Just one week to go until the New England Fiber Festival! We are packing bins and checking what we need to bring.
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| Yarns, yarns and more yarns have been spun in preparation for the show! |
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| Some last minute Star Santa ornaments are almost ready to come off the felting board... |
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| and we're picking out which of this years baby angoras will be coming along! You can find us in Mallory building. I will be there with the wonderful Naomi Allen who will have Hooked Rugs and supplies! Come and see us! |
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| When you see that little bottle of honey you are about to purchase, you have no idea the process that it goes through to get it into that bottle! After a hot and grooling summer in the bee suit with the bees working themselves to death, ,making sure they are okay, fed and healthy, the next step is harvesting. We only have a two frame extractor that hand cranks. It can take some time to spin down numerous frames. Lets not even mention the amount that gets all over the kitchen! There is nothing like walking through your kitchen and your slipper staying where it is as you walk out of it~! |
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| Our bees gifted us with countless frames that look like this! Capped and full of honey, some of them so heavy it was hard to lift them! |
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| First things first is de-capping the waxy coating the bees put over the honey when it's just right and ready! This is a hot knife that melts it away quickly and allows you to cut through the wax. Known as a de-capping knife. |
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| The extractor has a trap door at the bottom that allows you to elevate it and drip into a strainer startled over a bottling bucket that we place below. This strainer has two levels of straining in it. It strains just the wax but does allow some beneficial pollen to pass through making the honey taste amazing and also allowing all the beneficial good stuff in the honey to stay. |
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| Once it's strained into the bottling bucket, the bottling begins! Then the labels are applied and we now have honey available! One pound jars are $10, 1/2 pound jars are $5 and we will also have the plastic bear jars available for $5.00 as well! Now to wash the kitchen floor!!! |
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| Today we fired up the smoker, pulled all the tools and supplies we needed... |
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| loaded up the quad and headed to the hives. |
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| As we began to inspect the hives we realized that hive #5 didn't make it but had a lot of honey still in it. Last time I inspected it, it was iffy if the hive had a queen. As we opened the other hives, we saw frame after frame in the honey Supers that looked like this, just loaded with honey. |
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| Just another frame chock full of honey! |
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After the honey was removed, mite treatments were applied for the winter prep. The feeders were filled...
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| Welcome October from Maddie (on the left) and Pru (on the right)! October is our favorite month around here! A time to go back inward, sit by the fire, spin, knit, watch football and most of all no heat! The turning of the leaves and the sense of peace that the fall brings in New England is priceless. |
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| The girls got their fall haircut last week so they are not wishing for the cooler weather to come too fast! We just love these girls! We took them in a few years back with no history of how old they are or if they are even related. Their ear tags had been removed so there is no way to tell. Maddie is more outgoing while Pru is aloof. They produced some nice mohair this time around that I am looking forward to working with. |
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| These inseparable girls on the hill. I think they are telling Tim to get these logs out of here! |
