Live From the Hive

Back in THIS POST we discussed our attempts to make splits.  We explained that we currently have four hives and how you can make splits from existing hives to expand your colonies of bees.  We attempted to split into a deep box and also a small nuc box that I made.  Well, it's been almost a month ago and today was the day we had marked on our calendars to check to see if the splits were successful.

When we pull the top off, we'll be looking real quickly to see if we can see a queen or eggs or larvae.  If we see any of the above, we have a laying queen and will have expanded our boxes from four to six.  If we don't see any of the above, we'll restack the boxes on top of where they came from.  Tricia and I put our bee suits on and headed out to the hives.  Lots of activity from all of the boxes - bees coming in and out.  Bees carrying pollen going in.  That's a good sign!

Using the smoker to calm them down, we opened up the deep box.  Here's the moment of truth!  It's windy today, so I'm going to be looking real fast.  I don't want our new queen, if we have one, to fly off.  Once I see the queen, eggs or larvae, I'm closing it up as we will know the split was successful.

There's a pretty decent amount of bees on the first frame and the cells are heavy and full of nectar.

We didn't see the queen; however, if you look at the very center of the frame below and to the right, you'll see white larvae in some of the cells that look like the letter "c".  There are also a few capped brood cells.  Even though we saw no queen, the larvae and capped brood evidence the fact we have a laying queen.  It's a successful split!

Let's check out the split in the nuc.  Only five frames in here, but there was a pretty decent population of bees in it.

A quick look.  This frame has nectar in it.  You can see the reflection in the bottom of the photo below:

I do a quick scan on one side and flip it over to see the opposite side.

As in the other box, we were unable to find the queen, but if you look in the very center of the photo below and to the right, you'll see larvae!

Another successful split!  We added a queen excluder and then put a medium box on top.  That will keep the queen out of the honey supers.  I moved the brick from crossways to straight.  That's my note to tell me that we have a laying queen in this box.  In the photo at the very top, you'll see that the bricks in the split hives BEFORE we checked them today had the bricks crossways.

We started with four hives - now we have six!  There's a story to the box on the far right with the top cracked.  Why is the top cracked?  That split hive was the one that was in the nuc.  The nuc was a homemade box made with 1x12 lumber.  It wasn't exactly square, so the lid didn't seal perfectly.  The bees in the nuc never used the front door.  They would go in and out through the gap between the top and the nuc.

When we moved the frames from the nuc to a deep box so they'd have room to grow, bees coming in from foraging couldn't figure out how to get in the box.  They were congregating at the corner where the nuc had a crack for going in and out.  What to do!  I've got to get the bees back in the box!  I had an idea!  I'll crack the telescoping top.  It worked!  The bees coming in went right in the box.  Bees don't fly at night, so after dark when all the bees were safely at home, I went out and closed the top.  Tomorrow morning when they go out the front door, they'll recalibrate and find their way back home.

From four hives to six

What good news!  We expanded our hives by two boxes.  It's important to do this as it is not uncommon to lose a hive or two every year for one reason or another.  Making splits and/or catching wild swarms is a good way to "insure" your beekeeping operation. Should you lose a box or two to wax moths, varroa mites, small hive beetles, or any other reason, you've added a couple boxes by making splits.

The Renovation of The Old Goat Barn

I call it a renovation or a remodel, but it was really a demolition and replacement and upgrade of the old structure while using the same old heavy gauge tin.  My Dad and I and a fellow named Red built the goat barn 20 years ago.  The kids were young and in 4-H, and we wanted to get them involved showing livestock - Boer Goats, to be specific, in order to teach them responsibility.  I also wanted them to be involved in something I had taken part in as a young boy and thoroughly enjoyed.  This was before we got our milk cows and even the chickens.  

Twenty-something years ago we put up the goat barn using landscape timbers as the corner posts and some home cut lumber made from a large pine tree from my parent's home that we had cut into lumber.  The barn served its purpose well and, to be honest, it was a sentimental thing tearing it down.  It may sound funny to be nostalgic over an old structure, but I have may good memories with the kids that surround this barn as well as with my Dad and Red in building it.

I began the demolition project mainly with a hammer and crowbar, but it took a grinder to remove some of the screws that held the tin to the old 2x4 lumber that was rotten in most places.  The old lumber was filled with cobwebs, roaches and a big rat!  The cobwebs reminded me of a time when we de-horned a heifer.  

She was in the goat barn and we checked on her and she was bleeding and bleeding from the horns.  We called an old veterinarian in the middle of the night worried.  He asked us if we had any cobwebs.  Of course we do!  He told us to get a bunch of the cobwebs and poke them in the holes where the bleeding was coming from.  The cobwebs worked to completely stop the bleeding.  How you may ask?:  Well, Google tells us: "the cobwebs provide a dense network for rapid blood clotting (coagulation), act as an antiseptic to prevent infection, and contain vitamin K, which enhances the clotting process. Their large surface area and fibrous structure mimic fibrin, allowing them to act as a natural bandage."  How about that!

The rafters supporting the roof had completely broken due to rot.  It still served as some sort of protection from the elements in heavy rains.  Heck, even the cows would crowd in the goat barn for some reason in thunderstorms even though they had the main barn overhangs to keep them dry.

You can see the old feed trough for the goats on the wall.  I know what you may be thinking:  How would a goat reach the trough?  Well, there was a ramp that they would climb up to the trough while eating.  The purpose of that was to build muscle, which is important for a meat goat.  For humans, it would be akin to having to do push ups or sit ups in order to eat!  This photo also shows the sad state of affairs for the condition of the roof.

My plan was to come off of the existing barn roof overhang.  I put in treated 4x4's for the corner posts and cemented them in and then affixed the treated 2x4s to the existing roof.  Things started coming together nicely.  It was a beautiful day.  A fat hen was supervising the process.

Soon I had framed up the walls and hung the sides and ran 1x4's along the roof to support the roof tin.

One key part was the American Flag.  I wanted to save Old Glory that I had painted so many years ago.  The side of the goat barn does need to be washed to restore the Stars & Stripes that are tattered somewhat.  Fortunately, we were successful in saving the flag.

I got the roof on and even hung the horseshoe over the door that was on the old goat barn!

Here's the view from west to east.  I'll need to bring some fill dirt in to raise the floor level up a bit so the animals aren't standing in water when it rains heavily.  That'll come a little later.

And here's a look from north looking south.  I added a little window so when we're in the barn, we can look toward the house to see if we have company.  

We got the new, refurbished goat barn completed in two days.  It's a good thing it's done.  Callie, one of our Nubian goats, is big and pregnant.  This barn may be her labor and delivery room along with the nursery once she kids.  It'll be a good place to put her in a solitary environment with her baby or babies when they come.  The cows get real curious when new animals are welcomed to the barnyard.  We always get a little nervous with a 1,000 pound cow or three being nosy around a tiny goat.

Hopefully, the new goat barn will stand for twenty something years like the old one did!

Flower Power

Many things are blooming all over the yard.  I'll show you two items that are growing in the back yard and have a strange, but beautiful quality to them.  The first is a cactus.  Check out the beautiful yellow flower!  I'll show you a better picture further down.

Each year, Tricia harvests the 'paddles' off this cactus, cutting the sharp little spines off that cover it, and cooks it.  Nopalitos, they're called.  It makes a slime, sort of like okra does and you cook it with corn.  We always enjoy it.  The flower on this cactus is just stunning!

A friend gave me this plant and I put it out near the honeybees.  It is called the Coralbean, but here in Louisiana, it's called Mamou.  Would you just look at the "electric" red blooms on this plant!  I watched hummingbirds visiting it a couple of days ago.

Here is a close up of the Mamou blooms!  They are so bright it almost hurts your eyes.

In addition to the beautiful flowers, this plant is used as a medicinal plant and is known for treating anxiety, insomnia and muscle aches.  The roots are anti-microbial.  Seminole tribes used its bark to make a tea to help with pain and digestive issues.  According to what I've read, the seeds to this Mamou plant are very toxic!  They are used in Mexico as a rat poison.  Interestingly, if you boil the flowers, the resulting tea has narcotic properties.  I think we'll just enjoy looking at the flowers!

Your Food Is Killing You!

Your food is indeed killing you.  I'm not only talking about the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Movement even though we are generally proponents of MAHA and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Today I'm talking specifically about out at our henhouse.  There are things in our henhouse, that if they are eaten, they can get you killed in one of two ways.

This seems to be a recurring theme on the blog each year once the temperatures start warming up.  Big rat snakes (we call them chicken snakes) slither out of the woods looking for a free meal.  Our henhouse seems to fit the bill for them.  They curl up in a nesting box and eat our eggs!  This is why I purchase chalk or ceramic eggs and place them in the nesting boxes after marking them with a Sharpie since they look identical to a real egg.

If the chicken snake eats the chalk egg, well, they get stopped up.  They cannot pass the chalk egg and get a case of constipation that a quart of Metamucil with a Dulcolax chaser couldn't clear up.  Having eaten a real egg, the snake crawls through a fence or rubs up against something to break the egg so they can digest it.  With chalk eggs, there's no breaking them, and the snake will die.

Here's one I found in the henhouse yesterday that was feasting on eggs.  I hit him with a pipe and through him out of the henhouse.  The chickens were nervously cackling, happy he had met his comeuppance.

From the looks of the snake's girth, it is a pretty good guess that he has two of our eggs in his belly.  Can you see them?

If they are chicken eggs, there's no way I'd ever recover and eat them.  However, if they are my chalk eggs, I want them back!  Time to find out.  I got a shovel and dissected the snake.  I used my Croc to coax the first egg out of the snake's belly.  Look!  It is a chalk egg.  You can see the black Sharpie mark I put around the egg so that I don't gather up the chalk eggs when I pick up regular eggs each day.

Then I squeezed the second egg out.  You can see the 'X's' I marked on the chalk egg to differentiate it.  The fake eggs were covered in snake ooze.  I'll let them dry out in the sun all day before picking them up and placing them back in the henhouse egg boxes.  They are doing their job!

Here is a photo of the entire crime scene so that you can see how I got our eggs back!

Your Food is killing you!  Especially, if you are a snake!  You get killed if you get caught in the henhouse.  You also get killed if you eat a chalk egg or two.  I left the dead snake as a memorial, a reminder to other snakes in the area to mind their manners.  There's plenty of rats to eat and I won't do a thing about them.  However, if the snakes come into the henhouse and begin eating eggs, they will pay a very steep price.

Almost May and the Fall Crop is Still Coming In

Today was the 27th of April and the outside temperature was 86 degrees already!  Things are heating up.  I have most of the spring garden in the ground and it is growing quickly.  However, there are still some holdouts from the fall garden that are still producing.

First, we have some beets.  We grow three varieties: Bull's Blood, Detroit Red, and Chioggia.  We've been roasting a lot of these and have given a bunch away.  One lady we gave them to told us that she's making baby food for her infant using the beets.  You can't "beet" that.  Here's a crate of fresh picked beets.

Even though we've picked quite a few beets, we still have a bunch left to harvest.  I like to harvest them when they are about the size of a tennis ball.  We've found if you let them get bigger, they can get tough and "woody."  Can I speak freely here?  We're old friends, aren't we?  When you eat a lot of beets, something happens that people don't mention in polite conversation: It can appear that you are 'passing blood' and can be quite frightening.  It's not blood, though.  Don't worry.  It's beets in your diet.

Next on the clock from the fall garden that will be ending soon are sugar snap peas.  These grow on a trellis and they'll soon be replaced by a second planting of cucumbers.  But for now, they are still blooming beautiful flowers:

And they're continuing to make sweet, tender pods.  We love to eat them raw, but my favorite way to eat them are stir fried in butter or cook them in fried rice.  I like to pick them on the young side before the peas in the pod get too big.

I picked a nice colander full of sugar snap peas and Tricia gave them all away to our oldest son, Russ!

Not to worry, there's more on the way that I'll pick tomorrow.

When One Door Closes...

How does that saying go?  When one door closes, another one opens.  That's it.  When we closed the door on the staining and polyurethaning (I don't think that's a word) on our front door at our home, an opportunity arose to do the same to the front door at Mom & Dad's home.  It's a mahogany door that faces the western sun, and that results in a lot of UV ray and weather damage.  It hadn't been sanded and restained in years and years.  No time like the present to get started.  We used an air compressor to blow the dust/grime off of the door before we got started.

Then using 150 grit sandpaper on a palm sander, we gave the entire door a good sanding.  We didn't want to get down to the bare wood, though, we just wanted to take the outermost layer of finish off.  In all the little nooks and crannies where the palm sander couldn't touch, we used a sheet of sand paper wrapped around a foam block.  Once the door was sanded, we blew all the dust off with the air compressor and then used damp rags to clean down the surface of the door.

Then we applied a coat of Min Wax Provincial stain using some foam craft brushes.  We just put one coat on.  Take a look at the hardware on the door.  It's a brass knob with a brass face plate.  Time takes its toll on us all and doorknobs are no exception.  The brass hardware is dull and tarnished.  How can we get that cleaned up?  More on that further below.

After an hour or two, we used rags to wipe off any excess stain from the door.

The photo below shows the door after one coat of polyurethane.  The door is noticeably shinier and don't forget the doorknob.  It looks a tad shinier as well.  We found an old can of "Brasso" that we shook up and using elbow grease, rubbed the Brasso on the door handle with an old athletic sock.  It seems to be working a little bit to restore some of the shine and lustre, but it needs lots of finessing to get it shiny.  It has to get shinier than this!

And finally, here's the finished product after 3 coats of polyurethane.   Not too shabby for some amateurs (Dad & I)  Also, look at how the brass door knob shines!  I discovered an old hack for polishing silver or brass.  If you add some fireplace ashes to the paste, it adds abrasive material that more effectively cleans up the tarnish and shines the brass so shiny, you could see your reflection in it.

Final finished product photo:  Mom & Dad in front of their newly refinished front door.

Woo hoo!  Looks mighty spiffy.  (The door and the parents,)

Awash in Squash!

The squash vine borer (SVB) is a terrible pest.  It's a red and black moth that lays eggs at the base of the squash.  The eggs hatch and the larvae bore into the stem, hollowing out the plant, depriving it of nutrition.  One day everything in the squash patch is wonderful.  The next day, you walk out and the big beautiful leaves are wilted and the squash plant is dead!

I wanted to get ahead of the squash vine borers, so I planted early.  An ill-timed frost wiped out the big leaves, but they grew back.  I administered some of my homegrown liquid fertilizer and they grew like bad weeds.  I even had to put up some barriers so they don't crowd out my tomatoes!  And the harvest is really coming in.  This is a daily haul!:  

We are giving them away left and right, but we're eating a bunch of them, too.  We always like to try new recipes.  I'll show you two things we did recently that were hits and will be added into our rotation of dishes we cook.  I'll post links of the recipes if you'd like to try them out for yourself.

The first is zucchini bread.  It has nuts and cinnamon along with 2 cups of shredded zucchini.  If you have kids or grandkids that are picky about vegetables, well here's a sure-fire way to "sneakily" get them to LOVE zucchini!

I cut a slice about 10 minutes after removing from the oven and slathered some butter on top.  Delicious.  Click on the link for the recipe: Zucchini Bread

We had a whole bunch of shredded zucchini left over since the zucchini bread recipe only called for two cups.  So tonight I made zucchini fritters with the rest of them, and I'll be darned if I didn't just about eat them all myself!  Just a few simple ingredients and easy to do.  Here they are frying in a cast iron skillet.  One note: Next time I'll use a smaller zucchini.  You can see the seeds in the fritters below and they can be a little tough.  Zucchini grow really fast, though, so you have to keep and eye on them or they'll get huge overnight.

I like to let them get dark brown and crispy.  They still retain the bright, colorful green.  Fresh stuff from the garden is so tasty and colorful.

You can put sour cream on top, but I poured some homemade hot sauce we made using Anaheim Peppers.  It was scrumptious!

Here is the recipe that I used: Zucchini Fritters Recipe   Unless the squash vine borers wipe us out, we'll have a bumper crop of both zucchini and yellow squash.  If we find any recipes that we like, we'll share.  Maybe a zucchini martini?  Or a zucchini milkshake?  Perhaps not.