Bees

I received my packages of bees last saturday, and hived them the same day.  Here's a picture of my 4 hive setup.  .

 I get the plastic pallets from shipments of food that we receive.  I don't really have a very good market for them; I sell them for $1 each for folks to put under their hay, but they work great for holding up hives; pallets can hold up thousands of pounds of weight, and give you plenty of roof for two hives and a place to work.  I put down 4 pallets so that I don't have to bend over too much when I'm working with the bees, and only 4 so that I don't have to reach too high when I'm putting the supers on for honey later in the year. 

The hives are the green boxes.  The white boxes peeking over are extra supers that I'm storing there next to the hives.  The white "cap" is actually two parts; a thick styrofoam lid and a bee feeder.  These packaged bees come in with no food stores at all, so to give them a good start I feed them a simple syrup that is 1 part water to 1 part sugar, by weight.  Actually, granulated white sugar is about the same weight as water, by volume, so you can get pretty close just by measuring out the same volumes of water and sugar.  

 This is what the inside of one of the feeders looks like.  There's a clear plastic guard that is L shaped, and the bees crawl up and then over a wall to get to the syrup.  It's pretty normal to see a couple of hundred bees doing this when you open it up.  A feeder will hold about 5 gallons of the syrup, but I only put in a gallon at a time to keep it relatively fresh. 

 One of the hives just isn't figuring out the feeder though; only a few bees sipping it.  So I took the guard off and then scooped up some of the syrup and poured it down the crack that the bees enter through.  An hour later and they'd found it.  If they don't find and utilize the syrup it will really slow down their growth. 

 I hived them on Saturday, make sure that the queens had escaped their queen box on sunday and removed them, and then on monday checked to make sure that they were utilizing their syrup.  They were flying pretty well, and seemed very interested in pollen; there's apparently several sources nearby.  In the picture above you can see some yellow pollen on the legs of the bee. 

 In the picture above you can see some florescent orange pollen that they found somewhere.  I think it's salmon berry; that's the only thing that is that particular color of orange that comes to mind.  You can see several bees carrying it.  Click the picture for a bigger version. 

 I did notice that several of the bees were fanning; which is what they do when they think that the hive is too hot, or that it's too humid, so I removed the hive entrance limiters for a couple of hours to allow them to adjust their temperature and humidity more easily. 

Looking forward to working with the bees again this year. 

Still life, with dogs

When I thought about farming, I had a lot of ideas about what it would be like.  One thing that I really enjoy, a simple pleasure, is just sitting still somewhere on the farm; and it's exactly what I need sometimes.  So today I sat out in one of my fields and looked at the growing grass and watched my dogs play.

New farm purchase -- 10 days and counting to close?

New farm purchase

I've been working on closing on the new property for the last two weeks, and in the last 7 days it's gotten more complicated.   I've purchased property before, and like property as an investment, but what I'd do in the past is save my money until I had enough to make a purchase, and buy the property with cash.  

Yes, it takes a while, years, but when you're talking about property cash has its own magic powers, and it's nice to not have to pay for private mortgage insurance, points or other costs associated with getting a loan.

With this property, I've supplied all sorts of documentation to two banks now; bank statements, proof of funds, explanation of where the funds came from, proof of income, tax returns, credit report (and I paid the $47 parking ticket I'd forgotten about) and so on.  I've signed affidavits, releases, consents and a variety of other documents; and at this point we are probably within 10 days of closing.  It's frustratingly slow, and it seems like I have spent weeks chasing around this paper, or that one.  

visualize farm.  focus on farm.  farm will close.  the white dots on the left horizon are round hay bales.  this is about 40 acres.

It's complicated by the fact that I see the planting season slipping away week by week.  I've worked out an agreement with the fellow who leased the land last year for him to put corn in on 55 acres, and he's been out there plowing and discing the field in preparation, and I have to say that I'm really, really looking forward to having that much space to work with next year.  

My original plan was to close in February or March and have this field in pasture by the time summer rolled around, June or July.  Leasing it for this year means I'll probably frost seed it after the corn is chopped.  I will be doing some test plots to see what I can grow here; I'd really, really, like alfalfa (Lucerne to you, Brett!) and there are various strains that grow well, but no one else is growing it, and there's probably good reason for it.  Most folks around here use orchard grass as their primary pasture grass.  

I've already got the survey in hand, and as soon as I can close I'll start the boundary line adjustment for phase II of the farm acquisition plan; putting the house on a couple of acres, and the refinancing the house.

Part of my concern is that I'd like my dairy cow to have her calf on this property.  The cow facilities here are great -- it was a 300 cow dairy farm, after all -- and it'll be easier to keep and maintain her and the other cows here than it has been on my current farm.