orange blossom soap

Just like to take this opportunity to introduce our new  soap "Orange Blossom" it's going to be an incredibly rich lathering Bar. It will be available after curing on 12/04/12 so look for it.
You can also reserve some just for you by going to our website.
This bar contains saponified olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, beeswax, castor oil, goats milk, mountain spring water, orange fragrance oil, orange zest

Fallen tree

Some pictures of a large tree that fell at Cumberland gap (where I work)
You can see that this tree was pretty rotten. It has several large woodpecker holes!
Pretty neat how it just shattered.
Good thing it didn't fall on anyone our anything!

Joke from our grandson Carlos:

What do honeybees comb their hair with?

Honeycomb!
Hahahahahah

working on the website

putting a website together is quite and ur dating and it's extremely frustrating but I'm making it work should be up and running by the end of this weekend.

New pbotos

Plowing the fields, watching the bees etc.

the initiation of the campfire

we made a campfire area for the farm. Since today is my birthday and we are still on "baby watch"we decided to make today its initiation. All set to go with hot dogs (Nathans of course)& smores!
Had a great day today.
Followed up on a store we have consignment products @ Nuthins Perfect in Cumberland Gap Tn.
They had done pretty good on the initial products and we  left them more & some samples for their customers to try. Sue said they especially liked the goats milk soaps. She likes to offer local stuff.

Finally moving to the farm!

We after much stress, time, delays, etc. we have our closing date this tuesday july 3rd.!
We are so excited!!!! Hard to believe we made it.
We have movers set up for july 4th. Everything is packed and we will be cleaning and spending tuesday night In OUR forever home. Lots to do tuesday. Wish we had an earlier time, but 3pm will do I recon.
I'll post pictures during the process.

Progress

Well we have progressed through all but the appraisal. Though we don't expect problems, we are not in charge. We are scheduled to close June 18th.
There were termite issues in the woodpile stacked up to the shed that caused the termite ok inspection to fail but none elsewhere. The seller is paying for that remedy.

There were some foundation and grading issues causing them plus some fairly minor issues in the house. We ended up reducing the price $3,000 from 155,000 which they begrudgingly accepted. Now if we can get through the appraisal!
We are praying.

In the process

May 25

Well friends, we lost the home in Rogersville because it didn't appraise. missed it by 18,000 dollars.
we have found another 1 however in speedwell tennessee. this 1 is 10 acres it has approximately half that is wooded however. there is quite a bit in front where we will plant lavender. eventually we will clear trees. will make a space for the apiary in the trees just thin it out to get them more sun.We are hoping to close mid June.
Re the bees: the split ended up having to be combined with one of the other new hives. Did that this week. Will check on them later this weekend. All of the other hives are doing great. We should get 2-3 more supers of honey from #1. The newest super we put on was for cut comb. Sure hoping it gets finished.
Honey sales have been going well. We are down to only 1lb jars. Thanks to all our supporters.
Need to take off at least 1 super, probably 2 before we move them.
Later

May 14, 2012

Quite alot has happened since I posted last. Guess I'm not much better at blogging than I am at keeping a written diary!
We thought we would be closing on the property tomorrow, but alas, we are waiting on the appraisal to come back. They were supposed to have it back within 7 days. today is the 7th day and it did not come in. We are hoping for Friday this week (5/18) Had to change the U-Haul, movers, carpet cleaners, etc. Oh well life's a b....
The split is still alive. Did not find the queen (unmarked queens !@#$* never again!) but also didn't find eggs. Were able to procure a marked queen Thursday evening from a friend (Allen from Bee Friends) and installed her on Friday. Checked for her today, she was still in the cage and the sugar plug was  still pretty much there. Sterling took the screen off and they left. Flew off??? Happened too quick to tell for sure. This hive is totally in fates hands now. No more attempts to re-queen. We will not go in again until after we move the box to the farm. If they are still alive then it will be by a miracle. We saw only scattered capped brood, no eggs and no larvae.
Got the last box of bees for the Washburn apiary from Kelly's on Saturday and installed them. Used the shake method. No surprises and will return to check on the queen tomorrow when this rain is expected to be gone.
None of the hives are taking much syrup so we will not put on anymore, except the newest one.
We have a super of honey on #1 that had a little drone brood in. Took off the excluder, so the drones will be able to escape now. There were quite a few dead drones in that box as you can imagine. Now they can fly away we hope. We did not go lower and see what was happening. We will after they are moved.

Will keep you all posted on new developments.

Honey

Well we finally extracted some honey from our bees! What a treat that was. definitely can see the benefit of a larger extractor. But this will work for this year. Wasn't able to help and take pictures with sticky fingers. Will work on that next time. Prices are $4 for #1 jar, $8 for #2 jar.

Queenless hive

this is what happens when your queen dies. this was the hive that we installed the queen that was barely alive. we saw only a small amount of capped brood. Two super procedure cells. so if everything goes well according nature's rules a queen will merge and hive will return to normal. The bees have the last say.

New kitten

Patches
The new addition to the family

package installation

This is the least disruptive way to install a package of bees, but having now done things this way and the "shake" method, we opt for the "shake" since you don't need to get back into the hive until you check on the queen a few days later. This hive used plastic wax coated foundation. Not our choice.

New friends

Met Henry and Peggy Burggraph of Majestic Hills Lavender Farm today at the Thyme in the Garden Festival in Morristown, TN today. Wonderful couple that have undergone some major challenges to get their farm up and running. Things seem to be looking up for them and they hope to open up their farm this year. We wish them the best and look forward to working with them in the coming years.

New bees

finally got the queen installed and brought them to the house until we move. as you can see they're doing well. Will check on  the queen probably saturday to make sure she got out of her cage okay.
we will also be checking the other hives to make sure the queens are released from their cages.

Later:
We were able to check all 4 hives ( not the split) and all the queens were out. We found that 3 of the frames in one of the Washburn hives were not stapled on the top and were falling apart when we picked them up! The bees were drawing raw  foundation on those frames. It will be like a top bar hive! Also on the other hive they were coming in through the inspection board slot in the rear. Had to tape that one up. the Washburn hives had not taken much of the sugar syrup so we did not put any more. We did find both queens.

The Tazewell apiary: the new bees are russians. Queens were found. Bees were very busy drawing foundation. Very impressed with the progress.

We inspected the main hive since Sterling did not see the queen when he did the split. Finally found her. Saw quite alot of drone brood, not many eggs, but larve and capped brood.

the challenge with the frames and some of the foundation not wanting to stay in the frames because we did not use pins a lot of lessons learned today a lot of progress made we're  pleased

Bees

We got 4 new bee packages yesterday and got them installed. Two by the dump method and two by the box method.
We planned to do the split today, but it is way too cold! Hopeful we can do it before we loose the queen. Doubtful at this point.
Going to pull the boxes out of the two hives really  quick.
attached are some pics at Kelly's

blueberry flowers

this is this plant second year doing pretty cool it's actually got blossoms on it really awesome

honey bee swarm from wild bees

springtime means swarms.
we were setting up for tomorrow's delivery of bees in our apiary when a friend said there is a swarm that was starting to form. these are some of the pictures we took of that. it was real high up at least 60 feet so there is no way we can catch it but I am looking to see if I can notice were they go so maybe then we can get them. sterling ran home real quick to get the swarm catcher. it's very woody here so I don't know if I'm wasting my time. No worries mate!

Working with the bees day

Last week we went to the hive to see how the girls were doing. We wanted to see if the top honey super that had helped them get through the winter was harvestable.
We found that they were consuming quite a lot of the honey that had been capped in that super just the week prior. There were ALOT of bees! We decided that we needed to go deeper to try and find the queen.
Well, we found her! she was clear up through two deep brood boxes and into the new shallow honey super that we had put on with the prior inspection! This means that we should have done a third reversal when we were in last time. Queens only go out and up to lay brood.
Of course the deep that was right below this shallow was chuck full of bees and the one below that was empty of brood.
We put the shallow (with the queen) on the bottom, then the empty deep, then the full deep then an empty honey super, then left the full honey super that they were consuming on top. They now have plenty of room to grow.
I must say, this is one heck of a hard working queen we have been blessed with!
We would like to split this hive, but are having a hard time finding a queen for it. As it is, we are going to be short a queen from what we had intended to have that we ordered a few days later than the rest.

It was so much fun seeing the queen skirt around to the dark side of the frame. You would think she was a cockroach as light shy as she is!

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Sweet dreams......