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!

The Honey Harvest - 2026 (Part Two)

We still have honey that's dripping off of the cappings, so we won't have final numbers on the total number of pounds/gallons of honey for another day.  Our plans were to purchase a "Honey House," essentially an outdoor shed to store all the honeybee equipment in and to do the extracting in.  We decided to hold off for another year.

As it turns out, the garage is a fine place to do the job.  I'll show you the setup.  After bringing in the wagon with all the honey supers in it, we take the frames out of each box and use the knife to uncap the frames.  You can see the white uncapping tank on the table in the center.  The extractor is just to the right of the uncapping table.  Food-grade buckets with filters are positioned underneath the honey gates of both the uncapping tank and the extractor.

It gets quite warm in the garage.  Therefore, we have fans blowing on us.  The space beneath the doors and the garage doors were sealed up and it worked.  There might have been a total of six bees that got inside the garage during the extraction process.

As we spun the frames in the extractor to remove all the honey, we placed the empty frames back in the boxes.  I brought them out and stacked them criss-cross on a bench near the hives.  Bees are opportunistic, hard working creatures.  They will go through each frame, picking it clean of honey.  They'll bring that honey back to the hives

We generally leave the boxes like this out for around three days.  By that time the bees have salvaged all the honey.  We'll take the cleaned frames and put them in the freezer.  We want to make sure that any insect that might have laid eggs in the frames will be killed by sub-zero temperatures.  

In the spring, we'll put the honey supers with these frames back on the hives.  Bees expend a lot of energy making wax to draw out honeycomb.  If you put these frames out that have drawn comb on them already, the bees use their energy to make HONEY, not wax.  Re-using frames with drawn comb gives the bees a head start and I think that translates into a better honey harvest.

When we stack the boxes by the hive, it doesn't take the bees long to find it.  The begin, in earnest, to cover the boxes, and get all the honey to bring back to the hive.  You can hear a loud buzzing when you walk outside.  Those bees are working to get their honey back!  Click on the arrow below to watch the honeybees fly around as they discover the honey remaining on the frames and work to bring it back.

We'll be back with the third segment of this Summer Honey Series in a day or two.

The Honey Harvest - July 2026 (Part One)

It was time.  Past time, actually, to harvest 2026 honey.  We had pulled fall honey in October.  We sold out of all of our July 2025 honey and were now selling the fall honey and were almost out of that.  Time to see what our honeybees had produced.  We woke up and got all the goats milked and cow milked and then got everything set up in our garage to extract honey.

We lit the smoker and began on the last hive on the left.  To pull honey, you open the boxes and go through each frame.  You are looking for frames of capped honey.  Uncapped honey is still nectar.  You don't want to pull this as the moisture content is too high.  In reality, not all frames will be 100% capped.  In that case, the rule of thumb taught to us by the bee club is to go ahead and harvest if the frame is 80% capped.

It is a process of going through each frame, separating frames to harvest versus frames to put back on the hive to harvest later - maybe this fall.  A thing to remember is "this is the bees' honey."  They use it to feed on.  They are sharing their honey with you.  Of course, we want a good harvest, though!  In going through the hives, even though it was VERY hot, the bees were surprisingly mild mannered.

We shook and brushed the bees off of the frames of capped honey and stacked in a wagon.  Then we moved to the patio and blew the remainder of the bees off with a leaf blower.  We don't have a honey house.  We use the garage to do the honey extracting.  I wheeled the wagon with 6 medium boxes of honey into the garage.  I had all cracks in the doors and windows sealed up to keep the bees out.  They are protective of their honey and will seek it out.

Here is a decent example of a capped frame of honey.  When the honey has reached it's desired peak, the bees seal it behind a capping of wax.

This close-up photo is a great example of capped honey.  There is a coating of wax that protects the sweet honey lying just beneath the cap.  To harvest the honey, the cap must be removed.  More on that in a minute...

This photo shows a good example of capped honey as well as uncapped nectar.  As soon as the nectar is dehydrated, the bees will cap those cells as well.

A serrated bread knife is used to cut the outer wax cap off of the frame.  This exposes the sweet honey lying beneath the cap.  Russ, our oldest son, has perfected the craft of uncapping honey.

Tricia uncaps as well.

On some frames, the wax isn't built out enough.  When this happens, the knife doesn't remove the wax cap.  Another tool is used to puncture the wax cap that wasn't broken with the initial knife cut.  This entire process takes place above an uncapping tank that captures the wax.  (We'll use that.  In later posts we'll show that process.)  Honey drains from the wax into a reservoir below.

Here is what a frame of honey looks like that has been uncapped.

Here are four uncapped medium frames of honey ready to go into the extractor.  These are stacked inside the extractor.

The extractor spins the frames at a high rate of speed.  Centrifugal force causes the honey to be pulled out of the frames.  As it spins, the honey is withdrawn from the frame and the honey hits the sides of the extractor cylinder and drains to a reservoir beneath.  The extractor that was given to us is powered by electricity.  It takes about 10 minutes to extract the honey from the frames.  Once the frames have been spun, the cells in the frame that were once heavy and filled with honey are virtually empty.

The drum gradually fills and must be emptied into food grade 5 gallon buckets through the honey gate.  It goes through a series of filters to remove any bees, fibers, wax and other things that might be in the honey.

Back to the uncapping tank.  As the wax cap is cut off and opened up, he wax collects on top of the uncapping tank.  Honey that is mixed with the wax gradually drains into the reservoir beneath.  The wax will be later rendered and we'll use the beeswax to wax the foundation on new frames as well as to make lip balm, candles and bread bags.  Nothing goes to waste!

You can see that there are marked lines on the tank below.  Just from uncapping, we have 5 gallons of honey in the uncapping tank, just from the uncapping.

This honey is poured through a filter and into a food grade 5 gallon bucket situated below.

Tomorrow, we'll talk more about the harvest.  How much did we get?  How does it compare to last year's harvest?  We'll answer those questions and more.