kolrhabi-this is the first year that we have had them in the garden. both the bulb and the greens are tasty!
brussel sprouts-they come out in the space where the leaf meets the stalk. hopefully we will have some for thanksgiving.
things are a bit quiet in the bee yard. the girls are gearing up for winter and not much is going on.
and then we opened the lid and saw just why it is so quiet outside. the girls have been busy building comb all over the place!!!
and one of darry cleaning it...he is fully dressed this time, last time he was stung twice
darry set all of the comb he scraped off to the side to let the girls reclaim the honey. two days later, they had stripped that comb of every bit of honey-only the comb was left.
bees need to be treated preventively for things like mites. we placed some medication in the hive-it is mainly menthol and it smells like vapor rub. we will go back in to remove it in a week. 
kale from long hungry creek farm-home of the barefoot gardener, jeff poppen
over in the raised tomato garden, things are sprouting. in the half at the bottom it is all salad greens. in the top half it is all asian greens like pak choi and japanese mustard.
remember last year when darry went shiitake crazy? we had some rain recently and he discovered that his logs fruited! 
the scourge of the tomato garden-horn worms!!! there is one that is covered in parasitic wasp eggs and he will soon die and in front of it is a young one. he didn't last long after the photo shoot-we squashed him before he could do any damage.
we found two of them and here is the second one waiting to die as well.
darry looking at the frames, they were getting agitated and he was stung on the arms, twice
cleaning up the mess. the girls will build comb all over if you let them. darry scraped some off to keep it manageable.
all of the frames in the top box are full and capped, we really need to add more frames!
this was one of the frames in the top box. when they draw out the comb, they generally start in the center of the box and work out to the sides. if the frames on the outside are full-as this one is, it is time to add a new box. don't know what you see here? in the top corners of the frame, the whitish cells are capped honey. the dark open cells are most likely pollen-their only source of protein. the yellow capped cells are brood-the next generation of workers(females). if there were some larger, bullet shaped cells, they would be drones-males, but i do not see any on this frame.
in order to get them started, we took one frame from the full box and replaced it with an empty frame from the new box and then put that full frame into the center of the new box. we then placed the new box on the top of the hive. here you see the girls, orienting themselves on the full frame in the new box. that big black stripe in the frame is a beetle blaster. we are lucky to say that our hive beetle population is under control. we do have them but not so many that we are in danger of losing our hive. we have a friend who lost her hive to the beetles last week.
here's a look at what is blooming in our garden right now. these are annual dahlias
