Freebies! Free Bees?

As discussed earlier, our honey bees did not survive last winter due to somewhat mysterious circumstances.  The experience of losing two seemingly healthy and strong hives has created far more questions than answers.  Many of the questions that I have about keeping bees are about how to provide the bees with living conditions that most closely mimic those found in "naturally" occurring colonies.  My hunch is that, by providing these conditions, bees are able to fully take advantage of their innate tendencies, make more bees, produce a honey crop, and do all of that with a minimal amount of beekeeper intervention.  Unfortunately, I think that I have been failing to provide "bee friendly" conditions by using conventional Langstroth hives and their associated methods.  Thus the bee deaths of this past winter.  

Luckily, there are other people that share my philosophies.  Even more fortunate, they write books and have left a paper trail.  I have been reading and studying the methods of Fedor Lazutin and Georges de Layens.  These methods have been made readily available thanks to the work of Leo Sharashkin.  Leo does a fantastic job of presenting how to keep bees in a natural way.  What you see in the pictures are swarm traps built by me to the specifications on Leo's website.  Catching feral bees or local swarms is an important step in establishing a sustainable apiary.  I was a little bit late to the game in putting the swarm traps into trees.  Life was a little bit busy while building the traps and I was delayed by a certain baby goat among other things.  With some luck, though, I hope to catch a swarm to install in a new hive.  Hopefully, there will be more updates to follow this year.

Fox Kits

The neighbors up the road apparently have baby foxes living under their garage.  

Caught these two playing one evening!

New 'kid" on the block

Little Simon, a mini Nubian buckling, joined Silver Hill Farm last weekend.  We are bound and determined to get Abby bred this year!  

Eric is very happy to have another male body on the farm! 

 

From Paris to West Windsor

This post was to wait until later this month to celebrate the one year anniversary of our going to solar power.  Unfortunately, our federal government continues to lead us astray by ignoring the realities of climate change and we have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.  Without becoming overly political, I will simply offer a few statistics of how successful our solar array has been as one of the efforts that we are making at decreasing our impact on the environment. 

In a little less than a year, we have generated a total of 5.17MWh of electricity.  To put that in terms that make sense, that is the equivalent of 15,661.63 light bulbs running for an entire day.  That equals 8,002.95 pounds of CO2 emissions saved or 201.57 trees planted. 

Apparently, a major motivation behind withdrawing from the Paris Agreement was that it was "bad for American workers."  We are American workers and we have not paid an electric bill for over a year because we care about climate change.  In fact, we have a credit with our power company for generating more electricity than we use.  That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.