honeybees

Winterizing almost done

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well Winter is almost officially here. It did snow this week at our house but it did not stick. The mountains have been covered in snow for a week. I keep trying to get things done around the place but the paying job is in overdrive and I have been working a lot making it hard to find time. So I have been doing one item at a time when I have a spare minute. This does tend to drag things out.

We had one of the alpaca die, an old white one. He went to the eternal resting place of all farm animals, the boneyard. Half of them are ancient and half are under age 7 now. We are not sure how their food intake is with all of the land they have access to being dried up. I have been giving them round bales but they are also very dry and the rejects. The alpaca have been eating them but we are worried about their caloric intake. So I went out and got a big bale of alfalfa for them. We have done this in past years but one 1300 pound bale is more hay than 11 (now) alpaca can eat in an entire winter. This makes the bottom of the bale mold as it sits on the ground, gets rained on and lasts all winter long. So this year I managed to get the bale up onto two pallets so it is off the ground. This should make it last all winter, so we are able to feed 11 alpaca for $182 all winter long. Honestly, they are fairly cheap to keep. If we had to pay to have them sheared/feet/teeth trimmed it would be about $70/each. After this year that is not looking too bad! I managed to get the weight box placed on the Kubota and filled up with horseshoes. This is much better than the 50 gallon barrel we used last year. Using this on the Kubota I was able to lift the bale about two inches off the ground and I did not have to try and steer the bale to where I wanted it with only the two front tires touching the ground! I still cannot move the bale in two wheel drive, I have to use four wheel drive on the tractor to get enough traction when there is any moisture on the ground. I will leave the counterweight bucket on all winter, I am hopeful that when I put the snow blade on this will help me immensely. I simply do not want to battle putting on chains in the snow.

I managed to get the mower and weed eater moved over into the wood shed since the bridge is functional. I had already drained and rolled up all of our hoses (11) and drained the front sprinklers and blew out the drip lines in the lavender. I just need to get the hoses into the wood shed and I can cut down the bridge. There are two logs that act as horizontal supports. I will have to build new concrete bases in the spring but I am hopeful that I can use the logs again as the horizontal supports. I will just cut off the ends that have softened. I may be able to get another 15 years out of them. They were here when we moved here and I was able to reuse them when I repaired the bridge the first time. I may also raise the bridge about 12 inches. This should stop it from getting washed away in the floods. If it gets washed away after that then Annmarie will design an ached truss bridge and I will spend a couple of months building it. It won’t be a fast project.

We want to move the honeybees to this side of the back creek. The bridge did not fair very well after the flooding last year and half of it has collapsed. It will not survive another spring runoff. In an attempt to save it, I want to cut it down but then we will have no access to the back shed for a few months. This is unacceptable as we will not be able to check up on the bees and we have been feeding them already so they do not use up all of their honey this winter. We would like them to start the spring with a bunch in the hive so we can steal a lot this next fall. This means the bees need to be moved, without killing the queen and without taking the hive apart as it is now too cold to move the individual boxes. I was able to strap the hive together with a tie down but the bridge needed to temporarily fixed to allow for the transfer. I managed to jack the bridge up using two bottle jacks and this morning Annmarie and I went out to move the hive. It is very heavy and it was decided that just walking and carrying it was not an option. We strapped it to a hand cart and worked it over into the lavender patch. The only problem it will have now is if a huge branch falls down and crushes it. We don’t see that as highly likely but it is possible. We wanted it in the corner to provide some shelter from the wind and weather.

The weather is all screwy again. I am pretty sure that is going to be our new normal. We had 1.35” of rain in a 24 hour period. We set a new record for rainfall in a single day in November. So far we have gotten 1.59” of rain in November and its only the fifth and it did not rain yesterday. We did have a windstorm last night that peaked up to almost 80 mph winds. This of course caused us to lose power last night as all the power lines are above ground and susceptible to tree limbs or poles falling. They had the power up and going by around 1000. Luckily for us we have a propane stovetop and propane stove. We just lit both of them manually and had heat and coffee. Coffee before breakfast, always. There is a reason we keep an old coffee stovetop percolator. We have figured out we are going to have to keep a few gallons of water on hand. I used to keep plastic jugs but found that they will leak over years so we are going to reuse the gallon glass jugs I used to use to make mead. They will not leak and now that we use the old safe I can get rid of the new safe and we will have room for four gallons of water. We did figure one thing out though, we have an old fashioned land line as those used to work 24/7 without power. When our area lost power the land line went dead also. We will now be cancelling our backup as it no longer works without power. Our cell phone service is spotty but its what we have. I will need to get a solar charger for our electronics. We should probably look into solar panels so we have some type of power if the grid goes down but I am unsure about a battery bank and think the technology might be way better in five years. Our puppy did not like the wind storm, every time she went outside she barked at the wind for about 30 seconds before going outside to potty.

Planting done!

Steve Hardin2 Comments

It has been a pretty good week. Annmarie and I went out to get the sheep on Wednesday evening. We were headed out to the upper pasture when Annmarie spotted this alpaca with an injured eye. It was hard to look at from twelve feet away but it looked injured and had some blood on his face. I thought the eye might be encased in a scab and blinding him. Since I had just come home from work and we were only going to walk up and push the sheep back to the barn lot I had not bothered changing clothes. Knowing the best way to see if the alpaca was blind was to sneak up on his potentially blind side. This worked amazingly well, I got right next to him, but what if he smells you? The solution is to just grab him around the neck suddenly with no warning whatsoever. One would think I would have learned by now, but the rule is once you grab you don’t let go, no matter what! If you let go the there will be no touching that animal for the rest of the day. I held on despite getting tossed around and ending up on the ground. I managed to put a wrestler hold on his neck and get on top of him for the pin! Annmarie had to hold his hips while I looked at his eye, yep scabbed over, could not see the eye. We are going to just watch him. He is one of our older animals and pinning him into a pen for repeated daily treatments when he doesn’t have much life left doesn’t seem like a quality of life he would appreciate. We don’t do the vet for the alpaca, sheep, or cows. The history precluding this incident is he has been on the war path and chasing and beating up other alpaca all week before the injury. We are not sure if he got kicked or ran into something. He was literally chasing victims all over the farm earlier in the week. Annmarie found my phone and all the pens I scattered all over the ground during the takedown event.

I was finally able to get some triticale seed 400#. I could not get it locally in 50# bags and I don’t need a 2000# tote full of triticale seed. I ended up getting it out of Walla Walla through Nutrien Ag Solutions. They delivered it to the house as there is an employee who lives in the area nearby. I got this done Wednesday evening so I would be all ready to go on Friday when I started to plant the triticale. I have three small fields that need triticale, the grass has been planted. There are two patches up on the hillside that need grass planting still but they will have to wait until after the triticale is planted. I don’t want to break the seeder on the hillside while planting experimental test plots until the triticale is in the ground, essentials first!

Friday morning was the big day to get all of the seed in the ground. I got up, cooked a great breakfast and got out to the machine shed. There was only a little grass seed left so I just tossed in a bag of triticale over the top. The bins will only hold one 50# bag of triticale. It will hold about 75# of grass seed. On a fluke I decided to inspect the seeder, it had been used for several days last week. Yep, it has these six inch teeth that rotate, two teeth to each hub for a total of twelve, five of them were broken off. Very not user friendly to get them off. I kept pulling out tools, finally grabbed my impact driver and could not get bolts loose with that. I need a 18” bar to really get some leverage except the teeth sticking down cause wrench access issues. It was a nightmare and took way too long. I finally snapped a couple of bolts off. I managed to get three installed and called it good enough. I was going to have to make a trip to Pendleton to get new nuts and bolts and a round trip would take me around two hours. It was supposed to rain and the clouds looked like it was coming. I started to get the occasional drop on me while I was laying on the ground doing mechanic work. I fired up the tractor and started planting seed, after the first field I had to stop and go back to the machine shop for an actual jacket, it was cold. While I was there I had to pump up the left front tire, it has a slow leak. As soon as I did that the rain started. I got that field done and then drove up to the triangle. The rain makes it easy to see where you have been. It didn’t really start to rain hard until the last thirty minutes. I was shivering by the time I got done and it still took me until 1630 to get done. I spent a long time in the hot shower getting warm. We have gotten one inch of rain in the last 18 hours! The weather is just crazy. I will be planting the hillside after it dries out for 4-5 days. The ground needs to not be muddy. I will also be picking up new nuts and bolts for the seeder. Luckily, I did have a stockpile of teeth already in my parts bin.

Haying and illness do not mix.

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I spent most of the week being ill. I of course handled this with my normal male approach to illness, lots of complaining and whining occurred. I have not had my nose run that much in a couple of decades, I was pretty sure I was going to get dehydrated from fluid loss via my nose. I persevered and managed to come through whole on the other end of this horrible occurrence. The first night I tried to sleep downstairs the frogs/toads were making a ruckus. I mean they are incredibly loud. They are so annoying that Gizmo keeps running over to the rock pile to find them to silence them. So far he has had zero luck but after that first night I was starting to cheer for him. The next evening while we were outside pottying the puppy the noise started up again. Since I was once again going to sleep downstairs I went over to see about maybe silencing the infernal sound so I could get some sleep. I found both frogs, one each in these two water holding containers that got filled up with all of the rain we had last month. I could hardly believe that a frog smaller than a half dollar could make that much noise! I left them alone and went inside to bed and just put a pillow over my head. I fell asleep fairly quickly, being sick helped that.

Annmarie added another super to the bee hive! The bees are still alive and seem to be doing well. Annmarie got her bee suit on and went out and handled them without getting stung. She was even brave enough to pull the camera out of her pocket with no glove on and take some pictures. We recognize they are not violent and you can do all of the hive care with no gloves and no hood. I am not sure that we will ever get there but we do inherently understand it is possible, just saying. They built up some extra comb that Annmarie will have to knock down. She says its from not spacing the frames evenly. We suspect we may not get any honey this year, depending on how things go but if we can keep the bees alive that will be our primary goal.

I did have to go out and do some tractor work. Mr Professional has been coming out and working in the evenings and nights. The John Deere tractor lights were not working. I ended up going out and cutting off the rear tail lights as they were broken and probably shorting out power. I verified all the fuses were good and then then looked at the aftermarket assembly pieces. The inline fuse was not getting power so I had to change out the control box and tear down the tape job to ensure the power connection was secure. It was. In the end the control box and the external light switch were both bad and luckily I had replacements on hand in the ”light bin”. Creating two racks of spare parts for each piece of equipment has been a great help since everything takes days to get here from some far away place.

The quail are everywhere! They have paired up and are all over the farm. I have not spotted any babies yet, but they grow up quickly so they are easy to miss.