Thursday Night Candle Classes at the Beez Neez

     We had our first candle class of the season on November 13th.  I have a number of motivations for the candle classes. First of all, its a slow time of year and it brings in a little more business.  Secondly, I have to make candles anyhow because we sell a lot of them near Christmas.  However, the main reason I do candle classes is that I just love making beeswax candles. I have never gotten tired of making candles and playing with beeswax.  I look forward to this time of year when things slow down and I have time to make candles again.

    The feature event at the candle classes is making hand dipped tapers.  Dipping candles works better as a group activity. It requires a larger quantity of beeswax than most hobby beekeeper will ever be able to accumulate.  My dip tank holds about 10 pounds of beeswax and I must have close to another ten pounds of liquid beeswax available to keep feeding the dip tank. The wax is consumed as the candles grow so I am continually adding more wax. When we are finished I still have about ten pounds of wax in the dip tank.

    There has to be a certain interval between dips. If the interval is too short, the candles don't cool sufficiently between dips and fail to grow as quickly as they should.  On the other hand, if the interval is too long the new layers of wax don't adhere properly. I've found through experience that if I dip twelve racks of tapers I end up with just about the right interval.  I use dipping racks that each produce two pairs of tapers connected by a common wick.  We end up making a total of 48 tapers during each class.  Ideally I end up with six people in the class so that each student gets to dip two racks and I just monitor the wax level in the dip tank.  I only had four people in the first class so I was rather busy managing the beeswax level in the dip tank as well as dipping the extra four racks of candles.

Grand daughter Madelynn helps me make dipped beeswax tapers

The beautiful finished product

     I have never counted the number of dips it takes to make a taper. I'm always too busy paying attention to other things. On Thursday one of my students was curious enough to persist in counting the dips. It turns out that 25 dips is enough to make a hand dipped taper.  That was a lot less dips than I had expected.  One advantage to having less students in a class is that the students didn't buy up every last taper we made. At the end of the day I actually ended up with a few dipped tapers to sell in the store. I made another batch of dipped tapers on Saturday afternoon with the able assistance of my grand daughter, Madelynn.

    In addition to the tapers we poured votives and several pillars.  I have a lot of votive and tea light molds. When I pour votives or tea lights I usually do about 40 or more at a time.  I also have about 15  different flexible silicon molds that are available for use at the candle classes, including various sizes of pillars, three different sizes of pine cones, three different bee skep molds, and a few others. I also have an eleven piece nativity set which I never pour as candles even though they are technically candle molds and have holes for the wicks.  After all, who is going to burn Mary or Joseph or the baby Jesus?  It really isn't practical to pour the nativity set at a candle class. First of all, they are a bit difficult to pour. The optimum time to remove some of the figures is about four or five hours after pouring. I'm just not inclined to wait around at the store until two or three in the morning until the time is right. If I wait until the next morning, the wax has become more brittle and it is harder to remove the pieces from their molds without damaging them. I suppose the other option would be to use the honey warming cabinet to warm them up a bit before attempting to remove them from the molds. The animal figures are particularly difficult. If I'm not careful, I end up with what my friend Quentin calls Wyoming donkeys or cows.  Those are ones which have lost part of an ear to frostbite.  

   

Bird's Foot Trefoil and Wild Cucumber

    Bird's Foot Trefoil is a relatively common pasture plant and ditch bank weed in our area. I noticed some bees working the blossoms several years ago and had a difficult time identifying the plant. I stumped the local master gardeners at the farmer's market and asked a number of my plant geek friends before I was finally able to discover the name.  The name may seem strange at first blush, but its rather obvious once the flowers turn into seed  heads.   They look like mutant chicken feet with a few extra toes. I haven't noticed this plant in bloom in our area until after the blackberries have already started. It must be a decent honey plant for the bees to pay any attention to it at all but I suspect it is poor competition compared to the Himalaya Blackberries.  I certainly don't have enough of it in the neighborhood to allow me to harvest Bird's Foot Trefoil honey.

Bird's foot Trefoil with both flowers and seed heads evident

    I was unable to find this plant listed in the reprint of the 1926 Honey Plants of North America.  I did find some small amount of information on the internet.  That little article claimed that while the bees will forage on Bird's Foot Trefoil, it makes them somewhat cranky. I have not noticed any "cranky" effect on my bees, but I don't have large fields of this plant and I suspect a relatively small portion of my bees are foraging on it at any given time when it is in bloom.  If that is true, I wonder  whether the structure of the flowers, which is similar to a snap-dragon, may contribute to that effect.

   I recently found a reference to Birdsfoot Trefoil in "Nectar and Pollen Plants of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest".  This book gave the scientific name as Lotus corniculatus and indicated that it was a source of both nectar and pollen.  Birdsfoot trefoil was further described as an annual or perennial of late spring and early summer, being a secondary source in irrigated pastures in the Rogue  Valley. The book also mentioned reports of bees being very irritable when working this crop.

      I teach beginning beekeeping classes with Dave Pehling, who is pretty knowledgeable about plants. I told him about the wild cucumber I had discovered and he advised me that it probably wasn't the same plant I had found listed in Honey Plants of North America. He then sent me a link to an article about our local wild cucumber, ( Maher oregonus).  The main thrust of the internet article was that fact that this native plant is endangered on south Vancouver Island and described that as the northern limit of its range.  This particular species of wild cucumber can apparently be found on the west coast as far south as northern California.  The article didn't mention the plant's value as a nectar source for honeybees. I'm assuming it must have some value as a nectar source or the bees wouldn't have shown interest in it. I didn't observe that the bees were foraging for pollen so it must provide some nectar.  Since I don't have any of wild cucumber growing nearby, I haven't been able to observe if it is a consistent nectar source or one of those plants that produces nectar only under certain growing conditions.

    I also looked this plant up in "Nectar and Pollen Plants of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest". It gave the common name as Old-man-in-the-ground , also called wild cucumber, and described it as a climbing perennial herb which flowers produces white flowers from April through June. It was listed as both a nectar and pollen source but was also described as being of little value to honey bees.   There was no explanation given as to the reason it was considered to be of little value to honeybees. It may be that it doesn't produce that much nectar or pollen under normal conditions or there may just not be enough of it in any one place to make a significant contribution to the bees' diet.

      Fireweed is a great honey plant in western Washington. Its also known as Willow Herb. Unfortunately, we just don't have enough of it in the lowlands for my bees to produce fireweed honey. I'm sure some of my bees are working the fireweed, but it gets lost in a sea of blackberry nectar. As you move up into the foothills it becomes more plentiful and it is possible to produce fireweed honey.  One of the peculiar things about fireweed honey in our area is that it varies from year to year. The reason for this is the presence in the mountains of another local honey plant called Pearly Everlasting, a sort of wild strawflower. Pearly Everlasting produces a dark honey so the color and flavor of the fireweed honey varies from year to year depending on the percentage of nectar obtained from Pearly Everlasting.

Fireweed also known as Willow-Herb

    I let some fireweed come up in one of my wife's flower gardens several years ago and it almost took over. I had no idea it would spread so vigorously from the roots. I guess the "weed" portion of the name should have been a clue. I would have been content to let the fireweed continue to spread. After all, it produces beautiful flowers and good forage for the bees. That seemed like a win win situation to me. However, my wife had other plans for that portion of her flower garden and decided the fireweed had to go.  She pulled up most of it but I noticed we still have a few stalks left. I think I am going to dig those up and plant them in some less cultivated places where they will be free to spread without incurring Linda's wrath.