A Recycled Foundation

My son Russ lives in a neighboring town.  He had a sidewalk leading from his front door to the street that was cracking due to an oak tree in the yard.  The insurance company warned that a cracked sidewalk was a liability issue, so the sidewalk had to come up.  Russ rented a saw from a rental place in Lake Charles and in half a day we had the entire sidewalk chopped up and hauled to the back of his house.  He filled in where the sidewalk was with topsoil and the St. Augustine grass is quickly filling it in.  Russ attempted to get the town to take the big pieces of concrete to stop erosion in canals or ditches in the area, but they were not interested.  So, what are we going to do?

We poured a little sidewalk linking his old sidewalk to the driveway

I went one afternoon before it got too hot and, using a sledgehammer, I cracked the old pieces of sidewalk into pieces that would be manageable to handle.  The old sidewalk was at least four inches think.  After propping the pieces up on another chunk of concrete, I was able to crack them up pretty easily.

With our recent goat barn renovation, I had a brainstorm.  The goat barn sits in a low area.  We didn't think things through when we built the barn there.  Over the years we've hauled loads of dirt to build up the area.  Unfortunately, the goat barn area was never built up - until this week!  I moved several loads of clay into the barn and leveled it out.  Then we moved several loads of the old sidewalk ten miles east and north to our place.  I arranged them on top of the clay as best as I could so that the pieces fit as close together as I could get them.

The problem with that is the cracks between the sidewalk chunks.  What to do?!  Then we remembered that our neighbor had given us 20 bags of sand that he no longer needed.  I poured the sand in the cracks and let the animals walk on it.  As they walked and the concrete moved, the sand settled.  I added more.  This time the concrete is more firm.  I'll need a few more pieces of the sidewalk to be put in place and then sand poured in the cracks.  Then I'll spray it with water to really set in in good.

This 'recycled foundation' lifted the level of the floor by about five inches, ensuring that the goats will be high and dry.  An added bonus is the concrete will help the condition of their hooves.  They'll be on a firm foundation.  When the town refused Russ' concrete, he made two loads to the landfill to dump the old sidewalk.  I'm glad we were able to get the rest of it!  Always nice to recycle something that's no longer useful into something that is useable and an upgrade.

The Honey Harvest (Part 5)

Once the honey is extracted, the job is not done.  We left you last when we used a honey refractometer to determine the moisture content of our honey.  We are using a de-humidifier to get it to the optimal level.  While we are waiting, we put all the boxes of (mostly) empty frames out about 25 yards from the hives.  You see most of the honey has been spun out of the frames with centrifugal force, but we don't like to waste anything, and the bees certainly don't like to waste any honey left over either.  If you look closely in the photo, the bees have found the honey on the frames that we robbed.  They are taking back what they can.

The girls are like a clean-up crew and they work diligently to salvage any honey, pollen, and wax that they can get and carry back to the hive.  

Peeking down, you can see a bee that is reaching WAY down within a cell to pull out any honey remaining.  They'll fill up cells back in the bee boxes.  They will use it for food OR we will get it when we pull fall honey.

I want to show you something.  This is what's called "drawn comb."  The foundation is the black plastic portion of the frame that's coated in beeswax.  The cells are hexagonal, or six sided.  This gives it strength and optimal capacity to store honey and pollen.  On a medium frame the bees will draw out 3,100 per side!  That's 6,200 cells per frame.  We use 10 frames per medium box.  The bees fill all those cells with honey and cap it.  In extracting, you saw us cut the caps off to expose and extract the honey.

Another interesting thing about the cells.  I don't know how to show it, but if you look closely, you might be able to make it out.  The cells are drawn out perpendicular from the foundation, but it is not straight out.  The cells are sloped at a very slight angle upward so that the nectar that is put in them don't drain out.  I don't understand how you can be a beekeeper and be an atheist.  Honeybees are witnesses of the order, the complexity, the creativity of our Creator!

Once the bees have cleaned up the frames of any leftover honey, we put the frames into the freezer.  We freeze them to kill any eggs or larvae of any critter that may have gotten in the frames.  Next spring, we'll put these frames in boxes and put out on the hives.  Here's the neat part about that:  Putting frames out with drawn out comb saves the bees time and labor.  Next spring, the bees won't have to use all their energy making wax to draw out the comb off of the foundation.  They'll be able to use that energy and time in making HONEY!

After freezing for a week or so, we'll remove the frames and seal in a plastic bag and store in a tote.  They will be all ready and waiting for the honey crop of 2026!

The Flow Is On! - Checking in on the Bees

The flow in south Louisiana in our area is dependent primarily on the Chinese Tallow Tree.  The flow means that the tallow tree (and other plants) are producing lots of nectar.  The busy bees gather it, bring it back home and make delicious honey.  The tassels you see below are the flowers of the tallow tree from which the honeybees harvest nectar.

Here's an up close shot.  There were bees really working it, but I couldn't capture them as I was far away zooming in.

As semi-novice beekeepers, we've learned that when the flow is on, you don't want them to run out of room to put the nectar.  We check the boxes every week, adding honey supers to give them more space.  A super simply means a box placed on top. Here are our hives.  You'll notice that there are five.  Last week we had six.  I'll explain that in a minute.  Let's go through the boxes one by one.

The first box is a swarm we caught in the yard this spring.  You'll notice the brick is sideways.  That, in beekeeper language, means we could find no queen.  I did, however, find some larva, and that means there WAS a queen.  I'm going to give it one more week.  If I find no queen and no eggs, I will stack this deep on top of a healthy hive and they'll be able to use the nectar in these frames.

This second box is a swarm we caught this spring.  It's blowing and going.  In fact, I added a honey super to the super that was already there, because the first super was about 80% full of capped honey.  One thing you'll note is there are 2 deep boxes.  The reason for that is that one of the splits that we made failed.  No queen and no eggs.  I stacked the deep on top of the existing deep and put the queen excluder so that the queen won't go up into the honey supers.

The third hive is VERY active.  I added another honey super on top of the four honey supers already on there that are full.  We're really happy with this one!

This is the sad story we were telling you about.  One of the splits that we made, although initially successful, failed.  Rather than lose the nectar, we moved the deep box with the bees and put it on top of the second hives' deep box.  They'll use all that.

The fourth hive is doing well.  I didn't add a honey super to the top of the three existing supers as the top one wasn't quite full.  We'll check again this week.  One thing to think about when adding supers is this:  When we pulled honey last July, we put the supers with drawn comb in the freezer.  Using supers with drawn comb gives the bees a head start.  If they don't have to draw out the wax, they spend more of their energy making honey.  Supers with foundation only (meaning no drawn comb) requires the bees to build out the honey comb first before making honey.

The last hive is the swarm we caught at the farm.  These are "mean" bees.  When you pull the lid off, they are in your face, angry.  It is important to always wear your bee suit.  The good thing is that mean bees make more honey.  We added a new honey super to the top as the one beneath it was almost full.  This super was a new one with foundation only - no drawn comb.  It will take them a while to build out the comb.  They have about a month and a week before we pull honey.

Temperatures are in the 90's already and it is humid.  Even though ventilated, it is hot inside a bee suit.  Handling the boxes with angry bees flying around is tricky.  Honey is heavy!  A medium super with ten frames full of capped honey weighs about 50 pounds and when they are stacked high, are hard to lift and maneuver.  When we pull honey in July when the flow is over, it will be a hard job, but there are fruits to the labor: Delicious, healthy, raw honey!

Putting Together Frames For the Bees

Here's a look at one of the two bee hives that we have on the property.  It's been about a year since we caught two swarms - one in Jefferson Davis Parish and one out at the farm in Allen Parish.  I took this video, but wish I would've gotten film of the bees' activity today.  The video below is really tame compared to all the bees this afternoon.

We plan on expanding in the bee business this year.  We'd like to put out some additional swarm traps to see if we could be successful in catching more that way.  Primarily, though, we'd like to expand by making splits.  If your hive is healthy enough, you can make a split by taking a frame of eggs/larvae, a frame of honey and pollen and plenty of nurse bees from the existing hive and placing them in the center of another box surrounded by frames.

What happens is remarkable.  The bees immediately know that there is no queen.  They begin "making" a queen.  (You can also purchase a queen cell to speed things up.)  The queen will hatch, make her virgin flight, be bred by drones and return to the "new" box and begin laying eggs.  This will be a first for us.  We'll see if we're successful.

First, we need more equipment:  boxes, frames, bottom boards and tops.  Russ has a friend in a nearby town that had some new frames for sale.  We drove over last weekend and picked them up.  They came in pieces, requiring assembly.

I got some wood glue and put the frames together.  Once the glue had dried, Tricia began popping the foundation in place.  The foundation is coated with beeswax.

In a jiffy we had the 20 deep frames put together.  On Thursday afternoon, we'll head to Lacassine to purchase some boxes, bottom boards, and tops from a gentleman in our beekeeping club.  Then we'll be ready to go - either put up swarm traps OR make splits.  Our beekeeping club will be making splits in early March, so we'll try to glean as much knowledge as we can.

Better Late Than Never

Normally, in a building project, the first thing that is done after determining where your structure is going to be built is to haul dirt in and build the pad upon which the building will sit.  In building our barn, we went against conventional wisdom and erected our barn without bringing in dirt and building a pad.  I guess after milking in the open air in wind, rain, heat and cold for quite a while, we wanted to put up the barn quickly and omitted raising the level under the structure.  Hasty decisions are often poor ones, as I've come to learn.

Over the years, the hay/sawdust bedding we laid down in the barn, composted and raised the ground level.  In fact, it worked fine without dirt - until this year.  Above average rainfall amounts in the first five months of the year contributed to a very muddy barnyard area.  While the inside of the barn itself was high and dry due to the composted bedding, the area all around the barn was a muddy mess.  The cows and goat had to slog through ankle-deep mud to get to the barn.  It was a nasty mess for us too. The mud, on more than one occasion, caused our boots to stick and we stepped out of our boots in our sock-feet, wetting our socks.

As soon as the ground dried up, I had a load of fill-sand delivered to the house.  As it was still too wet around the barn to use a tractor to move the dirt, we did it the hard way - loading container after container with dirt by shovel, pulling the wagon to the barn, dumping it over and spreading it around the entire outer perimeter of the barn.

The Dirt Pile

It was high time (pardon the pun), to raise the ground level around the barn.  After a light rain, the dirt seemed to pack hard.  Because there was some clay in the pile, it was a little sticky, but there was a hard base as opposed to the ankle deep quicksand that was there previously.  You can view the built-up area around the north and west sides of the barn, providing a raised walkway and impeding rising water from entering the barn.

Raising the ground level around the barn

On the side of the barn with the gate, I raised the ground level about 8 feet out from the barn, providing firm footing for the animals coming inside for milking.  As with anything new, the animals were a little reluctant to walk on the dirt, wary of the change.  We stomped down the large 'clods' until they were compressed and are generally happy with the change.

Annie inspecting the new dirt pad

This shot gives you a "chicken's eye" perspective and I would estimate that the soil level was raised by about 4 or 5 inches around the outside of the barn and that should keep out the flowing rainwater that runs through the property during heavy rains.

We'll have to hold judgment until we get a big 'gully-washer to see if we'll need another load of dirt or not.  Regardless, it is much better than it was before.  If we ever have another construction project, we'll make sure to build a dirt pad at a sufficient height, especially if building at the lowest part of the property.