Start of the harvest

    As a bee keeper I have been moderately successful.  Success can be measured in pounds of honey at harvest.  Or you could measure it by how many years you are able to keep a colony alive.  Or perhaps your measure is just the fact that you chose to do this crazy beekeeping thing at all.  I measure success in all of those ways.
    This year in the Northeast where I live, the weather was spectacular for apples, and wild flowers, and thus, honey.  I just harvested the first of my hives today.  Wed. I will get the second one (I have Wed. off due to a college break) and start the extraction process. It is going to be a huge harvest.
   Backing up a bit - last year, both of my hives absconded.  We found a mouse nest in one, which explains a lot.  If the colony was weak to start with, they would not have been able to drive out the mice.  The other looked fine, but alas, they all left, not died, just went away, which was really a certain death, since by the time of year they absconded did not leave them enough days to make winter stores.  Sad, but part of the cycle sometimes.  So this past Spring I bought two nucs from my local beekeeping guru and started again.  (A nuc is a small section of an already active hive, with a queen - usually four frames of drawn honey comb and some honey, if you are lucky. Nucs start off more quickly since they do not need to spend as much time making wax for their brood and for their honey stores.  They are, however, more expensive than starting with "package bees" which is a box of many thousand bees and a queen they have yet to know.)
     As I stated - this year, with our cool, wet Spring and our summer of moderate temps (except for two really nasty hot weeks in July) and occasional rain, it was perfect for flowers, so the bees had everything they could wish for.  Additionally, we have had a pretty mild Autumn thus far, so the goldenrod and fall flowers have stuck around for much longer than last year.  Today, when I opened the hive, it was crazy with bees.  This is a great sign - you want a strong colony going into the winter.  They will kick out all the drones, if they have not done so already, and cluster together through the cold winter.
     When I lifted the super off, I was gobsmacked by the weight of it.  There must be 30 pounds of honey in that thing! (A super is a box of frames with the honey for harvest, as opposed to the lower boxes, which are the bees' stores for the winter.) I know many beekeepers who will put a second super on top of the first, in order to give the girls room to make more honey - but I have never done this.  Not for any reason other than I have never had the need.  I have always had moderate honey harvests, not massive ones.  Quite frankly, this year with the  beginning of our farming career and all the time spent learning and making mistakes, I didn't pay much attention to the girls.  I just left them to their own devices. Adding a second super was the last thing on my mind. A shame, because this would have been the year to do it! Each one of the ten frames is completely filled with honey.  I am interested to see how the second hive has done.  It has never been as strong, and I think it may be a less ideal location.
   So lucky as we are, we will be incredibly busy extracting the honey and the wax.  If I look a little sticky at week's end, blame it on the bees. 

Don't name your livestock

   Farming has started with the keeping of chickens, the mowing of fields, and the serious appraisal of the wood lot and what part might be selectively logged. Today, the children and I learned a few lessons in farming.
#1 Don't name your livestock.  If it has a name you get attached more easily. It actually hurts when it dies.
#2  Do not tend to sick chickens in your garage. It was certainly more convenient to treat Nugget's infection so close to home, but if a dog (or dogs) get into the  garage, the chicken will not last long.
#3  As my daughter succinctly said on her fb status. Bird dogs will kill animals, but not not mangle the bodies.
   Our sick chicken, Nugget, was  in the garage in her crate and it looks like the dogs managed to get the door open, or it was not closed firmly, but they gained access to the garage and that was the end of Nugget.  Our lab mix was sitting quietly on the path outside the garage with the still warm bird between her feet, looking quizzically at it. She was so quiet, my daughter ran past her on the way to the garage, not noticing the bird.  I was a little sad, as the bird had seemed to be getting better.  The children were sad.  My 8 year old was sobbing, "But she was the only chicken who liked me!  She would let me hold her." 

My eldest does not know how to process death. it is one of the trickier aspects of his autism. He knows people should be sad, so sometimes he cries, but not until he has melted down, screaming obscenities and trying to find someone to blame.  He was going to shoot the dog, shoot the chicken, send the dog to jail...anything to process the idea of the bird that was alive yesterday being dead today.   

     So we find ourselves down to 9 chickens and we have learned some important lessons.  (Be sure to remind me of the no names lesson when we get the sheep, okay?)

ALWAYS have a back up outfit

  Today is Homecoming at my older children's HS.  Tonight is the dance.  This year the theme is The Great Gatsby.  Now to me, that is a novel first, a film second and third, but not a theme, per se.  However, the idea of a 20's era dress was very appealing to my daughter, so to the store we went for red satin and seed beads.  Oh, yes, this was not going to simply be a dropped waist with a hip sash - Heaven forbid!  We decided on beading the front of the dress.
     Sometimes, even though you know how overly scheduled your days are, and how many responsibilities you have, you just have to say, "Okay,  I know this will kill me, but let's try."  So I cut the fabric, and was ready to sew when I realized the beading would have to happen BEFORE sewing.  Armed with an audio book and a clear (ish) dining room table, I copied the rose patterns onto the front of the dress and began.

   We decided on a black outline, then steel beads for defining the rose petals, as well as short  iridescent bugle beads for accents with gold  seed beads for the roses themselves.  Yeah, right.

The lower pair - not mirror images, as I had to freehand part of the design  when, after the first  use, our transfer paper failed

After about 6 hours of work, I was not even half way done.  My daughter helped when she could, but two people on one dress front gets tight.  We had a good time, however, listening to music, talking, and video chatting with her boyfriend. (My first experience with Skype.) Last night at 3 a.m. I had to sleep for a bit because I was not longer seeing straight.
    5:30 dawned grey and dim, and I looked at my husband and told him he was going to have to get our son to his 6:30 team bus for the meet, as I did not have any brain cells awake. By 7 a.m. I was up and beading.  By ten we decided that the gold seed beads looked fabulous, but were taking longer to apply than we had, so we would make the second pair of  rose images the reverse - bugle beads with gold  leaf/highlight areas.

The section we did not get finished.  

        At about 2p.m., my daughter and I realized her dance was at 8 not 7, so she called her boyfriend to see if he could move their reservation back an hour.  The dinner reservation was for 5:30. He was not inclined to do this, and reticent about why, making me think he had other things planned that just dinner, so I did not push it. Finally at 4:15 p.m. I told my daughter, to stop beading I was going to stitch the darn dress up, she might be able to get away with wearing it if part of a rose was not beaded, but not if the garment was in pieces.   So I stitched like the wind, and realized that I would need an extra 20 minutes just for the pressing.  So, with great disappointment and yes, a frustrated tear, I sent her to grab two dresses from my closet that I thought would work.  She tried on a blue one with a black sheer overdress - not drop waist, but sheath style.  After pulling the shoulders up an inch, adding a rhinestone choker, chandelier  style earrings, and a beaded evening wrap, she was ready to go.  Was it what we planned?  No.  Did it work? Well enough. Did she look pretty?  I'd say, yes.

Look who I almost ran into!

As I was looking for milkweed pods I stopped just in time to avoid walking through this:

which was a good thing since it was made by this

and I do not think she would have been happy with me.

It's Apple Time!

     Do you remember last Spring, before we even bought our farm, we were posting photos of all the gorgeous trees in bloom.  Well, it is now apple time and we are finding the apples and the crab apples

and trying to educate ourselves as to the varieties.  Yesterday I spend an hour or two wandering the farm, picking apples up from the ground, or pulling them from the branches to feel, smell, and eventually taste them.  I determined a few things:  we have a lot of apple trees; no one has pruned them in years, the neglect is appalling;

Most of the apples look like this - suffering from fungus or insects or disease - I am still investigating

Some trees are healthier than others

 we have many different varieties of apples; the deer seem to have gotten to all the ripe ones at easy picking levels; if the deer have not gotten to the ones on the lower branches, it is not luck, it is because they are not ripe.

These are ripe and sweet, but I need a ladder for this tree as the deer stripped the lower branches already

 I tasted a lot of sour apples yesterday!
     Apple trees are amazing things.  This tree is completely hollow - there is actually a hole at the base on the other side, which you cannot see in these photos, yet it is still bearing fruit!

An amazingly resilient tree

The hollow goes all the way through

The opposite side

  So this weekend we will spend some time at the farm with a ladder, some baskets or bags, and this coming week the house will smell of apple butter, apple sauce, and possibly pie!

Life in this town

   I have lived in many places in my life.  I have visited MANY more.  There is always something special about each place.  My little town here in upstate NY is special in many ways. First of all, it  is fairly unique because it is a two college town.  We are awash in students  for most of the year, and then we are awash in baseball playing youth in the summer.  This area is known as "baseball country" according to the banners on Main Street!  There are several theatre and museum options, as well as more baseball at Damaschke Field.
   This town LOVES its parade.  We  parade on July 4th.  We have a Memorial Day parade, a Halloween Parade, a "holiday parade."

There is puppet walking for First Night, as well as fireworks on the Fourth of July and New Year's Eve.
    Labor Day we have a gathering of balloonists in the park behind our house.  They do a Balloon Glow in the evening, and flights during the day.  Very pretty.

    Although we like to complain about the weather - very grey a great deal of the time, it is a good place to be, and as everyone told us when we were first house hunting, a great place to raise kids.  

A Coop and Crayons

   The chicks living in the brooder box are getting cramped, so it is a good thing we have ALMOST completed the chicken tractor.  My husband and I were roofing it today, and have to add the doors and windows before we can out  the chicks in.  The roofing material is a currogated material that feels like some form of rubber coated felt.  It is dark brown, and pencil did not show up on its surface.  We needed a grease pencil, which, of course, was not in the tool box we had at the farm.  However, a mother is never without a stash of things to keep kids occupied in the car, so I was able to dig out a yellow crayon and it did just fine.  We are hoping by tomorrow to have the birds in ther new domicile.
   My husband and I start back to school this week.  Summer was so busy and stressful, I am actually looking forward to classes.  My teaching load is a little lighter this term - I still have three classes, but we lowered the class size in my Theatre Appreciation classes from 65 in each to 50.  This means 30 less papers to grade, 60 less projects, 60 fewer exams,  and 210 less quizzes to grade.  I will only have 116 student this term as opposed to the 146 I has last fall term.  Whew! 
    Fall also includes designing two productions, one at the college of Clybourne Park, and The Outgoing Tide at Chenango River Theatre, with a dream cast which includes my husband. This will be so nice for him.  Right now he is in a brilliant and beautiful production of The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare.  He is King Leontes and the Shepherd, and has been so busy and stressed by this very heavy show, starting on Outgoing will be quite relaxing!