Saturday, May 3, 2014

New Laptop, new bees, and so much going on....

I am sorry it has taken me over a week as it seems to get back to writing this blog.  My laptop died a quick and painless death; however it left me in quite a bind.  Without my laptop I have been trying to get my school work accomplished through various other means.  It has been quite frustrating.  At one point I was working on an over clocked 486 dx4100…that was fun.  I am just glad that I have a good working knowledge of computers. 
I will be cleaning up the two dead laptops and selling them as parts only, in the magical world of Ebay.  I am sure I will not get much, but something is better than nothing and as long as they sit here, I am tempted to re-build boards or have new boards made for them.  It was truly a good computer aside from its little over heating issues.  I believe them to still be quite superior to the one I am using today, or maybe it is just the madness of windows 8.1 that has me hating it so much.  I and DELL are currently having issues as the people they have working for them, do not speak English as a first langue.  I asked them if they had anyone who spoke French, I figured I could have understood that better then their broken English.  It will be after next week before I can bear to deal with DELL again. 
Aside from computer issues, I am trying to finish up the last few weeks of school, again frustrating.  I have math to finish and American History.  Now the History teachers say please write me another paper, this one just two pages about my view of American history, it is not holds bare and anything goes, really will test that theory…lol  Still have many more tests to take and one section of math to finish up,  I hope to live through it. 
Our last year’s bees arrived on Thursday, Pigeon Mountain sent them and that is great one less person I have to sue this year.  I have not set up this computer for pictures yet, but once I do, I will post some nice photos.  The bees came thought the US Postal service, which did a really great job of keeping them alive for three days as they made their journey from Georgia.  They came in a rather small box made of wood and framed in screen.  There were around 10, 000 bees in the box, we had ordered Italian but got Russian bees, but they are bees so we are happy.  They are fun to get out of the box and since and my husband had never done boxed bees before we were ill prepared for what followed.  We did watch a very nice video which should a bee keeper and his new boxed bees.  In the video he removes the wooded cover, removes the can which contains sugar water (food for their trip) and a queen in a cage.  Now he does this no bee suit on and the bees are all calm and happy, he taps the box and the bees fall to one side, he dumps them in the hive, and then tap and the rest get poured in like thick cake batter. 
After watching a few times we feel that we can do this, my husband and I don our bee suits and I become the living image of the stay-puff-marshmallow man, and we bravely go to the old hive remove a section of comb with uncapped honey, which by the way is falling everywhere.  First set of bees toughly mad now, and off to uncap the box containing the new bees.  First we notice that it is a piece of cake to take the wooden cover off, no so easy to get the metal can out and lastly the queen cage.  Bees are now flying everywhere; hmmm this is nothing like the calm bees in the video.  Michael gives me the queen cage and I have the tool that the video said I needed, a match.  Well this is not going to work and now bees are everywhere, 10, 000 bees per three pounds, rolling my eyes and I am looking for a nail, stick anything to get the cork out of this so the bees can get to the candy and free the queen, great now I am a part of a living video game, shaking my head.  Finally we get the queen in the hive and start dumping bees in.  Michael does a great job, but the bees are having none of it and may do not want to leave the nice box and must be forced to leave, they whole time I have been spraying them with sugar water, so not they are drunk, pissed redneck bees, and just cannot seem to find their way.  In the end only a few refused to go and we left the box in hopes they would find their own way to the hive.  So we cover the hive of now drunk bees and went to do other things, now things are calming down and they seem to like the new hive.
We get our next bees on the 16th of May, I am ready. 
Got the okra in the ground in a month or two we should be harvesting it, I wanted to get more tomatoes in, but came upon a nest of spiders so they have to leave first.  Our chines cabbage are just a week or two out from harvest, they are looking so yummy, I did have to use D.E. powder on them,  I did it very lightly as to only kill the grass hoppers and not my earthworms or other helpful bugs.  We have started to harvest spinach, and radishes so far, along with our wild forage.  We have picked curly dock, and lambs quarters, yum, and add them to almost every evening meal.  The peas have yet to flower, the corn is coming along nicely and the test patch of the three sisters keeps growing and looking good, that garlic, looks great and I have starting picking strawberries, shhhh, don’t tell my kids, I leave like one or two a day and pick the rest, clean them, cut them up and freeze them for ice cream and jam.  The Jerusalem artichokes are looking good too; I will be cutting them back and feeding the livestock with them very soon.  Oh and the asparagus this year is wonderful. 
As for the birds on the farm, they are being weird as normal; my pigeons hatched out two OEG self-blue game birds today, honestly we had the pigeons in with the chickens and thought nothing of it, so my bad.  The pigeons must have been surprised as well when they hatched out chickens instead of pigeons…
We have new brown egg laying chicks for 4-h now as well, 50 or so, what was I thinking, more birds, oh sometimes, I should say no.  But in for a penny in for a pound I guess. 
We are of course still selling hatching eggs, which is provide a fair source of return on the dollar, but we will not get rich doing it, farming is not a job, but a life style, so back to doing art and such after school this term.
So this is a little bit of what we are up to, I will try to write again very soon.

Be Blessed

Shekhinah

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