Monthly Archives: October 2008

Products of the hive make bees into artists

The gentle art of beekeeping has been turned into a new art medium by these two artists. I’d love to try making a sculpture like these, but as Kimberley pointed out, the artists  have to sacrifice a lot of brood to accomplish their very interesting work. New York magazine has a cool slideshow of artist Hilary Berseth’s hive-built sculptures  and [...]

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Beer making, slowly, but surely

It’s official. Team Beer has been the most been delinquent of the One-Block teams, but we’re finally beginning to make some progress after some serious procrastination. In the time since we last posted, we have all done our fair share of (ahem) field research, of course. I conducted mine in Germany over the summer (Dunkelweizen is officially my new favorite [...]

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Our chickens are molting, and they look ridiculous

With cooler weather and longer nights, our birds’ bodies have decided that it’s time to surrender their feathers and grow new ones. Molting. Most chickens molt once a year, usually during the fall or winter. That means that they redirect their energies from making eggs to making feathers. The Ameracaunas were the first to start losing their feathers. Luckily, I’d [...]

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Living the secret life of bees at Sunset

Our girls are busy this beautiful October week of Indian summer. They’re working the wild blooming ivy hedge behind our nursery and Mexican bush sage in the test garden. Today we set some frames outside to dry; they had honey left on them after our last harvest and we thought we had washed them pretty well. But within the hour [...]

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