Guest article by reader Neil Stawski

While climate change may be a hotly debated issue in our government, we can take it upon ourselves to help preserve the planet by making simple, environmentally friendly changes in our homes and communities. Here are some actions you and your family can take to slow the course of climate change.

Begin by making your home more energy-efficient. The good news is that this can save you money, and that’s an idea you can share with your neighbors, too! There are a number of things we can change in our homes to accomplish that. 

Efficiency Indoors 
Begin by making sure you have proper insulation and air flow. Green Home Guide recommends ensuring that your walls and attics have effective insulation that slows heat flow out of the home in the winter and blocks it from coming inside in the summer. If your windows are old, they might not seal properly, and that can leave gaps that let in air. You can replace these with energy-efficient models or take steps to update them so they seal properly. 

Next, take stock of sinks and appliances. Install low-flow sinks, showers, and toilets to save water. You can also put a timer in your shower to keep your family from using up too much water while showering. Try to avoid taking baths, which waste much more water than showers. 

Buy all energy- and water-efficient appliances. To determine which energy-efficient appliances are best, check out Energy Star’s post on the most efficient appliances. 

You should also switch to CFL or LED lights and light bulbs. Traditional incandescent light bulbs use about three times more energy than a CFL bulb, and LED bulbs can have five times the lifespan of incandescent bulbs. Even though they are more expensive, you’ll compensate with energy savings. 

Efficiency Outside Your Home 
Use gardening and landscaping as a way to green your home. We don’t often think of our gardens in this way, but strategic planting can provide shade, both indoors and out, and protection for our bee populations. 

If you have a garden, consider composting. This is a great way to help the environment and creates nutrient-rich soil for your plants. Learn more about the process at Rodale’s Organic Life. 

Consider installing solar panels. Solar energy is cost-effective and can even increase the value of your home. Today, there are lots of options for financing this upgrade. Use a solar water heater to help save on your monthly heating bills. The investment will pay off in the long run with energy savings. You can either install an active system to completely replace your current water heater or a passive system, which requires you to keep it as a backup. 

Greening Everyday Tasks 
You can make small changes in your regular routines, too. Give your kids waste-free lunches. Exchange paper lunch bags and products for lunch sacks, canvas napkins, and a bottle to make your child’s lunch waste-free. Many companies make environmentally friendly, plastic-free versions of these products. 

Eliminate plastic bags and paper towels. While we can’t eliminate every product in our homes, we can start with the basics. Find a good reusable cloth for the kitchen rather than paper towels. Do your shopping with reusable grocery bags. 

Changes in Your Community 
Changes begin in your home, but you can also spread these ideas to your community. In addition to encouraging friends and neighbors on how to save money with environmentally friendly home updates, you can also effect change on a larger scale. 

• Support local conservation efforts with donations and volunteering. For example, local farms may have workdays where you can help out. You can also shop at organic and sustainable farms and farmers markets. 
• Find like-minded friends and neighbors and organize community cleanups. You can also participate in or organize an e-cycling event in your neighborhood. This allows you to collect unused technology, such as discarded computers and smartphones, and donate them to schools and other places. The EPA has a list of places to donate them. This can even turn into a fun, community-building event! 
•  Support businesses that embrace or are certified in green and sustainable practices. 
• If possible, bike ride, carpool, or take public transportation rather than driving. Consider buying a more fuel-efficient car or hybrid the next time you shop for a car. 
• Vote for local candidates who support environmentally friendly policies, just as you would on a national level, such as school boards. 
• Encourage your child’s school to become more environmentally friendly. This can take many forms, such as making a presentation to the school on reducing waste, encouraging them to create gardens as a teaching tool, or implementing more recycling ideas. This will require involvement and works best if a group of parents supports these initiatives. 

Our communities work best when we all pitch in. Do a little more in your home each week to save energy, and consider getting involved to make changes in your community. Every action you take has a positive impact on the planet

Less than a third of the red oak still stands, pushing up from a gnarled and buttressed base. If two of me were to lie end to end, we might span its diameter. Most of the base is only a stump now, but the living part of the tree still stands tall above her surrounding progeny of red oaks. 

A friend who knows these things says this tree may be 400 years old! Four hundred years old?! If so, it would have sprouted around the same time Charles Charleville built Fort Lick, later to become Nashville, where he traded furs with the local tribes. This tree would have presided over a part of this state's prehistory and over its entire history as Tennessee!

Early on I was advised to cull this and other old trees on my land--to make use of the wood and so that surrounding trees would have room to thrive. Isn't that what we do with our elderly? Remove them to make way for new generations? Don't they just take up space and resources that others could make better use of?

Maybe not. What we learn in The Secret Life of Trees, a book by Colin Tudge, is that these grand old trees send out a massive underground root system that feeds and is fed by other trees in the forest. The other trees live in symbiosis with these old growth trees, exchanging nutrients unseen below the soil line even when the older trees are but stumps. Not only this, they continue to sequester carbon, give off oxygen, and to support the structure of the surrounding soils. These old trees are literally feeding the forest and keeping it healthy as they slowly age in place and fade away--full of purpose until the end.

I feel as if I am becoming an old tree sometimes. I absorb so much angst and poison from the air around me, buffering and sequestering, trying to turn it into breathable air and nutrients, trying to protect and feed others as my own limbs become more withered and gnarled. On good days, I realize and appreciate how deep my roots go, tunneling unseen through the world to nourish those who've come after me and for whom I care so deeply. That bond and watching them grow and prosper nourishes me in return. These old trees show me that even when parts of me begin to fall away and I am left a mere stump of myself, I will have purpose. With that I'll be a happy stump!

Making nucleus hives or “nucs” is a good way to expand your apiary. This involves removing and re-hiving 3 or 4 frames of bees, capped larvae, newly laid eggs, honey, and pollen from a healthy, established hive and letting the bees use this to make a new queen and to establish a new hive. This article is an update of my 2014 explanation of how to do this. 

Timing

The absolute best time to start a new hive is at the beginning of the spring nectar flow, which is just about now in Middle Tennessee.

​Healthy hives naturally cast off swarms in the Spring and will begin doing this soon. Making nucs allows the bees to meet their need to swarm, but allows you to choose their new home. Honeybees need an abundance of nectar to make the wax needed to establish their new hive. They can only make this much wax in the spring when the flowers are in bloom and the nectar is flowing. In my area, the nectar flow occurs traditionally from mid-April to mid-June. But in the past few years, the season has started by the end of March. I have already started making nucs this year.

In making a nuc, essentially you are creating a controlled swarm--but without the queen. So along with taking bees for the new hive, you must ensure that you take newly laid, unhatched eggs, less than 3-days old. These look like little grains of rice in the bottom of the cell. 

Once in the new hive, the bees will discover that they have no queen and will go to work making one. To do this, they will choose one or more of these unhatched eggs and create a queen cells around them. When these hatch, the bees will feed them only royal jelly and thus develop the new queens. Waiting for the nectar flow is important not only because the bees will have access to lots of nectar and pollen for food and wax building, but also because plenty of drones will be available this time of year for the newly hatched queens to mate with.

This timing is also important because bees from your bigger, more established hives will be busy gathering nectar and pollen from nature’s abundance and less likely to rob out the smaller nucs.

My nuc boxes are regular-size deep hives that I have sawn in half and rebuilt (see photos).

​ But you can put your frames in the middle of a regular deep hive body or if you use all medium hive bodies, in one of those. Just put the nuc frames in the center of the box and fill in with empty frames or drawn comb if you have it. 

The hive you take the nuc from must be healthy with lots of bees and a good laying queen. A healthy hive will have a good solid brood pattern (not spotty) and by this time should have lots of eggs, larvae, and capped brood. Drones should also be present by this time of year.

Feeding

For those who follow my blog, you know I don’t feed my bees anything but honey. Since I’ve been doing this for a number of years, I’ve learned to freeze frames of honey for making nucs or for emergency winter food. I also usually have jars of crystallized honey left from the prior year that I can use for feed. You may not have that luxury if you are just starting out. In this case, you may have to make some sugar syrup as starter feed. However, by waiting for the nectar flow to create your nucs, you should only have to feed them once. Feeding them more than that during the nectar flow can be counterproductive. You want them to learn to gather their own nutritious nectar and pollen, not to be dependent on you, poorly nourished, and making honey out of sugar water. I have had nucs do very well during the nectar flow with no feeding at all and this is an option for you too.

If you do make sugar syrup, mix one-half sugar and one-half water, boil to kill any pathogens, and then let it cool before feeding. Do not just pour the syrup into a container because the bees will drown in it. You can use a small jar. Choose one that will fit inside your top feeder box (see photo). Fill it, punch a few small holes in the lid and place it upside down over the hole in the inner cover, inside your feeder box. Test it first to make sure your holes aren’t too big and the syrup doesn’t pour out.

Patience

Now you wait--and hope! As long as you see bees coming and going, stay out of the boxes for a month! It will take 14 days for the queen to hatch and up to another week for her to mate. In the last week, she will have begun laying eggs. If you check too soon, you may accidentally destroy a queen cell or you may not see her because she may be hidden among the bees (an unmated queen is easy to miss) or is out on her mating flight. When you see new eggs and larvae, you’ll know things have worked out. If things didn’t work out, you still have another month of the nectar flow to try again. On average, this method works to establish a new hive 70% of the time.

Happy nuc making!