Playing Mind Games with the Honey Bees

We had to move our hives of bees to a location that would maximize their situation for these coming summer months.

Today was designated moving day.

Since I don't have a good relationship with the bees (actually it's only their back end stinging apparatus that causes me a problem), I stayed out of the fun and games while Chicken Mama and Gilligan gave Papa Pea a helping hand.

The bees can be particular about the relocation of their hives.  If you move them less than a couple of feet, no problem, all is well.  But if the move is to more than a couple of feet away from the old location and still within their familiar flying range of several miles, you have to trick them into returning to their newly moved hives rather than going back to the old location . . . even though the hive is no longer there.

Just to make things seem even more complicated, if you move the hives to a new spot many miles away, they fly out of the hive, take a look around and realize they are definitely not (in Kansas anymore?) in familiar territory and will automatically re-orientate themselves to the new spot and have no trouble finding it when they make the trip back to the newly located home base hives.

Anybody still with me?

Now back to how to convince the emerging bees that we didn't locate them two counties away, but rather only moved them ten feet.

It's necessary to create some sort of barrier in front of the hive that is unusual.  This could be some lengths of boards leaned up against the hives, the handles of many garden tools like shovels or hoes, a length of snow fencing, anything that they can get through but not something solid like sheets of plywood.

Or you could use evergreen boughs as we did.  (Extra person in the above picture is our good neighbor, D, who had come over to pick up the incubator and some duck and goose eggs he's going to give a try at hatching out.)

The bees come out, (probably say, "What the heck?!") navigate their way through the constructed barrier and go on their merry little pollen-gathering way.  When they head home, they remember this strange barrier they had to go through to get back to the hive and all is well.

We'll leave the boughs in front of the hives for 2-3 days which should be enough time for the bees to acclimate to their (slightly) new location.

Now a new coat of paint on the hives and they should be set for summer and happy in their sunny location.

Chuggin' Away on Spring Time Chores

'Tis a lovely change to have our temps teasing us with a small taste of real spring weather to come.  Each day our remaining snow recedes a bit more.  The pond continues to open up to the delight of the waterfowl.  Even the chickens seem to prefer going down to drink the cold water appearing around the edges.

Yesterday Papa Pea brought the deck furniture out of storage.  I'm fantasizing about sunning my lily-white legs one of these afternoons soon when the sun's warmth is strong enough.  But first I need to wash winter's grit and grime off the chairs and table.  That would be after my dear husband moves the hive of bees off the deck however.

He had one weak hive that he gave extra protection to by situating it on the south facing deck up against the house these past winter months.  At the warmest part of our day yesterday, I went out onto the deck to wash furniture and immediately stepped into a whirl of honey bees taking advantage of the good weather.  This caused my hasty retreat back into the house as I'm allergic to bee stings.

"She's lovely to look at, delightful to see . . . "

 

I don't go into anaphylactic shock or anything close to it, but after being stung (see picture above from a couple of years ago) I swell up like a balloon and feel quite cwappy for about three days until the venom works its way out of my system.

I hit the kindling making job pretty hard yesterday and this morning my right wrist is well aware of the hour and fifteen minutes of constant thwack, thwack, thwacking.  I thought I had only three bundles left to work my way through, but found six more which is all for the good because the kindling bin won't be totally full even when I'm finished.

Beans.  'Member I mentioned I still have lots of frozen green and yellow beans left from last season?  There's no doubt the poultry would gobble them up (even without butter and salt) should I decide to give the excess to them.  But my frugal nature won't allow that (quite yet) so I've been trying to use as many as I can (without causing out and out revolt) in the kitchen.

Last week I made Cream of Broccoli Soup except I substituted beans for the broccoli.  As I was making it, it occurred to me that the left over wild rice in the refridge would go well in it.  Then, how about some cooked turnkey meat I had in the freezer?  The pot of "string bean soup" actually turned out to be very tasty.  Just goes to show there's more than one way to snap a bean.

Yesterday I made a casserole using more of the green and yellow beans.  (I'm on a mission here.)  It's a recipe for Hot Dog and Green Bean Casserole I've been making forever.  If you're interested, you can find it here.

Enough sitting at the computer.  Main items on my list for today (along with the usual other 15 . . . or so) are going to the dairy for our resupply of milk products and more wood work.

Hope you have a great day doing whatever is on your agenda!

Outside Work Has Commenced

We still have piles of snow . . . 

. . . as you can see by these plowed up piles by the beginning of our driveway.

The raised beds aren't totally snow-free yet.  The blueberry bushes are in the upper left side of the picture, and they're still about half buried in snow. 

A good half of the field garden, to the right of the raised beds, is peeking through.

And although we do have dry gravel in spots, there are still many areas like this.

The pond remains frozen except in spots around the edges.  You can see some of the chickens sampling that cold, cold water.

I've got a bit of wood working to do.  I've been working on splitting up the remaining bundles of wood slated for kindling and getting it into the kindling bin.

The bundles needed to be moved out of this section of the wood shed so we can start stacking large pieces of winter wood in there.  These few bundles are all that remain so that task will be done PDQ.

A task that will take me quite a bit longer are these bundles of soft wood that need to be split (not as small as kindling) for setting on top of the kindling to get the fires going well before putting in big pieces that will burn for hours.  They ended up stored in a spot where we'll need to stack more of those large pieces of winter wood.  (Who engineered this?)  The picture shows only half the bundles I need to work up.  Another bunch of the same quantity is across the aisle. 

And speaking of those large pieces, Papa Pea, Mama Pea (yours truly), Chicken Mama and her partner, from now on referred to as Gilligan (not his real name but an inside family joke), are working together to get wood put up for both households.  Above Papa Pea is working on one end of the wood pile . . . 

. . . while Gilligan works on the other end.

We already have a few days of work laid out for the four of us when we attack this pile that next needs to be split and stacked.

Yep, even though it's still wet and kinda muddy out there, it's time to get going on the spring time outside chores.  No more lounging around all day inside in front of the fire!

Makes Ya Wonder . . .

One of our male Pilgrim geese, Skidmore, has become quite aggressive.  His less-than-placid personality has made us start to wonder.

To share some background, we specifically chose the Pilgrim breed because one of their traits is that they are supposed to have a calm, non-aggressive, laid back temperament.

The breed of geese we had previously were Shetlands, which look much like the Pilgrims (the two breeds are often confused), but they tend to be a little cranky.  Papa Pea still has a scar on the back of his leg where one of the Shetland males took a chunk out of his calf.

In our search for Pilgrim geese, we were told by hatcheries all over the country that for some reason the fertility rate of that specific breed was at an all-time low and most hatcheries couldn't guarantee they would even have Pilgrim goslings to sell.  It took a lot of time for us to locate a hatchery that agreed to take our order and ship us some Pilgrim goslings when and if they had them to sell.

Luck was with us and we did end up getting Pilgrim goslings from two different hatcheries this past spring along with two pair of adult Pilgrim geese from another source.

Skidmore is one of the goslings we got and he was virtually hand-raised right along with his other hatch mates.

We realize it is breeding season and that can bring out the protectiveness of male geese, but his increasingly nasty personality doesn't seem related to any setting female he's trying to protect.

He's also taken to beating up on the ducks and some of the other geese.

Skidmore giving me the evil eye.

What we are wondering, and we may be completely off base with the thought, is if in an attempt to increase the fertility of the Pilgrim variety of geese, could it be possible that some breeders are introducing a little of the more prolific Shetland genes into the Pilgrim line?  It's just a thought that has occurred to us, but big, aggressive Skidmore seems to be doing a good imitation in personality of a breed of geese other than a Pilgrim.

We're not dispatching Skidmore to the stew pot yet.  We'll give him until breeding season is over to see if he works through this very bad mood of his.

Bigger Than A Bread Box?

No, not hardly.  But quite a bit bigger than your run of the mill chicken egg!

I've had some inquiries as to just how big are the goose eggs we've been getting.

Above we have, left to right, a goose egg, a duck egg and a standard-sized chicken egg.

The chicken egg weighs in at 2 ounces.  The Muscovy duck egg isn't a lot bigger at 3 ounces.  (I suspect the extra ounce is all in the shell.  Boy howdy, those duck eggs are hard to crack open.)  The shape is consistently a bit more rounded than a chicken egg.

Then there's the goose egg which tipped the scales at 7 ounces.  (That's nearly half a pound!)

Our Pilgrim geese are a smaller variety so I'm assuming the bigger geese would produce even larger eggs.

I've been using the duck eggs in recipes interchangeably with chicken eggs, one for one, with good success.  I haven't baked with a goose egg because I'm just not sure how many chicken eggs would be equal to one goose egg.

One of these mornings, I'm going to fry a goose egg and serve it on a dinner plate.  I'm betting it would come close to filling the plate!

One More Time

When we remodeled this house (tore it down to the studs and started rebuilding from there) and moved in, we purchased a new refrigerator and gas cooking stove.  That was in 1995, twenty-two years ago this next month.

Knock on wood, but we have had absolutely no problem with the refrigerator (it just keeps hummin' along) and no problem with the stove.   Well except for one little thing.

This was the scene in my kitchen today as my dear husband replaced the oven door hinges on the stove.  Again.  For the fourth time.

Something happens to the hinges having to do with wear and tear on them each time the oven door is opened and closed.  The door gets progressively harder and harder to open making an awful creaking sound that gets really loud.  Once, one of the deteriorating hinges snapped and the oven door wouldn't stay closed.  The only way we could get the door to stay closed was by wedging it shut with a 2 x 4.  You can read about that incident and see a picture here.  (This was before we remodeled the kitchen in 2011.) 

So to summarize, we purchased the stove in 1995, we had to replace the hinges in 1999, again in 2002, a third time in 2008 and a fourth time today.

My optimistic husband commented that at least the manufacturer of the hinges is making them better as they're lasting progressively longer.  "Ha," I said.  "They may last longer, but obviously they're still defective!"

On top of everything else, it's a tricky job to replace the hinges.  One has to be careful because the hinges are very strong and if one is not careful during the process, they can snap shut at just the wrong time and . . . 

. . . bite one.  The hinge took a piece out of his finger (his protective gloves were on the floor when this happened -- ahem), but it could have been a lot worse.  A LOT worse.

Any bets on how long this newly installed set will last?  Oy.