Pooped!

I'm pooped.  I spent the better part of the week getting up at 4:30 each morning to take the baby rabbits out to nurse, but once they hit 11 days and their eyes were open, I felt a little better about leaving them unsupervised overnight.  It is SOOOO nice to sleep through the night.  They are starting to move around the nest box a little and they really squirm when I pick them up, so it's hard to take a photo of them, but here are some I did manage to snap. 

This is what I see when I look in the nest box.  Baby butts!

Isn't this one just the sweetest!

This one was nibbling on hay while I was taking its picture.

And this one was exploring while its siblings were nestled in the background.

It has been raining non-stop and been very chilly most of the week, so there hasn't really been a good time to check the bees.  We've been keeping their feeder full of sugar water and have been patiently waiting to make sure the queen was released from her box and the bees have been drawing out comb.  I've watched them a few times during sunny periods and have seen pollen coming in, so I knew they were working.  Today, we finally had a good sunny warm day to open the hive and check its progress.

This frame is covered with bees, and you can see they've drawn out the comb from the top to the bottom.

This is a close-up of a frame with the bright yellow pollen they've been collecting over the past few days.

The main thing we wanted to see when we opened the hive was the queen, and this year, our queen is marked.  I was so happy to get a marked queen because to an untrained eye, she is really hard to find.  Do you see the neon blue dot?  That's our queen!

Now we just need our mentor to come by and make sure we aren't overlooking anything important.  He caught a swarm for us from one of his hives, so we should have a second colony soon as well.  Having two colonies really helps because it gives us a comparison.  We can check them against each other to help determine if one isn't doing as well as the other one. 

A friend of a friend was thinning out her ornamental flowers and offered us free plants, so we took advantage of the generosity and drove to her house today to get them.  Many of them are attractive to honeybees, so I am happy to have them.  We came home loaded down with plants, and I've spent most of today transplanting and did not even plant them all.  Finally at dark, I stopped. 

I do have one more project to share from today, but I'll share it next post.  I'm going to relax for the first time today.  Like I said, I'm pooped!

Happy homesteading,


Candace