Posts dedicated to travel, from exploring our backyard to overseas adventures.
Hey kitty cats! This week has been a little hectic tiring for me and we all know Kate is weeks away from giving birth so there are your excuses. I figured we would just get that outta the way right now. Why? Because today’s post might be a little underwhelming unless you’re a dog lover.
Wow, our first monthly welcome post took place one year ago, and we had just started Live Seasoned a couple of weeks before that, which means we’ve had our first anniversary and didn’t even acknowledge it! Sarah and I make the perfect old couple.
March is a tricky month for bees. Bee colony activity usually starts up again during late February or early March depending on the temperature. Temperature is the determining factor as far as honeybees are concerned. As the weather gets warmer, the days lengthen, and pollen becomes available, the queen starts laying eggs, and the bees become active gathering nectar and pollen from early flowers and storing honey in combs.
If you’re backyard beekeeping, March is the month when colonies can die of starvation if their honey stores aren’t big enough. There is a lot of activity and lots of hungry bee bellies to fill, so you may want to take a peek into your boxes to make sure there’s enough sugary syrup for your bees to feed on. Later this month, bee colonies increases brood combs and populations reach their peak capacity. The brood combs are the beeswax structure of cells where the queen bee lays her eggs. When the hive gets too crowded, the colony gets ready to swarm, which sounds terrifying, but it is actually the natural method of reproduction of the colony.
When the colony preps to swarm, the drone population increases and a few queen cells are built to produce a new queen. A few larvae that would normally develop into worker bees are fed a special gland food called royal jelly, their cells are reconstructed to accommodate the larger queen, and her rate of development increases. If you’re new to this bee business, a drone is a male bee and the product of an unfertilized egg. If the egg was fertilized it would be a worker bee not a drone. Worker bees are female, they have stingers and they help collect pollen and nectar. Drone bees exist primarily to mate with a fertile queen, which brings us back to swarming. Swarming usually occurs in March to June. The old queen leaves the hive with about half of the bees to a new home elsewhere. The remaining bees in the colony continue their work rearing brood and collecting pollen. When a virgin queen emerges from her cell, she stings the remaining queen cells and kills any other queen she finds – real nice lady that queen. Six to eight days after mass-murdering the other queens, the virgin queen flies out to mate with drones and return to the colony as the new queen. A few days after mating, the queen bee will start laying 1,500-2000 eggs a day.
As you may know, I’m lunar obsessed and while I remind you guys all the time to check out the moon, THIS IS THE MONTH! Ok, every month is the month, but during March the full moon hangs out in the sky all night long. On March 5th we’ll see the full crow moon rise around sunset and set around sunrise. During the rest of 2015 the moon will spend some time in the daytime sky. It’s no super moon (it’s actually the smallest full moon of 2015), but it will be glowing allllll night long. So take a night hike or at least spend a few minutes gazing up!
Venus is visible as an evening star in the southwestern sky this month. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, Mercury is your morning star during March. Last month, Jupiter was in opposition (meaning opposite the sun) and this month it will still be shining brightly most of the night!
Starting on March 8th and continuing for a couple weeks, a faint zodiacal light will be visible just after sunset. Find Venus and Mars (I use Star Walk for help) and you should see the zodiacal light that’s being reflected from interplanetary matter.
In a few weeks we all celebrate the Equinox, which means the start of Spring or the beginning of Autumn depending on which hemisphere you reside. Friday, March 20th is a day for celebration as the sun crosses the celestial equator – pull on your rain boots and go splash around in the snow melt. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, appreciate each and every Autumn day this year 🙂
Venus and the moon buddy up in the western twilight sky on March 22nd.
On March 24th, the first quarter moon passes close to the red giant star Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster. The moon passes in front of Aldebaran if you’re an observer in northern latitudes: Kazakhstan, Russia, northeastern Scandinavia, extreme northeastern China, northern Greenland, northwestern Canada, and Alaska. More on Aldebaran and the Hyades cluster here.
There are a handful of great environmental holidays to celebrate this month! I plan on participating in each one, wanna join me?! I am so thankful for water and woods that I feel like every day is international river, forest and water day, but I’m going to try to do something extra special on those specific dates this year.
Do you have kiddos? Teach them the importance of forests and rivers this month. At least read The Lorax or watch the video! During the Meatout, I plan on eating these scones, cold oat salad and maybe a rice pulse. I can’t wait to relive my days without power (when I first moved into my current apartment) during Earth Hour. Maybe we’ll make it a whole Earth Night in our household. Whatever you do or don’t do, at least spread the word to your family and friends about these environmental holidays this month. The bottom line is getting the word out, someone needs to speak for the trees 😉
That’s right, nuts, and we’re so excited about this pick. As you are well aware, we love varying our diet to take advantage of the freshest foods each season. At this time of year, as we’re anxiously waiting for the first spring spring markets to start up, our diets can become particularly boring if we aren’t careful. That’s why focusing our attention on nuts, which store well and are readily available year-round, can be a lot of fun and get us out of any creative ruts that we we were having in the kitchen!
Of course, we’ll do quite a bit of dessert baking with nuts, but we’re also excited to stretch our culinary muscles by finding more ways to incorporate them into main dishes. It’s likely that there will be some more nut milks in our future and some condiments too. As well as a lot of general snacking: in our trail mix and on our cheese plates. What about you, do you have a favorite nut recipe that you’d like to share?
Even though it doesn’t feel like spring, we’re happy to turn our sights towards longer days, warmer weather, and a variety of new topics starting with the introduction of our ingredient of the season next week! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy clicking back through our favorite posts of winter. If you had a fave we didn’t mention, we would love to hear in the comments!
Hey travel bugs! I’m extremely amped to write this post full of tips about saving money for travel because I’m in the midst of a big savings year right meow! I have a huge trip planned for the end of 2015 and if I want to make it a reality I need to keep it at the forefront of my consciousness. For me, a big part of successful savings starts with being mindful of it. If I’m always thinking about the trip and being frugal, I’m much more likely to skip the little extras: the cup of coffee, the random tank top, the $4 bar of delicious dark chocolate, you get the picture. This post applies to any big ticket item you want to save for not just a trip. Maybe you want to splurge and get a fancy new DSLR (and by you I mean me), or pay off a huge chunk of student loans, or put aside money for your snazzy wedding, whatever you’re planning, you can save for it and these tips can help you!
First things first. How much do you actually need to save? I get questions like this all the time: ‘how much should I save for a cross country road trip’ or ‘how much do you think I need for two weeks in Brazil’ and at first these questions seem unanswerable, but in truth, they’re pretty easy requests and they can be worked out with a pen, paper and a tiny bit of research. The short of it: what I need for a cross country road trip is probably not what you need for a cross country road trip. Why? Because we all have different lifestyles and ways of traveling. That’s why it’s important for YOU to estimate your own travel costs and don’t worry, it’s not as intimidating as it sounds.
Even though our days are packed, one of the things that we always make time for is keeping up with the news. We think it’s important to be well informed citizens, so we read everything, but by far our favorite articles are those covering science, environmental, travel, and adventure topics. Today we thought it would be fun to share some of our favorite sources of science and travel news, and we would love to hear yours!
Beyond the sites listed above, we like to follow a number of organizations doing good work. These entities all have their own websites, which is what I’m sharing below, but realizing that I don’t have time to visit their sites regularly, I’ve found that it’s much easier to keep up with their work by following them on Facebook (i.e. liking their page). This makes my Facebook feed so much more interesting and educational, and you’ll often find us sharing stories from these sites on our Live Seasoned Facebook feed. In fact, I find myself opening it with the intention of “reading the news”; crazy, huh?! Anyway, here are a few of our favorites:
So that’s where we get a lot of our science news. Hopefully we’ve introduced you to something new and exciting. And we would love to hear from you! If you’ve discovered something that we haven’t mentioned, please tell us about it in the comments.
Welcome February! Bye, bye January.. you suck. Am I the only one who thinks that? Hands down my least favorite month of the year, which makes February that much sweeter. Even though February is only a few days shy of a full month, it always seems to scoot on by. Here’s what’s happening this month:
I usually take a walk in the woods every day because it’s my job. Actually my job is dog walking, but they like to hike, I like to hike, to the woods we go! Anyway, this week I have been hearing and seeing a lot more bird activity. The squirrels started scurrying about more and more a couple weeks ago, but now I’m hearing lots of rustling in the bushes. If you focus your eyes you’ll notice little song birds hopping around in the brush. I also saw a few red-headed woodpeckers this week. It’s nice to feel like you’re not the only animal (besides the pups) in the woods.
It’s February! One-twelfth of 2015 is over. That is totally cool with me. One more month closer to summer says the bitter winter-hater in me 😉 Each month I post a screenshot of my desktop with one of the new seasoned view backgrounds. Did you notice that it always looks so clean and tidy? Well, I wanted to let you know that it’s a total illusion. Each month My desk top really looks like this:
Then I simply make a folder entitled everything or entire desktop or all of it and select all the crap on my desktop and throw it in there. I wish housework was that easy! See? All clean:
You can upload one or all of these photos to use as your desktop background or even as phone and tablet wallpapers. Simply click on the download link below each photo and save the image. Enjoy!
Click here for You’re Perfect.
Click here for White Birch.
Click here for Iced Tea.
Click here for Chesapeake Sunset.
Click here for Snowfall.
Hope you dig ’em and download ’em. Happy Monday!
Oh and a reminder that I’m challenging myself to meditate a little bit. Join in!
If you’re in the northern hemisphere and it is cold, cold, cold right now, but if you still want to enjoy nature, we have a remedy for you. Curl up, cozy up, comfy right on up in your hammock! We’re not talking about your grandma’s macrame hammock, although those are cool too. If you’ve haven’t seen them yet, we’re talking about a more heavy-duty yet light-weight camping hammock. It’s a great way to get outside while still kind of hibernating. Let me explain.
Once you stick to these tips and jump up into your hammock, you’ll feel as cozy as a caterpillar in a cocoon. The most important thing about having fun outside in the winter is, you guessed it, staying warm! If you’re uncomfortable freezing your butt off you will have no fun, none! So follow these quick tips and take a trip outside, it’s time for some winter hammocking.
If you’re at all curious about what gear I’m using, here you go: hammock, seriously awesome straps, sleeping bag, and pillow.
We waited until late in the afternoon to venture out into yesterday’s snow. I admit that I had to build up my courage to face the cold temps, but after a big bowl of soup and a few layers of wool, I was ready. Alex’s mission was simple : eat as much snow as possible, and my mission even simpler : quietly follow behind the little guy as he explored.
I think we’d both declare the mission a success.
