What a rainy day we are having today!  I started my day this morning at 5am with our Little Farmer.  He's an early riser.    It would be nice if he slept later, but at least he sleeps!!  Anyway, after everyone was up and running I went out to seperate calves and check up on my bees.  We separate our 2 little heifers from their mamas in the morning so we can milk their mams in the evening... if we didn't, we wouldn't get any milk.  And about my bees.... well, yesterday was a nice warm day and guess what happened.  The bees swarmed.  They got themselves a new queen and decided to leave the hive so we had to get out there and catch them before they left the farm.   It was pretty exciting and a little scary... bees were everywhere!!!     Since I'm still a baby beekeeper I was a little frazzled and not well prepared... thanks to the appearance of one Little Farmer.  Thankfully, I have some bee keeping friends and they came over and helped me out.  I'll be getting 2 new hives this Thursday, one to put the new colony in and one to spare!!  I was able to get a queen bee larvae to show the girls...they thought it was gross.  They also thought it was sad that when the new queen hatches she goes around and kills all the other queen bee babies.  I was also able to show them the difference in the worker bee and drone bee incubation cells.  The worker bees are females and the smallest...their cells are flat.  The drone bees are the males...a bit bigger than the workers and thier cells have rounded tops.  The queen bee is the biggest and her cell looks like a peanut...really it does... very cool.   Yesterday was very busy... today is very not.   

Since the Little Farmer came along life has been pretty caotic.  He came nice and peaceful at first.  Then at about 2 weeks the crying started.  We figured he had colic so we tried a lot of different things.  Nothing seemed to work until we took him to the chiropractor.  He is doing much better now, but I think it wasn't as much the adjustments (although I'm sure they helped) as it was that I just figured out that this poor little fellow just wasn't getting enough sleep.  He was taking little cat naps all day long, but never really sleeping.  We would bring his bed downstairs and let him sleep there, but 4 girls just make too much noise.  Now that I have him more on a routine and keep his bed upstairs (his bed is a bassinet, by the way) he sleeps much better/longer at a time and he's happier when he's awake.  Which, by the way, I hear him now. 

I hope your day is a good one!!

The Milkmaid