And We’re Back!

As far as non-timber forest products go, things have been pretty quiet up here on South Hill over the past few months, but never fear syrup, honey, and mushroom-lovers of the world; South Hill Forest Products has awoken from our annual hibernation! We are already taking on the year with a brand new batch of excited and dedicated Ithaca College students who have been busy as bees over the past week. In just seven days we have gotten the mushroom room up and running, Pink and Pohu Oyster mushroom spawn ordered, syrup-season preparations underway, and a batch of hickory syrup ready to go through a taste test.

This season is sure to be a special one (not that every single season with us isn’t). We have a new logo, some potential new products such as hickory syrup, and plans to expand upon some past experimental products such as our beeswax soap. Perhaps the most exciting news for this season, however, is the development in our maple sugaring operation. Chris Sinton, a professor in the Environmental Studies and Sciences department here at Ithaca College received a grant to research fuel efficiency for various small-scale maple syrup boiling methods. This year we will be using a brand new evaporator alongside our two boiling pans to begin testing the efficiency of the various methods.

Stay tuned; our mushrooms are just around the corner!
With love and appreciation,
Your new (and very excited) South Hill Forest Products team

Our new South Hill Forest Products Logo!

Some of our new students getting the colonization room for our Oyster Mushrooms set up and ready to grow some mycelium!

Waxing Poetic

As you might remember, we wrote a post about our two new wax extractors last year. Well, in our ongoing quest for perfection, we think we’ve found the best extraction yet! Say hello to our new solar wax extractor!

Built by my wonderful coworker Emily, this extractor is perfect because it doesn’t use any energy other than from the sun! And it’s so simple to make and easy to use that anyone can try it!

We grew a bit disenchanted with our industrial extractor when we tried to use it to clean some of the comb we pulled from hives that had died over the winter. Normally we would leave the wax for our new packages of bees to start with but this stuff was pretty gnarly—dark, almost black comb full of dead bees that had begun to mold. So for the health of the bees, we pulled out the worst frames and decided to try melting down the wax just to see if we could get anything useful out of it.

Top: One of our nicer (but still pretty dark) combs harvested from the dead hives. Bottom: That same wax after we’d put it in the extractor for 4 days and it still wouldn’t melt.

Granted, the wax we put into the industrial extractor was not the easiest to work with but we never imagined it would take almost a week for the extractor to do any …errr… extracting. Finally we just gave up and scraped it all out of the extractor.

We did end up rendering the wax by zip-tying it into a t-shirt and putting the t-shirt into a boiling water bath. The wax melted through the shirt into the water, leaving the impurities behind. We then poured the water-wax mixture into milk cartons with the tops cut off. Overnight, the water and wax separate, leaving a bar of wax at the top.

The solar wax extractor works on the same basic principle of using heat to melt the wax through a cloth. It’s basically a solar oven with a straining device inside. Solar wax extractors are easy, low effort, energy-free and cheap to make at home!

Here’s how we made ours:

Supplies:
1 cooler or box (this is the body of the extractor)
Milk carton or other container that will fit inside the cooler/box
Cheesecloth
Aluminum foil
Tape
Sheet of Plexiglass or glass large enough to cover top of cooler/box

1. Line the cooler with aluminum foil. Use tape to anchor the foil down but not too much; we want the foil to be as reflective as possible to elevate the temperature inside of the extractor.

 

2. Cut the top off of a milk or orange juice carton and tape cheesecloth to the top. Let the cheesecloth sag a bit into the carton so you have space to put the wax into the top.

3. If necessary, cut your piece of glass or Plexiglass to fit the top of the cooler. You can use a glass cutter to score a line where you want the cut to be and then gently bend the material until it snaps. As you can see, our Plexiglass hangs over the edge of our cooler a bit but it works just as well.

4. Rest your wax on the cheesecloth in the carton and place it inside of your solar extractor. Put the Plexiglass on top and find a sunny place to set the oven for a few hours as the sun does its work! We didn’t find a need to anchor the Plexiglass to the cooler as our piece was pretty heavy but if you think it will be especially windy, try holding the glass down with tape, rope or whatever you have on hand.

5. Come back in a few hours and check on the wax. You can add more to the top and reuse the carton but once the cheesecloth gets too clogged or the carton gets too full, it’s time to switch them out.

Pretty easy, huh? And you have nice clean bars of wax after barely lifting a finger!

Can you hear the buzzzzzing?

If not, it’s because 5 out of our 6 bee hives didn’t make it through the winter 😦  This past season was one of the worst on record for beekeepers all over the area, and the success of our apiary on South Hill was no exception.  All three of our Langstroth and two of our top bar colonies died, but the last top bar seems to be feisty as ever and we have high hopes that they will keep going strong into the summer!

We attended a “dead-out clinic” sponsored by the Finger Lakes Beekeepers Club on April 19 to try to deduce the cause of death for each of our hives.  We suspect ours were stressed due to a heavy Varroa mite population in combination with extremely low temperatures and lots of ice and snow.

But the good news is we have EIGHT packages of bees heading our way in the next few weeks!  Sam Comfort, owner of Anarchy Apiaries, is providing us with our new bees this spring and we are excited to make the trip to the Hudson Valley to bring ’em home.  We’ll keep you updated when we begin installations!

Another Successful Open House!

Two weekends ago the South Hill team completed yet another successful open house. With free pancakes, a log splitting demonstration, 2 roaring fires, a live sap boil, live music, and weather in the mid 70s- who could say no!?

Throughout the 4 hour long event we saw several hundred people, and nearly sold out of all of our products that were for sale including our own maple syrup and soap! Stay tuned for pictures from the event that will be uploaded on the website shortly…

 

Stay tuned,

Your NTFP team

Bees in the Winter

Although bee season won’t really start until April, it’s never too early to get amped up about some of the coolest little critters on the planet! I’m talking, of course, about beeeeeeees.  Though the hives in our apiary may seem deathly quiet, the bees in each colony are, as we speak, clustered in massive, living “balls” and living off their honey stores, vibrating their bodies to keep themselves warm.  Since it’s been bitterly cold recently, we plan on taking a stethoscope down to the hives sometime soon to check up on our brave little patients–opening the hives during winter is a no-no, because the colony will lose the heat they’ve worked so hard to generate, but rumor is you can hear the vibrations of the mass of bees through the sides of the hives.  Check back soon for an update on what we hear!

 

If you’re a fellow bee enthusiast, read on for a bee candy recipe you can experiment with while you wait for the snow to melt…

Bee Keeping Tips/Techniques

Last winter was abnormally warm, and our bees started to become active and buzz around too early. This worried us because they wouldn’t have enough food (since the flowers did not bloom yet). Although bees save honey in their honey stores, we wanted to make sure that they had enough food so members of our class made bee candy. For more information on bee candy, look at the recipe below (made by our very own, Hannah Whitehead):

Stovetop Candy Recipe

1. Heat one pint (1/2 liter) of water to boiling in a large pot on stove.

2. Stir in as much sugar as can be dissolved. This will be about 5 pounds (2 Kg). More sugar is better.

3. Boil without a cover, stirring it near continuous until the mixture reaches 234 degrees F. It takes a while.

4. Pour into a mold made of cardboard or a container lined with waxed paper or butcher’s paper. The candy will harden as it cools. The candy will become brittle, and can be slipped on top of frames where the bees will consume it. Or pour it into an inner cover without the vent hole (use duct tape to cover the hole). Use the inner cover upside down with the candy in the  brood chamber.

What’s new on the Hill

After a few months of hibernation we are back with a new group of worker bees. We had our first team meeting learning what has to be done to get things going again. Our starting week has seen the preparation of the lab, testing the equipment, and cleaning and sterilizing the mushroom room. The ‘shroom room. The ‘shroom. Get ready, in the next couple weeks we will be spawning the oyster mushrooms. We’ll keep you updated!

Wax Extractors on the Loose

Keeping bees isn’t just about the honey, it’s also about the WAX!

So how do you get bees wax straight from the hive (above) into a more usable form (below)?

Meet our two new steam wax extractors! On the left is the industrial steam wax extractor and on the right is the homemade steam wax extractor.

At 21 inches wide and 25 inches high this industrial steam wax extractor can get the melting job done in a jiffy. There is a false bottom that serves as a water reservoir sending steam up a pipe into the tank where the wax is placed. Wax filters through a screen and into a bucket. One con about the industrial extractor is that you need to have a lot of wax to make running the extractor worthwhile.

Our homemade steam wax extractor is similar, but simpler, and super effective. The homemade extractor consists of an open-bottom wood box that has a hinged lid that is placed on top of a metal screen on top of the bottom piece of wood. A hose connects from a steamer into the top of the wood box. As steam is produced the wax melts and filters through the metal screen and drains into a bucket.

Both wax extractors have been tested but have not been used for large quantities of wax. Stay posted to hear how our industrial steam wax extractor verses homemade steam wax extractor competition goes!

Meet Our New Hives: the Warré

Hot off the bandsaw comes two new hives, the Warré hives. 

The Warré hive, also known as The People’s Hive, was developed by Abbé Emile Warré and the plans were published in 1948. The Warré hive combines the elements of the Top Bar Hive and the Langstroth Hive. The original design of the Warré hive allows honey bees to build comb in a continuous downward fashion by adding additional boxes under the last box. The Warré hive simulates hive construction in a tree where the honey bees can build feet of comb downwards. The stacking of the boxes is in the fashion of the Langstroth Hives, but the free building of comb off of a top bar is in the style of the Top Bar Hive. As fascinating as it would be to harvest six feet of comb, it is a little unrealistic to safely and easily perform that sort of harvest.

For this reason we designed our Warré hives to hold top bars in each box, like the Langstroth Hive, but the top bars do not have foundation so the bees can build comb in a free-form fashion. Each hive that was built has four boxes, but more can always be built. 

A hive is not just the boxes, but also the floor board, the roof, and with a Warré hive there is a box called the quilt.

The floor board holds the rest of the hive and has a ramp entrance for the bees. Entrance reducers have also been created.

The roof is larger than the boxes because it completely covers the quilt box. The roof is designed to allow moisture to vent out of the hive.

The final part of the hive is the quilt box. This box is shorter than the other body boxes and is placed on top of the top body box with the roof placed over it and covered (as seen in the first picture). The quilt has burlap attached to the bottom to hold organic matter, like straw, to allow moisture to leave the hive and protect the hive from moisture build up.

And here is our new final product! Make sure you stop by our bee yard to view the rest of the beautifully painted hives by contacting southhillforestproducts@gmail.com.

If you’re interesting in building your own Warré hive then CLICK HERE. Our Warré hives have slightly different dimensions than the ones proposed, but done so for no specific reason. Keep posted for updates on how the Warré hives hold our bees!

Hawk Meadow Farm Field Trip

On Sunday, South Hill Forest Products took a field trip to Hawk Meadow Farm, a shiitake mushroom farm in Trumansburg, NY, owned and operated by Anne and Steve Sierigk.

Anne and Steve started out with Acorn Designs, their graphic design business, and grew shiitake mushrooms on the side. Shiitakes became more and more lucrative for them, however, as Steve started building relationships with local restaurants. Now they sell to specialty restaurants on a weekly basis, all within 30 miles of the farm, and produce hundreds of pounds of shiitakes each summer.

Steve shows us his growing area. Logs are soaked in the creek, and then stacked on a gravel platform to help deter slugs.

They offer a wide range of products from their farm besides shiitakes, although that is their main product. They are also producing some vegetables such as rhubarb, onions, and garlic, and beginning to sell black locust posts which are naturally rot resistant.

Expanding from shiitake growing, they are also starting to offer shiitake tinctures made from cold-weather strains. These shiitake varieties are part of traditional Japanese herbalism and have been found to boost the immune system, is a potent antiviral and antibacterial, and can reduce platelet aggregation.

Inoculated logs, ready to fruit.

As a class, we got to inoculate poplar and bitternut hickory logs with shiitake and oyster mushroom spawn from Field and Forest. We drilled 1/2-inch holes along the log, 6 inches apart in a row and 2 inches between each row, offset by 3 inches. We then plugged each hole with spawn-infused sawdust, and covered the hole in wax to keep out competing fungi.

To top off our morning on the farm, Anne and Steve shared with us some carrot soup and miso soup, made from ingredients grown in their own garden — and their own shiitake mushrooms! We also learned that in a macrobiotic diet, a bowl of miso soup each day keeps the doctor away.

We are so lucky to have Steve and Anne as our local shiitake resource! Be sure to check out the classes they offer on shiitake cultivation, herbalism, and more.

Oh, and their dogs are adorable.

Happy puppy 😀

Happy Earth Day!

This Earth Day, South Hill Forest Products is praising the power of mushrooms!

             Three years ago right around Earth Day, 11 lives were lost as the Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion released inordinate amounts of oil, reaching the coastline over the next few days and sending plumes into the depths of the Gulf.

Various clean up methods were applied in the Gulf of Mexico to reduce the impacts from this devastating spill. These methods include (but are not limited to): the chemical dispersant Corexit 9527, surface burns, microbial additions, and passive collection sorbents. However, one technique that has yet to be applied widespread in the Gulf of Mexico post-Deepwater Horizon Spill is mycoremediation. According to Paul Stamets, fungi can actually aid in recovery of damaged ecosystems caused by human activity or natural disasters, making mycoremediation an excellent choice for reducing the effects of the Deepwater Horizon Spill.

Mycoremediation is a form of mycorestoration that involves repairing the weakened immune system of ecosystems by denaturing of toxic wastes and absorbing heavy metals. Fungi are excellent molecular disassemblers, as they can easily break down long-chained hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide and water. Enzymes such as lignin peroxidases, manganese peroxidases, and laccases are secreted by the vegetative part of the fungi (mycelia) and allow for the break down of hydrogen-carbon and carbon-carbon bonds.

According to Paul Stamets’ book, Mycelium Running, mycoremediation is one of the most inexpensive ways to remediate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from soil. Mycoremediation was used to mitigate the San Francisco Bay Oil Spill of 2007. Oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus, were grown on mats of human hair that had absorbed oil on the surface of the bay. In most circumstances, surface oil would be burned off, releasing toxins into the air that can spread for miles. By using the oyster mushrooms, the toxins did not become volatile and spread, and the oyster mushrooms facilitated the creation of fertilizer, which was then used for landscaping.

Here are some photos from an experiment conducted by Stamets. See the results for yourself!

Mushrooms, including the Oyster mushrooms that we grow here at Ithaca College, certainly are great restorative agents to repair damaged ecosystems.

And for that, South Hill Forest Products praises the power of mushrooms this Earth Day!

For more information about the power of mushrooms,check out Paul Stamets TED Talk:

6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.