packages in time.  We had ordered beekeeper protective suits, entrance feeders, water feeders, hive tools, smokers, but none of it came in.  Then I remembered that I saw on Twitter that a new farming store had opened in Brooklyn called Hayseed's Big City Farm Supply.  Hayseed was opened as a seasonal farm supply store by Brooklyn Homesteader and the folks at Brooklyn Grange.  They recognized an increase of "urban farmers" maintaining gardens, chickens, and bees in the city and thus there was a growing need for a local source of farm supplies.  Things like hay, organic soil amendments, and poultry feed were absolutely impossible to find in the 5 boroughs.  I had read that they also sold beekeeping supplies, and since our beekeeping group had not received any of our supplies in time, I went there to pick up the most important bee gear, the protective veil.  At minimum, we needed hats and veils to wear when we pour the bees into our beehives.  We were so lucky that this store opened up this season to save us in this pinch!  At first sight, I was so impressed with this store.  It was so beautifully designed, that these photos really do not do it justice.  I was literally giddy walking around and looking at everything.  I was like a big kid in a gardening candy store!

I loved how they used a mixture of woods as their wall treatment.  They also had this lovely suspending light fixture above the cashier's desk, which were light bulb fixtures drilled into a garden planter.  And they integrated wooden pallets as decoration and farming supplies as wall ornaments everywhere.  I thought the store interior looked like a super cool stylish and modern barn.  It was so pretty, that I thought to myself, I want my apartment to look like this!  :)  I could totally live in a space like this! hahaha

This store was total eye candy.  It was so visually pretty, that it made me want to buy everything in sight.  However, I had to focus myself on picking up the beekeeping supplies that I came for.

So many different kinds of gardening equipment!!  Check out how they recycled wooden pallets as holders for the gardening shovels.  Isn't that an awesome idea?

How pretty is this?  The design of the entire store blew me away. It was lovely, and so much prettier to shop in a store like this than say a sterile looking Big Box Store.  I loved the look of the turquoise shovels suspended from the ceiling.  And look closely, next to the shovels are mason jars with lighting inside.  How novel right?

I wish my gardening supplies looked this neat and orderly!  Totally inspiring.

I also loved how they displayed seeds. I've always thought seed packets were very artistic, and this really highlighted that.  Here you can see the use of the mason jar lighting better.

And here is the section I was most looking forward to, the section on beekeeping supplies.  They sold Langstroth hives, smokers, bee brushes, hats and veils.  It's a great place to buy supplies in a pinch.  I picked up 2 entrance feeders, and a hat and 2 veils.

I'll definitely be coming back to the store since gardening season is in full swing.  There were lots of other supplies I saw that I wanted to buy.  It's a gardener's candy store.  I spoke with one of the owners while I was there and she said that the store is going to be seasonal, opened only from April - June.  I begged them to stay open throughout the summer, through to August.  I've always thought that New York City needed a local source of farm supplies.  And Hayseed is absolutely perfect and super convenient for us city folks.  I am telling everyone I know to go and support this new local store.  As this urban farming community continues to grow, we NEED businesses like this.  If you're in the NY City area, come out to Greenpoint, Brooklyn and support them!  They also offer classes, events and workshops, see their calendar of upcoming ones.  I definitely see a few I'd like to attend.  Go to the store, I promise, you'll love it!

Building Langstroth Beehives in a Queens Apartment

Two weeks ago, I had my last beekeeping class, and on the last day of class, our teacher told us about a woman in Fort Greene, Brooklyn that wanted to host a beehive on her rooftop of her house.  I didn't have a location yet for a beehive so I jumped at this opportunity.  After completing the beekeeping class, I was so inspired that I really wanted to have beehives this year, so this was a chance I couldn't pass up.   To have hives this season will be just awesome.  I found out that 3 of my fellow classmates were also interested in the same space, so instead of the four of us fighting for the same spot, we decided to partner up together to do a joint beekeeping adventure.  This was actually a perfect scenario for us because we could work together to create a successful hive!  Since this was my first time to ever have beehives, I didn't want to through the whole process by myself.  It is a lot of work and to be able to share in the start up costs and the bee maintenance will be amazing.  So it's great that I am partnering up with 3 other fellow enthusiastic students to go through this beekeeping learning process together.  We ARE so excited.  The following two weeks was a whirlwind of activity.  We had to order beehives, bees, beekeeping suits, equipment and oh yeah, meet our new host.  Every day for two weeks straight involved some type of beekeeping preparation.  A whole week went to building the beehives and installing them.  Paul, the only guy in our group, picked up the beehive kits that we ordered from our beekeeping teacher.  The hive kits we bought come unassembled so our job was to build them.  We learned how to build the hivekits in our last class.

I have to say that putting the hives together for the first time took a lot longer than we had anticipated.  It looked so much easier in class.  Hahahaha. 

Paul was such a rockstar with building the hives.  He's been working on the boxes every day in his Astoria, Queens apartment before work for 5 days straight.  Poor guy.  I came to help him finish building out the boxes.  Together, we got all the deep and shallow boxes built! Aren't they so pretty?  They smell like fresh cut wood too!

Paul also built all the frames.  There are 10 frames per box in this kit, so there are 60 frames to build in total.  That's a whole lotta frames!

We decided to paint the beehives white, a very traditional beehive color. Painting the hives helps protect the pine wood from the weather.

Here are all the hive boxes painted white.  Unfortunately, this is a badly lit photo.

When I left Paul's apartment, I noticed that there was a giant billboard with a bee on it at the subway station.  It was like a sign from the gods that we were doing the right thing!

The day after we finished building the hives, we installed them into their permanent locations in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.  One beehive went on a rooftop.  After we met our first bee host, she told us about a friend of hers that also wanted a beehive.  So the four of us decided to do two hives this year. 

The other one went into this gorgeous backyard space.  The beehive will go into this spot.  The bees will love it since there are lots of blooms to forage for right in their own space!

This bee host was concerned about her dog getting too close to the hive so we decided to put in some fencing and a trellis.

Doesn't the hive just look amazing?  I love the color too!

Here is Paul installing the fencing.

All set up and ready for bees!