Finished Beehive

Grace lived through Saturday with no trauma; Jonelle sounded good on the phone.

Phil finished the first top bar beehive. I had sort of hoped to have just one beehive for both colonies, putting in a divider between the two.



Phil urged me to make sure that that would work, so I called Gunther Hauk (who wrote the lovely Towards Saving the Honeybee) and asked his wife if one hive would work.

"Oh, no! The queens would kill each other!" was her horrified reply.

Good thing Phil made me ask.

So he built a second hive (almost all the way) in just a few hours, and our bees will have a lovely home waiting for them in the orchard when they arrive.

I felt like I had been puttering all week, sort of waiting to plant trees with Phil. It's a lot of effort to do by oneself. But yesterday I could not handle waiting another day. And I managed to get 13 trees in the ground, with a little support help from Jadon and Isaiah. (I had dug most of the holes earlier in the week, and Tim and Cathy had marked where to dig when they were visiting. This was such a big help!)

Total yet to get in the ground: 84. We're getting there.

I bathed the children in the blue plastic bin, and that closed out our focused Saturday.

Today our milking continued disappointing. Just over three cups for over an hour of man-time. Phil and I tried to talk through how to better organize our systems. In some ways, though, it feels like we're just treading water until the orchard is in and we can focus elsewhere.

We stopped at the Bessettes, but they weren't home. We haven't seen them since the end of February, and it looks like things go well there: home-hatched chickens out eating on the pasture; piglets growing and turning over the ground; larger mammals grazing.

Back at our house, we had a mellow, refreshing afternoon.