Well, it’s the end of July already, and we at Our Bright Acres are doing our best to buzz into action in order to get ready for the honey harvest less than a month away. We hope your summer has been going well. Here are a few of the activities that have been going on in our neck of the woods:

• Painting: “Auntie Susan” was over a couple weeks ago for a visit. The kids got to play with their cousins, and Suz painted one of the panels on our mini-library. She is a superb artist, among many other skills, so we were very thrilled to have her paint a meadow-scape with a bee hive, which you can see featured at the top of this post.
• Prairie restoration: Speaking of wildflower meadows, we have started a long term project in this regard. We got inspired by the TEDx talk given by Chris Schad at the TEDx ZumbroRiver event held in May. Chris talked about a simple approach to prairie restoration that worked for him. The first couple steps involve putting down black plastic, which we obtained free from a friend of my folks. So we have four quadrants in our yard where the grass/weeds are dying, and these will be ready for a fall planting of prairie flowers. The photo here was from May and we will update you on the progress. It’s a small step, according to our budget, but part of a much longer range vision of transforming our ‘lawnscape’ into a pollinator habitat and place of exquisite beauty.

• Ordering stuff. There are a lot of items that we need to purchase each year to make our honey available and prepare for coming years. We’d like to spend one full day on extracting this year rather than the 2 or 3 it would take with our previous system. And that means two uncapping stations and a faster extractor at a minimum. The extractor, we can rent/borrow, but we have decided to invest in another uncapping knife, uncapping tub, and filter. Then there is the bottles, jars, labels, honey gates, and pails for the bottling side of the process. And, of course the bee hive equipment needs each year.
• Free hive boxes. Some equipment one can get a good deal on. We were fortunate to be clued-in to a bunch of available old hive boxes from a new beekeeping friend down the street who had been trolling craigslist. There were several hundred hive boxes of all sizes for the taking from a shed they had been stacked in for some 30+ years. My friend rented a U-haul and we packed that thing full of boxes. It was quite an experience as the mice and squirrels had made their homes in those boxes for many years. The wax/foundations weren’t really salvageable, but a good number of the boxes were in decent shape. I got the impression that the gentleman tried to make a go of the business for not too many years, and it didn’t pan out. Here we are loading the trailer. If you or someone you know would like some of these, please let us know, as we still have some left.

• Checking on the bees. This is a regular activity for us. There is so much to learn about these creatures and how they operate. They work on their own schedule, not ours. The last time that I looked at our hives, I tried to take an inventory estimate of how much honey we might expect to harvest. If they finish capping off the combs that they’ve drawn out and started to fill, then the estimate I came up with equates to one barrel. That’s 55 gallons for those not familiar with the measurement. So it will be fun to see how far off I am. We aren’t in the big leagues by any means, but that isn’t our intention anyway – we’d much rather have small batch/locally sourced/premium raw honey available for our clientele. Nonetheless, 55 gallons is a step up from last year’s 40!
• Enjoying our garden harvest. It’s exciting to get produce practically everyday from the garden. So much better than the produce section of the grocery store! We’ve been grilling green beans and zucchini, shelling peas by the bucket, gathering broccoli, cauliflower, kale, lettuce, and we got our first picking of sweet corn for dinner yesterday. Several families are helping us share and work the garden space and that has been really great. Everyone’s garden space at ‘our acres’ has been looking fantastic this year. We are looking forward to carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, melons.
• Spending time with the kiddos. It’s easy to get wrapped up with life in general and our sideline businesses, but more important is just taking the time to enjoy God’s blessing of children. At ages 6, 4, and 2 at home, they demand our energy and fill our hearts. Evan has got his own bike with training wheels this year and we are practicing going together with the two others in the carrier 🙂

And though we mow the clover, the little heads come back and the bees return to see what nectar might still be available. Just watch the bees and consider how many dozens of flowers a single bee might visit just to get one drop of nectar.