Chimney Honey

Four years ago today we were collecting sooty honey from the bedroom fireplace above this stove in the front room. In the summer of 2011 a swarm of bees had settled in my bedroom chimney. The fireplace in that room is boarded up and the terracotta chimney has a lid (also terracotta; it's not a separate cowl) but with some side air holes for ventilation. The bees used one of these as their entrance.

At the time, I called a beekeeper friend to ask what to do because hundreds of bees were getting into the house and although I helped as many as I could to get outside again, in the hope that they'd find their way back to the chimney, a lot of them died.  He said that since the swarm was inaccessible it was best to just leave them alone and they would also leave us alone.

After a day or two, the swarm apparently settled down and made a hive, presumably attached to the inside of the chimney. We would hear a lot of buzzing during the day but they'd go quiet at night. And, as Bee Person had said, they stopped coming into the bedroom (by crawling under the skirting boards) and only used the outdoor chimney entrance.

One night some weeks later, I heard a loud 'kerflump' from the chimney just as I was going to sleep.  There was no subsequent buzzing. I thought no more about it until Hogmanay when I found a blob of shiny, sticky stuff on top of the stove and some underneath it. Shining a torch up this chimney, which is 'stoppered' except for the stove flue, I saw that the stuff was dripping not down the chimney but seeping down inside the wall! A taste test confirmed that it was honey and looking at a blob in the microscope confirmed that there were soot particles in it. There was not very much honey in the end but it showed that the bees had made a nest and had begun to make honey before they died.

There's interesting stuff inside the walls of the Boggy Brae house!

Bookshelves and a mantelpiece

During...

After...

Space! partly because I'm putting the books two deep on some shelves and partly because there's a boxload of stuff for Derbyshire Daughter, and we're getting rid of some too.

Stones of wild cherries and a cotton mouse

The plan was to clean the stones of Boggy Brae wild cherries in a hot water solution of sodium percarbonate so that I can make a cherry stone bag to warm up in the microwave oven and stuff into this mouse for a sick child. The photo to the left shows my first experimental batch.

The cotton mouse used to be Toadlet's but I'm going to pass it on to the grandsons.

The cleaning process worked quite well, and inspecting the gnaw marks on the stones where bank voles or wood mice had opened them to take out the kernel was interesting, but some of the stones had a covering of what I think is a black resupinate fungus which I didn't think would be good to have in a warming bag.

I guess my old wild cherry stones from under the soggy dead leaves of monbretia were not quite fresh enough for the purpose. Ah well, I daresay a purchased cherry stone bag, probably made with the stones of cultivated cherries, will work just as well. Or a wheat bag. Or some such.

It's good to see that the wild cherry stones are a useful source of food for some small animals.

Leaves against a shabby old door

...and more on the wash'us floor.

These leaves are from a weed, a large weed, some kind of non-native cotoneaster of which there are several plants on and around the Boggy Brae. I presume their berries and seeds are spread by birds and, possibly, deer. One is supposed not to like invasive weeds but on a day as grey and dreich as today, the wet and brightly coloured leaves are a joy so, well waterproofed, I went climbing over fences and splodging through damp sodden vegetation and cut some branches for a vase.

Chopsticks and fondue forks

The fit took me to clean out a kitchen drawer. Wonder what happened to the other chopstick? And have we got enough fondue forks?

Which reminds me to put Gruyere, Emmental, and baguette on the shopping list for next week.

Kirsch we have already.

A bumble about in the woods

I went for a bumble about in the woods up the hill the other day. Nine years ago, when we moved to the Boggy Brae (and I've just realised, saying that, that I've lived in the Boggy Brae house for longer than I've lived in any other house in my life), trees up the hill were being harvested. The lower part of the wooded area was left in a right mess. We contacted the logging contractors to ask them to hoik muckle hunks of tree out of the burn that runs along the back of us lest it should overflow. They did. Since then a lot of trees near the burn have fallen over, making it, ahem, interesting to go for a stroll there. I tend to follow deer tracks but roe deer can get through smaller spaces than I can so my walks turn into boggy wood bumbling: under tree, over tree, bumbling free. You get the idea.

Up hill, I have watched first the foxgloves, then young birches, and now replanted crop trees various growing all over the cleared area. There is a lot else too. Most of the plants and fungi in my garden have relatives in this wood.

On the birch trunk, the top one in the picture above, I found these little mushrooms growing in a crack in the bark. I don't know what they are yet and have left them there. I'll keep going to visit them for a while to see how they progress.

click on any photo to see it larger

On another fallen trunk, a pine, many mini-trees were growing out of it.

Its bark looks like this:

bark of a pine

Further along I edged along a trunk similar to these on the right but stouter. It was just as well it was stouter and a good bridge because it spanned a small ravine. All the sticky up side shoots were actually quite useful to jam my boots against for steadiness. I wanted to get a closer look at this fungus on yet another fallen tree. I couldn't get any closer. Well... possibly... but I decided not to.

another not ID-ed fingus

Down from my trunk treading, I then explored a marshy bit. It shows as a pond on some old maps but it's actually just a bog and the sides of the area are steep and skiddy, as I discovered. Scaly Male Ferns are very tough though and a big handful makes a useful rope for hanging on! In the marshy bit, I found the mushrooms shown below. I haven't managed to identify them yet either.

mushrooms in a marsh

transluscent cap

The spore print is a rich brown and they have a 'grassy' smell.

The tree from which this leaf comes has recently lost half its crown because of collapsing pines crashing through it. The leaves are a beautiful bright yellow-green in spring.

There's nothing like a bit of messy woodland for watching Life–and the deaths that help it along–doing its stuff.

A walk up the hill

I went for a walk up the hill the other day and this is what I saw.

 

<< Collected these and we ate them with macaroni cheese.

Lots of these. I think they are Russula ochroleuca (Ochre Brittlegill).
Edible apparently. In the woods, slugs eat them.

There were lots of other Russulas too such as these two below.

Russula under beech

The plan was to get up to the Sentinel Tree. I didn't think there was a way through here >>

So I carried on looking at mushrooms.

Picked up some litter that some picnicking slob had left behind long ago :(

Why do people do that?

<< Didn't think I'd get through to the Sentinel Tree that way either.

This one is an Amanita though not sure which one. 

Gave up trying to reach the Sentinel Tree but I'll get there one day. I sat down under the beech tree where I found these and listened to the water  in the burn for a while.