Enjoying the long weekend....

Mother Nature has decided to grace us with some sun, finally, and everything on the property is enjoying it! The garden has started a burst of growth, and all of our berries and trees are thriving.

We checked the bees today, and they're doing really well. I managed to get the first bar up enough to see that it's full and capped, and they've just started building comb on the 5th bar from the back(there's a total of 17 bars in the hive). So, in about two weeks we'll check and see what kind of progress they've made on that bar, and depending on that, we may harvest in about a month. We'll store the honey back on the off chance it's needed to help them through the winter, but hopefully we'll find come spring that we're free to enjoy!!

Lily's due to kindle this weekend, and just looks very put upon by her pregnancy. She's due today or tomorrow, and Mike and I are checking regularly. She has a decent little nest built, but hasn't started pulling fur yet. I'll post pics of the babies when they arrive!

Cocoa's litter is growing amazingly well, and they're a trip! They'll be five weeks old tomorrow. The first is of the chocolate otter...all of the bunnies used to love to sleep under their feeder, but they've grown to the point that they don't fit anymore...so Otter's shoved her head underneath - she's camera shy!!

And it was bath time when we visited this afternoon...

And, last, but not least, here's the latest additions to our farm. DJ managed to sneak a heat past us and a tomcat found her...sooo, yesterday five little kittens arrived to take up residence in a box in our garage. There are three white ones, a black one, and a grey tabby. I took these pictures today. We won't be keeping any of them, but I'm going to make certain I tame them so we can find all five good homes :)

Capping the Comb

Checked the hive this past weekend, and were thrilled to see that the bees are starting to cap the honey comb! The bees were amazingly calm, letting me pull out five bars before even starting to buzz at me, and still never got really agitated at us. Definitely is just too neat to see the progress they're making, and we're really looking forward to them being an integral part of our homestead.

And here's a shot of one of our homemade beesuits! I couldn't figure out what to do with the sheer fabric I wore as a shawl with my wedding, until we found ourselves in need of veils! So, we wear sweats, boots, ripstop nylon raincoats(since the bees find that stuff slippery), gloves, and the homemade veils(with ballcaps underneath to keep the fabric away from our faces. To date, they're working quite well, and saving us a ton of expense in not having to buy beesuits!

Busy as bees and Busy Bees!

Well, it rained all weekend, so we took advantage of being stuck in the house and worked on some projects. Got started on the builtin for the living room(no pictures of that yet, not enough progress to share) and worked on the kitchen, what a difference!
Here's the before shot...hideous isn't it? Up until Sunday, this is what it looked like, minus the pizza, and such on the counter, since this picture was taken before we closed on the house. We also replaced the stove after the infamous fireball incident.

So, on our last trip to Ohio to fetch stuff from our old place, we brought back some of the cabinets we had installed when we renovated the garage. We brought up four wall cabinets and a corner cabinet, in addition to some base cabinets for the living room built in. Two of the wall cabinets were added to either side of the microwave, resulting in this:

Much better don't you think?? We also added a 9" cabinet to the left of the fridge, and replaced the corner cabinet. The kitchen looks SO much better now, like it was unfinished before.

Busy Bees!!!

Well, our bees are just trucking! They arrive May 3rd, and this was one of the bars a week later! Amazing, isn't it?? There's a full bar before it too! It's really been neat having the bees, and knowing that they're our bees buzzing around the yard has just made me even more aware of how nature is at work.

And this is the same bar just five days later!! Can you believe the amount the got done? Granted, it's not full of honey yet, but they are just TRUCKIN' along, it's absolutely amazing. It's going to be just phenomenal come next year when we'll be harvesting honey from our own hive, and hopefully will be able to pay attention to what's blooming and label the bars so we can try honey from different flowers.