Taro & Ti Home

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted about my little bucket-lo’i project. I have several 25 gallon molasses tubs re-purposed to be used as pots to grow my taro in. Since these particular taro plants prefer semi-aquatic conditions, I opted to not drill a drain hole in these tubs and to flood [...]

It seems that every week popular opinion vacillates between coffee being healthy ambrosia and coffee being toxic waste. This week, it seems, coffee has been given a nod for it’s health benefits so we all can drink our cuppa with assurance of good health. Until next week, of course, when we will be required to [...]

For the last couple of years I’ve kept taro in the greenhouse in large molasses tubs filled with water. The taro themselves grew in smaller buckets of topsoil submerged in these tubs, which I have dubbed bucket-lo’i. Of all my taro, these taro grew the best and produced the largest corms and healthiest leaves. The [...]

A poi pounder is a stone shaped somewhat like a half an hour-glass with a rounded bottom. It’s usually carved out of a gray lava with tight pores. In those days, these stones were pecked at with a hammer stone to shape it – a process that took many many patient hours. Once the shape [...]

The hardest part of planting boo is thinking years ahead. After all, bamboo is a long term commitment. Once planted and established, it’ll take a bulldozer to get rid of it, so one has to be absolutely certain that it’s planted exactly where one wants it to be planted, and planted in an area where [...]

Not long ago I was presented with an opportunity to gather some bees. As usual, until you go look at it, you have to form a picture in your head with the questions you ask and the answers you get. My wife’s friends mother called about bees in her roof – way up at the [...]

Up until I got bees, flowers were just pretty colorful things growing on the weeds in my back yard. And until I got bees, I had no idea just how many flowers I had growing back there – and how many there are. There are just a ton of them back there. Always could be [...]

I had a bee cutout this Saturday to do. Last week I built a bee vacuum, sure it was going to cut my cutouts from four hours to two hours. Yep. Just suck all them bees up then cut and mount the comb at my leisure then pour the bees in when done. That was [...]

My first swarm of the year hasn’t done a whole lot just yet. But then, the nectar hasn’t really kicked in yet. My other hives are also pretty dry too – they’re certainly ready for the flowers to kick in. Currently we have bluebonnets in bloom and have had a few trees in bloom this [...]

I have always pictured a swarm as a bunch of bees and the old queen leaving the old hive, hanging out on a tree and then deciding on a new home – in just a few hours, if that. I’ve never heard of a swarm that would hang out overnight. But today’s swarm changed all [...]

I got a call this weekend, earlier than expected. A friend had a yard full of flying bees and there was a mass of bees landing on one of his little Crepe Myrtle trees. My first swarm this year. I admit – I was a bit unprepared. But it didn’t take long to fix that [...]

Saturday began like any other day – getting up and realizing that I’m running late.  I rushed to my job to set up some equipment at a convention and while there conducting the work I was to do, I bumped into a fellow beekeeper. In these parts that’s a pretty good thing – there are [...]

As with any plan, things change. This season I was distracted by bee opportunities and had to shuffle my deck to do a couple of emergency (as in they would be exterminated otherwise) cutouts, which meant building hives and planning my apiary. I have 6 hives being assembled to expand that little apiary and the [...]

There’s always an occasion where you take a hive and split it. You take half of the hive and put it in another box, and the one without the queen will make a new queen from the open-brood left over. This mimics the natural way of hive multiplication, that colonies do in nature – swarming. [...]

I started a couple of in-ground taro beds early last Spring. The idea was to see if I could keep taro alive thru our harsh environment. I’ve had other beds fail but that was during a multi-year drought. One is dug in about 9″ deep and is positioned in a way that drainage water that [...]

A while back a co-worker notified me of a lightning damaged tree that had bees in it. The city had tried to remove the tree by pulling it over, and the top split off down the side, exposing the hive. Needless to say, they scooted out of there pronto. I’m sure they were planning on [...]

Putting together frames is actually a pretty simple thing, but if you’re doing a lot of them, it helps to have a jig of sorts. There’s a great design for a frame jig over at BeeSource.com but I had a cutout very soon, not a lot of fancy wood-working tools and just some scrap wood to [...]

As you have no doubt gathered, from reading my previous posts, a cutout is the act of cutting a hive out of a cavity where it is not wanted. Such as, out of a wall or a tree. I’ve yet to do a tree and may not do trees tho I will be putting out [...]

Most of the routine work involved with bee-keeping seems to be inspecting. Going out periodically and giving the combs a good gander. Is the queen laying? Is the laying pattern consistent? Are there queen cells? Drone cells? Are there honey and pollen being stored. Are there any bees with malformed wings – an indicator of [...]

Since the cutout, I left the bees pretty much alone. It’s been a week and they’ve been busy foraging. It’s strange to conceptualize the thousands of bees inside that box and only see a few bees coming and going as they forage. I’m not seeing a lot of pollen coming in – perhaps they bring [...]