Today I fed the bees and opened up the hives to check on their progress.

I still feel like I have no idea want I’m doing bee-wise, in spite of taking a class and reading every in-print book on the subject.

Still, I am completely fascinated by them.

These bees are passing nectar from one to the other. The bees who go out foraging for nectar store in the their stomach and pass it off to the bees who take care of the babies and make the honey. I’d only seen this in books before today. Also, see that white blob in the lower, left-hand corner? I’m almost positive that’s a bee larva.

See those bright yellow dots on the bees back legs? That’s pollen, stuffed in the bees pollen sacs for the return journey to the hive.

Bees travel up to six miles in search of nectar and go back and forth all day long, returning to the hive only long enough to drop off their loot. Did you know it takes nectar from 10 million flowers to create one liter of honey?

If you are interested at all in bees I highly recommend Tales from the Hive, a Nova documentary, available on DVD. My friend’s Jen and Doug gave it to me and it is phenomenal. Some how, the filmmakers actually mounted cameras on the bees. The footage is amazing.

It might be a holiday weekend but the sheep don’t take any time off at Juniper Moon Farm. I had been letting some chores pile up and today was the day to get them off my plate.

In the morning, Maggie and I wormed, deloused and hoof-trimmed all the boys and the goats in the west pasture. It was still pretty cool when we got started, thank God. Worming is a piece of cake but hoof-trimming is filthy work, takes forever and makes me wonder why I still have goats. (The sheep’s hooves are much harder and only need trimming a couple of times a year. Angora goats’ hooves must be done every six weeks or so. Sheep don’t need to be deloused either, but it’s not such a big deal as it only takes about 15 seconds per animal.)

Since it wasn’t blazing hot when we finished I decided to mow the lawn to get it over with. I hate mowing the lawn, not because it’s hard but because it’s boring as hell. Boring and loud. I felt very grown-up since I did it anyway.

Next, Maggie and I loaded up her truck and took a huge load of brush and recyclables to the landfill. By then it was blazing hot, so we didn’t start on worming the ewes and lambs until 6 p.m.

This was the Tiny Man’s first time getting wormed, so we took a couple of pics for his baby book.*

After each animal is wormed, they get a red stripe with a livestock marker on their nose so we can easily tell who’s been done. (Yes, it comes off. Every time I show pictures of animals that have been marked some one asks in the comments. It comes off. I promise.)

A whole pen full of wormed ewes and lambs is a beautiful sight.

Miss Ethel is still sitting on her clutch of eggs and she protects them rather fiercely! I tried to give her some grain tonight and she pecked my hand. From here on out, she’s on her own.

Now I’m making sugar syrup to feed the bees, after which I expect I will collapse in an exhausted heap. Hope you had a terrific Saturday, my friends. More tomorrow.

*No, Rush doesn’t really have a baby book. That was a joke.

It was time to add a new super to my beehives today. A super is the box full of frames that make up the beehive. Each of the boxes for my hives holds 8 wooden frames that I have inserted wax foundation into.  The bees will make their honeycomb on the foundation and use it for rearing new bees and storing honey.

If I didn’t add new frames and left the bees with just one super, they would very likely quickly get crowded and swarm, leaving the hive in search of a new, roomier home.

I was pretty excited to try out my new bee suit today. It’s nearly impenetrable to bees and made me much more confident while working with the hives.

First I blew some smoke into the front of the hives. The smoke cause the bees to behave in a predictable way- basically, it causes them to start eating honey as quickly as possible rather than going after the beekeeper.

Then I removed the outer cover.

Next I puffed some smoke into the hive through the hole in the inside cover and removed it, exposing the frames.

After checking to be sure that the bees have drawn comb on most of the frames in the first box, I brushed the bees out of the way with my bee brush and placed the second box on top of the first.

The boxes are only held in place by gravity. I always thought they would lock together some how but they don’t. You really have to be careful when walking around the hives that you don’t knock into them and cause all kinds of havoc.

Once the new super was in place I put the inside cover on top of it and used my bee brush to encourage the bees to get out of the way of the incoming outside cover.

Then I fed the bees and moved on to the next hive.

Remember Tosh, the sweet young man from the horse farm up the road that rescued us when we were snowed in this winter? He came over the other day and mowed the pastures for me. They look so lovely now.

In other farm news, Ethel, one of our laying hens has gone broody. We don’t have a rooster, so all of her time sitting on a clutch of eggs would be for naught, except that my friend Amy brought over some fertilized eggs for us to slip under Ethel. Chickens aren’t too particular about who’s eggs they sit on, so if all goes according to plan, we should have some farm-hatched baby chicks around here in a little under a month.

My lovely friend Louise drove down from Manassas this morning to help me install my bee packages. THANK GOD she came, because it was much harder than all the books and blog posts I’ve read made it seem.

First Louise and I created a level surface for the hives off the ground with pavers.

The hives need to face the South, get all day sun and be in a location where people won’t be walking in front of them all the time.

Then we inserted the frames into the hive bodies. The frames contain a thin piece of beeswax that the bees will use as a base for “drawing” comb. The comb will hold the brood (baby bees) and eventually, the honey. My hives hold eight frames in each box, but we left a frame out of each hive for the installation.

In order to calm the bees for what was to come, we sprayed them pretty thoroughly with sugar water. I ordered two packages of bees, one for each hive. The hives were sort of nailed together for shipping and we had to use a hive tool to separate the two boxes for installation. I got stung while separating the two boxes. It was the first bee sting I’ve ever gotten in my life and it was kind of a relief to get it over with. It hurt, but not badly, and in a different way than I has expected.

Louise offered to install the first package so I could watch. First, she pried off the piece of wood that was sealing the box.

Next, Louise used the hive tool to pry out the feeder can from the box. The feeder can contains sugar water to sustain the bees during shipping. At this point there was nothing keeping the bees in the box.

Next, she pried out the queen chamber from the box. The queen and a few of her attendants are shipped in a small box with mesh sides. On one end of the box, there is a small hole filled with a fondant cork. The worker bees will spend the next few days eating away at the fondant in order to get to the queen. At first they are trying to get to her to kill her, but by the time she is freed, all the workers will have fallen under the spell of her pheromones and become her slaves.

Louise set the queen box aside till we were ready for it. The next step is to bang the box of bees (rather more forcefully than I expected) on the ground a few times and then shake them directly into the hive.

It took a whole lot of shaking to get most of the bees out of the box and into the hive.

Now we were ready for the queen. Louise took a ten-penny nail and pushed it through the fondant plug to make it a bit easier for the workers to free the queen and her attendants.

The queen’s box was stuck into a sort of mesh basket in between the frames.

Next, we used the bee brush to get most of the bees off the top of the frames to prevent squashing them with the inner cover.

Then Louise slowly slid the inner cover on.

And we placed the top on the hive. Since all of the bees didn’t make it into the hive right away, we left the bee packaging propped up on the hive for the night. By morning, the remaining bees should be inside the hive. The yellow thing sticking out in the front is the feeder. It’s filled with a 1:1 solution of sugar and water to feed the bees until the nectar starts flowing.

I followed the same procedures as Louise.

Installing the bee packages was slightly scary but I was super-calm the whole time and never panicked.

In a week or so, I will go into each hive and make sure the queens have emerged, replace the missing frame in the slot where her box is and make sure the bees are drawing comb. The only other thing to do right now is make sure the bees have plenty of sugar water and wait.

BIG thanks to Louise for coming down to help- could not have done it without her- and to Maggie, who took pictures with my telephoto lens without the benefit of a bee suit.

I am far from an expert but I’ll answer any question that I can in the comments.

Before I get into the farm update I want to say an enormous thank you for all the birthday cards, gifts, wishes, emails and tweets! I can honestly say that my 40th Birthday was the best one I’ve ever had, thanks to all of you. I’m regularly spoiled by all the lovely things you all send me even when it’s not my birthday and I’m pretty sure the luckiest person I know.

Well, my unplugged weekend didn’t exactly go as planned. I did (mostly) avoid the internet from Friday to Sunday, but several things went wrong with the flock and I was up to my ears in stress nevertheless. On Friday night around Midnight, Miss Liberty decided that she didn’t like the way Lucy was looking at her lamb through the fence, so she repeatedly rammed the gate until I heard the ruckus and went outside to stop her. The result was a cut on her head and a bloody nose. I got her penned up with Knightly, her lamb, and doctored up her wounds before finally getting to bed around 2 a.m.

Bloody wounds are bad news in the Spring and Summer when the flies are a problem. Flystrike is a nasty business and all cuts must be treated with an anti-fly ointment ASAP.

Liberty and Knightly are fine and she seems to have calmed down.

Saturday got off to a lovely start. My good friends Kris and Charlie brought me lunch, we walked across the street to an art show and spent some time just talking about nothing. My favorite kind of Saturday, actually. Then my aunt Ann and cousin Jack (15-year-old) came over to spend the night. We went out to dinner in C-ville and watched a movie. All good stuff.

Disaster very nearly struck in the morning when Jack found Alabama tangled up in the moveable fencing and choking to death. Luckily, Jack didn’t lose his head and we were able to cut Bama free of the fence, but he was in very bad shape. I built another pen and doctored all the deep cuts that the wire fencing left in his skin. The fence had been wrapped around his face and head and he was so swollen that he was unrecognizable. Both of his eyes were swollen shut and he was in shock.

Bama is almost fully recovered and should be out of the isolation pen tomorrow. It scared the bejesus out of me, though and we won’t be using movable fencing anymore. Alabama spent every day of his life in that fencing and still managed to get tangled up enough to nearly kill him. Erin’s goat, Sweet William, died last month after getting tangled in the same fencing. So, unfortunately, it’s going.

In better news, Dr. Grover, our lovely and amazing vet, came by the farm today to castrate all the ram lambs and buck kids, dock the lambs tails and ear tag everyone. I felt a bit guilty asking Dr. G to come, as I usually do all of this myself, but with so many lambs this year I just kept putting it off.

Each lamb and kid was given a pain killer before they were docked and castrated. Honestly, it wasn’t a big deal to the lambs at all. Maggie, our resident vegetarian, was amazed by how un-traumatic the whole thing was for the babies.

In the past, I haven’t docked my lambs tails. My flock was small enough that I’ve always been able to manage the kinds of problems that docking prevents without cutting off the tails, but the fly situation this year is already so out of control, and I decided that it would be far crueler to subject a lamb to flystike than to dock their tails. I don’t know if I will dock next year- it depends on the conditions- but I’m comfortable with my decision this year.

We chose to dock tails by banding them after doing a lot of reading and talking with Dr. Grover. Basically, a special kind of rubber band is placed around the tail under the third vertebrae. The band cuts of the blood supply to the end of the tail and, in a few weeks, the dead portion drops off. The advantages are that the procedure doesn’t cause much pain- only a little discomfort- and doesn’t create an open wound.

As you can see from the pics bellow, the lambs and kids were completely fine after the procedures and spent the afternoon jumping, playing and grazing.

The Tiny Man was looking a little bit hunchy today which worried me. Hunchy is what we call it when I lamb has his back legs pulled in a bit and just doesn’t look right. I don’t think that Rush’s mama is making enough milk to supply him anymore, probably because his tiny appetite was enough to keep her producing. We have gone back to feeding him and will probably have to bottle feed him till it’s time to wean him.

Since I brought Rushworth inside to tube feed him anyway, I decided to give him a bath. He is now the whitest lamberoo in the pasture!

In other news, MY BEES CAME TODAY! I got a phone call from the post office at 7:30 a.m. asking me to please come pick up my bees. I did pick them up but I didn’t install them in their hives today. It was rainy and, according to my cooperative extension, rain makes bees cranky.

Several people asked me how the bees were packaged so I took some pics. More tomorrow when we’ve put them in their hives.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who purchase the pattern Willie to help cover the cost of Crush’s surgery. I got an update from Pam today and I am thrilled to report that sales of Willie have thus far raised $1900, nearly two thirds of Crush’s vet bills! Isn’t that amazing?!? Y’all are amazing.

To see more pics of the lovely Crush in her cast, check out Pam’s flickr stream.

And the winner of the half share in the 2011 Juniper Moon Farm Yarn CSA is…

Congrats Kathy! Please email Maggie at Maggie AT fiberfarm DOT com to claim your prize!

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I am starting to keep bees this year. Beekeeping is incredibly interesting and I am stupid-excited about it! My bees will be arriving here at the farm on May 2 or 3 but I’ve already spent several hours in a class offered by my County Extension, read every book I can get my hands on and prepped all my equipment for the big day.

There must be something in the air because beekeeping has suddenly gotten very cool. Bees are this year’s backyard chickens, I guess. New York City recently overturned a long-time ban on keeping bees within the city limits. Even the White House has a hive! The Obamas were the lucky recipients of 134 pounds of their very own honey last year.

I would love to encourage some of you to consider keeping bees, so I’m giving away two copies of The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yarn and Garden to two of our lucky readers. This book is a great introduction to the world of bees.

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on this post telling me why you’re interested in beekeeping. Easy peasy. One comment per person please! Entries close at Midnight on Friday, April 2, 2010. Two winners will be chosen at random and the winner’s names will be posted here on Saturday, April 3. The winners will have 48 hours to contact me with their mailing address to claim their prize.

Good luck!