Monday, September 27, 2010

Logan Visit





Grandson Logan has been here for a short visit. Since he is being home schooled, he has some flexibility in his schedule and was able to be here for the honey harvest on Saturday and helped Grandpa with some garden cleanup today. He and Grandpa found some sweatbees or some sort of bees other than honey bees digging a nest in the ground near our porch.


Saturday, September 25, 2010

Honey Time Again




This year's harvest of the honey crop included 3 newcomers - George, Grandson Logan and Grandpa Lyon (Anna's dad). It had lost some of the thrill for last year's participants (some of us are still excited) and they opted to ride the golf cart during part of the harvest process.





It was not as productive as last year when we got almost 5 gallons of honey. We harvested close to 2 gallons this year. Somewhere in our reading or through our local beekeepers group, we learned that we should put what was left of the honey supers (boxes with honey trays) in the yard somewhere not back in the hives as we did last year. The bees have been swarming to the boxes for the past couple hours since we put the boxes out. Supposedly, this will prevent the robber bees from getting into the hives as they did last year. We sure hope it works. It was sad to see our hive's demise last year from the robbers. They say the bees will come to the boxes and clean them up so well that we can then put them back on the hives and ready them for winter. We will start feeding them sugar water to give them plenty to build up their own honey for winter and we didn't take all of the honey - left a box on each hive to give them enough to make it through winter.





The end of another good day and season at the farm.









Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Tree





After a fun picnic with Pat's family and the Elwood Branch (I forgot my camera as usual), we had an early birthday celebration for George's #32 by cutting down a dead tree in his yard.