In late winter, when you have a warm day, say 44-50 F, its a great opportunity to quickly check your honeybees and beehive. In this beginning beekeeping video, we show how we open the hive and place some fondant and a grease patty in the hive to get the bees through the last bit of winter.( fondant and grease patty recipes below video )

Your honeybees may or may not have enough food stores to make it thru this last part of winter, but I am of the mind that it pays to put in some fondant. Other beekeepers will have differing opinions on this and many other practices related to beekeeping. It is too cold to feed your honeybees sugar syrup in late winter, feed them fondant.

We have produced this series of Beginning Beekeeping Videos to document our first years of beekeeping to show people how fun it really is and to demystify it, and to spread the word on raising honey bees. We are not beekeeping experts, we are still learning. Tell us your experiences below and we can all learn more.

Bee fondant and Grease Patty recipes are based on information from WVBeekeeper’s Blog and the BeeSource forums . Cass Cohenour, author of WVBeekeeper Blog has a great list of bee supplement recipes on his blog, a big thank you to Cass for his writings.

Fondant from WVBeekeeper:

Fondant Bee Candy

Fondant bee candy can be fed directly to the bees once cooled. Fondant is a good food source for mini-mating nucs because there is no drowning involved when you have a small amount of bees. It is also common to use this recipe in small quantities to plug the hole on a Queen Cage.

> 4 parts (by volume) white sugar
> 4 parts (by volume) 2:1 Syrup or HFCS
> 3 parts (by volume) water

Boil water and slowly add the syrup and sugar until dissolved. Continue heating until the mixture reaches 238°F (114°C). Without mixing allow the solution to cool until it is slightly warm to the touch. Then begin to mix and aerate the solution. As you do this the color should lighten. Pour into shallow dishes or mold and save for later use. I prefer to make the fondant thin enough to where I can work it into an empty frame of drawn comb.

Grease Patties:

I made my own based on reading thru the Bee Source forums and WVBeekeepers blog.

2 cups vegetable shortening  – NOT butter or other flavored shortening

4 cups white sugar

10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil

1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.

mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.

you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.

I am famous for this kind of thing. Its always when I hear the clunk of some foreign object bouncing around the clothes dryer that I realize I’ve done something un-smart.

This time I discovered the problem early. I learned I had put my two best largest USB Flash Thumb drives in the washing machine when I was emptying the washer.

I was not pleased. One of the drives is a 16 gig flash drive that I use to transport GF video files around. And there might be a bunch of photos from our Canon EOS Rebel that don’t exist anywhere else on that drive.

After getting over the initial ‘Doh!’ moment, I remembered a NY Times article on what do to for electronic gadget emergencies. The article suggested putting the flash drives in a bowl and covering them with rice. ( I can’t find the article online right now, so no link )

So I did this. I used brown rice, as that’s what we had in the cabinet. Don’t cook and/or eat this rice afterward.

Rice will absorb water out of electronic devices

I let it sit for a few days, and then plugged the drives into a laptop.

They both turned on.  wow.

Every once in a while the wind tilts in your direction.

Have any Doh! stories of your own? tell us here:

Why do we like to wander around hardware stores? Find the answer to this and life’s questions on this week’s Gardenfork Radio. Today Eric and Mike talk about windmills, bees, home water damage, and snow. And more stuff. You just have to listen.

A very simple how to on calibrating your TV:
http://www.flat-screen-tv-guide.com/how-to.html

A much more detailed one:
http://www.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/lcdtv/lcd-tv-calibration.html

I’m pretty sure this is the wind farm we drove through.  I don’t know if I said this, but the red lights on top of the wind turbines flashed in unison.  It’s a really amazing thing to see at night:
http://www.earlparkindiana.com/windfarm.html
This is a short video explaining computer virtualization.  It’s a little commercial but it’s the simplest explanation I’ve seen of virtualization:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html –>  Click “Watch Demo”

Harold McGee’s NY Times Article: Better Bread with less kneading

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/dining/24curious.html

what do you think? let us know below:

Grilled Salmon done with Fireplace Cooking, neat. Fireplace cooking means you don’t have to fire up the stove and your house doesn’t smell like fish or steak the next day. Watch as we grill salmon steaks with this simple recipe .

Do you cook in your fireplace? Please come tell us about it below!

Fireplace Grilled Salmon Steak Recipe:

4 Salmon Steaks, as fresh as possible

Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper

Start a fire in the fireplace a few hours before cooking, allow the wood to break down into coals, kinda like charcoal.

Place your cooking grill over the coals in the fireplace – be careful doing this.

Allow the grill to heat up and clean the grill with half an onion rubbed over the grill.

Drizzle olive oil and then salt and pepper to each side of the steaks.

Place the steaks on the hot grill, and let each side cook about 5 minutes. This time may vary depending on how hot the coals are.

Flip the fish, and check in a few minutes for done-ness.  The flesh will flake easily when its done. Ideally you will take the fish off the grill just before the desired done-ness.

Please let us know your fireplace cooking recipes here:

Yum, Yum, Yum!

Eric had posted a while back about how using the library is green and it reminded me to renew my library card. I love my Forest Park Library.  It’s rather small, especially against our neighbor’s Oak Park Library which is just beautiful. I can order books or DVDs online and they are delivered to the library. It close, convenient, and makes a nice dog walk route.

Seventh Generation, the company that makes all sorts of eco-smart and recycled products for your home, asked me if I’d like a box of their products to check out.

We already use Seventh Generation products, so why not say yes to some free stuff?

Charlie likes to eat paper towels and tissues.

Seventh Generation is rolling out  new natural disinfecting wipes, and as part of their goal to get the word out about these wipes, they sent some to me.

It had not occurred to me to think about what might be in regular disinfecting wipes. I still don’t know exactly. But knowing this company, their wipes don’t have mystery chemicals in them.

Seventh Generation's new disinfecting wipes

What I like about Seventh Generation is that their products work and make sense. I think I first bought a roll of their paper towels, and what got me to buy them was some of the info on the wrapper, such as:

The natural color of these paper towels comes from the mix of colors in cardboard, office waste, and other paper materials recycled into this product. These materials often end up in landfills because there is insufficient demand for them. By reusing them in our products, we put them to work, not in the ground, and we help ‘close the loop’ to encourage more recycling less waste….

I wouldn’t use these, or write about Seventh Generation here, if I didn’t like their stuff.

The company also sent me a copy of Naturally Clean, The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe & Healthy Non-Toxic Cleaning. The book is chock full of footnoted information. I learned some things I was not aware of about my dishwasher:

…Researchers at the EPA and the University of Texas recently documented the dishwasher’s role as a leading cause of indoor air pollution. Pollutants released by  dishwashers, include chorline .. chloroform.. radon .. and other volatile contaminants… When these materials are exposed to the piping hot water that circulates through your dishwasher as it cleans, they are easily ’stripped out’ and evaporated into the air.

OK. Did not know or think about all that last time I turned on my dishwasher.

This book is full of info like this. Its almost too much. The modern home has lots of stuff in it that is not great for us to breathe or absorb. Makes me want to go live in a yurt. But the  book does give you pause about the sorts of materials we have in our home, and what they might be doing to us.

What I like about the book are all the footnotes, most ‘green living’ books don’t cite sources.

One of our Real World Green shows talks about recycled toilet paper, and it features me juggling toilet paper. Check out the video and tell us what you think below.