One Last Glimpse of Bees

As a quick commemoration, I would like to mention that, as I picked bugs off the cherry trees yesterday, I found a single cherry. I ate it. It tasted like a cherry.

Phil sheared two sheep first thing this morning. He did it the "professional" way; rather than sitting almost on top of the sheep to control it, he stood up, and rested the sheep against his legs. After the first sheep, he said, "I feel like I've run about six miles, after not exercising for years."

Shearing is hard work, but he did another, B.B. the lamb. The lamb looked fluffy, but it didn't have much wool. He thinks he won't do the other lamb, which means that shearing is done for the year.

In the afternoon, we managed to corral Fern. She is a smart cookie, but with both Phil and I holding (non-electrified) electric line between us, we got her into the headgate we'd made for her on the fourth try or so. We fed her treats, and brushed her. Phil put her collar back on her, and led her around with the halter for a while. She calmed down significantly in the twenty minutes or so he walked with her.

Towards the evening, Phil and I went to shovel more minerals under the trees. Incredibly, he glanced down at one of the trailer wheels and said, "Oh, my! That wheel is about to fall off." Sure enough, the bolt that holds the wheel on had fallen off. And Phil had spotted it! Out of our whole farm, he knew just where to find the bolt.

How that wheel hadn't fallen off, with the hundreds of pounds of minerals in the trailer, over the very rough terrain: it's another provision of the Lord. (Phil carefully tried to drive five feet further to get to a better spot, once he spotted the problem, but the wheel immediately loosened so that Phil stopped.)

Phil shoveled so many minerals that he finished off another of the final three totes. He is so happy that those totes will soon be empty. He moved aside the pallet it was on, and found many nightcrawler earth worms. So we captured them, and have them in a bucket in the kitchen. They don't seem to be doing a whole lot.

I went to cook dinner, but Phil kept on. After a bit, he called me over: he'd found a small swarm of bees on a tree branch. It was a tiny swarm, no larger than a cup. But I glimpsed a swollen abdomen: an unmarked queen! I looked in the beehive, and, sure enough, the final queen had emerged at some point in the last week. I'm guessing she flew her matrimonial flight, and swarmed with any bees yet living.

They have flown away now, but it was a happy, sort of hopeful ending to the Spring Forth honeybees of 2010.

The weather cooled a bit now, down to the mid-80s. I had heard that June 24 was a record-setting day, three degrees hotter than the previous record, set in 1914. But I didn't realize, until Phil heard on the radio, that normal June weather is in the mid-80s, not 95-100.

This makes much more sense about why I had multiple recommendations to plant my sauerkraut cabbage in mid-June. Usually, it wouldn't be too hot. Cabbage does fine, according to the books, even at 85. But I suspect that 100+ is, truly, too hot for it. So I plan to buy more seeds, and try again, a little later.

In the evening, I planted 96 broccoli seeds. I use styrofoam egg containers, with a hole punched in the bottom as my inexpensive planters. We'll see if I do a better job keeping them alive than the tomato seedlings earlier this year: those ones I set out in the garden way too early.

The boys and I planted more corn. I rammed the spoke into the ground, and the boys took turns dropping seeds in the holes. I liked that method very much; less stooping for me. And we were thrilled to see tiny shoots from the corn I planted several days ago; something is growing!