An Amazing Bee Miracle?

Today Harold checked out our 3 hives.  They are doing exceptionally well, and he needed to put on another honey super.  However, he had no sooner finished putting on a super and walking away after checking everything out, when one of the hives swarmed!   A huge swarm went into one of the trees behind the bee yard.   Harold could see where they landed, and he went to get his tractor loader to get a ladder up there and bring the hive back down and haul them off someplace else in another box.   But as he went to get the tractor an amazing thing happened!!  The swarm went back into the SAME hive box!  It's like they swarmed, and then came back home!  Within minutes!   This never happens.  Bees just don't do that.   Harold said a quick prayer when they swarmed (that he would be able to get the swarm into a box with no problems, to haul them off to the Miller farm, where we take all our swarms), and within minutes they all came back to the original hive.   Perhaps the Lord heard Harold's prayer and brought all our bees back to where they should be instead of swarming.    I tell you, this truly never happens -  that bees will swarm and come back to the same box!  We have never witnessed any such thing in all our 9 years of beekeeping.    Here are some photos of this morning's episode: 

Harold checks out one of our hives.   For a thorough checkup, he used the bee smoker this morning and suited up.

Lifting up a frame of bees and honey from the top super.

The frames look really good.   The bees are filling them up with honey.

Shortly after inspection the bees swarmed, and then came back.   Here is what THAT looked like:

The front of the hive was just covered with bees trying to get back in.

The bees were everywhere, waiting to get back into the hive.

Another view of the bees trying to get back into the hive they just swarmed out of.

They are all back home now and all is just like it originally was.    I wanted to get a photo of the swarm in the tree, but they weren't there long enough for me to get a good shot of them.  Sometimes a beekeeper just can't figure out bees!  But thanks be to God for bringing the bees back, and without us having to do anything!  We witnessed a very rare thing indeed!

Nanking Cherries!

My Nanking cherries are ready!   I have not had a good crop of these wonderful cherries for several years now.  For a few years we have had freezing temps when the bushes were in blossom, and all of the blossoms died.  And even this year I was afraid I would have none of them because of the tent caterpillars this spring.  But the birds took care of the bugs for me, and the good Lord blessed me with a truly bumper crop of these cherries this summer!  We planted these bush cherries about 8 years ago, starting with small bare root cuttings only about 15 inches high.  Now the bushes are about 7 feet tall and thick with branches.   I have 6 good sized cherry bushes.  Usually every summer the birds eat most of the crop, and even the deer and bears get them.  But this year I was able to harvest the fruit before any of the critters got to them!  And what a huge crop!  I am just thrilled, as these little tasty cherries make a wonderful juice, and even better jelly.   Nanking cherries are smaller than regular tree cherries, but they have an intense cherry flavor.  Today I picked a pail full of them, enough for a couple batches of jelly.   There is still plenty of fruit left on the bushes, not quite ripe, and if the birds don't beat me to them I will be able to pick another pail full later on next week.  I spent an hour picking these this morning, listening to the birds "scolding" me.

Nanking cherries do not 'hang' from the branch, but grow closely attached to the branches of the bush.  They are ready to pick when deep red, and when they taste sweet.  They are about 1/2 to 3/4 inch in diameter. 

Every branch of the bushes are just loaded with cherries!

One of the "farm hands" who came to "help" me.

A pail full of these sweet delicious beauties!

Busy Bees (And Us, Too!)

It's been a while since I posted anything on this blog.  I have had cataract surgery on my eyes earlier this month, first one eye, then a week later the other one.  In between surgeries, my vision was not the best, as one eye was 'perfect' and the other one was very cloudy.  Now that both eyes are done and healed, I can see great!!  I am still in the recovery stage of having to use eye drops several times a day, but that's no big deal.  At the end of next month I will be able to be fitted for new glasses to correct for astigmatism and reading, and a slight vision correction in one eye.  Cataract surgery apparently doesn't give a person 20-20 vision, but comes close.
     Then, we have been busy weeding and tilling and doing yard work.  That is, in between rain storms!   With all the rain, weeds sure can grow!  But everything is growing very nicely, and we have started up our farmer's market booth, selling several varieties of fresh leaf lettuce and head lettuce and romaine and spinach and herbs.   Soon we can add lots of cabbages to the booth.  Check out these (very straight!) rows of cabbages:

Three rows of various varieties of cabbages beginning to head up.  Each row is 50 ft long. 

Our bees have been really working hard!  This year so far our hives are doing well and are very healthy.   Lots of activity today as the bees bring in lots of yellow pollen.

All three hives have bees coming and going like crazy!

I've had a big problem with barn swallows lately!  These birds insist on making a mud nest above either the living room door, or a back window.  I don't want them there and have tried just about everything to discourage them.  I've tried hosing down the mud they gather with a pressure hose, and using "fake birds", too.   But so far, what has worked the best is to tape strips of shiny tin foil above the door and windows.   The birds just don't like that! They don't know what it is, and the shininess of the foil must scare them.

Hanging strips of tin foil above the door seems to deter the barn swallows from building mud nests above the door!

My flowers are so pretty now, especially with all the rain we've had lately.   Here are some views of my petunias on the Ferris wheel Harold made for me, and also the specialty marigolds I started from seed in a pot just outside the greenhouse door.

Lovely shades of pink, purple, blue and red petunias!

A colorful and large variety of marigolds.

We have had many new kittens this year so far.   Some are doing very well, and some died early due to weather exposure and Mama cats who didn't care for the newborns like they should have.  But we still have plenty of mouse catchers on the farm!  Here is one of the older kittens born in mid April.

One of the 10 week old kittens contemplating life under the porch.

And that's the way things are as of today!

A Little Bit Of Everything

It's been a busy time here on Honey B Farm.  We got the gardens planted in between rain storms, and things are growing nicely (including weeds!)  Our new bees are very busy and working hard, and the hives are doing superbly well!   Yard work keeps us busy, too.   Harold has been fixing various things on his tractor/loader, and fixing the mower.   I've been busy trying to keep up with the constant grass cutting.   Yesterday a drive belt on the riding mower wore out and started burning.  So we went to town and got a new belt and Harold fixed that this morning so I could continue mowing.
     In between all of this, I have been recovering from cataract surgery on my right eye.   This coming Wednesday I get the other eye done.   Oh what a difference!!  When I look at everything with my newly fixed eye, everything is so bright and colorful and sharp!   The vision in the other eye is cloudy and yellow.  It will be SO good to have both eyes clear and sharp again!  I need to put special eye drops in 4 times a day, and I am not supposed to bend over a lot or put strain on the eye or lift anything heavy for a week after surgery.    That means I can't bend over and pull weeds.   So the weeds will just have to grow for another week or so.   Harold did what he could with weed pulling and tilling, but it takes two people to keep up with all of our gardens and yard work. 
     I walked around the place today taking new pictures of how things look now.   So far we have had a good June with gentle rains and warm temperatures.   The only thing to complain about is the tent caterpillars.   Those green/black worms are eating everything.   They especially like fruit trees and berry bushes.   We can't really use insecticides here because of our bees.   Harold rigged up a contraption to ward off the tent caterpillars from our apple trees.   They come up from the ground and work their way up the tree trunk to the tree, so we put a bucket or a milk jug around the tree trunk and seal it off.   The worms try to get up the trunk and fall back to the ground with this system.   It has worked well for us for the past few years.  Here are a couple of pictures of what I am talking about:

On a small apple tree we can use a milk jug to deter the worms.

Our large apple tree needed a bucket to keep the worms off.

The apple tree is going to produce apples this year!

One of many young apples on our tree.   These apples are Prairie Magic variety.

The bees are doing so well.   Today we witnessed a massive hatching of young bees and the orientation flights they do around the front of the hive.  Here is what we saw:

Many newly hatched bees learning where home is, and doing their "orientation flights" to practice going into and out of the hive.

Harold also put an electric fence around the garden.   This will keep the deer out.   I have tried many things over the years, but an electric fence works the best!

Harold is stringing the wire all around the garden.   We use a solar powered fencer for this garden.  It produces enough of a zap to keep the deer out, but we have a very powerful electric plug in type fencer around the beehives to keep the bears out.  We haven't seen any more bears since my blog post about them a while back.

Every year I start my flowers from seed.   This year I think some of my petunias are especially pretty in shades of deep purple, blue and various shades of rose.

Isn't this a gorgeous deep blue petunia? I am very proud of my efforts at seed starting on these flowers.

Check out these purple and pink beauties!

This will be a good year for our gooseberries, too!  That is, IF the caterpillars will leave them alone!  Gooseberries are good to eat just as is, but they also make exceptional jelly.

Gooseberries end up being a deep pink when ripe, and about an inch in diameter.

I have tried several new varieties of lettuces this year in the greenhouse.   I hit upon an heirloom variety called Tom Thumb Lettuce which I really love!   This will definitely be a yearly favorite!   It grows into small compact heads of delicious mild and tasty lettuce, about 8 inches in diameter and about 4 or 5 inches high.  If you have a garden and you like to grow your own lettuce, I highly recommend Tom Thumb variety!

Here are 4 heads of great tasting Tom Thumb lettuce, an heirloom variety.

Things are doing well in the greenhouse.   I am on my second crop on some things in there!

Tomatoes and lettuce on the left, peppers and garlic and leeks and carnations in the middle, and lettuces and spinach on the right. 

We mowed a path to the lake through the un-mowed section of our yard.  We call this small lake Two Squaw Lake, and we share the ownership of it with our neighbors.   It makes for a nice trip down to the water on this path!

The path to Two Squaw Lake through our prairie. The front of the lake is a bog, but the back part is a nice sized lake.

The front part of the lake is more or less a bog, but it supports a lot of wildlife.  Canadian geese and loons and wood ducks use the water for nesting, song birds live all around it, too, and there are plenty of muskrats. 

Another view of the path, looking towards the house.  We like to sit on our raised porch and look out over the lake and the woods, and listen to the loons in the evening.   The path looks flat, but it's really a bit of an incline.   I get my exercise walking up this hill!

And that's the status of everything around here as of today!  Life is good and peaceful here and we are so blessed.   The weatherman is predicting some very bad storms tomorrow, but we hope it doesn't include hail!  We could use the rain, but not the hail!

Something New To Grow

My husband and I enjoy growing all kinds of things.  Our motto is 'if others can grow it, so can we'!  My son asked us if we would grow some hops for him, as he is into artisan beer brewing.   We discovered that hops can be used for other things besides beer, namely sleep pillows for insomnia and teas for indigestion, diarrhea, and also for folks with Crohn's disease.  Since we have the room to grow things, and have never tried to grow hops, we thought this would be a fun venture for us.  There is apparently quite a market for hops these days.  Hops require special support as they can grow to 25 feet tall!  We don't know much about them, but we have read enough to get started, and this will certainly be a learning experience.   I am anxious to try out the sleep pillow thing, as I often find myself having difficulty falling asleep.    The hops pillows are not something you sleep on, instead they are small pillows that are filled with dry hops and crushed each night to emit a scent that is supposed to help make a person feel a bit drowsy.   Sort of like aroma therapy.  We shall see.   I am skeptical about that, but I see that hops pillows are sold by many vendors in eBay.  Hops are also used in scented soaps and apparently you can eat them, too, in various recipes.  Maybe the soap thing would be more to my liking!
     Anyway, here is what we have done so far:
We bought 10 rhizomes from a garden supply place in Washington state and they grew like crazy in my big bay window in the living room.

The hops plants ready to put out in the field

Yesterday Harold used the tractor loader to sink a 20 foot tall post in the pasture.  He put a large chain around the top and from that we strung lines down to posts in the ground for the plants to grow on.   Hops grow up the rope and wrap themselves around the twine in a clockwise direction.   We have 10 lines strung to the top of this pole.  Harold is planting one of the hops plants.  The twine is a special rough textured rope especially designed for hops growers. 

A close up of Harold planting one of the hops plants

After planting one of the vines, we began to wrap the vine in a clockwise direction to get the plant started on the special twine.

Harold made 2 ft tall stakes out of scrap iron and welded a washer to the top.  These stakes will make a strong support for the vines as they grow up the 25 foot twine.

You can see several vines already planted in this photo.  We can pump water from our lake if need be to water the plants, if hand watering isn't enough.

It will certainly be fun to watch these vines grow!  Harvesting will be a new venture too!  If we get enough of the hops, my son can have plenty for his brewing purposes, and I will be anxious to try out the sleep pillows and hops soap making.  I have heard that hops are quite fragrant.  We have honey and beeswax also for making soap.   Who knows?   That might be my next new hobby! (As if I need something else to keep me busy!)

Up Close And Personal With Wildlife

If you recall the other day I mentioned in my latest post that a bear came into the yard and trashed some of our reserve hives.  Well, he came back this morning!   I first took a photo through the porch window, then quietly opened the back door and went out into the yard.   I took a couple other photos of the bear.  I wanted to get closer, but was afraid of scaring him off!  I guess 100 feet away was close enough anyway.  Based on the one photo of the bear standing over a fence post, we estimate that he stood about 6 1/2 feet tall.  And he probably weighed close to 450 lbs.   He was a HUGE bear!  I think it's kind of neat to be able to see wildlife this close.  When you live in the woods like we do, you have to expect to see all kinds of animals.  But - we will definitely have to find another spot to store our reserve hives.  We do have a very powerful electric fence on the new beehives, and the bear must know this because he never went anywhere close to the new hives.   After I got my photos, Harold scared the bear off with a couple of gun shots in the air.  The bear went into the woods and came around the other side of the house and down the road.   I could have gotten a great picture of him in the front yard, but my camera batteries died!  Grrrr...

My first picture taken through the porch window.

I managed to get the bear to look at me!

By now the bear was getting nervous about me being there and stood up to act defensively.  The post he is standing behind is a little over 5 feet tall, so this bear must be about 6 1/2 feet tall.

All this bear business makes for an exciting start to the day!

Animal Wars

Some days it's a real battle with animals around here!  We woke up this morning to see that our favorite cat, Smokey, had a face full of porcupine quills!  Oh no!  These weren't the real big ones, but smaller inch and a half size.  He must have found a baby porcupine somewhere and tangled with it.   Poor thing had them in his nose, mouth, and under his chin.  I wrapped him in a thick blanket, put on heavy leather gloves, gripped him with a 'death grip' by the nape, and Harold began pulling them out with pliers.   Of course Smokey would have none of this and it was a real battle.  I think dogs are much more patient about this than cats are!  We got down to the last one on his nose when he went totally berserk and worked his way out of everything, put a few new scratches in my arm and ran off to sulk.   We found him behind a hay bale in his cat house with a bloody face.    I tried to comfort him and pet his paws and he went for that OK because I think he was so scared.   Tonight we may try to get that last one out.   If we don't, according to the internet quills will work their way out but sometimes not in a good way.  Smokey comes to me now again, but I don't dare try the procedure until much later.  The last quill is only sticking out by 1/8 of an inch, so it will be a trick to get that one!  The scratches he gave me this morning are still bleeding when I move my arm.

After all this, Harold and I decided to start planting corn.  Things were going well until the other 14 farm cats decided it was time to inspect our business.   Have you ever tried to plant seeds with 14 curious cats running, jumping, digging, and chasing all around you?  We took a short break and that's when Harold discovered the extra beehives that we have reserved honey in, were scattered all over.   Bears!  During the night they must have decided to see if the unused hives had anything good in them to eat.   The bears  destroyed 5 hives worth of reserved honey-filled frames that we had planned to use for this year's bees.    And they tore things up pretty good.   The bears were most likely after bee larva, but they will take honey if larva isn't there.  We will either have to move those empty hives somewhere else, or put an electric fence on them, too.   I'm sure the bears will be back tonight for more honey.

While Harold decided to fix his truck, I started planting tomatoes.  Pretty soon bees were after me!  They were angry!!  One bit me on the side of the head.   I told Harold that the bees were very angry about something to come after me like that.   Sure enough, upon inspection he found out that ANTS were getting into another hive and eating the bees' honey and the sugar syrup we put out for them!   Yesterday we had a problem with ants in one of the hives, too.   We can't use ant poison because that would kill our bees.   So an alternative is to put used motor oil in cups (like a Cool Whip container) and set the hive on blocks inside the containers of oil.    The ants will not cross the oil to get up into the hive, and the bees don't bother the oil.    The ants that are in the hive already  are stung and taken out by the bees.  Harold did that yesterday and it solved the ant problem.  Today he has to do the same thing for the other two hives.   We have never had such a problem with ants before, so we don't know what's going on here.

Yesterday when Harold first tried to inspect what the bee problem was, he got stung badly  at least a half dozen times in the eye.   Today his eye is swollen and red and he looks like a prize fighter who lost the fight!

As if things weren't enough for today, when I went back to planting tomatoes one of my cats decided to come over and barf up his dinner right in front of me where I wanted to plant a tomato plant!  I tell you - some days the battle against animal life is something else!!  Living in the country can sometimes be real exciting!

Edited to add:  We got the last porcupine quill out of Smokey's nose tonight!  He didn't fight us too bad this time.  I think he knew we were trying to help him.   Afterwards I petted him, fed him, and gave him some warm milk.   He is happy now, and hopefully will not tangle with any more porcupines!

Bee Talk

Today we went to Clearbrook Minnesota to pick up 3 hives of bees.  We have to start all over again with our bees because all of our hives died over the winter.  The fellow who usually takes our bees to California for the winter did not do so this year for various reasons.   We tried to winter them over but did not succeed.   Sometimes that happens.   Sometimes it is good to start all over fresh.   We could only afford 3 new hives, so that's what we will start with.   Harold built some new hive boxes for winter time use that are 3 inches thick all around and will be able to accommodate a heater and extra foam insulation underneath.   When cold weather comes this fall, we will transfer our bees to those thick boxes and heat them in the back yard this winter.   We will no longer rely on others to take our bees elsewhere for the winter, and our bees will not be going to California anymore.   After all, if Canadians can winter over their bees, then surely Minnesotans should be able to do so!  We will see if our new winter hive design will work or not.   Having only 3 hives will set us back a lot regarding honey production, but we can hope for a really good bee year, take what honey we get - and then it's only up from there!  Later when one of the hives is really strong we can split the hive into two boxes, or catch a swarm and take it to another bee yard at our friend Joe's place.   This is our 9th year for doing bees.  We hate the thought of having to start from scratch again, but it just can't be helped.  We have learned a lot in 9 years, and we can always hope for a really good year!
     Here are some photos that I took this morning.  These bees came from Beaumont Texas, on the eastern part of the state.

One of the bee workers prepares a hive box we brought to fill up with a nuc full of bees. 

 A full frame of bees going from the nuc box on the left to our hive box on the right.  He is checking to see that there is a queen on the frame.

Two other workers prepare our other two hives.

A closer look.  This bee seller brought up about 300 hives from Texas.

Our three new hives ready for the long ride home to Honey B Farm!  The lids are screwed on tight for the ride and air spaces are nailed with screening.

Harold (in the blue jeans) talks shop with the other beekeepers.

When we got home, we opened up the entrances so the Texas girls could get out and start getting used to the place!

Harold opens up the entrances on another hive.

We put the hives on blocks and kept the entrance holes fairly small for now.

Then Harold put on good covers and took off the temporary covers.   One is finished, two more to go.

Within 20 minutes, the bees were already working!  They already did their orientation flights, and started gathering food from the dandelions!  You can see two bees working in this photo.

Lots of bee food here!  The Nanking cherries are blossoming, and there are tons of dandelions around. 

Plenty of bee food .  Beekeepers don't kill  dandelions!  This is good bee food.  I should be mowing the grass, but I will hold off for a day or so until the bees work over the plants.  At this time of the year, wild plum is in bloom, as well as forest wildflowers.  Our Texas girls will have plenty to do for a long time now.   What a feast for them!

And so another year of beekeeping begins...................we hope for a great summer, warm sunny weather, lots of wildflowers and natural bee food, AND as good a honey crop as we can get with 3 hives.