A Bad Dude in the Back Yard

I walked out to check on the bees.  There is lots and lots of activity.  In fact, I need to open the boxes to see if I need to add more honey supers on top.  I don't want them to run out of room and swarm on me.  Honey Extraction time is about a month and a half away.  As I looked at the bees, there must have been a sizable hatch from the two hives that we split.  Initially, the population in both the split hives was a little low, but now many bees fly in and out, bringing in nectar and pollen.

It was hot and humid so I sat on the swing by the BBQ pit.  The shade of the live oak tree makes it a nice place to sit on hot days.  While sitting, I heard a loud buzzing noise.  It was too loud to be a honeybee, but I couldn't locate the direction it was coming from or what was causing the vibrating noise.  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement.  A huge hornet-looking creature had a cicada in its clutches and was dragging it along the ground.

This operation was no small feat as I'm positive the cicada was bigger in size and weight than that of the wasp.  I looked it up and this thing is called the eastern cicada killer wasp.  It gets its name honestly, because that's exactly what he's doing.

The cicada killer's fancy name is Sphecius speciosis.  They use their stinger to paralyze the cicada and then they grasp it in it's arms and legs and begins climbing a tree (or a pole, in this instance).  Since the cicada is heavy, the use gravity to assist them.  They climb high and then jump off and fly to their underground nest carrying their prey with them.

Something like Uber-eats or Door Dash, I suppose.  The wasp drags the cicada in her hole in the ground and lays eggs on top of the cicada and then covers her burrow up with dirt.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the cicada.  Thanks for the food, mom!  It grows, digs out of the burrow and continues the cycle.

I watched in amazement as the cicada killer was focused on it's task.  As it buzzed by my ear, I ducked.  I read that the males don't have stingers.  It's only the females that sting.  There's a parable in that sentence, I'm sure, but I'll leave that alone.  I wasn't about to try to determine if that big wasp was a male or female, so I just got out of it's way.

The Local Park

We have a local park here in Jennings.  It is at the junction of I-10 and LA Highway 26 and is called the Louisiana Oil & Gas Park, commemorating the discovery of oil in Louisiana here nearby in a little town called Evangeline.  There is an old wooden oil derrick and there is a lake that is stocked with catfish and in the spring, believe it or not, rainbow trout.  Around this lake is a walking trail and Tricia and I frequently walk briskly for 30 minutes around the lake taking in the sights.  There are numerous ducks and tourists flock in (pardon the pun) and purchase feed to feed them.  The fat ducks waddle up and poop all over the sidewalk that makes up the walking trail, making messy obstacles to maneuver around.

But the real attraction at this park is the Gator Chateau.  You can go inside the visitor center and enjoy free coffee and a gift shop and listen to locals playing french music while they pick up tourist information that gives where to get boudin and cracklins in town, among other things.  It's called the Gator Chateau because it is home to a number of alligators that lounge about in their nice habitat.

It's clean - much cleaner than where we normally see them in muddy bayous.  They pose for pictures and probably feel quite fortunate that they aren't someone's cowboy boots, purse are belt.  At least not yet, anyway.

The main attraction in the Gator Chateau is that you can actually get to hold a baby gator.  They have their nails painted and that's how you can pick out the one you want to hold.  The one below with the pink toenails is named Chloe.

I enjoyed my free cup of coffee and looked at Chloe for a bit while finishing up being a tourist in my own town.  If you're ever in our neck of the woods, stop off at the Oil and Gas Park, sit for a spell, and enjoy yourself.

A View From the Kitchen Window

It's important to have a view from the kitchen window.  A lot of time is spent there.  Although we have a dishwasher, we haven't used it in years and hand wash and dry dishes and pots and pans and spoons and forks.  As we look out, we can see when honey or egg or milk customers drive up.  We watch the squirrels run and jump across the limbs in the live oak trees.  We saw the new swarm move into the column.

A few weeks ago we saw lots of activity in the cleyera shrub that is only 3 feet from the window.  It was a momma cardinal, and she was hard at work.  We spied on her as she carried twigs and straw and constructed a nest right in the crook of the shrub.

She was on a mission and seemed not to mind that she was being scrutinized in her construction project.  When she had it complete, she seemed satisfied and rested.  It felt like home.  Comfortable.  Safe.

Each day the momma cardinal would fly off briefly to find something to eat and then she'd come back and sit on her nest.  While male cardinals are dressed in bright red, the females are a light grey-ish red.  They aren't flashy at all - except for their beaks!  That beak stands out like a sore thumb.

One morning as the momma cardinal flew away for her morning coffee (black, no sugar added), I snuck outside and took a peek inside her nest to see what she was sitting on.

Three little eggs!  It reminds me of the "Robin Egg" candies that are so popular at Easter time.  Faithfully, everyday, rain or shine, the momma sat on her nest.  She had nothing to read, no cell phone to scroll on, yet she was focused on her job.  You know what?  She got the job done.  One morning we looked out and saw this!:

That's some ugly little birds right there!  At the slightest noise or movement, the heads pop up and mouths open wide.  And the mother bird was right there, bringing the babies what looked to be bugs and worms to eat.  

But it wasn't just the mother.  The father, dressed to the nines in his spiffy red suit showed up.  I thought he wanted to just inspect his offspring.

But it was more than that.  The father was bringing food, too!  He was leaning over feeding his babies.  Both the mother and father were taking part in the nurturing of the babies.  No absenteeism, but true teamwork in this home.  It was a touching thing to watch.  I wonder if humans could rediscover this virtue?  But I digress...

In what seemed like no time at all, the babies grew and grew until they had outgrown the nest!  Little feathers now covered their wings.  The once ugly, nude little creatures were now beginning to look like birds.

And then the time came for them to leave the nest.  Be safe, little birds.  Ginger, our cat, is a skilled hunter.  Fly high and out of the grasp of Ginger.  Oh, an empty nest.  It's quiet for sure, even in a human family.  Tricia and I can vouch for that.

The Flow Is ON!

For about the first five decades of my life, I loathed Chinese Tallow Trees.  We also call them Chicken Trees.  Why did I hate them?  Because they are truly an invasive species.  If not kept in check, they will turn a lovely pasture into a scrub brush forest before your very eyes.  They encroach on the borders and outside levees of rice fields, suddenly turning a 50 acre field into a 47 acre field.  Birds eat their seeds and then sit on fence rows.  As a result of the bird poop propagation, Chinese tallow trees sprout up along these fence rows and before you know it, they've grown through the fence.  These trees require constant clearing, hauling, and burning - non-stop labor.  I wished we could eradicate them, make them as extinct as the dodo bird.

But then something changed.  When we began beekeeping, my intense hatred for the Chicken tree evolved into vehement dislike.  This spring I actually dug up two chicken tree seedlings growing in our flower beds and replanted them along the fence row bordering our neighbors in the back.  Tricia could not believe it.  Had someone abducted her husband and replaced him with an imposter?

As it turns out, the Chinese tallow tree is the primary producer of nectar in our area.  It makes fantastic honey!  The honeybees just love it.  Each year at this time, the tallow trees tassel and flower.  The bees are on it like white on rice and bring loads of nectar back to the hives.  When I walked out to the bee boxes today there was SO much activity!  Here is a shot of the Chinese tallow trees in bloom:

The flow is on!  I wanted to see if the honeybees had found it yet.  Within seconds, my question was answered.  Bees were all over the place, moving from one flower to the next.  They were moving so fast, it was hard to get a photo:

Now that the flow is on, we'll have to be diligent in making sure that we're adding honey supers on top so that the bees don't run out of room.  That means we'll be donning the bee suits once a week, opening up the boxes and checking to see if we need to add supers on top.  We have a little over a month until we're extracting honey.  Hopefully, we'll have another good honey harvest.  We're a land flowing with milk AND honey afterall.

Taking Care of Business

One of the things that I pray for each morning is something that I used to not pray for - that's to be a good steward of what God's given me.  Am I taking care of my family and putting them first, showing them the love they deserve?  Am I taking care of the animals that depend on me for their well-being?  Am I properly caring for the assets and belongings He's given me charge of?  See, it all belongs to Him.  I'm just the caretaker.  If I neglect things or don't maintain them, then I am not being a faithful servant.  I'm trying to do better in that regard, so of course, I have a list of things to catch up on that have slipped.

Back in 2017 our chimney sweep passed away from cancer.  Since we live in the deep south, there's not a chimney sweep in every town.  In fact, I've struggled to find one.  It's embarrassing to say that it's probably approaching 10 years since we've had our chimney swept.  To make matters worse, we use our fireplace a lot in the winter instead of expensive electric heat.  We never installed a gas jet to get the logs started and instead use "lighter pine" (you might call it heart pine or pine knots) to start the fires.  Pine sends thick black smoke and soot up the flue.  I imagine that causes quite a build-up.  I needed to get this taken care of as it could result in a fire hazard.

Image Credit

This past week I called and was able to find a chimney sweep about an hour away from us who agreed to arrive the next morning at 8AM.  He knew of our sweep that had died and told me that now that Ed is gone, he's the only chimney sweep left anywhere in the vicinity.  Two guys arrived.  No, it was not Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.  They did not get up on top of the roof and sing "Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chiminey, Chim-Chim, Cher-ee" and dance.  Instead, they got to work setting out drop cloths to protect the interior of the house and worked sections of a 30 foot telescoping pole with brushes up into the chimney, scrubbing and cleaning.  LOTS of material fell down the chimney!

They scooped and vacuumed.  It took about 90 minutes.  In their inspection, they found some cracks in the firebrick that they patched for an additional sum of money.  Here is the tub of material they removed from the inside of our chimney, telling Tricia that this is the amount of material that they would expect to remove from THREE houses!  He recommended once a year chimney sweeping to be done.

In the end, the price tag for the chimney sweep work was $295 with and additional $50 to patch the cracks in the firebrick.  It was good to get that job done!

New Life on the Farm

We had just finished discussing the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in our Sunday School lesson.  It's a familiar teaching of Jesus in Matthew that explains the final judgment in which the sheep will be separated from the goats.  For those not familiar, the sheep are the righteous who will be blessed and the goats are the wicked who will be damned.  If you have kept goats, you might understand why the goats are the "bad guys" in the parable.  They are always getting into trouble.  In fact, we have one goat that we nicknamed 'Devil Goat' because she is so mischievous - wicked, you might say.

But goats have a loveable side, too.  We've been really watching Callie closely these past days.  We don't have to look hard to find her.  You see, Callie has a loud voice.  She's always bleating, letting us know that she has a grievance of some sort.  She's been pregnant and her bags have gotten so huge.  We were expecting her to kid every day now for about two weeks.  We'd leave her in the barn and then  hurriedly go check on her each morning at 6AM... but no baby!  We even began to wonder if there could be such thing as a false pregnancy?

But then one morning, we saw a large mucous discharge, followed by little feet poking out!  Callie's finally in labor.

Suddenly, plop!  And a baby is on the ground.  Tricia cleared away mucous from the kid's face so as not to inhibit breathing.  Callie went to work licking her baby to get it all cleaned up.  I got in the middle of things, lifted a leg to determine the sex of the baby.  It's a little buckling.

Callie has these strange markings on her face.  She's mostly black, but her face is a wild, unscripted, hodge podge of black, brown and white markings - almost like a puzzle.

Like they say, "The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree."  Callie passed her "busy" face on to her little boy.  Take a look at this:

It's so confusing, you can't even tell where his eyes are!  One thing that's not confusing is the fact that we need to ensure that the little dude gets some colostrum in his belly.  Tricia positioned the little fellow beneath Callie's huge teat, squeezed some colostrum into his mouth, and the sucking reflex by the little guy instinctually began.

The next morning, he had colostrum poop all over his backside, giving us evidence that he got the good stuff inside him, giving him the best shot at a healthy beginning of life on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.

Another Use for a Beet Bumper Crop

We planted three varieties of beets this past fall: Detroit Red, Bull's Blood and Chioggia.  Chioggia is an Italian beet that is white with red stripes and resembles a starlight mint when cut.  We had such a bountiful harvest this year, we don't know what to do with them all.  We've given some away.  We've eaten roasted beets on the regular now for months.  We have a bunch of pickled beets in pint jars in the pantry.  I had a work colleague about 10 years ago who was a missionary in Ukraine, and she shared a recipe with us for Borscht that she got when over there.  That's a good use for beets, too.  

Meet the beets.  The one on your left is the Detroit Red beet and the one on the right is the Chioggia.  The bull's blood beet was unavailable for the photo shoot.

With the main ingredients waiting in the wings, let's get started with today's novel way to use up a bumper crop of beets.  We haven't made this in a few years.  We're making Beet Kvass.  This beverage originated in what is now modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  We're using a recipe from the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook by Sally Fallon.

So what is beet kvass, you might ask?  It is a healthy tonic that is fermented.  It helps the liver to detoxify your blood.  It is packed with probiotics and aids in your body's digestive process.  So let's make a batch!  It's easy like Sunday morning.

First get three good sized beets and cut them up into chunks.  Put them in a half-gallon Mason jar.  Pour a quarter cup of whey over the beets in the jar.  Add one tablespoon of sea salt to the jar.  Finally, fill the jar with filtered water and stir thoroughly.  Cover the jar and sit at room temperature for 2 days and then place in the refrigerator.

This is what our beet kvass looks like.  It is not as red in coloration as prior batches have been because we used a chioggia beet along with the red beets to make it, but it still has a nice red hue to it.  

I poured myself the first glass this afternoon.  Good stuff!  You're supposed to have 4 ounces of this each day.

Another good way to make use of a great beet harvest.  But wait!  I just thought of another that we haven't thought about yet this year: Making Red Velvet Cake with beets!  That's next on the agenda.