Donna continues to work her booty off weeding and mulching the flowerbeds -no small feat in this humidity. Her perennial hibiscus are blooming, and look amazing!

And look at the size of these rosehips! Will be amazing in tea, jam or sauce.

We harvested our garlic. It will dry, then it can be trimmed, cleaned, stored and used.

Baby watermelon!!

We distilled a new hydrosol -bee balm. So far it's INCREDIBLE! really interesting, fabulously strong... Wild and pungent. We will give it a day or two to rest and mellow, and play with it. It has a lot of wonderful medicinal and aromatherapy properties.

And then.... Maggie's legendary mess-making tendencies kicked it. I was working on cleaning out our drying shed. We store packing peanuts in there, but last winter a raccoon got in and made a HUGE mess and they all have to be thrown away. I loaded a bunch in a box and carried them halfway across the farm to the trash.... Not realizing I was leaving a trail of peanuts the whole way behind me.

Lets just say... There is no good or easy way to clean up packing peanuts off wet grass.

My young nephew helped me pick up peanuts (as well as John and Donna), and then he helped me check the bees! He suited up and got right in there and enjoyed the process. He was great!

Dante enjoying the day's veggie harvest.

Our hive at Prairieland Herbs is acting very strangely. First... It swarmed, a few weeks ago. The queen took off with half the workers and a load of honey, despite being in an excellent location with plenty of room in the hive.

Then a few days ago we discovered that the hive -which successfully requeened itself after the first queen left -was making new queen cells. LOTS of them.

So yesterday was all about bees.

We assembled several new hives and lots of new wooden frames (we are thinking maybe the black plastic frames in the original hive are displeasing the Queen), and set up two new hive locations (shown here).

We removed as many of the black plastic frames as possible from the original hive.

And replaced them with wooden ones.

Next I removed the frames with queen cells, and placed them each in a new empty hive, with a frame of honey. There were about 8 queen cells on each frame. I was very careful not to remove the existing queen!

Then, I drove across the road to Picket Fence Creamery.

The hive we have over there is doing really well!

The girls were really interested in the goings-on.

REALLY interested!!

I took two frames with baby bees from
This hive....

And put them in the other two new hives with queens/honey. This is a sort of risky thing which may or may not work, but it's all an experiment (Zan, I hope I did it all right!!)

Now we will feed all these new hives and keep checking them for signs that the queens are all doing their jobs. I guess that's all we can do!

I checked on our other two hives, one located at picket fence creamery, and one at raccoon forks farm in redfield. They are both doing GREAT!

(footwear of choice of pink-haired beekeepers). By the way, donning jeans, hi-tops, a long sleeved button up shirt, hat, veil, and gloves in 97 degree heat and 115 degree heat index? Is HOT.

Swiss chard is so pretty!

Tomatillos!

The garden is loving the heat. We haven't watered ONCE during this heat wave.

Let me repeat that.

We haven't watered ONCE during this week long stretch of 95+ degree hear and heat indexes over 110 every day.

That, my friends, is the power of mulch, lasagna beds, and soil rich in organic matter.

Started harvesting a few veggies!

Ask Donna how much she likes figuring retail sales tax. Go ahead. I double dog dare you.

Making bath teas

Our rooster-that-was-supposed-to-be-a-layer started crowing yesterday. At Maggies house, in town. He was promptly relocated to a friendly farm outside of Madrid! Lucky fella... Gets to do what roosters were meant to do, with lots of lovely lady chickens!!!

A "cold front" moved through Thursday, bringing rain and temps "only" in the upper 80's yesterday. Donna and Cam took the opportunity to go puddle stomping. (note Cam's foot attire....cracks me up!)

So, I load the smoker with some mite-repelling herbs and head out to check the Prairieland hive (Beatrice) on Sunday.

Silly bees are getting a little creative with their comb building. Including building comb between the upper and lower supers.

I find they have done almost no comb building in the last three weeks!! What's up with that, girls???

But I did find these crazy cells... Which looked to me to be too big to be drone cells....

And no baby bees, or bee larvae! Not good!

After consulting with some experts... Seems our queen died or swarmed, and the hive made another! There are six or seven small queen cells, all opened. So hopefully one of them is alive and well and starting to do her queen thing...

I will continue to check the hive very frequently, looking for signs that the new bee is alive and well.

Today began with some kitty lovin's. These are barn babies, caught last week, along with their feral momma. Momma got spayed and is safely back in her barn, happy and healthy. Now we are making the kittens friendly; they'll be spayed/neutered, and adopted out.

Donna's rose garden by the house looks spectacular!

And the lavender is starting to bloom already! A bit early this year. It never grows very well for us, but we have a few nice bushes that overwintered well.

Here's a photo of one of Maggie's lasagna beds, in the early phases. I take big cardboard boxes (of which we get many!) and flatten them, and lay them in thick layers on the ground. On top, we pile all kinds of organic matter: old hay, weeds, compost, trimmings, horse manure,leaves, bedding from Maggie's rabbit's litterbox. I usually am working on the beds to be planted next year, but you can also plant directly into it the first year. The soil quality is wonderful, no tilling is involved, and weeds are minimal.

Here's another project in the works: mulching around all our fruit trees (three peach, one plum, two pears and two apples) and planting perennial herbs and flowers around the bases. This will provide extra food for our bees, and make orchard mowing and maintenance much easier.

This is Beatrice, our first bee hive! She is doing well... Currently the Beatrices are enjoying the roses, lavender, and alexander. We installed two new hives on local farms a few days ago. Catherine is at Picket Fence Creamery, and Diana is at Raccoon Forks Farm in Redfield.

And last but certainly not least, we had a major Barn Cleaning Event today! Removing junk, sorting, and reorganizing. A very dirty dusty job (achoo!) but it's more spacious and clean now!

Hazmat? Aliens? no...beekeepers! We had a WONDERFUL beekeeping class last Saturday, and now we have one hive of bees on the farm (another one to be added very soon, I think!)