New arrival

We welcome the newest member of the family, James Oliver Wilkes, 8 lbs 14 oz, 22 inches, 12:52am, November 10. Mother Shannon and baby are doing very well after an intense, short labor - Shannon went from 5cm dilation to a delivered baby in 20 minutes!

Not much time to post now as usual. Pictures coming soon.

Swarming Bees!

Once again, I've been lost for several months ... notice it coincided with the growing season on the farm. Anyway, now I'm back with a bunch of videos from the spring swarming season. Here is the first one with more to come hopefully:

Home alone - day 2

This will be short. My hands are very weak and shaky from two days of pounding a mushroom inoculation tool! I estimate I filled 2000 holes in logs with mushroom spores in the past two days. So now you know what we did this afternoon, the final 29 mushroom logs. Here is the rest of the day:

5:45-7:15am: delivered baked goods to Bald Guy
7:15-8am: animal chores and breakfast
8am-noon: assembling racks and supers and putting in foundation (it was 22 degrees with an inch or so of snow on the ground, so we had to delay working outside)
12:30-1:22pm: animal chores
1:22-4:22pm: mushroom logs

papa left (thanks for two great days of work papa! He's such a good father to me.)

The remainder of the day involved wandering around doing animal chores, cleaning eggs, riding the four wheeler and pushing the four wheeler (it wouldn't start after I turned it off about a mile from the house ... luckily it is mostly downhill from where I was so I coasted), planting 15 Christmas trees, hauling wood, and eating pizza. Now I am going to bed. For Shannon: I tried to work on the shower, but no luck yet.

Home Alone

Shannon and the children left this morning to go to the beach for a few days with Ron and Marcia, Reine, Clark and Britney, thus leaving me home alone. I have to go to work Wednesday, but in the interim, I have two days to work on the farm!!! Papa Bob (aka the great actor in several of my videos) came up this morning and is spending the night.

Today was quite busy. After finishing the packing and saying goodbye to the beach bums, I called a local Christmas tree grower and ordered 200 seedlings to replenish our tree patch. He just so happened to be coming this way and agreed to bring the trees with him and meet me at the corner store. As I waited for papa and the trees, I began assembling racks and supers. Papa soon arrived and joined in the assembly. We built 6 or so supers with frames with foundation in a couple of the supers before I went and got the trees. I ended up with 250 from the generous nurseryman. By now it was time for lunch. After lunch we drove across the creek and through the woods to my mushroom tree spot and cut down two more trees. I hoped this would be enough to get us over the 200 log goal. We brought the logs out of the woods and began the innoculation process. We fixed about 20 logs in the next two hours and then counted. We were at 168 logs and there were 29 left on the truck. Do the math ... three short. I'll have to cut one more tree.

Throughout this day, other farm chores were performed: gathering eggs (27 today!), feeding and watering chickens, catching and feeding escaped goats, feeding and watering rabbits and making sure the baby rabbits were alive (they were), and feedinng cats and dog. Oh yeah, it was darn cold today too and we ran out of wood at the house, so we had to take a load to the house from the barn.

As the day drew to a close, I decided we would plant a few Christmas trees as a test to see how long it would take us to plant all of them. The first tree was in the ground when a few flakes of snow started to fall (did I say it was cold?? it had been snow showering off and on all day). We continued without much thought and before we knew it, everything was getting white, our holes and seedlings were getting covered up as fast as Papa dug the holes. I was timing the planting of ten trees so I could multiply by 20 to get the time for 200 trees. It took us 17 minutes to do 10 trees. The snow fell so hard that in 17 minutes everything was white. At least half inch had fallen. We went inside to stoke the fire, scramble some eggs, fry some bacon and toast some homemade bread. The snow fell for another 17 minutes or so. We had more than an inch of accumulation, but now it was clearing off.

After supper and the evening animal chores and cleaning 27 eggs, I had to wrap 2 dozen muffins and a dozen cinnamon rolls to take to the Bald Guy at 6:30 in the morning. Which means it is time for bed! I'll give you another post tomorrow evening summarizing tomorrow's exciting events ... as if anyone out there is really reading this. Of course, Shannon will have to read it.

Going on the Web

Faith Mountain Farm is developing a web presence: www.faithmtnfarm.com
We are doing everything "in house" using simple google apps, so it may take some time to get the site up to speed. However, if Margaret gets hooked on the web page design side, we'll have things built sooner. Note that we are also launching a new venture in beekeeping: www.backyardbeehive.com Check it out!

Barrel Rolling

While cleaning up some bee equipment we found a barrel. The boys wanted to play with it. Another barrel (our barn trashcan) was soon involved and a new past time was born, barrel rolling, along with ancillary activities like hula hooping, riding inside barrels, and babies crying. I hear a more sophisticated act involving pieces of wood and an incline are in the works!

A Tractor Tale

The boys and I were getting oak logs to use for mushrooms out of the woods on the trailer. When I turned around to make sure no logs were falling off the trailer, I drove the front of the tractor into a branch next to the road. After trying to back out and using a come-along to no avail, I decided to drive down the hill and into the creek. It was a little hairy at times, though hard to tell from the video, and required taking down two fences, several small trees, and a big rock, but turned out okay. Much of the video is boring back and forth on the tractor, showing the persistence required to get out. We were quite happy in the end.

Bridge Building 101

Since we moved to the farm, the only way to get across Big Laurel Creek to the bulk of the property was to use a foot log or ford the creek. Having company almost always resulted in a visitor plunging into the creek from the foot log. We have remedied the situation by building our very own bridge that is large enough for lots of people, strollers, lawn mowers, four wheelers, and vehicles for the brave (it is quite narrow, but I drove the tractor across it as a test!).

The short video shows the new bridge on the day we did most of the work. Prior to the video, my 83 year old neighbor helped me get the locust trees out of the woods and onto the old bridge pilings last summer. I then leveled them up as best I could and spaced them for putting on the planks, which is about where this video begins.

Four Wheeler for Christmas

This blog has not really gone as planned, which was supposed to be a chronicle of life on Faith Mountain Farm. Let's try again. Much has happened since catching that bee swarm, but let's just fast forward to Christmas. The Casner Family blessed our family with a four wheeler for Christmas. Watch the video to see the boys' response. Look carefully at the four wheeler because it will never be as clean again after the past couple of weeks of riding!

Catching a Bee Swarm

Haven't posted in a while due to the business of farming, family, and school, but thought I would put a link to a video of my father, Bob Wilkes, and me catching a swarm in our front yard.

Tractor Woes

The farm came with a 1953 Ford Jubilee tractor that ran great and had several implements. It is very handy to have around, especially for hauling wood and turning the large garden. So, being without the tractor for the past few weeks has not been easy. The starter went bad, I thought, and I got a new part from Ebay that took forever to get here. It came today, and I put it on after some effort only to find out that it still wouldn't start. The engine is frozen up somehow. It was running fine when I parked it, so this is rather odd. I tried towing it with the truck while Galen was riding the tractor and had him put it in gear ... the wheels on the tractor stopped completely and just slid while I dragged it with the truck. Oh well, it looks to become a yard ornament. What do you do with an old tractor that doesn't work anymore?

Ant Boat Races

You never know what boys will come up with. Galen designed a 2x4 scrap outrigger with sticks for masts and leaves for sails and built two of them, one for him and one for Sullivan. Then they raced them down the creek from footlog to footlog. Later they were digging in the dirt in the barn and found some big ants with big pinchers that can grab onto your finger. For some reason they decided to put them on their boats and float them down the creek.

This is "ant boat" racing:

• put your ant on your boat
• put the boats in the water at the same time at footlog #1
• if your ant falls off before reaching footlog #2, you lose
• if both ants fall off or both ants stay on, the first boat to footlog #2 wins

Stop by if you are in the neighborhood and join in the fun. Maybe I can get a picture of the boats and ants tomorrow.

Of bees and such

I try to keep a bee log (I suppose that could be a more accurate use of the word "blog"). Here is what I have from Winter/Spring 2006-2007:

Finished last season with 13 hives, 3 were swarms I had caught. There was little to no fall honey flow, so I fed the bees the best I could going into the winter. Most hives were very light and not expected to make it. They were all treated with apistan strips and with menthol soaked paper towels Papa gave me.

Lost the 3 swarms before winter had really begun. Lost 2 hives following the first cold snap in December – they had honey, assumed they froze as I found the cluster intact. Lost 2 more hives following a 6 week very cold spell in late January and February – they had stores, assumed they froze as I found the cluster intact.

March:

· checked hives during a warm spell, 4 hives were okay, two were very weak with a handful of bees each. One of the weak hives had some brood and a queen, the other had no queen, so I put them together with newspaper. They joined forces, but were still weak. That leaves 5 hives from the winter.

· Bought 6 hives (brood plus one super) from Gene Pierce in Millers Creek for $80 each. Hives were of varying strengths, but all in good shape with new brood and about 3-4 weeks ahead of mine. Mine had not really broken cluster yet.

· Received 8 packages on March 31. One queen was dead in her cage, so I put that package with the weak hive. Installed the others, 6 with internal section feeder, all with entrance feeders. Fed 15 gallons of syrup over the next two weeks to packages.

· Extreme warm spell the last week or two of March accelerated blooming and all hives were active, though ones from Pierce were very active, looking like the strongest wanted to swarm.

· Two of my wintered hives are very strong with brood rearing in full swing in the bottom brood chamber and two are in good shape, but all in second super, so I swapped the shallow and deep to encourage them back into the deep.

· For the strongest hive, I put a honey super on it and pulled alternating racks up to the new super to try and raise the honey ceiling to prevent swarming. Will see if it has any effect.

· Removed meds from two hives in Mountain City. Swapped the two brood chambers on biggest hive. Bottom board is rotten, need to replace. Both hives are very strong with lots of stores and need space.

· Extreme cold spell after the warm slowed things down.

April:

· When removing queen cages, I discovered two queens were dead. Both in cages, one had been opened, but she was apparently already dead. The other had not been opened. I pulled fresh brood rack from strongest hives and put in two queenless hives, hoping they would make a queen. Brushy Mountain is sending me 3 new queens, so I will put them in upon arrival and check for signs of queen rearing. Will use the extra queen to make a split.

· Put a new bottom board on double deep in Mountain City and added a honey super to the other. Got a speeding ticket on the way to Boone to pick up Margaret, 62 in a 45!

· One of the queenless hives must have a queen from somewhere because it has brood. I added a queen to the other. Used the remaining two queens to make splits, one in a nuc and one in a full hive.

May:

· Added another honey super to my strongest hive from Wilkesboro. Bees were hanging out of the hive even though it already has a brood and two supers, so I added a third.

· The nuc is not doing well. Appears to be making lots of queen cells and I couldn’t find a queen. The split in the full hive is doing well.

· One of the queenless hives appears to have a laying worker. I think they killed the queen I installed. Need to get another queen.

Resting

A summer afternoon break in the swing, resting from the constant farm chores. It is not so green right now, but we are looking forward to the warming of the soil and the renewal of life.