Author: Steve Hardin

Bee swarm success!

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The bees are helping us out. We had just purchased two more used hives with miscellaneous bee working tools and ordered a second full hive kit. I had just assembled the new hive and we were deciding where to store all of the stuff when Mr Rainman spotted a bee swarm. We were outside working and the bees started to swarm and he came over and asked me what was going on. They are very loud and become a cloud of bees before they settle down onto something. They ended up in a tree on an old magpie nest. Way too high to mess with trying to catch them. I thought it was a missed opportunity. About an hour later Mr Rainman spotted them all massed up on one of our lavender plants! It was one of the grey plants that have not yet started to green up but they were inside the bush.

I decided to give reclaiming it a go. I had never attempted it nor worked the bees. Annmarie does the bee work usually but I did not want to miss out on a free colony. I donned the bee suit, Mr Rainman had to help me zip it up as I could not figure it out once I had it on. He took some pictures and attempted to film it until he got stung on the forehead. I just knelt down and started scooping the bees out of the bush and putting them into a plastic starter set we had just picked up. I did that for a while until the bees were good and upset. I could not reach down into the bush and was only able to get about half of them and I figured the queen was still in there. I had a full honey frame that I slipped into the starter box in the hopes that it would attract the bees into it. It did attract the bees but they just went in and ate all of the honey! They took it back to the mound.

I was working on the driveway when Mr Rainman spotted them swarming again. They flew up into a tree near the barn, again out of reach. They came back to the lavender about an hour later on a different greener bush this time. I had the starter box out there already so I had Mr Rainman take the new hive box I had just assembled and put it out in the lavender with the hope that they would migrate into it.

By the time Annmarie came home they had not moved. My set out houses idea was not working. So she went out and took the super, removed some frames so there was only five in the box and set it on a diagonal over the bees with the lid on it. Just before we went to bed I put on a bee hood and gloves only and went out to check on them in my short sleeve shirt. They had gone into the box and were on the frames. So I picked up the box, put it on a bottom and put the lid back on. I was going to do more but working in a bee hood with a head lamp is not super conducive to actual work and the bees were starting to get upset. I realize that as we get more comfortable around the bees we will wear less protective gear. If you are calm and don’t hurt them they are pretty passive, you just have to stay calm and move in a controlled manner. It definitely takes some practice.

The next morning she went out, closed off the hive and moved it to the new area we set up out in the orchard. Eventually, we will get the hive from the lavender patch moved out into the orchard, but it is full of bees and heavy so it needs to be moved as an entire unit early in the morning when its cool.

Annmarie watched a You Tube video on how to clean bees wax and make wax pellets. There was a full honey super of no plastic insert frames in the used hives we just purchased. So I cut them all off and am now filtering the honey out so we can harvest the bees wax also. She cleaned up the little bit of wax we had collected last year and made pellets out of it. Once I get the honey out of this crushed wax mess we will take the wax out to the hive and the bees will clean it all up then we can harvest the wax. They are far more efficient at finding all of the honey then I am.

Spring catchup and yard improvements

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We are working on getting everything caught up and ready to go before our vacation. The yard is getting watered and all of the hoses are getting repaired and we are going to try and get the ram pasture back in shape and get some actual grass length on it. The sheep use it as a pass through spot and always eat it down to nothing every year. I am surprised it comes back annually, Mr Rainman has been cleaning up the garden area, he cleaned off the old house porch and burned both slash piles we created over the winter. We still have a bunch of dead branches down by the spring head that need cleaned out and tossed on the slash pile.

He brought a bunch of compost (sheep manure and straw) over to the lavender patch to fill the horse trough. We are going to plant strawberry plants in the trough so they don’t take over the entire patch of ground. All of the hoses got laid out and connected to automatic timers. Annmarie will program the lavender and berry timers. She has been working on the garden every weekend. It is all planted as of this weekend. The elevated beds have vegetables and all of the wine barrel halves have herbs in them. We are also going to plant marigolds in planters between all of the elevated beds. We are hopeful that they will help with the bug issues and keep them away. If nothing else they are more flowers for the honeybees. We also seeded wildflower seed over three spots in an attempt to get more flowers up and going for the bees.

I was able to offload the side by side today. I just need to run the wiring for the machine shed across two more bays so it is out of the way. I will now have room to easily park both tractors under cover. I also cleaned up in front of the machine shed and beside it. I moved a lot of alpaca poop and some piles of dirt. I want to bring the old lamb shed up next to the machine shed. As of right now I could start using it to store all of the scrap metal I use for welding repairs and the fencing tools. I can build some racks and shelves for the metal. This will let me move three more pallets out of the machine shed. My mother-in-law wants me to move the old Dinky tractor, the very first brand new tractor ever purchased for the farm, into that corner spot. It is currently hidden across our driveway in and amongst a lot of other stuff. Everyone would be able to see the tractor when they come over to visit in the new location. It will just depend on how hard it is going to be to move the old lamb shed.

The entrance driveway is over 1/4 mile long and was starting to get pretty rutted. I spent a few hours yesterday with the John Deere tractor and tore up the road with the box blade hooks until I had broken up the surface pretty good then raised the hooks and used the box portion to spread out the gravel evenly. I usually do this right after a rain storm but the little tractor was at my mother’s house last time it rained. The road is very smooth now and won’t need any attention for a few months.

Final lamb update spring of 2023

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This is the final tally after a long drawn out birthing time. It is so long that we will have to sort the sheep and pull off all of the three months and older lambs off of the herd before we can stick the ram back into the main herd.

  • Date of update- May 13, 2023
  • # of Lambs born – 63
  • # of ewes who have delivered babies – 39
  • # of ewes still pregnant – 0, it should be zero now!
  • # of single lamb births – 17
  • # of twin lamb births – 20
  • # of triplet lamb births – 2
  • # tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-idk, still have a few to tag and band
  • # tagged female lambs-idk, still have a few to tag and band
  • # of bummer lambs – 5
  • # of lambs who died in first two weeks – 2
  • Total # of lambs on farm -54 (but after predator kill this week only 52 but that doesn’t count towards productivity. That is a predator loss)
  • % birthing rate- 162%
  • % production rate -138%
  • % survival rate at birth – 100%
  • % survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 86

Dragging out the birthing process is not good. We had a lot of bummers this year, far more than normal. We still have 52 lambs to sell by the end of the year. We also want to weed out about 5-8 of the older ewes. If we get the ram in with the ewes in the next two weeks we will have more lambs five months later, so mid October. This is a much better time to lamb than January.

I enjoy the sheep way more than the cows. Currently, the cows are worth more but they are a lot harder to deal with and as I get older they may be one of the things I have to give up. I went ahead and ordered a solar powered red eye predator warning light. I can mount them on a wooden pole down in the orchard and hopefully scare off whatever is killing our lambs. It should be here next week and it can get installed. I am hopeful it makes a difference. I would advocate some 243 therapy for the predators but they are never seen so that solution is really not viable.

I am using the sheep to mow the lawn but today I opted to let the sheep go up with the cows and give the ram pasture a break from them. They will need to be brought in every night for their protection. It will be good practice for Chance.

Predators 3/ Farm 0

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Well the predators are definitely bold! We lost one lamb in the orchard in late January and we lost two more lambs in the orchard last night! The lambs had not had rigor set in by the early morning and neither were torn up but one was missing its entire abdominal cavity contents. I noticed the magpies fighting out in the orchard on my way to work and messaged Mr Rainman to check when he came out. He is coming out a couple of days a week to help out.

Due to this calamity between the houses we are no longer letting the sheep stay in the orchard overnight. They are getting moved into the barn lot at night. We think its a coyote, both of our dogs sleep in kennels inside at night. We are going to look into some solar motion activated lights. I think there is a solar set of red eyes that you mount on the fence at predator eye height to scare them away. I will need to do more research on that item. The funny thing is I have not seen a coyote this year at all. Our 11 month lambs running around on the back hillside have all survived, only the lambs have been killed. We have woven wire fences already.

I am mowing the yard again with the sheep. It’s just easier and more environmentally friendly! Again, the sheep poop is very wet and slimy due to all of the green grass but they are working on the yard. They like the hillside better as the grass/clover on it is shorter. They like to eat the short grass first before eating the tall grass. It’s pretty weird.

The puppy Chance is doing well when we use her to work the sheep and cows on a lead. I had the sheep in the front yard so the dogs are in the backyard. Our side fence is low and temporary and Chance decided yesterday that jumping the fence and playing with the sheep was fun. It was fun for her but not the sheep. She totally went crazy, running around, running into the herd, biting everything she could touch. She would not listen and would not follow “down” command. There was zero off switch. I had to wait until she grabbed a sheep then grabbed her. She spent the rest of the day on the overhead run. No way to get loose and as long as the sheep stay away she cannot harm anything. We spent a lot of the day going into the “down” command with me across the yard or from the road. There will be a lot more training to teach her that she is to herd the sheep, not chase or bite them.

Cow sorting gone bad

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I was up early, ready to go out and load the steer at 0730. We had kept him in the corral for the last two day so we would not have to sort everyone. Sorting can take 2-3 hours on a good day. We had even kept the dogs in the back yard, otherwise they can get right next to the corral and harass the animals. We had let the sheep back out into our yard for one day and then I pushed them over into our orchard area. The orchard area is getting tall and I did not want them to knock the clover back down. Even though it had already grown about two inches since the last time they had been on it. It grows pretty aggressively when it is grazed on. The yard is a little out of control, the sheep may have to come back in soon so I can be eco friendly and not run the gas powered lawn mower! The trade off is you have to dodge sheep poop on your way to the front door.

The customer came with a horse trailer. It had a solid door on the back that was much wider than the opening of the chute. I figured if we backed up on one corner then got the cow in we could pull forward and quickly shut the gate. I backed him up to the corral and there was about an eight inch gap. Annmarie came out to the yard and the dogs got out, Chance was still pissed about getting rolled two days ago and just started tearing it up, barking and running the length of the corral and trying to get through the fence into the corral. She would not give it up, or listen to us. I had to catch her and Annmarie drug her off by the collar to the back yard. She listens when she is on the lead, but not off when we are around livestock. She will listen off leash now to us but now we have to get her “off” switch wired so she will drop down no matter what is going on around her. This is harder than you think to teach. It means constantly exerting your will over the little things so she learns to just obey on command. It takes time.

Cow top left of picture, me from road on tractor, not where it belongs

I had money in my pocket from the sale and we loaded the cow. It went into the trailer then I shut the chute gate so it would not get out and it spotted the 8” opening. Once it had its head through it was all over! It got stuck twice but just kept bucking and hollering and got through in about 15 seconds. I rearranged the barn lot gates so we could just push it back into the lot and try again. I went and got the tractor to shoo it back toward the now opened gates. It jumped the fence into the fallow wheat field. I had to drive down to the corner then up the road then out into the wheat field. Annmarie had to come out with Chance and open the gate out into the wheat field. I was just going to drive the cow along the fence line to the gate. The crazy cow was not scared of the tractor and I had to keep blocking the fence line with the bucket to keep it from going past me. This worked until it jumped the fence back into the main house area, Chance was involved now and then it eventually jumped the fence again into the small seven acre fallow field, then jumped back into our main pasture area by the school house. I went to go talk to the buyer while she did the chasing into the school house field.

Chance (1 year old puppy) is the white Border Collie, Mouse is the grey/white one

I gave him his money back then we discussed options. I told him that if he called around and could get a carcass cut and wrapped that 243 therapy and assistance in cleaning and skinning would be available but he was going to have to plan on a few hours to do that hard work. Damn cows! He left without a cow and us without any money. He will reach out next week after making some enquiries.

I spent the rest of the day assembling a new bee hive. We purchased it before I knew about someone else wanting to get rid of their two hives. So now we have four full hives and a bunch of extras. I am going to have to clean up an area for all the extra bee supplies. I am thinking about moving the old lamb shed and creating a clean sub room inside it. I can use an old road side billboard sheet. They are fairly inexpensive, line the entire inside of the room, seal the edges and put in an airtight door. I will have to look into this more. I have a lot of extra stuff laying around and if I cobbled it all together I think I could do it fairly cheap.