Spring? Here's A Sign.

The girls were busy this past weekend. I'm optimistic that this means they have made it through the winter again. I hope this also means they are ready to get to making me some more honey for this year.

I haven't opened up the hive to inspect things yet, but this was a goodly bunch of bees hanging out on the front porch, so that's usually a good sign. Either they are ready to go or these girls are robbing my hive.

We'll see in a few weeks when I break into it and check them out. I don't like to break their waxy weather proofing until it has warmed up for good and true outside.

My honey from last year has already sugared up but that's okay. I think it was just too cool in the bottom of the pantry for it. I just warmed up a jar, stirred it and we are enjoying the first jar of last year's harvest.

Good things come from small packages.

Honey - Day 24 of 31 Days of Blogging

Short post today.

I wanted to show you the honey I got this year from my bees. I did absolutely nothing for them this year. They were completely and utterly unmedicated and unmolested. I did feed them some sugar water when I remembered to in the spring but that was it.

I plan to hoard this honey because I don't know when I'll get more. I eeked two more little jars after I let it strain for a few more days. I ended up with 240 ounces of honey. Almost two gallons from one super. I bought a 46 oz jar of honey at the feed store in the spring for $10. If I'm doing my math right that would be 22 cents an ounce so that means I have $52.80 worth of honey here on my counter. I paid $90 for the bees last year.

I'm pretty sure I'm losing money on this adventure.

But it sure is sweet.

Hay, House & Honey - Post 2 of 31 Days of Blogging

This is a hay bale from our field out front of our house. We haven't done anything to improve the pasture since we bought this place ten years ago except brushhog it. The field is full of orchard grass, fescue and brome grass. It's really not all that great, but a guy stopped by a few weeks ago and asked if he could bale it and have the hay. We were just going to brushhog it down anyway so Bryon told him he could.

I'm sure he's just going to sell it somewhere, but it was cool to know that he got fourteen big round bales off of our that field. That would be enough to feed a couple of calves all winter probably. If we ever get any fencing put in at least we can have some decent grass and hay for them. Everyone tells us if we lime the field in the spring the grass will get a lot better. Maybe this will be the spring we do it.

We've been pretty consumed with our house lately. Specifically the log siding. Log siding is very cool. It looks pretty and rustic and natural. It is also a tremendous pain in the ass. Every three years we have to clean the entire house and re-stain it ... by hand. We stained every log before we sided it to begin with. Then three years later we rented a boom lift and Bryon washed the entire house and I stained behind him. It took us three whole days from dawn until dusk. It was not easy. Then we sat back and didn't think about it much more.

We weren't eager to repeat the process. This year though, it's starting to look really bad with lots of black junk on it. Bryon started cleaning it like he had before and this time things didn't go so smoothly. It had been six years since we last did it. We waited too long and it was too far gone to take the easy three day route. So now, instead of just cleaning it and then staining, it had to be completely sanded down to bare wood. I've spend five hours sanding two ends of our house, our friend Aaron has spent nine hours working on it with us and Bryon has probably spent forty hours on it already. We still aren't finished with just the two ends. We aren't even going to do the front or back until spring. It's a daunting task.

Bryon was hopeful we could just pay to have it done. We got a bid. The bid was $4,500. There was just no way to justify spending that much on it. Not yet anyway. We are seriously wondering now why we didn't just brick it like everyone suggested. Oh yeah, because we hate brick that's why. Unfortunately we are also starting to hate logs.

On a brighter note, I robbed my bees last weekend and I have about a gallon and a half of honey drip, drip, dripping into a bucket in the kitchen in my homemade extractor. I think I'll try to put it into jars tomorrow night. Hopefully that will last a while. There's nothing better than homemade honey from your own little bee slaves.

Life is good in the Big Cedars even if it is a lot of work sometimes.