Yesterday I went to the International Plowing Match with my friend Ronna (more on that to follow, but check out her blog post here. It is littered with photos of me and various other livestock.) I am posting this photo this morning because the wonderful Cognitive Dissenter asked me the other day :
"Is that a real dish that people actually eat?"
Yes, people that don't care about their cardiac health. HAHAHAHA! It was pretty good but they were not sufficiently generous with the cheese curds.
We've been extracting and processing honey as of late. I haven't done a grand tally yet, but I got perhaps 110 pounds this year. Less than I'd hoped for, but I'm back down to two hives from four after splitting two into four last May. I had queen issues, as did some other beekeepers I know. The mysteries of the hive!
Here's Gordon scraping the wax cappings off a frame of honey. He is doing it over our uncapping tank, which has a filter over the bottom container. The filter catches the wax, and the honey drains through.
It's hard not to smile when you're surrounded by sweet stuff!
After the frames of honey are uncapped, they go into the extractor. The honey will be thrown out of the frames by centrifugal force. This sucker is bolted to the concrete floor, to stop it from walking its way across the garage when it's switched on!
The white frame fell out of its tracks and had to be adjusted. No harm done.
As you can see...
...I am not good at following instructions!
Precautions schmecautions! But I swear I just lifted the lid for a quick pic or two, and I didn't put any body parts anywhere near the interior of the drum. Nobody wants bits of fingers in their jar of honey!
Spin spin spin!
Next the beautiful golden goodness came out of the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor and flowed into a bucket. Later, I strained the honey through a filter to get out any wax bits and bee body parts.
I didn't get a photo of it, but at one point a honeybee got into the garage and headed straight for the draining honey. She sat next to it, frantically licking up honey from the stream! No doubt she thought she'd found honey heaven. I removed her to the outside world before she could fall in the bucket and meet a sticky end.
After the honey is strained, it goes into jars:
Here we have two different batches. The bottom one came from the first super (shallow hive box in which you place the frames in which you want the bees to store honey.) The top one came from the second super I extracted from. Last year, the lightest honey (with lots of basswood nectar) came from the first box. This year, I don't know what's going on but it all tastes awfully good!
Hopefully my two hives will make it through the coming winter and we will try to expand the hives again next spring. For now, I'm enjoying fresh honey with my morning fruit and yogurt!
Poor Gordon got stung on the foot yesterday in a freak bee accident. One was drowing in the duck pool, and when Gordon emptied the duck pool to put in fresh water, some old water and the unfortunate bee sloshed into Gordon's rubber boot. Said bee then took her stinger to Gordon's foot! Ouch!
Well, I sort of lied on Sunday. I didn't post yesterday, so it wasn't about ducklings. Today, however, is about ducklings! Surprise, surprise. I didn't really want to write about this stuff until I was sure everybody was okay. Over the past few weeks, we've had THREE near-death duckling experiences! These little cuties are worse than toddlers for getting into trouble, I swear.
First, we have Amy Winehouse duckling: hell-bent on self-destruction.
In her first week of life, she nearly snuffed it. We went out to the duck run to shut everyone in for the night, and discovered we were short one duckling. Much frantic searching, and still we could only find eleven. I gave up, figuring Mama ate her baby. We just couldn't figure out how a duckling could disappear in the Fort Knox duckling run. But before we went back up to the house, I did one last search, and found Amy hanging upside down from the chicken netting under the step into the duck house. It's hard to explain the situation, but it was the one weak spot in the whole enclosure where a particularly determined duckling could get into trouble, and Amy found it. I rescued her just in time, as she was feeling quite cold and I think she had hypothermia. I took her inside and warmed her up under a lamp. She soon perked up, started eating, and seemed fine, so back to the duck run she went. Gordon fixed the weak point in the run. All was well with Amy until yesterday...
(If you're squeamish, look away from the next photo!)
We went down the run and found Amy cuddled up with two of her siblings, bleeding from her beak with blood all over her feathers. What the HELL?!! I still don't know how this happened, but she had large crack running vertically down one side of her beak:
Poor litte angel! This is her after I cleaned her up.
We managed to get the farm vet on the phone right away, and he said that if she was eating and drinking, it was best just to clean her up with soap and water and let the beak heal itself. So we brought her in and I watched her for half an hour. I gave her a warm bath in the kitchen sink, dried her thoroughly, and kept an eye on her. She was eating and drinking enthusiastically, so we took her back to her family and looked around the run to try to figure out what happened. We have two theories. She might have gotten her beak stuck somewhere, and damaged it in a frenzy of trying to free herself (but we can't figure out where this might have happened.) The other theory is that she stuck her beak through the chicken wire and chain link fencing, and one of the drakes came along and tried to chomp it off. On Sunday, I removed the board I had running along the front of the run, because I thought the ducklinsg were big enough now not to come to any harm if they could see out the chainlink/chicken wire fence at ground level. APPARENTLY NOT! The board is back.
Amy seems fine this morning so fingers crossed the beak heals up and grows okay. The vet said that it was best just to leave it alone and that the more we fiddled with it, the more likely it was to get worse.
I am starting to think we need a baby monitor down there so I can keep a closer eye/ear on things!
And then we have Squishy...
Squishy is fine, but there's a reason she has this new nickname. Early Friday morning, Gordon came into my office with this duckling in a box. Apparently, he had STEPPED on her while letting everyone out of the duckhouse Friday morning. Poor Gordon, he was devastated over this and it was of course a complete accident. Apparently Squishy rolled over and closed her eyes, and Gordon was sure she was dead. But by the time she was in my office, her eyes were open and she didn't look too bad.
I felt her all over for broken bones but everything seemed fine. No blood was oozing from any orifices, and she didn't seem to be in pain. However, she was having trouble standing up, which was worrisome. When she tried to stand, she seemed unable to support her front end, although her wings and legs and neck all seemed in working order. I decided to keep her in a box in the warm bathroom for 24 hours and see how things went.
Her appetite was voracious, and she was pushing herself around with her legs. By the end of Friday, she was managing a few steps upright. I gave her a stuffed toy to cuddle up with, and Friday evening, she snuggled in a towel against my chest while we watched TV.
By Saturday morning, she was managing more upright locomotion, and we decided she was well enough to go back to her family. She has improved steadily ever since and apart from a slightly wonky walk, she seems just fine now. Ducklings are so resilient! And Gordon is greatly relieved. The last thing he needed was a dead duckling on his conscience. He is VERY careful about where he puts his feet in the duckling run now.
So there you go, three near-death duckling experiences. I am waiting for another from this little firecracker. We have named her Danger Duck for the time being:
She is always running around on her own like a maniac, trying to catch flies and just acting like she's over-caffeinated. On Sunday, we banished the two drakes and Ronna-duck to the barn for a bit while we let the babies and Mama Eugenia out into the main run for the first time. They had a blast, but eventually Mama led them all back to their house. We let the adults back into the main run, but then Danger Duck decided to make a run from freedom. She zoomed out the open duckling run gate into the main run, and MacGregor decided he was going to check her out, which I did NOT want. After some effort, I managed to capture Danger Duck and put her back with her siblings and all was well.
Last night I came up with the first verse of a song about her, sung to the tune of the Spiderman song:
Danger Duck, Danger Duck, pretty soon you'll be out of luck!
Break a beak, crack a skull... life in the duck run is never dull.
Look out! Here comes the Danger DUCK!
You know, I think it's a good thing I didn't have any human children... these ducklings will be the death of me.
If this keeps up, I'll have to change the name of my blog to "Duckling World." The babies are growing like weeds. I took so many photos on Thursday that I am going to post half today and half tomorrow!
I thought I'd give you a break from ducklings, although I just took my Nikon down there and took a whack of new cute photos! Soon, grasshoppers, soon.
I am working on a brochure about bats for our local stewardship council. Gordon is running a bat house project for them, and wrote the copy for the brochure, which I am woefully behind on. Lucky I have an understanding "boss!" I'm finally getting it together and doing the bat drawings for it. Unfortunately, I don't have my own photos or live bats to draw from, so I collected various photos of each species and am trying not to copy anything directly! Here are a few pencil drawings.
I think bats are almost as cute as ducklings! And bats and ducks are both great insect-eaters.
These are all pencil drawings. I'm going to design a two- or three-colour brochure and have one more bat to draw, plus a few other illustrations. This is what I call a fun and satisfying design job!
These cute winged teddy bears live in the pine wood plantation next to our house! We identified hoary bats near our house with an ultrasound detector last June.
To learn more about bats, visit Bat Conservation International. I get a membership every year, which includes a subscription to their quarterly Bats magazine.
...cuz it's time for your daily overdose of sweetness!
The ducklings are so huge, we've graduated from the paint tray to bigger swimming pools. We change the water at least twice a day but they are filthy little devils!
I gave them some leafy greens and dandelion leaves before I started taking photos. The babies were going nuts over them, tossing them around and playing tug-of-war with their treats.
They are growing SO FAST!
She still hates me.
Time for a nap!
And this is one of the smaller ones!
Who's your Daddy? They'll never tell!
Yesterday one of Gordon's co-workers placed an order for a duck for Christmas. HAHAHAHAHA! Poor misguided woman. You all know that NOBODY will be eating my ducks. :)
Today would have been my Dad's 81st birthday, had he not died in 1992. Well, I guess it's still his birthday! I was thinking of him today and found this old slide photo of us in the early 60s. I think we were next to Lake Ontario. I always look happy in photos with my Dad. :)
