February Work Bee! Outside and Inspiring!

click to enlarge the Beehive!

Yes, Vancouver is in the spotlight these days, but what you may not get to see are all the awesome community things that are happening totally apart from the corporate spectacle that is the Olympics.

We have spring already in Vancouver. The cherry blossoms and magnolias are blooming, as are the tulips and daffs. Not sure what is going to happen with the "Bike the Blossoms" festival which is usually in April... as spring has sprung two months early this year. Not so good for those ski hills where streams have washed all the snow from the billion-dollar ski-slopes. Don't say we didn't tell you not to host the olympics here!



OK, so with the spring the Beehive was buzzing yesterday at our monthly Work Bee. This is when we all work together on our House for three or four hours. You might think... "oh, they must have a clean house after that"' but cleaning is done at other times. What we work on at Work Bees are larger projects that we need more hands to accomplish. The feeling of all working together on something is GREAT! Check out what we worked on:

We started the morning with vegan waffles with fruit sauce by Travis and Leslee. YUM!

Kyle created an advanced recycling centre, since our local community centre now offers recycling of almost everything which is not accepted by our not-so-progressive municipal recycling. Things like foil packaging, styrofoam, plastic bags, electronics.




Michael fixed the roof.



We sorted the shed, and built a shelf for storing nut-butters and apples and other cold-ish things. No pic of the shelf, but here is some stuff.



Travis cooked lunch. One-pot rice and lentils, with barley and kamut too.



Elisa took the fence boards off the front fence, creating a huge new sunny garden! Go back to the first picture in this blog posting and look at the de-fenced fence! Elisa is getting started in this picture.


Donut helped with lots of things, such as
with drilling:


and with airing some things:


and with tapping the maple trees! For real!
THANKS DONUT!




WEST COAST MAPLE SYRUP
Ben's friend Tim lives in the house behind us, and we noticed that when Travis pruned a few branches off of the maple tree that they were dripping! So we asked Tim if we could tap his trees. He said SURE! Wish you were here too Ben! (Ben is escaping from the Olympics on Long Beach and Salt Spring Island)

Here are some pictures of Sara and Travis tapping the trees. They are gushing! Check out that old-school drill.




What a sweet day in the sun.
We love the Beehive!