A Facelift and Some Bees

Our new bees!

Where do you start when you haven't blogged in over four months?  I guess with a facelift, which is just what Sprout the Right Brained Bean got this afternoon.  It took some time and fenangling to get things just the way I liked - I'm certainly no computer genius (that's my husband's forte) - but I'm pretty pleased with the new look.  Sure there's still some work to do.  Life in itself is a work in progress?

A lot has happened in four months.  Life has felt a lot busier since we moved the girls to their new (temporary) dwellings.  We swap boarding fees for the nightly chores of taking care of not only our two alpacas, but a menagerie of 20 other sheep and goats.  It sure has been fun interacting with all of them - what personalities they have - but it is easily an hour or more out of each night, as they are 10 miles away.  We are still searching for our own home and farm (looking at a place today, as a matter of fact). And it will be so nice to have all our animals in one place one day.  But for now, we make this work.

We also added a hive of bees to our ever-growing homestead.  Last fall, at the Mother Earth News Fair, we purchased a top bar hive from Bee Thinking in Portland, OR, and couldn't bee happier with it (pun intended)!  Then in March we took a beginner bee keeping class from Christy Hemenway (who I also heard speak at the Mother Earth News Fair) with Gold Star Honeybees.  We learned so much, and it gave us the confidence to get ourselves going in a land where no one else keeps bees in top bar hives (or at least we don't know of anyone).  She's been such a wonderful mentor through the beginning of our beekeeping adventures!  I can't say enough about how available and patient she's been with us.  And it's seriously been an adventure - our bees swarmed a month and a half after we got them, leaving us with half the bees and a queenless hive (we accidentally destroyed the new queen cells left behind)!  It took us a month to confirm that we had no queen, and once we did, we immediately had a new on shipped to us.  Would you believe that in a mere 10 days, she had laid eggs in SEVEN full combs!?  We couldn't believe it either!

There she is!  With the shiny black thorax!  Our new queen!

We've been extremely pleased with our bees, thus far (other that the swarming).  They really are a calm bunch.  We never have to smoke them to examine the hive.  As a matter of fact, the one (and only) time that we tried, only agitated them.  So we said, "Enough of that!"  We've come to find that you can tell the mood of your hive just by the sound of their buzzing.  This was very evident during the month they were queenless.  They actually sounded frantic during that time.  Once their new queen arrived, they calmed down - almost immediately.  It was amazing.  They too are up with our alpacas, as my friend's farm has an abundance of flowering plants.  The bees seem very happy there.

Well, this doesn't begin to cover my four month absence and all that has happened/changed on the farm, but it's a start.  One last note:  I didn't completely disappear; I spend a lot of time on Instagram!  So come on over there and visit!  There's a link to my Instagram on the left side of the screen!