Bees!

Today was a wonderfully hot, sunny day. We appreciated not only because it provided a welcome break from all the rain, but because it was a perfect opportunity to finally check up on our bees.

Jon volunteered to don the bee suit, meaning he was the one to do all the close up work. Bonita yelled instructions to him from a safe distance, and I took pictures.

Jon started by smoking the bees. By gently blowing a bit of smoke around the entrance and

over the top of the hive, we trick the bees into thinking that the forest is on fire: they quickly get to work eating honey, so that they can move their food to a new, fire-less area. This means that they are too busy to notice a beekeeper poking around the hive. By reapplying smoke every few minutes, we can keep the already gentle bees occupied and make the whole process as easy as pie!

Since we got them in late May, our Italian breed, extra-gentle bees have been busily working at filling up their new home with honey and brood. Now that it is well into summer our hive needs room to expand! It was time to add the "super" to our hive, a box of honeycomb trays that sits on top of the hive and stores honey for human consumption. Because of a nifty "queen excluder" screen that fits between the super and the rest of the hive, the worker bees can fill the super with honey, but the queen (who is larger than worker bees) can't lay her eggs there.

The expedition into hive territory went off without a hitch. Soon (I hope) we'll be able to taste the fruits of our labors!

With warm weather comes wonderful Wows

So far the rain has been significantly less in July compared to June. We are still getting rain often but not continuos day after day. With just the right amount of rain and the warm sunny July days things in our garden are really stating to pop! A few days ago Bonita came back into the house, from her morning check-up walk, with a small collection of our first non-leafy veggies and the announcement that I had better go collect our newly ripe strawberries before the birds or some little bug gets them. She came in with a radish and cucumber, the tiniest broccoli I have ever seen a pepper and a fava bean. Catie cooked up a quick and delicious medley of our new veggies with noodles and lemon thyme so that we could then make our way to Waterville where the Maine international film festival was occurring.

With the warm weather a few new fauna have arrived. The most surprising of which was discovered one night as Catie and I were cooking dinner. We heard the frantic thumping of cat feet then followed by some squeaking. Our assassin cat, Chicken, the one in the earlier picture, had managed to injure a little brown bat so that it could not fly away and was tossing it around the barn as squeaked. The bat was able to avoid chicken enough that we could step in with a pair of gloves and intervene. There are a lot of biting bugs around that we need that bat to eat! We carried the bat up to the cupola in the barn so that he might have a cat free place to rest and heal.

A Maine Birthday

Jon's birthday was 7 July. Coincidentally, his friend Eric planned a going-away dinner for the same day (he joined the Europa a few days later for the long trip to Antarctica). We decided to make it Jon's birthday dinner as well! The one hour drive to his house took us twice as long, but the dinner was well worth it. The captain and several other crew members of the Harvey Gamage were there, along with other friends.

We brought an appetizer of crostini made with Jon's homemade sourdough bread, thinly sliced and toasted with a thin spread of garlic/basil/olive oil emulsion (the genovese basil was from the garden), and a goat cheese spread to top it.

For dinner, we ate a curry of vegetables, Maine mussel, and hake (a very Maine-y fish), rice, and spring rolls filled with fresh veggies from Beth's Farm topped with a homemade peanut sauce, all made by Eric and Christine.

Our first dessert of the night was made by Captain Flansburg and his friends: strawberry shortcake. The strawberries were fresh from the garden, and the cream was whipped about 3 minutes before we sat down to eat it. The whole event was delicious!

When we finally got home around midnight, I pulled our second dessert out of the fridge: a New York Cheesecake I had made the day before for Jon's birthday and hidden in our neighbor's kitchen. Although it was late, and we were stuffed, we each had a small slice while Jon opened his presents and birthday cards.

If I do say so myself, it was a fun and delicious birthday!

Wet Weather

We've had a very rainy month here in Maine, which hasn't helped our garden at all (you can hear and read all about the problems rain causes here, and then learn about the late blight that

has appeared recently--a result of all the wet weather).

The weather has allowed Jon and I to explore our new home a bit more. Recently, we made our way down to Rockland to visit the Farnsworth Art Museum, which features a variety of Maine-centric 2- and 3-D art. Afterwards, we stopped in at Atlantic Baking Company for some sweet treats and coffee from Selva Negra, a coffee plantation I visited a few years ago!

We've also spent a few sunny-ish days outdoors. On another trip into Rockland, we spent the afternoon sailing with Jon's friends Christine and Eric. We saw a Bald Eagle, a porpoise, and many seals!

A few weeks ago we hiked through a good chunk

of Camden Hills State Park. The view from the top of Mount Battie was amazing.

More recently, we hiked through a section of the Georges River Land Trust, a large area of protected land that runs very close to our house. Part of the Georges River, in fact, runs through our backyard. We canoed down a section of the river recently. The river was wide and high, making it easy to pass through the rapids--the one good result of all this rain!