Feeding the bees, the flyboy, and me

Everyone eats, but we here at the Fox Plot like to make a project of it.  I’d have to say if I had to make a list of what we spend time on here on a weekly basis, making meals would make it high up the list. The food preferences run the gamut but there seem to be some themes or similarities to what we like.  Without sounding too cliche or Portlandia-ish, we like things that are fresh, local, organically grown, not to mention have a story or can be traced to where they spent their early days.  Where the differences begin to show when Nate is left to his own devices to cook, you might expect it add spicy, salty, and maybe meaty where as I with my sweet tooth like milder flavors, sometimes tofu, and dark chocolate after as many meals as possible (a vice which is not usually local in the slightest).  So here’s one dish cooked up at the Fox Plot last night: Remnants of Roasted Root Vegetables, including beets and turnips (harvested back in November) and onions from July!  For lunch today, we revisited these veggies in soup format, heated up with some vegetable stock and coconut milk.  My dear flyboy couldn’t enjoy his without a generous portion of Tabasco.

The bees have yet again different food preferences.  While the bees and I agree wholeheartedly on the tasty merits of honey, even bees cannot live on honey alone. In the past several winters, we haven’t managed to overwinter the hives through to spring so in effort to do something different and eliminate a few more variables, I bought some bee ‘food’ called Brood Builder from Dadant.  There’s not too much involved in the feeding, just crack open the hives and slide it in.  My fingers are crossed that they both find it and they like it.  The historically stronger hive seems to have more dead bees and less activity than the neighbor hive, which is concerning.  It’s a good lesson in ‘let’s wait and see what happens’, a lesson I apparently still have not yet mastered.  In the meantime, anyone have any suggestions of hive names; numbers are a bit boring and the strong hive and weak hive may be a misnomer.