What we have been doing this winter.

Spinning yarn from our angora goats and making charcoal,what fun!

Six inches of snow, what a mess of fallen trees!

Dalia gave birth to this little bull calf on February 17th, 2019.

this is her with her new born calf and her calf from last year.

Twenty years old and still can do "Mama".

Elsie gave birth to this beautiful little girl in a rain storm on February 8 2019.

Time to wean this year's calves!

Here they are and not at all happy about being separated from there mothers.

Winter solstice!

Here we are with the rod that we drove in the ground that lines up with the sun to cast a shadow in the center of the rock on solstice morning. This picture was actually taken two days before as we were afraid solstice was going to be cloudy as you can see the shadow is just to the right of center.

 

Re: We are so impressed with all the native bumble bees in our garden this year working right alongside of our domestic bees.

On Aug 9, 2018, at 9:21 PM, Norman wrote:

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We are so impressed with all the native bumble bees in our garden this year working right alongside of our domestic bees.

These fotos were taken a week or two apart in the same place in our garden.

And here is the latest calf.

This beautiful bull calf was born on the 18th of July. This picture of him on his feet was taken within thirty minutes of him hitting the ground. Good job Mama!

Swarm Box.

So with my recent poor luck with cell builder hives. I am trying this other method.
I take a strong hive, find the queen and isolate her.
Then place a frame of pollen and a frame of green honey with bees into this well ventilated six frame box. Then going from one frame to the next I sweep all the bees I can into the box with screen top and a small opening.
I put the queen back into the hive where most of the bees return. I did this with two hives giving me two swarm boxes filled with queen less bees.
After a day I placed a frame of queen cells with grafted larva.
One box accepted them but the other did not.
So into that box I placed a frame of eggs and young larva from the downer hive and right away they began to make two queens!
When we get back from Philly, I am going to use this method to produce another set of hives.

Preparing our tamale corn for planting.

We have been planting this same corn for the better part of twenty years, always selecting the prettiest ears.

Both calves want to nurse? She's fine with that!

Grafted queen cells are now capped and we are placing them in there nucleus hives.

The last photo shows how we place each prepared queen cell into each prepared queenless nucleus hive. If all things continue as planed, each of these cells will hatch a queen that will successfully mate and begin her own hive.

It is the right time of year to help our bees produce more queens.

Basically we form some cells from bees wax then place freshly hatched worker bee larva into the bottom of them and place the whole thing into a specially prepared hive. The next day they are doing just what we want! And no, Trixie is not much help with this job.

Preparing lunch right in the garden.

We get a lot more work done in the garden if we don't go to the house for lunch.

Weeding the beets and carrots today.

The calves are abut a week old now.

Two beautiful calves born today!

The first photo is of Zorra and her calf who was most likely born less than an hour before I found her.
The other is Dahlia who's calf must have been born just after I checked her this morning. Nether of these cows have had calves before and both did fine with no assistance.

Its time to get ready for the honey flow.