Mr Rainman

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.

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.

Moving cows is never easy, no matter what

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Mr Rainman came out this week and finished spraying all the major fields. He has been backpack spraying the difficult to reach areas and still has more of this to do but I think he can be done in less than two days and will have gotten most of the farm, even the difficult to reach areas.

I came home early on Wednesday so that we could sort cows for butchering. It turned into sorting off six month old calves, sorting out 5 kill size cows and moving the old bull. This was going fairly smooth. I say that loosely as sorting any live animal does have its challenges. Mr Rainman is not a cow person, even really an animal and every time I got in the corral to walk around and sort out 12 jumpy horned cows he would squeal and get nervous. All was going well, I had placed Chance (1 year old border collie) on a 30’ lead and she was doing well. We are working on “down” command at any time and “left” and “right” commands. We only use “circle around”, “to Me”, “guard”(creates dog gate), “away”. “Stay” and “easy”. Those are the main ones, we do realize there are a lot more commands but over the years these are the ones we use. The only other thing is they have to learn to work in the barn with mommas and babies and to stay and allow the lambs to pass or sniff at them.

Once we had the cows in the barn lot, I tied Chance to the gate so the cows would not try and push on it and then we proceeded to push them into the corral for sorting. Everything was going smoothly (first indicator you are about to be in trouble) when one of the slaughter size cows reached the corner gate chain and lifted it off its anchor slot and pushed the gate open and got back in with the main herd. We finished sorting all the rest of the cows and even moved the weanlings off to the third holding pen so we could still use the main two and chute. We tried to push the herd back into the corral and they did not want to go especially the one we wanted. So I grabbed Chance and we pushed them into the corral. She got rolled twice by the cows, but she just jumped up and got right back at it. We pushed the cows in and I ran our target into the chute after he tried to climb the five foot corral fence. I failed to notice that I had left the sheep ramp in the chute. It is for running the sheep into the back of the pickup. It was leaning on the exit gate with about a 60 degree angle and the steer ran right up that ramp and jumped off it from five feet in the air. So we spent 30 minutes getting him back into the pen and in with the four sale cows. We never could have done this without Chance. We sorted off one steer (not crazy one) for someone to come pickup on Saturday morning (next warning sign). We would keep him in the corral for a couple of days until he could be picked up. The bull went into the corral to spend the night. He is so placid you literally have to go up and nudge him in the direction you want him to go.

I get up bright and early so I can be in Lagrande by 0730. Annmarie comes out to help me, the first four just go right into our livestock trailer. I try and run the bull through the chute but he keeps dragging his horns and having to turn his head. He is 13 or 14 years old and has a very large head and decent horns. So we let him back into the corral and Annmarie suggests just backing the trailer into the pen, opening the entire back and getting him to just walk into it by himself. We do this and he is coaxed in under five minutes. He is so calm.

I am off early around 0530, I adjust the trailer brakes and start the trip. I am going 55 mph and it feels fine. I get on the freeway and keep it at 55 mph, I can feel the animals moving around in the trailer. I creep up Cabbage hill at 45 mph. Honestly, except for my nervousness it is going well until I start coming down the hill on the backside. The whole rig starts shaking every time I hit the brakes over 50 mph. It did not do this on the flats. So more white knuckled driving and I pull in to Hines meat. I was there before the place was open. The guy comes out, compliments the bull on how good looking he is and we try and unload them. We got them unloaded but of course they did not want to comply.

When Hines called back this weekend to give weights on the cows they said there was one “surly” cow that gave them some trouble. Wanna guess who that was? Due to the small stature of a Dexter cow you get a lean meat and much smaller steaks. The carcass weights came in at 327#, 332#, 320#, 313# and the bull at 673#. The bull went to all hamburger. We are charging $3.50/lb hanging weight now. The average for our area is around $4-4.50/lb hanging weight.

On the trailer trip home I just dropped the horse trailer off at the tire place and asked them to balance all tires, check brakes and pack wheel bearings. The lights worked great!

Beautiful day

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Last week on Sunday was my catchup day. I was able to get the trailer tires loaded into the pickup and ready to go to town to fix all three flats, sitting is bad for tires. I will get them repaired and then reinstalled and the trailer will be ready to go to Lagrande Thursday morning bright and early. This will be my first trip over Cabbage Hill hauling a horse trailer. I know this sounds innocuous, hauling a horse trailer, but for those that do not know Cabbage Hill is the steepest and longest grade west of the Mississippi. The length is what gets most people, especially semi trucks. It is also a major thoroughfare for crossing the upper part of the United States when traveling from Coast to Coast. After having two overloaded trailers almost flip me in the pickup I am getting a little gun shy about traveling long distances with a heavy load.

I went out to work on doing my part of the spraying. Mr Rainman has been making great progress. The weather was perfect and I sometimes forget how nice it is to just go around in circles in a green field on a sunny cool day. It was amazing. I noticed that the sprayer boom was bouncing around quite a bit. The arms are designed to bounce up and break away backwards if you hit something. I thought I had better look at it. I stopped spraying and noticed that the nozzles were tilted. Turns out the steel tabs holding the boom had broken on one side of the drilled hole.

I decided that it was going to fail soon and needed to be fixed. This meant breaking out the welder! I passed the class at the local community college with a B (an A for all written tests and C for all actual welding). After much practice and discussion with the welding instructor it was determined that I just needed to be able to weld a strong weld on the farm and beauty was going to be nonexistent. I am okay with that as long as the weld holds. So I went back to the machine shed, laid out all the tools and found a piece of scrap iron. I cleaned up the area with a wire wheel grinder. Cut two triangles out of steel and the proceeded to weld on a cross vibration support and welded the breaks on both sides. Not sure when they designed it why they did not do that initially. It needs it if you plan on using it to spray 30-50 acres 2-3/year. I even shot some paint on it when I was done to slow down the rust.