Water Woes

We keep missing our rainfall and the grass is parched and thirsty.  Today, we had a 65% chance of the wet stuff, but we came out on the short end of the stick and got 0 rainfall at all.  On the north side of our barn, I positioned some water troughs to catch rainwater running off of the barn roof.  Normally, these stay full.  Very rarely do we have to turn on the faucet at our water trough under the pecan tree because they drink out of these three water troughs.

The water troughs are empty.  The cows use this opportunity to push the empty troughs around in the pasture.  I have to stay on my toes and push them buck under the drip line in the event we would catch a surprise shower like we got last week when 0.4 of an inch fell.  They've already finished all the rainwater we caught during that shower.

But there are other water woes.  Nicky, the bull would like to tell you about one that has affected his pasture that we call, "The bullpen."  Lean in close and he'll tell you about it.

Speaking of Nicky, he's little Betsy's father.  He is full of muscle and he's mean.  If you get around him, he's snorting and kicking up dust and making threatening gestures at you with his big old head.  It's time to bring him to the butcher shop and fill our freezer with meat.

I'll get back on topic.  The water woe in the bull pen was noticed a couple of afternoons ago when I looked out and saw a geyser spraying up into the air from the water trough in the bull pen.  I walked out to see that the plastic float valve had broken.  The float valve is very important as it allows the trough to fill until the water level pushes against the float and turns the water off.  This keeps the water from overflowing the trough.  When the plastic piece broke, it allowed water to spray into the air and make a big mud hole around the water trough.  There's no telling how long the water was flowing.

Fortunately, I got a new float valve and installed it.  That process wasn't without adventure.  Fire ants had built a big mound right where I needed to undo the old one and install the new one.  Those fire ants tore me up!  I got it all installed and turned the water back on only to find a leak in the threads.  I was rushing so fast to avoid the ant bites, and I forgot to put the teflon tape around the threads.  I had to go back and do it again!  But this time, I got it right.  No leaks.  It will, however, take a while for the water to soak in to the ground.  It's not good for animal health to have mud holes like this as it is a vector for parasites, mosquitoes and other things that plague good animal health.

Cajun Music Jam Session At the Gator Chateau

On every other Saturday morning beginning at 10:00 AM and ending at 1:00 PM, there is an acoustic Cajun French music jam session at the Gator Chateau in Jennings, Louisiana.  This nice place sits at the Oil & Gas Park located at 100 Rue de l'Acadie, Jennings, LA (I-10 at Hwy 26).  This same building houses the facilities where you can come by and hold an alligator.  Actually, if you look at the photo below through the window on the right, you can see someone holding up a baby alligator to hand to a tourist to hold!

We like to go walk on the walking trail that circles the lake at the park and then have a complimentary cup of Community Coffee Dark Roast, sit in the chairs in the nice air-conditioned facility and listen to French music.  Local folks show up with their instruments, bringing guitars, accordions, fiddles, bass, and other instruments to play together.  The neat thing about it is that it is a nice mix of both young and old, male and female.  They look like they are having a good time.  I know we enjoyed it!  Hit the arrow below and you can listen to about 1 minute and 10 seconds of some toe-tapping French music.

If you ever find yourself wanting to do something different, hold a baby alligator, drink some strong coffee, and enjoy a morning listening to some great music and learning more about Cajun heritage, The Gator Chateau in Jennings, Louisiana is the place to be!  

Dealing With Mastitis (Dr. Trish, Medicine Woman)

One thing you've got to watch for with cows in milk is mastitis.  The system that we normally follow has been a good one in that we've not had any problems with mastitis.  That system is: We separate the cow and calf at night and we take all of the morning milk.  The cow and calf are put back together in the morning after we milk, and the calf nurses hard all day, emptying the udder.

LuLu calved last time in the middle of a drought giving birth to a little bull named Nicky.  She was heat stressed and didn't produce a lot of milk.  As a result, we let the calf have all of the milk.  Then, one of LuLu's teats got cut and she wouldn't let the little bull nurse on that quarter because it hurt her.  She'd kick him off of it when he'd try.  It was a few days before we caught it, and by then, mastitis set in the front left quarter.  We tried and tried to clear it, but were unsuccessful.

A month ago, after LuLu calved Betsy, we tested and the teat that was injured last time still tested for subclinical mastitis.  That's a condition where the milk shows no visible signs of infection and the udder is not red, hot or sore.  The good thing is the udder is separated into four quarters and they are self-contained.  So for the past three weeks, we milk the 3 good quarters for our use and let Betsy clean up the quarter we didn't milk as well as the rest that we did.  She does a good job of emptying all the quarters.

But we've got to get the affected quarter cleaned up.  Here's what we did: Tricia contacted Synergy Animal Products in Pennsylvania.  They offer organic udder care products.  We used a protocol called "A Farmer's Secret."  We mix 10cc Yellow Jacket, 10cc Excell 7000 and 10cc Cellex.  These are products that Synergy sells.  Those three products are mixed and put into a syringe fitted with a teat infusion cannula.  The contents are then injected into the affected quarter by means of going up the teat.  Here is Tricia getting it done.

We make sure LuLu is distracted while eating sweet feed and alfalfa.  She didn't seem bothered by it at all.

Almost done!

This is done three milkings in a row after the udder is empty and then we keep the calf off of her between milkings.  The second part of the protocol is rubbing SCUM on the affected quarter.  SCUM is Super Cow Udder Mint and it smells great!  

You rub the SCUM all over the bag, working it in real good.

We also gave an oral dose of Ex-Cell 7000.  15cc's of this is put into a syringe and I held up her head and gave it to her.  It must taste good as she didn't object and swallowed it all.  

This was repeated for three milkings in a row and then we waited a week.  Once the week was up, we tested for mastitis using the California Mastitis Test (CMT).  We did this just this morning at 6AM.  To do this you squirt milk from each teat into a paddle and squirt a solution into the milk and swirl it around.  If it thickens, it shows you have mastitis.  The amount of thickness indicates the level of the somatic cell count of mastitis in each quarter.  Time for the moment of truth!  We applied the solution an swirled and.... (drum roll)

NO THICKENING.  The subclinical mastitis was cleared up!  Success.  It's so nice to see positive results!

Instead of milking out three quarters, we'll be milking out all four.  We'll be happy.  Betsy?  Not so much!

De-Horning Little Besty

Back about 50 years ago growing up, my younger brother fashioned himself as a train conductor or something.  He had an affinity for trains.  One day my parents were notified that my brother had hopped on a Missouri Pacific Lines train heading south out of town, riding on it like a hobo.  Another time, he found a railroad flare and lit it.  He was waving it above his head and some of the molten substance dripped out of it and landed on his head.  That must have hurt something fierce as it burned his hair off.  He jumped in the car afterward and the scent of burning hair filled the car.  To this day, he still has a bald spot about the size of a nickel to remind him.

Tonight we'll show you someone else who got their head burned, but not by a railroad flare, and this time it was intentional.  It's time to de-horn Betsy.  We don't want horns on animals.  Those horns can be used as weapons, or they can cause them to get their heads stuck in the fence.  When a calf is between 2 and six weeks old, it's time to get it done.  When we separated LuLu from Betsy last night, we put the breaking halter on Betsy and told her that she wasn't going to like us much after tonight's events.

If you look in her hair right above where her ear is, you can see a tiny horn bud.  I took some clippers and clipped the hair away from both horn buds to fully expose them in order for me to see better to get the dehorning iron placed where it needed to be.

Here's the tool we use to get the job done.  It's called a dehorning iron and you plug it in until the end of it glows cherry red.

I held Betsy's head down securely while Tricia held her legs so she wouldn't kick.  Then we hold the hot iron on her horn and count the time.  You hold it for a period of 10-12 seconds, slightly rotating so that the entire area around the horn bud is burned.  Then I use the iron to burn the tip of the horn off.  Betsy was not happy.  The trick is doing this while holding a thrashing animal and not burning myself in the process!

What you are looking for is a copper-colored ring around the horn bud.  That's an indicator of success - that you've killed the roots of the horn and it won't grow.

This process is repeated on either side.  Then Betsy is left to rest.

She was glad to see us go.  This is not an enjoyable task for any of us involved, but it is necessary, and we reluctantly do it so that we don't have animals with horns.

"Wet" Honey and How to Dry It

The rice harvest around here is in high gear.  I remember when harvesting, you take a sample and put it in the moisture machine to test to make sure the rice has the right percentage moisture.  If you make a mistake and fill the bins with wet rice, you run the risk of it mildewing.  Once that happens all you can do is sell it for chicken feed for next to nothing.  Ask me how I know.

As it turns out, honey requires the same moisture check.  If your honey is too "wet," it will ferment and turn into mead, the first alcoholic beverage in the world.  The find the moisture percentage, you need a little tool called a refractometer.  Looks high tech but only costs $20.  First you calibrate it using extra virgin olive oil.  To test the honey, you put a few drops of honey on the glass and close the lid.  Then you hold it to the light while looking through the eye piece.  Honey will hold if it is between 15.5% and 18.6% moisture.

How does honey get wet?  Well, most people will tell you that if you pull honey from frames that are fully capped, you'll be okay.  Others will tell you that if your frames are 80% capped, go ahead and pull it.  The 20% uncapped, they'll tell you, isn't honey, it's nectar.  We've learned that some 100% capped frames have high moisture content and some uncapped frames can be 17% and be considered dry.

Refractometer (Looks fancy and high tech)  

I tested each of our four 5 gallon buckets.  Unfortunately, each of the buckets tested 19.5 except for one that tested 19.0.  That means it runs the risk of fermenting.  This honey needs to be dehumidified.

In our guest bathroom, we transformed it into a honey drying house.  We put a dehumidifier in the bathroom and covered the honey with muslin cloth to keep anything from falling into the honey.

The humidity showed to be 35% in the bathroom with an 89.4 temperature.  Hopefully the drying will cause the honey to drop into the safe range.

After two days running, we really weren't making any headway in drying the honey.  So here is what we did:  We left the dehumidifier running on the north side of the bathroom.  We poured honey into the uncapping tank and a 5 gallon bucket with a honey gate on it.  We barely open the honey gate and let the honey drip slowly.  The honey drips into a filter that sits over another five gallon bucket.

The honey drips into the filter where it slowly spreads out, widening the surface area, before dripping into the 5 gallon bucket below.  On the other side of the bathroom, a fan is positioned to blow on the dripping honey.

After a day running the dehumidifier, I checked the humidity checker: 30% humidity with a 91 degree temperature reading in the room. 

Here is a photo of the first tank dripping very slowly through the filter and into the five gallon bucket.

Here are both of the buckets being dripped into by the uncapping tank honey valve and the five gallon bucket with a honey gate on.

We will continue to drip the honey like this until it is dry.  Today, I checked and the moisture content in the buckets we drip into had dropped a point!  From 19.5 to 18.5%  Mission accomplished.  We will do this same process with all of our five gallon buckets of honey.  Now we can start the bottling process!  We are almost out of honey to sell!  Only a few jars of the fall honey crop left.  We'll get this done so that when our honey customers stop in we'll have an inventory to sell.  Tricia picked up some jars from Rayne yesterday so that we can begin the bottling process.

The Honey Harvest (Part Four)

Honey isn't the only thing we're harvesting.  As it turns out, there's another by-product when you extract honey.  As we showed in previous posts, you use a knife to uncap the honey.  This is done over an uncapping tank and all of the wax falls on a screen which allows most of the honey to flow into a collection tank located below.  The wax stays on top of the screen.  What to do with all this wax?  We keep it and use it for making several things I'll discuss further on.

The wax is taken indoors and in batches, we put it in a crock pot on the high setting.  This melts all of the wax.  The beeswax is a clearish liquid, but you can see impurities floating on the surface of the melted wax.

These impurities must be strained out.  The way we do it is to pour the melted wax through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter.  Can you see how it has caught all the junk that was mixed with the beeswax?

The muslin cloth is draped over a sieve, and the pure beeswax flows into a collection pan below.

We allow the beeswax that's been poured into the pans to cool.

When it cools completely, we pop it out.  Pretty, isn't it?

When we finished rendering the wax, I stacked it up so that you can see how nice it looks.

It's hard to get perspective on how much wax that is, so I weighed it on our kitchen scale.  We rendered just shy of 5 pounds of pure beeswax!

What will we do with all that?  We'll we're going to make candles this year.  We also make lip balm.  The beeswax is used to coat the fabric bread bags that we posted about a couple of weeks ago.  Finally we use the wax to scrape on new foundation.  Waxing the foundation let's the bees know that there is enough to begin drawing out comb.  We'll also be thinking of new uses for beeswax.

The Honey Harvest 2026 (Part Three)

Tonight, we'll finish up with the Honey Harvest.  We'll show you a few more posts a little later to show how we test the honey for moisture content and how what we do when we have "wet" honey.  We'll also show you how we render the beeswax, make honey water, and finally, the honey bottling process. 

Without further adieu, here are the honey production figures for 2026:

First, it's good to know that a gallon of honey weighs 12 pounds.  Another rule of thumb is that a medium box of honey will yield between 3 and 4 gallons of honey.  Each frame in a medium box yields about 4 pounds of honey.  We use only medium boxes for our honey supers.  Lifting and stacking deep boxes is too heavy and too much work for our liking.  They say beekeepers all have bad backs!  Our brood boxes are deep boxes, but we're not lifting and stacking those and even if we would, they are not as heavy as boxes filled with honey.

The afternoon of July 25, 2026 we pulled honey.  We ended up with 6 medium boxes.  Once extracted and collected in 5 gallon buckets, we weighed the 5 full buckets of honey:

55.7 lbs
53.1 lbs
51.8 lbs
53.7 lbs

214.3 pounds total

203.3 pounds (once weight of buckets were netted out)

   4.75 pounds (from bottom of uncapping tank)

208 pounds grand total of honey

Since there are 12 pounds to a gallon, we harvested 17.33 gallons of honey!

• To compare prior years, our first year with bees (2024), we harvested 13.5 gallons of honey
• Our second year (2025) we produced 20.39 gallons in the spring and 4.75 gallons in the fall.
• This year (2026), we produced 17.33 gallons of honey.

We will likely pull honey again in the fall this year.  What a sweet harvest!