Ground Hogs Prove to be a Gardener's Enemy

In my past garden experiments, I've dealt with rabbits that love to strip small plants of their leaves, racoons that love to eat tomatoes and the occasional hot pepper and chipmunks that have extrasensory knowledge of exactly where I planted my squash seeds.

But this year, at my new location, I'm dealing with a whole new animal -- groundhogs. These pudgy, furry creatures otherwise known as woodchucks have become my new foe. Interestingly, the answer to the tongue twister "how much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?", is none. They actually aren't very interested in wood and are more interested in eating my garden and digging an impressive network of tunnels all around my yard.

Secret woodchuck hole in day lily patch

However, one morning I did see a young groundhog scurry out of the day lily patch behind the garden and climb right up a tree. Yes, it climbed up a tree. When I asked it what it was doing it promptly scurried back down the branch and back into the foliage, where it has a secret tunnel.

What started out as two groundhogs multiplied so we've had the pleasure of watching a whole herd of them grazing the clover in the field next to my yard. If all they ate was the clover, I'd have no problem with them. But they've become very good at shaving my kale, beets, broccoli, peppers, lettuce down to stubs. And chicken fencing hasn't stopped them. They climb right over.

So my wife and I have taken it upon ourselves to explore various ways of deterring these pesky pests.

Here are some of the solutions we've been working on to keep our gardens safe from our buck-toothed enemies:

• Deer fencing
• Live traps
• Pest deterrent spray
• Wrist rocket (Haven't gotten to that point yet)
• Some other "methods" that my farmer friends have said work phenomenally but are probably not palatable to most audiences

Deer fencing was attached to our original chicken wire

Another method that seems to have worked with some success is shouting at them and being physically intimidating (that was actually a recommendation on a website I saw).  I threw a chunk of soil at one while it was in my garden and it quickly climbed out and started for one of its holes. I threw another rock at it on its way back to its hole.

The rock hit the ground about a foot behind it and scared the thing so much that it literally flipped over on its back and let out a loud squeak.

This woodchuck ate that whole apple in about 30 seconds

For about a week after that encounter there was no sign of them in the garden. Then we noticed some more nibbled plants. So we set up the deer fencing.

That seemed to work fairly well except one morning as I was leaving for work I noticed a groundhog frantically trying to get out of the garden.

It seems it found a way under the deer fencing, but couldn't get out. I lowered the live trap into the garden and stood outside the fence, using a large stick I found to battle it into the trap.

After a prolonged struggle where it lunged at the stick and clicked its teeth together I was able to push it into the live trap without any injuries to it or me.

Unfortunately, it escaped the trap as I accidentally lifted the trap by the wrong handle and it opened the gate.e. But later that day, the trap actually caught one and I let it go at a nearby natural area.

Since then, I've caught four more of them including one large adult. Twice they've gotten themselves into the deer-fenced area where they can't get out on their own, which actually works in my favor. I've released all of them at the same location so hopefully they will re-unite as one big happy buck-toothed family.

Yet there are still at least two more in the yard. One huge adult and a young one. Since they have a network of tunnels, I'm going to put the live trap in various locations to catch the sneaky varmints.

My suggestion is: if you garden and discover that you are sharing your space with groundhogs, get deer fencing and a live trap and get them off of your property before they multiply!
 

A Brood of Bees - Sign of a Queen

A couple weeks ago, after our bees swarmed, we checked the hive to see how the bees were progressing with making honeycomb and honey. More importantly, we wanted to see if there was any brood, the eggs, larvae and pupae, which would indicate that there was a new queen present after the swarm left with the original queen.

At the time, we removed all of the frames one by one, and saw lots of honey-making activity, but no brood.

This was a concern to us because without brood, there may be no queen. Without a queen, bees will still make honey, but they will not overwinter. That means that we'd have to start with a new colony next spring.

Not a huge deal, but we thought it would be nice to go through the winter and be able to start with our original hive. Plus it would be a good educational experience to see the life-cycle of the bees from start to finish.

When we checked the hive, we also added two new honey supers, the stacked wooden boxes that comprise the area where bees will make honey that we can harvest. We did this to give them more room to do their work and to prevent another swarm. Our hope was that there was in fact a queen and that she just hadn't gotten around to laying eggs yet in the honey-comb cells, and that the worker bees would ascend into the new supers and make honey that we could harvest this summer.

Capped worker brood in the middle

On Sunday, we checked the hive again from top to bottom. The top super had a few bees in it but no new comb. The middle super had a ton of activity in it, new honey and what we thought were brood cells, which are normally capped over with beeswax when they contain worker brood that have developed into mature larvae on their way to becoming pupae. A very good sign!

In the bottom part of the hive, or the hive body, we found even more activity, and more capped brood.

Then I noticed some whitish looking objects in some of the clear honeycomb cells. Looking closely, I saw what was for sure larvae! The larvae are c-shaped in the cells and eat a mixture of royal jelly, nectar and pollen.

It was an amazing to see the brood cells for the first time and to learn a little bit more about bees and their life cycle. We are looking forward to our first honey harvest in hopefully about a month!