Blue Ribbon

     Before you look at this first picture, I must admit that this is not our pumpkin. Although we did have high hopes of growing our own larger than life, blue ribbon State Fair pumpkin, the squash bugs got word of our plan and devoured our largest one.

     Since taking MB and EC to the NC State Fair last year it has been a goal of ours to enter something of our growing in one of the fields. With all the interest in our CSA and the work involved, we temporarily lost sight of this vision. That is until yesterday!  We were working on cleaning up one of our undisturbed compost piles that had been overflowing with the healthiest sweet potato vine all summer long. Oh, had the fair just been one month later, we certainly would have entered this............

    Look closely and you'll see that scale reads 6 lbs. 5.2 oz.  Our average sweet potato this year weighed about 5 oz.

WHOA!!!

And to top that off, we dug a sssssssnakey sweet potato:

   There is truly nothing that compares to waiting all summer to dig up a harvest you've worked all summer to grow.  I'll take the squeals of two happy children over winning a blue ribbon any day!

The Joy of Beekeeping

I have to admit, I would have never imagined there "bee"ing any joy in keeping bees. Was I ever so wrong! These busy little creatures are amazing to watch and are much more intelligent than I would have ever given them credit. 

Did you know that the one and only queen bee in the hive lays every egg, up to 1,500 a day, and is attended to and fed by other female bees while she works. Actually, the majority of the bees in a hive are female, worker bees, that work day and night to protect, defend, and build up their hive.  We think a lot of our girls (and the few boys) and will work just as hard to keep them from being harmed.

Having said this we have just discovered small hive beetles in our hive. These little black beetles made it to the US from South Africa in the late 90's and have made their way to NC quickly. We are lucky to have a very strong, healthy first-year hive that is doing great in fighting off an infestation of this pest. However, we don't want to take any chance that their winter honey storages could be ruined because of them.

There are lots of ways to control the small hive beetle population and MB and I got a great lesson in those at our local bee supply store this week. We opted for small traps that slip between the frames in the hive, which are filled with a mixture of olive oil and apple cider vinegar. The hope is that the beetles will be attracted to the liquid bait and when near enough, the honeybees will chase them down into the trap. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we'll observe its effectiveness when we go in the hive this week.

MB holding up the filled trap, ready to go in and aid our hard working honeybees.