Busy Week and Busier Weekend Ahead

It’s been a busy, busy week and we need to get ourselves to bed since we need to get up by 5am tomorrow morning but first I must do a quick post. This week was filled with some much needed and welcome rain! Lots. The skies were moody and the rain would sometimes be gentle sprinkles and at other times be torrential. And the rumbling thunder was so wonderfully exciting. I love rumbles. I must admit that yesterday there was a clap so loud above us that I screamed out as I was startled. I cracked myself up and had to call Mark just to tell him how silly I felt. 🙂 The Purple Sage bushes are all blossomed and bursting with color. This morning I paused to snap a few wonderful shots of the blooms as well as the bees buzzing all around the bush. It’s so neat when the bush is alive with bees.

Earlier this week I went shopping at Crate & Barrel to see about things for the new house but instead I found some adorable dishes that would be super for photo shoots of honey and bee inspired photos. I’m already enjoying the ones I did purchase and I’m sure you’ll see them in future shots.

Tomorrow we head on over to San Antonio for our first market at the Pearl Farmers Market and we are very excited! With Mark working full time now (and me too still), we tried to do as much prep work as possible earlier in the week so that we wouldn’t be up until 1am tonight. We are too old to do the all-nighters a certain beekeeper keeps suggesting. LOL

Okay that’s a wrap for now. We hope to see some of you at the market tomorrow because besides us, there are so many wonderful vendors out there. As Mark said to me, the goal tomorrow is to make sure we leave the market having made more money than what we spend at other booths. We’ll try! And I’ll write a report for you either tomorrow evening (if we’re not totally wiped out) or Sunday. Have a great weekend!

Here’s a parting shot for you – look who’s coming with us to the market!

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Installing Bees at the Big Red Barn

Today Mark went out to the Big Red Barn, formally known as the Texas Agricultural Education and Heritage Center, which we’ve posted about in the past when he or both of us have been out there for educational events such as Ag Fest. This time he went out in order to deliver some bees of ours for the observation hive. Seems their bees flew off so they needed some replacements. In the above shot, Mark’s opened up the case with the help of a very nice man who works the farm. He has to remove the old bottom frames and clean things up a bit. Looks like these bees and frames had been in the case for a while. Then, in the below picture, he is placing one of our new bee frames into the bottom slot. He picked some frames that had plenty of brood ready to go. This one was nice and full on both sides.

Finally, in the shot below, Mark has completed the cleaning and installation of our bees and they now have a new home at the Barn. We are eager to see how they fare there and hope they will thrive with their Derwin Thrash queen. We’ll need her to lay plenty of eggs in order to rebuild the hive there so that when we go out to speak to people coming through there, we’ll have plenty to educate with as they go about their business. I still wish we could figure out how to put a webcam on the bees. That’d be really neat to see where they go and how they get in and out of the tube at the Barn. 🙂

Read Full Post »

Ulster Observation Hive

Well, here she is – our new observation hive! We are SO excited about this new purchase because it means we’ll be able to take some bees with us to any shows we do in future. Actually, we have the Seguin Trade Show coming up next month (once we definitely firm up the show, we’ll post the details), so we are going to introduce the bees to our customers in a safe and really cool way. We’re hoping it will also draw the curious over to the stand. 🙂 This is from Brushy Mountain out of North Carolina (can’t go wrong there); they have really nice products. I got Mark a very cool smoker from there for Christmas. Below is a shot of Mark preparing to place a frame of bees into the glass slot, where it will easy to observe the bees as they go about their activities.

The bottom is a nucleus hive where Mark will place four additional frames of bees in there. The queen will be in the glass part and all her bees will be able to move up and down to tend to her as well as the brood in the other frames. In this way, we hope to have a good amount of activity going on and then we’ll be able to educate people who stop by to check out the bees. We are really excited adn can’t wait to see what the response will be. We’ll keep you posted.

Read Full Post »