Buzz Kill

Well, not everything goes as planned on the farm.  We have made so much progress on many things and we have also taken a few steps back on some others.  But this is the way we learn.

Ruger with baking soda on her bee sting

Kenn and I opened our hive on Saturday to check things out and what we found were a bunch of sluggish bees.  After checking the frames we noticed there weren't any eggs.  What happened to our queen?  I'll tell you what happened to our queen... once again, we made a beginner beekeeping mistake.  We hadn't changed out our poor honeybee's sugar water for over a few weeks.  Who would have thought that something so loaded with sugar could go bad?  Well it does and bad sugar water causes bees to starve.  StinsonFarm should write a book titled, 101 Ways To Starve Your Honeybees.  We have already found the first two ways.  Lucky for us, once we changed out the sugar water and threw some powdered sugar into the hive, our sluggish bees came back to life.  We did have to re-queen though.  Hopefully she takes!

We lost some of our rabbits too.  Not as in they hippity hopped away from the farm, but rather, they died.  As I'm writing this I'm realizing how terrible at farming Kenn and I must sound.  I can assure you that it is normal for any farmer to lose animals every once and a while.  It just seems that it happened at StinsonFarm all at once.  We had somewhat of a cold snap during the evenings last week and a few of the baby bunnies got out of their nest box and couldn't get back in.  Unfortunately those babies didn't make it through the night.  The same litter had a runt that didn't make it either.  We're pretty sure that momma rabbit wasn't feeding it and that it died from starvation.

My lesson in rabbit butchering (note: this
is not one of the baby bunnies that died)

Drying anise leaves

In good news, I was able to harvest some of my anise leaves already!  It's so early for this so I'm pretty excited that I'll get more than one harvest out of them this year.  Anise meringues here we come!  My cousin, Nicole, was visiting us this weekend and brought us some perfect containers for storing the leaves.  Thank you Nicole!