Honey!

Well, we finally got around to harvesting our honey for the spring, and it was finally a good harvest.  The first time we harvested, a couple years ago, we had one hive and got 11 quarts.  The second year, we had 4 hives, although some were young, and harvested 8 quarts.  Total.  This year, we've lost a few over the winter (but noticed one was gone quickly and salvaged the honey - about 10 quarts), so we currently have 2 hives.  We collected 24 quarts this time!  We still have 8 quarts from the early spring lost hive, so we are able to sell most of this, and it's going fast.  I hope we continue to have healthy bees, it's so encouraging when something goes well!

Something else this week didn't go so well.  I was right - our heifer Corinne was indeed about to calve.  She was in labor Sunday night, and Caleb checked on her twice overnight, but she didn't show any signs of either progressing or distress.  We monitored her periodically throughout Monday, and same thing - she was lying around panting (like all the cows) and occasionally pushing, but didn't seem in distress, but also didn't seem to be any different.  I'm always unsure about the first-time moms that act like this.  Is it because something is wrong, and labor has stalled out for a bad reason, or are they just nervous, and think they're in true labor when it's really justt pre-labor, so they work at it more and longer than they need to?  Well, it turned out with Corinne that there was a problem.  We had the vet out about 8:00 Monday night, and they pulled a tail-first breech calf, already dead.  It's very frustrating, because there's no good way to know what's going on inside there - the only thing we could have done would have been to call the vet out at the first sign of labor, which would have been a silly reaction without the hindsight of now knowing it was breech.  Corinne's older half-sister Myra did the same thing with her first calf, but worse - she pushed for most of a day, strenuously, but finally got out a calf in the normal presentation.  I think she stressed about it too early, and calling the vet on her may not have hurt anything but would have been unnecessary.  You just don't know until after all the facts are in, when it's too late to change anything.  

We have just finished hosting a great pair of WWOOFers for a week, a father and 6-year-old son that were a real help here. Liam and the son played non-stop, except for pairing up on chores, and that left Malachi to actually play unmolested, corrected, or bossed around, which made his week!  They left this morning, leaving us with another WWOOFer who arrived Monday, and will be here for a few more weeks, so I still have some good help outside as I get more and more house-based as I get bigger and hotter!