The color of honey

The color of honey changes with the summer and the bees available nectar sources. If you look at the jar on the left it is lighter in color. The jar on the right was collected a couple of days ago and notice the color, more darker and also a little bit thicker too! Even the taste ranges as well. I am really looking forward to the early September final harvest to see what color it is!

Oh no, not the Greenhouse!!!

 This morning at 5:00 a.m. I went up to let the chickens out and feed them and almost walked right into this branch that came right down on top of the greenhouse during last nights storm.

 The branch is a left over remnant from last years October storm. We have been watching it from way up far hoping it fell to the left or right a little farther, but to no avail...

When I opened the door I almost died when I saw the branch that had come crashing thru the upper window...

when we looked closer inside we also realized that another branch had punctured straight thru the roof. Thank goodness none of our chickens were harmed and that was the most important part. By 4:00 p.m. this afternoon, with the help of our friend Kenny, everything was repaired and all is back to normal.

Our Honey Extractor has arrived!

This year we decided to purchase a honey extractor. With the past 4 years doing it manually, taking so much time and not being an efficient way to extract honey from the frames it was time to take the step and add a honey extractor to our equipment.

Our extractor is only a two-frame extractor and a hand crank at that as well as a low end of the kind you can buy, it's basically the economy version, but we are just happy to get one! The picture on the right is a look down inside it. You can see the two baskets that the frames sit in, you slide the top close and it acts like a centrifuge, spinning at a fast rate of speed sending the honey down the sides to the spout below that opens up to filters that empty into a dispensing bucket that fills the jars! We are gearing up for the best honey season we have ever had. I have grown as a beekeeper and this is my pay off for never giving up on the bees!

Our morning chick rescue!

This morning Tim and I got a frantic call from my friend Debbie that a box of baby chicks were unclaimed at a local post office and were in danger of dying. She asked if we could go right down and get them. Not knowing much more than that, off we went.

Apparently these chicks were shipped out of Georgia on Monday from a hatchery there, stopped in Ohio and  a woman in Hawaii ordered these 26 chicks not knowing that they have strict agricultural laws about the import of fowl and other animals into that state. They were turned away, shipped back to Ohio and the return label was in Monroe, Ct but there was no such address! These babies sat in this box for 5 days with no food or water. Tim and I made a mad dash to get them home and my rescue skills kicked in! When we opened the box there were already 4 dead, one more died a short time later. We began to warm them, hydrate them and feed them. There are a few weak ones but we have been dipping their heads in water every 15 minutes and getting them to eat. It just make me so sad that these babies had to endure such an experience.

The Chicken Aprons have arrived!

  Our Chicken Aprons have arrived! Now my girls can get some peace and heal their wounds!

 They fit over the wings and lay over their backs.

This picture gives you a view of just how comfortable of a fit they are...

 and moments later another chicken is out in the yard not even phased by the chicken apron!

She never even acted like something was on her back...

and Mr. Red your days are over of ravishing the girls! I want pretty feathered and healthy chickens in the back yard thanks to the new "Chicken Aprons"!

My Apiary and Honey!

 I thought in this blog posts I would share my apiary, aka my bee yard. If you notice I call it my bee yard because Tim is a bit afraid of the bees :(  I guess not everyone is crazy about bees the way I am! We sit on the deck and watch the bees come in and out all day long.
 The apiary sits on a hill just next to the garden and greenhouse. We have gardens planted with various flowers that attract them and provide them with a lot of pollen as well as neighboring yards. The storage bin is an essential part for keeping this and that. If you look closely each hive has a couple of cinder blocks for the smoker and tool placement.

Today I had a very exciting discovery, honey, but not just any honey! During the winter I did some research on how to get Comb Honey by putting a frame with foundation, then put a frame next to it with no foundation and repeat this process in the super which is the top box (smaller that they store "our" honey in). Not all the hives have this but this one is showing success with the process! In the first frame you can see where they have built comb in the negative space and filled it with honey!

This picture shows some of the space that they have not quite filled in yet. There are queen excluders to keep her down below so only honey is stored in these cells. I am trully excited about our bees this year, we will not only be offering honey for sale, but also lip balms, bee pollen, beeswax ornaments and comb honey! 

A ravished chicken and a Maxi Pad!

   What do you do when you discover your chicken has been pecked beyond just feathers but down to the skin and you don"t have any bandaging material handy? You improvise! I am a Wildlife Rehabilitator by trade so I am used to having to use what I have, so I whipped out the peroxide, bandaging tape, anti-biotic cream and a Maxi Pad!  First step was to clean up her deep and mean wounds and then make a make shift bandage. I will be researching how to make a "Chicken Dress" for her, I have seen these for hens who are favored by the rooster. In her case she is a chicken I took in a few years ago that was found wondering the streets in Waterbury. She is picked on by everyone, but she is the sweetest thing. When I returned her to the coop they were all afraid of her make shift "Chicken Dress"! So I guess "Sherry Lynn" Wins!

Our first honey harvest!

   Our hives have been going full speed this summer! The bees are crazy busy. I sit on the back deck in the morning with a cup of coffee and it's like an airport, 20+ bees taking off every 5 seconds from each hive, the backyard is like a runway!
   I was able to harvest some honey last week. Notice the light yellow color of the summers first harvest and it tastes so good too! The way it looks we should have a very bountiful honey harvest this year!

Black gold makes our garden "sow" beautiful!

I have been ever so busy bringing soil down to the garden. Under the manure piles lays this wonderful "black gold"! I dug, filled the wheel barrel, brought it down the hill, emptied it into the raised beds and repeated this process more times than I would like to admit! The results are amazing and our garden is getting off to a good start already this year! I have already harvested rhubarb and made strawberry rhubarb jam! If you are in need of some good soil for free, bring over some buckets and we will get you hooked up!

A new "beast" added to the farm!

   We have been in need of a machine to help us with the more harder things that take a toll on these aging bodies of ours. Our farm consist of mostly hills so a tractor was out for fear it would tip over. We started looking at the cost of utility quads and they were very expensive brand new so I started looking and came across one that had everything we were looking for, a wench, a plow, a hitch, racks in front and back, and most of all an automatic! We ventured up to Mass today to check this one out and met a nice fellow named Bob, who by the way shared our love for music! We made him an offer, he threw in some extra things and we were heading home with Tim's new "beast"!
   In the top picture is the quad, Tim on the quad and him heading into the woods for some fun. Our first task with it was taking a bale of straw up to the upper barn which was so nice except Tim drove while Autumn and I still hiked the trail. We have a lot of tasks that need to get done around here, but most of all seeing Tim happy with his new toy is priceless!

Making Lip Balms...

   The bees have been very busy this summer on the farm and I have managed to harvest some beeswax...  

 and I set out to make some lip balms with a recipe I found that had everything I wanted in them..

 The finished product contains: Almond oil, beeswax, honey, Vitamin E and essential oils...

The first two scents I made were Peppermint and Vanilla with Peppermint. I am busy peering at my oils and thinking of some other combo flavors like lemons, lavender and others. Please share your favorite flavors of lip balm which will give me ideas for future flavors!

Lamb antics...

   Happy Fathers Day to all the great fathers out there. How time has flown by and the lambs have grown and continue to get into trouble. In the picture to the left, I am trying to take a picture of "Daisy" our white ewe and "Baby Baa" wants to know what I am doing!

I did get a nice picture of "Daisy", she is so silly. She hops down the hill, runs back up, and hops down the hill all day, why, because she can.

I cannot turn my back on them for a moment, here they have slipped into the hay storage barn and are helping themselves to some old fashioned "hay robbing"!!

They are a family unit though, always together, forever bonded...in this picture are actually 4 generations  of our "Babydoll" Sheep. They will be going to their new homes soon, which will be a sad day but the folks who will be getting them will be getting some funny little sheep...



When Nature and Farm life collide...

    On Saturday evening, one of our chickens was attacked by a raccoon. I was at work, Tim was watching the game, it was getting dark out and he let his guard down. He's knows better than this and felt really bad. We know that we have a mom raccoon up in back with a litter and she is a hungry girl.

   She went into our coop, grabbed this girl and gave her a few good injuries. We are giving her anti-biotics, cleaning the wounds and giving her a lot of TLC. She also has a ruptured air sac but that will re-absorb. I think she will be fine, just a tincture of time to heal. All her wounds are surface wounds and some loss of feathers.

    When the commotion started our two hero's, "Jesse" our shepherd mix and "Autumn" our terrier mix were both up to the coop in 3.5 seconds. Dogs are wonderful tools for thwarting such attacks and keeping wildlife at bay. These two are always on high alert and do their jobs well.
   So, Ms Raccoon has got to be watched very carefully and "Jesse" and "Autumn" are watching and working!
   We can live with wildlife, but always have to be on our toes, they have a right to this earth as we do...

Update on our hatching...

    Here is an update on our incubation of our Rhode Island Red eggs. We put 25 eggs into the incubator over the course of three days. Each was dated and numbered. The left row netted no embryos at all. We had some that formed half way and then had died in their egg at different stages of  development. I called my neighbor and he said he as well as our neighbor up the road was having the same issue. These two guys have been doing this for years and have never had issues like this. We all spoke and tried to find a common denominator. We found that we were feeding different feeds and had nothing that seemed to link our problems except the weather. The weather here in Connecticut has been rainy and the barometric pressure has been up and down.
We did however have two chicks hatch but one lived...

and she will be going to a friend who has 4 other chicks in her brooder and we will try again next week to hatch some new chicks!

Pollen Trap and our first pollen harvest!

    As I learn more about beekeeping, I have been researching the benefits of bee pollen or "bee bread", so I decided to purchase a pollen trap to put under my bees..

It took them a while to learn how to get into the new entrance, but within a few hours they figured it out...

The pollen trap has a slide out tray on the side of the hive that catches the pollen they drop... 

and here is our first harvest of bee pollen, not bad for two days. The picture doesn't do it justice but there are so many different colors of pollen, it was quite a beautiful show of natural colors.

Incubating baby chicks, one week and counting!

    Two weeks ago, after a failed attempt, I loaded 25 Rhode Island eggs into the incubator. I now have the proper liner, two thermometers and a humidity gauge. My first failed attempt was the lack of participating people putting water into the incubator and "cooking" the eggs. My mom bought the incubator...

and I bought this rocker which gently turns the eggs 4 times a day. At the 18 day mark I will take out the rocker and place the eggs on the "O", marked on each egg. They have to be in the incubator for 21 days. The chicks should hatch in 7 more days. The eggs have the date, the number of the egg (up to 25) and an "X" on the other side to help me track them. I will also "candle" the eggs to see which ones have chicks growing in them. Our egg business is doing so well we need more chickens! We can't keep up with the demand and I have also promised some of the chicks to a friend. I will update in a week what our success was!

Greenhouse Planted and ready to go!

   Happy official beginning of the summer and Memorial Day weekend as we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice so we can enjoy our freedom. It also kicks off the official planting season! Our greenhouse is planted and did rather well with everything growing nice and healthy. It is bursting at the seams with everything from vegetables to flowers and herbs.
   So today I began the task of locating things where they will be planted in our new raised beds made of re-purposed lumber. We took a trip to the dump today and got more lumber for more raised beds. It always amazes me what people throw away!
   Happy Birthday to Tim who is outside swearing at the new grill we bought him as he is putting it together!  So enjoy this holiday weekend and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice...