The Fruits of Many Labors

One of our chickens finally took me seriously. I kept talking to them last week, explaining that if they didn't get busy soon it was chicken noodle soup time. The three brown eggs pictured above are one hen's rescue efforts. She laid the first one on Friday. We got another yesterday and one today, so it looks like this hen is getting going on her one-a-day. I placed her eggs next to a large egg from the grocery store so you could see the contrast in size. They're not even the size of a golf ball yet, but as the chickens mature their eggs will increase in size.

In our apiary Owen and I added a queen excluder to the hive. It is a metal screen with gaps that will permit the worker bees to move through it, but not the queen because she is so much larger. We put the screen down between the upper hive body and a honey super. The bees haven't drawn any comb yet in the super, but there were bees climbing around the frames. I decided it would be interesting to see what was going on in the upper hive body because we had seen lots of honey waiting to be capped in there. Holy Moses!! I would say the upper hive body is at least 80% honey only, and there were several frame sides that were mostly capped. It's easy to tell the capped honey from the capped brood. Capped honey is flat across the top and its caps are white. The capped brood is more bumpy in texture and usually yellow or tan.

Bronwyn and Owen and I all tasted a little of the honey because there was a small chunk of honeycomb I had to pry off from between two frames -- I couldn't budge up the frames right together without squashing a bunch of bees if I left it. We took it inside where Owen threaded the honeycomb onto a wooden skewer so it could drip over a cup. The honey is very light in color and had the faintest suggestion of mint (we have a lot of peppermint and spearmint in our yard) and it was the most delicious thing to cross my tongue in days. I would have posted a picture of the honeycomb dripping, but Owen couldn't wait for the honey to drip out so he squashed it with two table knives to speed things up. Sigh. This makes me so very excited to see if I get to harvest any honey in late August.

And the garden is starting to produce!! We have eaten zucchini, green beans, lettuce, and beets so far. And the chickens seem to love beet greens (which is good because I know they're nutritious, but they just do NOT appeal to me). And it looks like there will be peaches and apples this year too. After the hard freezes in May I wasn't sure there would be any peaches at all. Food is so much more delicious when it comes out of your own garden.