In my past garden experiments, I've dealt with rabbits that love to strip small plants of their leaves, racoons that love to eat tomatoes and the occasional hot pepper and chipmunks that have extrasensory knowledge of exactly where I planted my squash seeds.
But this year, at my new location, I'm dealing with a whole new animal -- groundhogs. These pudgy, furry creatures otherwise known as woodchucks have become my new foe. Interestingly, the answer to the tongue twister "how much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?", is none. They actually aren't very interested in wood and are more interested in eating my garden and digging an impressive network of tunnels all around my yard.
Secret woodchuck hole in day lily patch
However, one morning I did see a young groundhog scurry out of the day lily patch behind the garden and climb right up a tree. Yes, it climbed up a tree. When I asked it what it was doing it promptly scurried back down the branch and back into the foliage, where it has a secret tunnel.
What started out as two groundhogs multiplied so we've had the pleasure of watching a whole herd of them grazing the clover in the field next to my yard. If all they ate was the clover, I'd have no problem with them. But they've become very good at shaving my kale, beets, broccoli, peppers, lettuce down to stubs. And chicken fencing hasn't stopped them. They climb right over.
So my wife and I have taken it upon ourselves to explore various ways of deterring these pesky pests.
Here are some of the solutions we've been working on to keep our gardens safe from our buck-toothed enemies:
Deer fencing
Live traps
Pest deterrent spray
Wrist rocket (Haven't gotten to that point yet)
Some other "methods" that my farmer friends have said work phenomenally but are probably not palatable to most audiences
Deer fencing was attached to our original chicken wire
Another method that seems to have worked with some success is shouting at them and being physically intimidating (that was actually a recommendation on a website I saw). I threw a chunk of soil at one while it was in my garden and it quickly climbed out and started for one of its holes. I threw another rock at it on its way back to its hole.
The rock hit the ground about a foot behind it and scared the thing so much that it literally flipped over on its back and let out a loud squeak.
This woodchuck ate that whole apple in about 30 seconds
For about a week after that encounter there was no sign of them in the garden. Then we noticed some more nibbled plants. So we set up the deer fencing.
That seemed to work fairly well except one morning as I was leaving for work I noticed a groundhog frantically trying to get out of the garden.
It seems it found a way under the deer fencing, but couldn't get out. I lowered the live trap into the garden and stood outside the fence, using a large stick I found to battle it into the trap.
After a prolonged struggle where it lunged at the stick and clicked its teeth together I was able to push it into the live trap without any injuries to it or me.
Unfortunately, it escaped the trap as I accidentally lifted the trap by the wrong handle and it opened the gate.e. But later that day, the trap actually caught one and I let it go at a nearby natural area.
Since then, I've caught four more of them including one large adult. Twice they've gotten themselves into the deer-fenced area where they can't get out on their own, which actually works in my favor. I've released all of them at the same location so hopefully they will re-unite as one big happy buck-toothed family.
Yet there are still at least two more in the yard. One huge adult and a young one. Since they have a network of tunnels, I'm going to put the live trap in various locations to catch the sneaky varmints.
My suggestion is: if you garden and discover that you are sharing your space with groundhogs, get deer fencing and a live trap and get them off of your property before they multiply!
A couple weeks ago, after our bees swarmed, we checked the hive to see how the bees were progressing with making honeycomb and honey. More importantly, we wanted to see if there was any brood, the eggs, larvae and pupae, which would indicate that there was a new queen present after the swarm left with the original queen.
At the time, we removed all of the frames one by one, and saw lots of honey-making activity, but no brood.
This was a concern to us because without brood, there may be no queen. Without a queen, bees will still make honey, but they will not overwinter. That means that we'd have to start with a new colony next spring.
Not a huge deal, but we thought it would be nice to go through the winter and be able to start with our original hive. Plus it would be a good educational experience to see the life-cycle of the bees from start to finish.
When we checked the hive, we also added two new honey supers, the stacked wooden boxes that comprise the area where bees will make honey that we can harvest. We did this to give them more room to do their work and to prevent another swarm. Our hope was that there was in fact a queen and that she just hadn't gotten around to laying eggs yet in the honey-comb cells, and that the worker bees would ascend into the new supers and make honey that we could harvest this summer.
Capped worker brood in the middle
On Sunday, we checked the hive again from top to bottom. The top super had a few bees in it but no new comb. The middle super had a ton of activity in it, new honey and what we thought were brood cells, which are normally capped over with beeswax when they contain worker brood that have developed into mature larvae on their way to becoming pupae. A very good sign!
In the bottom part of the hive, or the hive body, we found even more activity, and more capped brood.
Then I noticed some whitish looking objects in some of the clear honeycomb cells. Looking closely, I saw what was for sure larvae! The larvae are c-shaped in the cells and eat a mixture of royal jelly, nectar and pollen.
It was an amazing to see the brood cells for the first time and to learn a little bit more about bees and their life cycle. We are looking forward to our first honey harvest in hopefully about a month!
Saturday morning, Heidi and I went for our usual morning walk around the yard, to enjoy the fresh air and check on our gardens and bees. We almost decided against the walk as it was getting to be close to 9 am and we were planning on going to church that morning at 9:15. But I felt like we shouldn't break with tradition and forgo the walk. Little did we know, that our decision to take the walk that morning would turn into quite a learning experience.
As we approached a certain tree with a low hanging branch that always ends up in Heidi's face -- which we had already broken off once to prevent an eye injury -- Heidi glanced up at it as if to say "I'd like to break it off higher". Instead, she exclaimed with a pitch of surprise "Our bees!"
Looking up in amazement, I saw what she was talking about. Our bees were swarming, and had clustered around the branch in a tight, glowing, golden orb about the size of a melon. I was struck with both awe and the urgent sense that something needed to be done immediately. Once bees swarm, they will only remain clustered together like that for a short time before finding a new hive to live in.
Bees usually swarm when their hive has become overpopulated. It is their way of multiplying and creating a new colony. Essentially, some of the worker bees decide that the hive has become too crowded and emit pheromones telling the queen that she needs to produce another queen. Once another queen egg has hatched, the workers then chase the original queen out of the hive.
She proceeds to find a branch somewhere nearby to land on. Then about 20-60% of the colony follows her, and clusters around her in a formation like the one we found. From their, the most experienced of the worker bees go out as scouts to find a suitable location for a new hive. Once a location has been established and agreed upon, the entire cluster of swarming bees leaves together at once to their new home.
We wanted to gather up the bees before that happened. First, we were glad that they had swarmed to a branch on our property and not on a neighbor's. But we didn't want them leaving and creating a new hive in a neighbor's yard either. So we had to act quickly.
Our plans to go to church that morning were quickly set aside because the bees usually only cluster on a branch for a few hours before taking off again as quickly as they appeared on the branch. I called my friend and beekeeping mentor, Robert Pierce. He has kept bees for years and has dealt with swarming before. Thankfully he answered his phone and after a hearty laugh, said he'd be over shortly. After about an hour, he showed up with his beekeepers suit and a Styrofoam minnow box with holes in the lid. The video below shows some of the process of getting the bees off the branch and into the bucket, so they could be moved to a new hive of our choosing and not into a neighbor's yard. Of course, they could reject our choice altogether, but at least we would try.
The good thing is, when bees are swarming, they are very docile as they have no hive to protect -- and also because they are all full of honey they gorged to keep them going on their journey. So approaching them and handling them is very easy.
The whole process took about 30 minutes of shaking the bees off the branch, into the box. Since not all of the bees would land in the box, many would start flying all around and eventually settle on the branch again, because the queen's pheromones were on it. So we'd repeat the process until nearly all the bees were in the box.
After we had them in there, we went to my original hive to check on it. Thankfully, it was full happy bees, and full of wax and comb. We should have expanded the hive a couple weeks ago, and this likely would have prevented the swarm from occurring in the first place. But, it was still a pretty neat learning adventure. And, due to some unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to procure the supers (the smaller boxes where honey production occurs) needed to expand the hive. But now, we have to act quickly to get those together to prevent a second hive division.
One of the things that impresses me about bees so much is their single-minded devotion to the colony, and to their queen. They literally act as an organism and truly a single bee could not survive on it's own. In the book of Acts in the Bible, the early followers of Jesus after his resurrection truly shared all they had in common and lived as a unit, doing what was best for the community of believers. Because of their shared devotion to Christ and to one another, they were able to get amazing things accomplished, such as spreading the message around the entire Roman empire and beyond in a short time. In various places in the New Testament, this community of faith is called the Body of Christ, where each member is a vital piece to the whole. Is it not time to start praying how to get back to that pure, unadulterated Christianity?
It appears that the world has tried to emulate this in the various forms of government. While good in their intentions, it seems to me that all of these fall short of the ideals of the believers recorded in the Book of Acts in that they are not voluntary systems as was the early Christian community, and that they have sinful people - not Christ the governor -- as their rallying point. Most of these forms of government have - in many cases - worked hard to take God out of the picture, and do not retain the essential values of self-governance and of the personal putting away of evil ways.
No human government will ever be able to emulate what was experienced by those followers of Jesus or what can be experienced by his followers today or in times to come. True unity, true solidarity can only be found in Christ. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, wrote that one day we would all "come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Ephesians 4:13.
And I'm not talking about the politicized Christ that is used these days by so many for people's selfish ambitions. I'm talking about the Christ that said others would recognize his disciples by the love they had for one another.
However, it is nonetheless true that when people make sacrifices for the survival and health for the rest of a community whether local or global, and put aside the self-centered ways that our current society seems to promote, amazing things can and do happen. I believe we all have a lot to learn from the bees about sacrifice, about putting others first, about working together to get things accomplished, about laying our lives on the line for something greater than ourselves. These bees literally will work themselves to death to keep the colony going. And in the circumstance where the hive needs to be defended against a predator, a bee will sting the enemy, and lose its own life. Only the queen can sting multiple times and survive.
I'm thankful that Heidi and I decided to take our morning walk and found the swarming cluster of bees. That swarm preached a sermon to us that clearly illustrated much needed principles for today's world, especially for followers of Jesus. A sermon about true solidarity, true unity and singleness of purpose. The Bible tells us that there is a day coming when God will be "all in all". Perhaps then, when all have submitted our lives under Christ, we will look back at the lessons in the bees and see that God had been trying to teach us something through his creation all along.
