Life is good!

Honey bee hives wrapped in tar paper for the winter.

I’m finally getting around to filling you in on the happenings here.        The honey bee hives have been moved to the front hop yard for the winter months and wrapped with tar paper. The girls treated them for Varroa mites, (A small brown mite visible to the human eye) Tracheal mites (not visible) and Nosema (a disease of the intestinal tracts).   We use Apigaurd as a treatment for the mites, also an all natural Grease patty against the Tracheal mite.   For Nosema we used Fumigilin B mixed into some sugar syrup.

Note: We never medicate our bees during the honey flow.  It is done to keep the bees strong for the winter.  Now after we are through, we pray they make it until Spring.

Giving grease patties to one of the hives.

Having lost two hives in late September, one due to lack of worker bees the other to a serious case of robbing, there are now 24 hives that we hope are strong enough to make it through our Minnesota winter.    Anyone who lives in MN knows what that means………a good deal of snow, ( with the exception of last year) freezing temperatures of 20 to 40 below zero………..brrrrrr

The bees share a yellow Poppy.

Honey sales have been good; thank you all who help support small farmers.  We still have honey available, so drop me a line or give us a call if you are wanting to buy some.  For the locals, we brought in our third shipment of this season’s honey to Brad’s Market in Minneota.  You can stop in there to try it out.  I know you will be able to taste the difference.

Overall, it has been a successful honey production year, considering the on going drought we have been experiencing.  Eleven of the original twenty six hives produced 650 pounds of honey. This we thought, seems pretty good.  The fifteen new ones of this year, we hope have enough bees to sustain them and have made enough honey for themselves to be able to survive the entire winter.  Time will tell.   Looking forward to learning even more next season:)

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  Our farm today.

I’ll be back with more updates and pics of what we have been up to.  It’s been so long that they changed the format on wordpress and I am figuring it out as I go:)  This takes time but so does, school, cooking, spring cleaning (yes I meant spring), farm chores, butchering hogs, ducks, turkey’s, roosters and deer, enjoying children, grandchildren, friends and life!  All of these  are wonderful because it means we are living.  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.  Happy Advent too.  God bless us everyone!