April's Farm Friend of the Month

It seems like we blinked our eyes and April flew by! So before the month ends we will be featuring good old "Norman". This boy is such a sweet soul and you can see it in his eyes. We bought a couple of alpacas a few years ago from some friends and passed on him. We were looking for special colors, etc. He is fawn on his head and white on his body. We bought three males, went home and I could not get this boy off my mind. I thought about how lonely he was going to be without his brothers who he was inseparable from. He arrived the next day and was so happy to see them. We love this boy and are so happy we got him. He is always intrigued by what you are doing and is kind to everyone! We love you Norm!!!

Bee Inspections today!

Today, Kisha and I, my new bee partner in crime, opened the hives with some interesting results. In her hive we found no evidence of a queen. The bees were disorganized, had only drawn out a small amount of comb and were clustering on three frames all the way to the left. We assumed that they either killed her or she may have flown away. In my hives, hive #1, which was brought through the winter was filled with bees, as well as brood, pollen and honey too! They were beginning to work up in the Super as well, but we did find swarm cells! This is very common this time of year with an over wintered hive. We took a frame of swarm cells and switched them into Kisha's hive. Later we checked and they were tending to them. Got to love them nurse bees! Hive #2 was a recent new package. When we opened it up, the hive was doing exactly what we wanted it to do. The girls had used some of the frames that had drawn out comb. The queen had laid eggs, larva was apparent and all was well with this hive! Then we went to hive #3 and what we found was far different from the rest. The queen in this hive was there, meandering about, had not laid a single egg. My thoughts are that she is not a bred queen. The worker bees in this hive had drawn out numerous superceder cells with nothing in them. It was a great day for Kisha because she got a chance to see so many scenarios of hive results! The coming week is filled with rain, so we will re-inspect next week and hope for some real positive results! Happy bees make the beekeeper happy too!

My new beekeeping partner and the bees are here!

 The Apiary aka Bee Yard is up and running! We are now up to 5 hives with the additional hive owned by a woman I am mentoring. I am so excited about this because it gets lonely up there working away with no one to talk to but the bees! Yesterday we worked together and 4 hands are definitely better than two! We located the queens and marked them which is so much easier to do with someone helping!

This is Kisha's new hive! The bees are active and adapting quite well. Looking forward to teaching her what I know and learning together. The bees are forever teaching us!

The lambs are weaning!

The lambs are weaning! Even our bottle fed baby has weaned off her bottle. They take forever to eat, but we distract the mom's with some hay and they can enjoy their grain.

Taking a moment for cuteness!

I'd like to take this moment to say awwwww, so cute!? This is little "Ivy" with our first time mom, Daisy. These two are madly in love with each other and we have decided to keep her! For the most part we always let our ewes keep their first ewe. There was no question from the first time we saw her!

An "Ivy" update...

It was inevitable from the moment I saw her, her name would be "Ivy". She is so cute, we are so in love with her! She is laid back like her mom and just stunning like her dad!