May 31, 2013

Elliott Crawling and Standing

Videos of Elliott. He is doing great. I think he is resting this week after hitting a bunch of milestones. His language skills seem to have taken a jump. He waves at people now, and there is the crawling and standing. Videos below. 



May 26, 2013

Bee Confusion

I went out to check the hives this weekend and it seems like the queen of the purple hive has split. I deduced this because there were at lest six queen cells in the hive and no new baby bee larva. There was also no new babies in the hive splits, however it has been raining for a week, so if a queen did hatch she would not have been able to do her mating flight. To be fair I did not do thorough hive inspections (and am feeling like I really should have now) but this is how things seem to be.


  • Brown hive (Ponyo) Looks good. This is the most active colony and appears to be fine.
  • Grey hive (Mercury) was a hive split from the purple hive two weeks ago. It seemed to be doing well, but now I am not so sure. I thought a new queen would be laying by now... but it has been raining.
  • Purple Hive (Sally) was created from a captured swarm from the green hive last year. Now there is no queen, but there are queen cells. Things should work out in this hive if a new queen survives her mating flight.
  • Green hive (Soskai) I kept waiting for the last few bees of this queenless colony to die off. It has been about two months now and still some workers are lingering. So I took one frame with two queen cells  (from purple hive) and put it in the hive.  After doing this Ilana told me she was doing some reading and it was a mistake... I'll check next week and see.
  • Yellow hive (no name) I made a hive split from the brown hive last week with two frames of brood. I did not see queen cells this week so I am a little worried.




May 19, 2013

Printmaking

Alden and I did some printmaking this weekend. 
On Saturday Karen offered to open the press and teach us some techniques.
Alden and I went to the store and got a doughnut and then met up with Karen at 8am. I figure it is important to have ritual with this and the doughnut will be a key part.
Alden worked for about 45 minutes and then became distracted. I worked until 10, when Karen had a meeting. It was a nice morning. I hope we can do it again soon.

May 15, 2013

Close to Crawling

Elliott is about a week away from crawling, tops. He can sit up from a laying down position and get to all fours. He has not quite figured out the fine mechanics of motion from there, but he works on it with enthusiasm. 
Milestones seem to be accumulating rapidly. It looks like he is getting a second tooth (next to the first). he can grab food and put it in his mouth. He is eating just about any food of breakfast cereal consistency or softer. We celebrated his inside-out party the other day (9 months in the world celebration) and found out he is as tall as Alden was at 1 year. He is also very conversational and can identify Dada and Mama an Ahda (Alden). 

May 8, 2013

Splitsville for the Bees

Upon another inspection this week I noticed the green hive was missing the queen and it seemed like over half the bees that overwintered were missing. I am not sure what happened, perhaps colony collapse or maybe something just happened to the queen. It also seems like the queen had not started laying eggs yet, so the poor workers could not make a new queen.

This means that we are two colonies short from our desired number of four and this has helped me decide to do a hive split. A hive split is where you taks some frames (say 3) from a healthy hive and put them in am empty hive. You make sure the frames have eggs or young larva on them. The workers on the moved frames will realize that the new hive has no queen and will raise some of the larva to be the queen. Then we have a new hive. I will know in two weeks if it is a success.

May 3, 2013

New Tooth

We discovered Elliott's first tooth at the Friday Gardiner Artwalk. It is just a bump on his bottom gum, but it should break through any day.
The tooth comes just in time because we just started feeding him puffed fruit and cereal. We've been trying to get him to feed himself. No luck yet. The best he can do is hold the food in his left hand and suck his thumb while the food slowly melts in his fist.
If you look closely in the  pictures you may be able to see the tooth-bump.