Honey Extraction 2017

This weekend we pulled the honey supers off our hives and began to extract honey from the frames.  We spent Saturday and today spinning out frames in the extractor, and we will finish tomorrow.   It has been a good honey year, and we will probably end up with about 350 lbs or so of honey.   This year's honey has a lot of basswood blossoms in it, and so it is a light, fruity tasting honey.  Some of the boxes have a more clover tasting honey, and we will mix a little of each to get a good blended honey with a little bit of every taste! We pulled the honey supers a little early this year so as to give the bees more time to make honey for themselves from the wildflowers that are still here.   We will no longer be sending our bees to California for the winter, but will attempt to winter them here.  The bees will need a good winter store of food for themselves, and we will use thick hive boxes that Harold has built for winterizing the bees.  Sturdy boxes and a heater/thermostat should insure that the bees will make it through the winter right in our own back yard.  Winterizing the bees here will be less stressful for the bees (no travel), and will help to cut down on bee diseases from other beekeeper's hives out in California.   We do not care for sending hives out for almond pollination, we just want good honey.  We have not been successful at winterizing bees in past years, but since Harold has designed and built very thick, insulated hives, we should be successful this year.
     Here are some photos of the process.

First the wax is cut off from the frame of honey with a hot knife (we keep the knife in hot boiling water).  The bees put a wax capping over honey that is 'ready'. 

Here is a hive with 9 full frames of capped honey.  The bees have actually attempted to store and cap off honey in between the spaces of the frames!

A close up of a fully capped frame.  A full frame like this of honey weighs approximately 5 lbs.   So a box of honey weighs about 40-45 lbs. 

Harold is turning the crank on the extractor.  We set up the honey process right in my kitchen (I have a very large kitchen!).  This year Harold built new support legs for the extractor out of strong thick metal to replace the flimsy ones that originally came with the extractor.   Next year we hope to motorize the extractor - we're getting too old to crank this out by hand for the required 5 minutes!

Honey coming out into the filter and bucket.

You end up with a lot of wax cappings mixed with honey.  We strain out the wax and separate the honey from the cappings.  The honey is filtered again, and the wax is melted and put into blocks to be sold. 

We have three buckets with honey gates to make bottling easier.  Additional honey is stored in plain buckets.  All the buckets are of food grade plastic.

The inside of the extractor.  It will fit 18 frames, but we only spin 9 at a time by hand.  The frames of honey are spun out by centrifugal force.

You can see the honey at the bottom of the extractor.

Harold is transferring more wax cappings into a large bin for later filtering.  We have 5 more boxes of frames to work with tomorrow. 

When we are finished for the evening, we cover everything to keep out dust and moisture.

Finished boxes are stacked up and ready to go out into the metal building we store them in.

At the end of the day, we relax with some popcorn (homegrown, of course!) and a game of Scrabble!

A batch of bottled honey from Honey B Farm!!

Pea Pickin' Good Time

Today I picked peas for over 2 hours.  I only had 2 rows, about 50 feet long, but I guess 100 feet of peas is plenty!  This evening I am starting to pod them out to put in the freezer.   The pile on the table in this photo is about 3 feet long, 2 1/2 feet wide and a foot high.   This should give me quite a few quart bags of peas for the freezer.   I probably won't get them all done tonight, but I'll get a good start.   There will be more peas in a few days, too, as I only picked what was ready.   When you have pollinator bees, you have lots of garden veggies!!
     This is sure a busy time for us now!  I also spent 3 hours mowing grass today.   So I spent about 5 hours out in the sun.   I certainly got a good dose of vitamin D, eh?  Also cucumbers are coming in now, so I've been busy making dill pickles and bread and butter pickles.  Our market day on Thursday keeps us busy, too.   Last week we picked 35 lbs of green beans, 10 lbs of yellow beans, many, many zucchinis and cucumbers, and peppers and cabbages and fresh herbs.   It usually takes us about 4 hours of picking to prepare for market day.
     The other day Harold dug up about 30 lbs of potatoes for me, so I'll be canning those also.   And as if we aren't busy enough - this coming Friday we are pulling the honey supers on our beehives and on Saturday we will extract honey.   We anticipate a big honey harvest, somewhere around 400 lbs. 
     So if I don't put many articles on here for a while, you know I'm very busy!   But this is a good kind of busy.  We are so blessed with wonderful vegetables and everything else.   Even our apple tree is producing many fine apples.   But the deer are eating them before they're ready, so Harold put an electric fence around the tree this evening to stop that!   Those deer are NOT going to eat my beautiful pie apples!

Just getting started on a huge job of podding out peas!  Yes, peas are a lot of work to pick and pod, but fresh garden peas are SO worth the trouble!  We love Pea and Cheese Salad, Creamed Peas and New Potatoes, and Fettuccine Alfredo with Peas, just to name a few of our favorite dishes with these lovely peas.  We also love them with fresh mushrooms as a side dish.

Look What We Found!

Today we discovered something new on our property.  Hazelnuts!  Harold was doing some tilling in the pasture, and when he walked back home, he discovered a different kind of large bush he had never seen before.   He brought a branch back to the house and we looked it up.  We have a hazelnut bush!  A quick research on the internet told us that these nut bushes can and do grow in Minnesota, as well as Wisconsin, northern Michigan, and especially in Oregon and Washington.   Other states can have them, too, but these are the most prominent growing areas.   These wild hazelnuts are definitely edible.  Harold says the bush is just loaded with these nuts.  The bush is about 8 feet high, and about 10 feet across.  However right now, it is surrounded with high Canadian thistles and tall grasses, so getting to it is not easy.  When it's time to harvest the nuts, we'll have to get rid of the thistles!  We have heard that a person should pick them at the green stage, but fully grown, and they will brown up when they dry.   Then when they are thoroughly dry, you can crack them and eat them just like the ones you buy at the store.   Or you can roast them (we'll have to do some research on that one)  Our neighbor has eaten these and says you must pick them before the worms get into them.   So we'll have to keep a close eye on these, and learn something new!
     Here is a view of the branch Harold brought in:

The Hazelnuts grow in clusters with a curly outer layer.

A close up view of the nuts inside.  They need to grow for a few more weeks, I think.

Anyway, I will have to keep you posted on how we did with picking and drying these nuts.   There is always something new to learn in nature.   And I am anxious to taste these wild nuts.

On another note, this is canning season again, and I bought several boxes of Mrs. Smitcamp's canning peaches, which come from Cutler CA.  These are wonderful peaches and I have very good results every year canning up these lovely peaches.   A couple years ago I did a blog article on how to ripen peaches.  In case you missed it, or can't find the post I wrote back then, here again is the method.   First you must lay the peaches on linen, stem side down, and not touching each other.  Then cover with more linens.   The peach grower who taught me this method says to use Damask linens because they have good "breathability".  Yes, don't laugh, he said!  Old time damask linens can be bought at flea markets and antique stores for very little cost (because nobody wants them anymore!).  After a few days, the peaches are perfectly ripened and ready to can up.   Most peaches come in the box fairly green, and this method always produces juicy peaches that can up nicely! 

I put my peaches under damask linens to ripen for a couple days.

The perfectly ripened peaches ready to can.  You want the peaches to be only slightly soft, as they will cook somewhat during the canning process.   Some of these peaches have a little green left to them, and I will do them the following day, picking only the yellow ripe ones for canning tomorrow. 

I bought 3 large boxes of peaches this year, as I had some quarts left from last year.   Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be busy canning peaches!   They are easy to can up, and I always enjoy the process.   And they taste SO good in the winter when the snow is a couple feet deep and it is 30 below zero outside!

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!)