BLACK HILLS PACK GOATS ON A STICK

Lee experiments with a fancy new video boom  (hand held electrical conduit) while enjoying a late-fall Saturday afternooon hikelet with Thuh-Boyz.

MULTI-USE BEE FITNESS AND RECREATIONAL SPA FACILITY

Kate's Mom, Jane, seemed to feel Lee'z B'z are not being pampered enough.  She quized me on the phone from Cincinnati one day about how the bees drink, attend to personal hygiene, how they play and persue life as a (nearly) all-female colony.  Then one day a month later a large box shows up from UPS.  The rest is, as they say, history.  South Dakota's first (and I suspect only) Multi-use Fitness and Recreational Spa Facility for bees.  One unit is the wading pool, another is the water park, and the third is the combination beech/sunbathing unit.  Well, this should take the sting out of living life as a bee.  Except I noticed this morning that one of the units now serves as a skating rink.  Rats.  Where am I going to get 400,000 pair of bee ice skates this close to Christmas?

A LATE FALL HIKE TO UPPER PICNIC POINT

Goats were getting barnyard fever. But November is hunting season. So we all donned our garb for hunting season and took off. A beautiful crispy-air day with no wind and visibility enough to see Chicago.  We mozied all the way, sampling dried oak leaves, pine needles, tree bark, ground holly and various weed seed pods.  A truly delicious walk-in buffet.

GOATS ENJOYING A FINE FALL

The Black Hills Pack Goats have been enjoying an especially sanguine fall season. Can you tell? Custer decided to convert a feed trough to his private lounge. Harney even snuggled up to Custer for an afternoon nap. Custer went nose to nose with Kate. And, of course, Custer had to pose for a glamor portrait to use in press releases to his fans.

WINTERIZING A FIRST-YEAR HONEY BEE HIVE

Added 2" styrofoam temp insulation on three sides, 3/8" thick mouse guard with 3/8" holes on bottom entrance, and new top entrance with 3/8" spanning entire front width. All this for first wintering of new hive and newbee beek. Please comment and advise. Thank you. -Lee

CAN THIS KITTY HANDLE A BARN MOUSE?

The new barn kitty starts the day going for one wounded chicken, then two hours later taking on an entire flock of wild turkey. Look close to see the incredulous deer watching this new predator unleashed on the forest. This might be a good time for our barn mice to seek alternate housing arrangements.

KATE'S SEEDY PRIVATE LIFE

We've been pretty busy. I had not walked in to bedroom #5 in months. Shoot, someone could have been living back there and I wouldn't have known.

Well, someone was living back there. So many times when I've been out at bedtime, as Kate calls it, "kissing the goats good night," it turns out Kate was leading a seedy private life unto her own.

After being busted, Kate admitted to having scrounged, scavenged, and socked away millions of seeds from thousands of plants from all over the Rapid City/Black Hills area. She's been smuggling them home in little baggies. All harvested from fall dried flowers languishing still in their summer beds. Some from beds around campus, some with permission from City gardners, some from County beds. Samples from beds all over the region, and all converged in stacks of baggies on one final bed (in our extra bedroom).

I finished goat-kissing early last night and stumbled in on Kate in the back bedroom. It felt like returning to the Witches' Market on the edge of La Paz, Bolivia. There was Kate laboring under a high-intensity desklamp, splitting open seed pods, sorting and counting, cataloging and caressing. She did it all. Except the incantations.

Her private life exposed, she consented to a coming-out photo shoot.

HAY FEVER

Always something new at Ten Green Acres in The Black Hills of South Dakota. We got a new barn-kitty/mouser from the animal shelter. So...we needed to build a hay barn for him. All the while the Black Hills Pack Goats were certain it was all about them, stocking in supplies for their winter pantry. Whoofda. It was all about me, getting a live-in farm hand who never calls in sick. See the video and watch all three plots unfold...

LEE'Z B'Z HOLD AN OPEN-HOUSE

I have opened the hive for quick checks several times, but by the four-month mark, it was time to do a detailed walk-through of the ladies' four story home. It was also time to make some decisions in preparation for the coming winter. Since I'm a newbee, I'm still processing what was inside. But anyway here's a photo record of what the ladies have been doing inside the past four months.

This is the #2 Frame in newest (second) super.

#5 Frame in 3-Month (Upper) Deep

#7 Frame in (oldest) 4-Month (Lower) Deep

Looking in to The Abyss.
Middle of the lowest hive box.

What IS that Monster ? !

It's not easy re-assembling a hive when
10,000 of its inhabitants are angrily seeking
an opening in your clothing to sting to the death.

HOW BEES DO FAMILY PLANNING

When a community loses tens of thousands population over winter then has to repopulate with tens of thousands of newborns in the spring, get them raised and slotted among six job descriptions, all without a top-down presiding leader, then "family planning" takes on a whole new meaning. So how do bees do it? I'm a newbee, but this is what I understand. Also watch the video. But caution. It includes violence and adult bee content.

Honey bee drones have about one function in life. Which, by the way, leads to immediate death.

Each hive of 75,000 females needs a few drones around, so that when the queen takes one mating flight in the spring...well...you know. Birds n bees and all that.

Anyway, while we humans do spring cleaning, bee home makers do their major house cleaning in the fall. They need to get ready for the cold, starving winter. And, since these ladies know there won't be any queen flights for a few months, what to do with those remaining drones who never got any action?

All winter, drones just lay around, eat precious food, eye the girls, and contribute nothing. (Sounds like football season?) So at one point in the fall the ladies boot most (but not all) the boys out. No one knows how the ladies arrive at a consensus decision on what day to do it. Or how they rate the guys to decide who's in line for lucky in the spring.

If you watch this video close you can see this ritual in action. The video is shot at the front door to a hive. One little guy (actually the drones are the largest) just won't give up and tries to sneak back in.

No big deal. If the girls run short of queen-ready drones in the spring, they know how to re-breed some new drones next spring (the female worker bees know how to set gender by size of honeycomb cell, feeding regimine and larvae uncapping/recapping schedule). But they must do it all in time to date the queen. Then from that one mating the queen will have over 100,000 babies over the next few months. Some of whom will be drones that they'll have to kick out in the fall.

FALL HARVEST: RUSH RUSH RUSH

No soapmaking, ultralight flying, hardly any packgoat-catered hikes, and minimal housekeeping. We're overwhelmed by fall harvest deadlines. Happy deadlines. Kate's vegie gardens have come in bountiful. The new, improved and enlarged solar vegetable drier I made for Kate this year to replace the old one, is still not large enough. Need to double it next year. Good rains yielded plenty alfalfa hay to last us til first-cutting of hay June next year...that's why I had to build a new hay barn. And still not done. Racing against the first-snow date. Lee'z B'z population exploded from under 10,000 in the mail order rom Georgia in June, to around 75,000. Those ladies have sucked nearly eight 25 pound bags (200 pounds!) of sugar thru their little bodies to make honey and thanks to a boomer year of white clover and forest flora we're overflowing with honey the B'z won't need to over-winter, that now needs to be harvested. Trouble is, I have never harvested honey, don't have the right centrifuge, hot knives, canning jars or decanting barrels. So I need to learn quick what to mail order on line to extract honey. This week the year-one chickens started laying "practice eggs" (i.e., soft shell). Soon they will be popping out brittle-shelled eggs by the dozen per day. The Black Hills Pack Goats are now strong and eager young adults approaching 200 pounds, if not more, at only 2 years old. Next summer these giants will be packing some real serious supplies for us. The forest-thinning has yielded many downed trees that need to be harvested for fire wood to heat with in two years. But we haven't even begun to chop wood for this coming winter. The mice will soon want to set up warmer fall housekeeping in my hay barn, so we have a vet at the animal shelter helping nurse a kitten back to life so we can let it grow strong and frolic in the happy life as a claw-totin sheriff to clean up Dodge (our barn) this winter. Then there's good old Sherlock. She's a Timex dog...takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Holy cow. If it's this busy with just 10 Green Acres, what do people do with 100 acres?

Did I mention our big innovation this year? The "yard truck." It is one awesome labor saving, productivity-making machine. I've arranged to be regional distributor for this British firm.

Hey. It was a slow day.

As if any one should believe that.

FALL IS COMING

BEE BREAKFAST BAR

Caught some early morning bee-grazing. The Ladies are still at it.

Also, tonight we opened the hive again, while Amanda, Ryan, twin babies Lidya and Grant were with us. Only Ryan came close to observe. The Ladies are hard at it. Lots of comb on new super, but only 10% filled with honey, and only 2% of comb capped with honey inside. ... i.e., "room to grow."

Got to admit, though. The photo is just a bumble bee passing thru, near my Ladies. The bumbler is a real ham, right?

THE AERODYNAMICS OF CARGO BEES

Please click on these photo's. It's the best I could do with a cheap instamatic, but still it is fascinating what these ladies do all day, every day. Soon as the sun opens flowering blossoms the ladies take flight en mass to bring back the pollen and nectar. If you've ever seen a hang glider come in for a landing, it sure looks like the ladies here have it knocked solid. Also, see the leg-sacks of pollen. On this day they were bringing back material from bright orange flowers. A dew even showed up having found white blossoms, that made it appear they were wearing white bloomers. The girls are so focused on their tasks that they ignored my bare hands holding the camera just six inches away. And this morning I discovered they have resumed the consumption rate of 1/2 gallon of sugared water per day.