Can't we talk about something pleasant? Of course, Wine!

 

It is that time of year and the crop came in big.  Apple wine is being made from a variety of Washington State apple developed in 1985 and named Cameo.  A large tree grows in a neighbors yard which we offered to pick clean so they would not have to clean up after the tree dropped them all.  Windfall deal without the fall.  Not using fallen apples is a must so you greatly reduce any potential for contamination.  This is my favorite apple variety for wine making.

Simple process.  Squeeze lots of apples, put juice in big jars, keep out the bugs and bacteria with an air lock, add sugar (1#/gal) and champagne yeast, wait until it quits bubbling.  You need a champagne yeast to kick the alcohol content into the 12-14% range which kills most everything else in there with it.  This alcohol level will not happen with most wild yeasts but it is easy to buy the right kind at a beer making equipment store.  These can be housed in bricks or online. Consider them your pets.  The yeast, I mean.  There are millions of them in there with your wine all reproducing quicker than little rabbits. 

It can be a bit more complex than that but that is a good outline.  Lots of good wine making sites online.   No need to get too complex with the process but a few pieces of equipment are fun to play with around the wine and let you know what's happening in the process.  It is alive  just so you can play doctor.  Enjoy it.    

This particular type of wine is FAR better the second year after it has been made.  It is a gamble saving it that long without sulfites but sometimes you get lucky.

Cider is being made.  There is nothing hard about making hard cider.  Squeeze apples, put juice in jar, keep out the bugs and bacteria with a cocked lid or air lock, if you want to get fancy, drink it when it gets real bubbly and don't be afraid of the scum on top.  Just skim it off and take a drink.  Ah, just like back in the good old days when water could be poison and beer was not yet king of America.

The Great Bush Depression

Here we are entering into the Great Bush Depression.  This time it is a bit more entertaining than the Great Hoover Depression.  Dow has dropped both a greater percentage and in terms of number of points lost over the last year than it dropped during the first year of the Great Hoover Depression.  Housing prices have dropped further, too, over an equivalent time period.  Disturbing start.  The gov't is doing the same things it did last time almost to the letter.  The dollar amount is larger but the problem is larger this time, too.  From what I have read, the problem amounts to a "bit" over $60 Trillion.  $700 Billion Bailout is a rounding error for that amount of trouble.  Can you say, "Doomed to failure"?  I knew you could.

Mortgage derivatives, initially, are the problem this time.  They are based upon home mortgages.  The last time we had a depression it was based upon home mortgages.  This time it is base upon mortgages that have been leveraged at up to 40 to 1 in some cases.  Yikes.   Some say house prices must drop to the equivalent of 2.5 to 3 times the average income, locally, to be back in line with historic home pricing indexed for inflation.  (That makes the "leveraged vehicle" worth less than ten cents on the dollar invested in many cases.  That is why some companies can now not give back the money of some holders of mutual funds that were based on the safest of vehicles other than Treasury bonds, corporate bonds issued by major US banks and insurance companies like Lehman Bros and AIG both of which have cost you and me over $175 Billion to finance so that their bond holders will not go into default.  Confusing?  The details are even more so but it boils down to trust of which there is currently very little among thieves and bankers.  That is what stops lending worldwide.  It is an amazing thing to behold.)    Some say that will be overshot to the downside as owning a home will be viewed as a ball and chain.  When we bought our first home in 1984 it had cash flow over principal, interest, taxes, and insurance.  That is where housing is headed judging by places like the Central Valley where 50%-70% drops in home value are commonplace.

If you are interested in info about how this financial mess began, how it will progress, and possibly how it will end I would recommend reading these, to begin with, and progress from there:

Mr. Mortgage’s Guide 

Excellent behind the scene Cal housing info.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

In depth economic overview.

Dr. Housing Bubble  

This has an interesting set of articles.  Don't read this to your children at night.  It is scary. 

Federal Reserve Bank research article 11/08

 This compares Depressions then and now and gov't response to both.

DryShips Inc. - Daily Market Report

 This shows a global shipping company specialising in the transport of drybulk cargoes.  If they are not moving product, the world is not buying and selling items and, therefore, not manufacturing as readily across the globe.  The chart says it all excpet for the 'why' of it.  See the 11/14/08 entry for that here:  London Banker

THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS
 The banking system has lost over 1 Trillion dollars (dollar amount is outdated as of 11/08, see below), more than was ever made in the history of banking.  It only took them two years.  (That's why they get the big bonuses.)

The Fourth Quadrant is an examination of why and how the banking/lending/brokerage industries made the Great Bush Depression possible and impossible to avoid.  Skip down to the first two charts in the The Fourth Quadrant.  It is about Turkeys.  That much is darkly hilarious.

 FRB: Speech--Kohn, Productivity and Innovation in Financial Services --November 12, 2008

 Paragraph 7 points out the Turkey aspect of banks.  Kohn is a Fed Vice Chairman.

Cost of the Bailout: $3.5T So Far, But Real Cost May Be Much Higher 11/08

Please do take some time to read some of the above info but...  

Fair Warning:  It's a nightmare seemingly come to life.  

Raiding Bees

I had stepped outside to empty the grey water.  The hive sounded different.  It was surrounded by more bees than I had seen since I brought home the old hive box that still had honey comb in it.  That was when our bees raided the unprotected, empty hive.  They had looked like they were going to swarm when they filled the air over the patio but the bees were in an agitated looking flight pattern instead of the smooth flight pattern of the swarm.  They had spent two days emptying the old hive box.  It was then so alive with our bees that at first I thought another swarm had moved into it when I looked inside. ( The picture shows the old hive box on the left that was empty of bees but had honeycomb in it.  On the right is the smoker hive with too many entry ways at bottom and where the lid fits onto the body of the smoker just above the handle.  A pan of water with rocks in it always sits next to the hive.)

This time it was not our bees doing the raiding.  It was bees from the neighboring hive 40 feet away and definitely in the agitated flight pattern.  I walked closer to the smoker hive and saw dead bees littering the ground and hundreds of bees attempting to gain, and many gaining, entrance to the smoker hive at a time of day which was not normal for our hive to have bees around it.  Our bees come home between 5:30 and 6:30 every evening.  This was 7:30 and there were far too many bees to be just ours and they looked blacker than our bees.  I watched the flight pattern of the raiders and they were definitely heading over the fence to the neighbors yard after filling up on honey at the smoker hive.  

Not good.  

Raiding happens to a hive that is either weaker than the raiding hive or has too many entrances to the hive to protect efficiently.  The smoker hive had too many entrances.  The hive is strong but indefensible.  Raiding bees are often blacker in appearance than normal bees.  These certainly were.  They get their blackness from battling to get into defended hives which knocks off their hair as other bees bite them.  The stiff hair on an insect is there to keep other insects from biting them easily and the hair on bees give them a golden coloration.  Under the hair their exoskeleton is black.  I walked into the swarming raiders and placed entry closures until just a one inch width of one entrance was all that was available.  They were able to protect the hive at this entrance and the raid stopped after another attempt to gain entry the next morning failed.  

All seems back to normal today but there is not the usual number of bees in the air at any one time and they are not at the right times.   It seems they may have avoided a food storage catastrophe and a very lean winter, if not outright death at the jaws of the marauders.  Tough life being a bee.  If they stay a viable hive into the fall, I will place honey in their hive this winter to be certain they have enough food to make it through until next spring, if I do not see new cells capped off in the currently uncapped comb before this Fall.  If the queen was killed, they are in big trouble and the hive will probably be weakened into next year.  They will have to replace the queen, a five week job before she can begin laying eggs, then another three weeks to get the eggs to bees and that takes them into October with winter staring at them.  Every day fewer bees are replaced until, after about three weeks, no more are replaced until the new queen's eggs mature so their ability to collect food and defend the hive is constantly reduced over the next two months.  Increasing attrition is a nasty situation to overcome.

The clover we grow in the yard is still blooming nicely and the eucalyptus nearby will bloom this Fall so food availability is not a problem.  The problem is how much food storage they lost and whether they have enough time to replenish their stores to a level that will carry them through the winter.  

If anyone is interested, I have not yet been stung even with all this "I walked into the swarming raiders" stuff I have been posting.  Probably, it is just luck but knowing how to move around bugs and other animals so they are not alarmed by having a large mammal so close to them is important.  Also important with bees is that I do not wear cologne or use stong smelling soaps or, in the case of bees, wear any black clothing, leather, or fur (clean, perfumed Goths are in big trouble around bees).  Maybe this all contributes to why I have not yet been stung.  The sting has to happen eventually.  I will post the exact details and my moanings and cursings when it happens.  I am assuming I am not allergic so will not die from it because I do DISTINCTLY remember being stung when in the second grade after stepping on a bee.  That is the only time I have been stung.  Should be interesting when it happens next.  I talked to a beekeeper of many hives that said he had been stung 150 times by July.  Just for this year.  A friend had a bee get into his bonnet as he was collecting a swarm and sting him next to his eye which swelled shut for a day or two.  Not so much fun but it's a good story.  Creeps me out thinking about stinging insects in my clothing.

Over the next few days we realized the bees had fled.  The hive is empty.  I dismantled it.  We have our feelers out for another hive and will probably pick up a swarm early next year when overwintering hives split and move.

I kinda miss those bugs.

Bee sting remedy

This is not a scientific study but certainly took some pain and persistance by the author to get to the conclusion.  It seems he did his homework and put some thought into the research.  Toothpaste...who would have guessed?

Swarming Bees

This was the first view of the swarm out the back window. Estimated to be about 40,000 bees.

Toward the end of the swarming bees

Beginning to settle onto the tree.

At one point, after about half of them had settled on the tree in a cascade of bees, I had to walk out into them to close up an open access into the attic. Definitely did not want those bees inside the house. Walking into a swarm of bees is not highly recommended because it is usually difficult to be certain how long they have been swarming. A dry swarm, that is one that has been flying for more than a day and is getting hungry, can be a stinging swarm. Not something I want to get involved with on any given day. This one, however, had just taken off from next door and each bee was full of honey and no longer had a hive to protect so it was very docile. That's why I felt relatively good about my safety when walking outside into a back yard full of flying bees. Took me a while to get out the back door even knowing that, however. I had to go over in my head a few times why it was OK to open that door and walk into a cloud of thousands of bees in flight. The avoidance of the potential for receiving multiple stings can be a very visceral thing.

Here is the bee cascade in the apple tree. The queen is near the top.

I calculated there were about 40,000 bees flying above the patio before they had settled onto the tree. The swarm was a 15 foot cube of bees about 4 inches apart from each other. Amazing stuff.

Another kind of bee rarely seen in person

This bee variety is sometimes called a solitary, leaf cutter, blue orchard, or a self employed bee.  It is really hard to get one of these to sting and I have never known it to happen.  They are startlingly iridescent in coloration from an emerald to a stunning, electric blue.  They live in holes in dead wood and seal them off with bits of leaf and mud.  They are much smaller than honey bees.

The top photo is the "hive" constructed to attract them to the yard.  The bees are rarely seen but the cut leaf margins on our climbing rose appear around the time they begin laying eggs in the five inch deep holes I drilled into the aged wood.  That seems to be the preferred plant for making beds for their larvae.  

The next photo is a close up of a few completely filled holes that are sealed off with mud.  There is a bowl full of mud and water kept at the base of the posts holding up the nest logs until midsummer.  There are about five larvae per hole and they will exit next spring about the time the apple blossoms happen.  Last year we had five holes filled.  This year we have eleven.