SWEET HEART: Sweet stuff at our place and I am so excited!!!

This has been an exciting week at our "homestead". I have mentioned before on here my dream of keeping bees. I have wanted to do that for several years and I have done some reading up on it but it still continued to feel like a dream. I just didn't quite have the confidence to go into it. I could read books but in this sort of thing I do much better with hands on or visual learning and I was a little afraid to just jump in and do that.

There was a class on bee keeping offered locally by the academy of life long learning- which is free of charge and usually attended by a bunch of retired folks but my kids and I have had fun joining them a couple of times now. It was on Tuesday morning and we went, me with notebook in hand and a plan to learn just as much as I possibly could.

There were two beekeepers doing the talk (one of them was the guy that I actually buy our natural beef from but we had never met in person before, just talked on the phone) one has kept bees 4 years and the other 19 years and both of them love it. They brought a hive for us to see and showed us how to put it together. They showed us the equipment that we needed and told us a lot about bees and their care. Afterwards we visited with them a lot and I told them that I would really love to raise bees and asked if they knew of any disease free used equipment for sale. They weren't sure but Les took my number. That afternoon he called me up and said he had found some. Yesterday the kids and I went and picked them up.

Our beehives!

The bees are also ordered (Beekeepers in our area order through Les and we all go to get our bees at one time) and we will be picking them up the first week of May. The bee hives are currently stacked in our garage as I need to get a good foundation made and put up an electric fence. My Dad had extra fencing so that was a huge blessing. I had hoped not to fence ( for aesthetic reasons )but it is pretty important in our area for keeping bears and skunks away from the hives.

This whole experience is pretty unreal to me as this went from being a dream to reality in just a few short days. I am learning so much right now too. There is a whole new set of words that go with bee keeping and I am trying to learn them. Such as a hive/frames being "drawn out". The frames that I got area which will give the bees a huge head start. That means that they already have the beeswax cells on them. (See picture below)

I also feel so very blessed because both of the beekeepers (older gentlemen) that taught the class have just taken me and my kids under their wing and are very gracious to help and answer any questions I might have. We got to go and explore Les' beekeeping shed and even saw a few hives that he already has going this year. My Dad has also been very helpful with fencing, a smoker he had on hand and other ideas.

Other sweet stuff around here has included canning Maple syrup. I have 16 jars all sealed up and ready for using on our pancakes and waffles this year. It looks like our season might be pretty much over. The nights have been staying too warm. We had hoped we might get a bit more than we did but we will be thankful for what we do have!!