Well, folks, it has been crazy around here the last few weeks.  I’m glad we are now going to get back to normal life as we settle into fall and prepare for winter.

A couple of weeks ago, Michelle and I left for our Honeymoon to Disneyworld in Florida.  We were planning on fulfilling a lifelong dream of mine to visit the country where the largest percentage of my genetics comes from, Norway (along with Denmark and Sweden).  This will have to wait a couple of years, though, since the trip would have brought a price tag that would have had us paying on it for years (plus interest).  We instead decided to go with something we could reasonably afford.  Sometimes you have to be practical in order to ensure your finances remain stable. The night before we were to leave was when the first unexpected hiccup happened.  Michelle went to check us into our flight and found that my ticket wasn’t purchased…at all.  After a few tears and some panic (I won’t mention who did that, but it rhymes with Rachelle) we got it all figured out and didn’t have to pay some crazy rate for the flight. We hadn’t really considered the hurricane that was lingering to the south of Florida when we left, mostly because we didn’t know where we were going until just a couple weeks before we left.  As most Floridians know (or at least, that’s what my buddy Daniel said…), hurricanes aren’t really a jaw dropper most of the time. It’s just business as usual around there until something huge actually gets close to hitting land and hasn’t been downgraded to a Tropical Storm.  In our case, we were a few days into our vacation when Irma slapped into the Florida Keys as a Category 5 and we decided to get out of Dodge. We had our flights booked on Southwest for the following Wednesday and had to make the changes. When Michelle made the phone call two Thursdays ago she was able to change my flight but got disconnected before she could change her flight (remember we were on two separate confirmation numbers).  She was getting frustrated. I understood why once I got on the phone since I could barely understand the guy at Southwest Airlines.  It wasn’t because he had an accent or anything like that, but because I only received about every other syllable.  Basically, I went back to the good old Army training that we received regarding conveying information over a crappy radio connection.  I used my phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.) when I was trying to spell something out, or in my case, tell him my confirmation number.  I repeated what I thought he said and asked for confirmation that it was correct and the guy and I were finally able to work something out.  It didn’t help that flights were booking up as I was talking to him.  It was a great South Park moment. “I have a flight at 3:30pm on Friday. How does that soun…aaaannnnddd it’s gone.”  We went about four rounds of that before I finally just told him to put Michelle on the first available flight out before 8pm Saturday (the time Irma was supposed to hit Florida, at that point). He got it done after being on the phone with me for around an hour (while I was walking around the Magic Kingdom trying to get a better connection).  I was very impressed with that Southwest Airlines representative.  He worked through the difficult communication and worked with me to get our situation resolved. No, I’m not getting paid to say that. I just believe in giving credit where credit is due and this guy went above and beyond to meet the needs of the customer.  At any rate, we are home and have started getting back into the farm life.

The chickens have moved into egg production mode.  I’m not sure exactly how many are laying, but we are getting 4-6 eggs a day.  At least we were.  Saturday night, I went to lock the chickens in the hen house for the evening.  As I counted them, I saw that four chickens were missing.  I hoped that they had just lost track of time and would be back in the morning.  No such luck, so on Sunday I went all over the property looking for signs of predation (chicken carcass, a lot of feathers, etc.) and found nothing.  I took the car out and looked on the streets around the property to see if they had gotten ran over by cars and there was no sign of them.  I went through the neighborhood behind the house to see if they had gotten into the neighborhood and there was nothing.  I looked through all of my outbuildings to see if they had gotten stuck in boxes or fallen into a container of some kind (which is what happened last time) and found nothing.  I am guessing that they wandered into someone’s yard and that person collected them up.  It wouldn’t be hard since they are extremely friendly and come running when a person goes outside.  I know they got out at least once while Michelle and I were gone because a neighbor came and told the house sitter that they had gotten into her yard.  It looks like we are going to have to invest in some fencing.  Not just to keep critters in, but to keep people out.

Right before we left on vacation, I found some guy on my property.  He was leaving at the time I happened to see him, but he never knocked on the door so I am guessing he was up to no good. In the forty seconds it took me to get my keys and try to chase him down, he disappeared.  It is making me nervous about not having a fence around the west side of the property.  Anyway, the missing chickens made for an extremely depressing end to my vacation.  Even though they are just farm animals, Michelle and I have grown to love them like pets and are heartbroken over the loss. In other chicken news, we acquired another fifteen chicks.

They are happily milling about in our makeshift chick rearing pen in the hen house (i.e. a kiddie pool with a hardware cloth dome over it).  They are starting to feather out, so they should be good to go when the cold weather hits Oregon.  With the missing chickens and the new chicks, we will bring our numbers up to about 26 chickens.  We had originally thought that the 14 hens we had would be enough eggs to have a surplus.  Normally, that would be correct, but when I am on vacation and home all week it is just enough for us two. We figure we will have lots of surplus eggs come spring.  Sorry for my miscalculation to those who were anticipating buying eggs from us.  We will get this figured out eventually, but it is a learning process. And then there are the bees.

We finally got to harvest our 2017 crop of honey and it was amazing.  We ended up with much more of the early season honey, which is light in color, and less of the late season honey (dark colored presumably due to the bountiful blackberries that are blooming in mid-summer).  I think we ended up with around 120 pounds of honey which we sold on Facebook for 24 hours before we left for vacation and our niece Sam has been selling at her high school.  We decided to cut her in on a percentage of everything she sells, so it works out for both of us.  For the rest of you who are still trying to get your Priddy Acres wildflower raw honey fix, you may send your order to our email priddyacres@gmail.com (include order and address) and we can send you a link for payment on PayPal. We have some of everything left (early/light honey, late/dark honey, and both light/dark in the comb), but our supplies are starting to get low on the jarred honey (especially the dark late season honey). Remember that all of our honey products are available ONLY while supplies last, so get yours before we are out.  We did consider selling it on Amazon, but we would have to raise the price in order to break even.

For anyone out there that is considering opening a small business and selling on Amazon, they take 15% of all sales and you are paid by Amazon via direct deposit (I believe) once a month, while PayPal only takes 3% of the billed amount and the money is deposited into your account at the time of transaction.  Additionally, I’m not sure what the rules are for selling products meant for human consumption on Amazon and it could be a rather lengthy and/or pricey thing to do. Regardless, we are weighing the options and may decide not to pursue selling honey on Amazon this year if we are able to get some traction selling the honey directly to the consumer (i.e. you lovely folks reading this).  We were also able to extract quite a bit more honey from the crushed comb this year.  Last year, we just sat the crushed comb on top of a grate over a bowl in cheesecloth then waited a couple days for it to drain.  This year, we went to our local DIY store and built a bucket contraption for letting the honey drain in a way that wouldn’t expose it to the atmosphere until we put it in a jar.  Basically, we scooped the crushed comb with honey into two filters that were stretched over the top of a food grade bucket.  We then put the bucket lid on and sealed it up so nothing could get in or out until we were ready to put the honey into jars.  Prior to using the bucket, I installed a tap with a simple ball valve onto the side of the bucket near the bottom.  This allowed us to simply open the tap and let the honey flow into the jar without having to scoop the honey or lift the bucket to pour it.  Additionally, when we are ready to melt the wax into molds we can simply take the filters over to the melting pot and pull out the debris that is left behind.  With the filters and all the parts, we spent just over ten dollars per setup.  If you buy a similar setup online, you will pay around twenty dollars (assuming you have Prime) for the bucket and about thirty five dollars for the metal screen filter. The non-metal “honey filter” I was able to find will supposedly filter out everything except the honey, which includes the pollen.  Personally, I don’t want the pollen filtered out of my honey. That is what makes honey great for helping people with springtime pollen allergies.  They are exposed to the pollen year round and it gets their body used to it in small doses so, when spring comes around, they aren’t completely debilitated by it.  That being the case, I just got some filters from said DIY store which had slightly bigger holes.  They filter out bee parts, wax, and large particles, but let everything else through. This is what raw honey is all about folks. Unprocessed, natural, and sweet; just remember that you shouldn’t feed honey to babies.  Honey has a natural propensity, especially if it contains too much moisture, to have a bacterium which is harmless to adult immune systems but can be harmful to infants.  In other bee news, it is time to get those bees treated for mites!

If they haven’t already been treated in August, which is actually the time to do it, you should find a treatment that doesn’t have such a tight temperature requirement and get to it.  Remember that the load of mites can increase at an exponential rate if left untreated, so you need to hit those things before they have time to reproduce.  You should also be feeding your bees more concentrated sugar syrup at this point.  In the summer, the temperatures are high enough that the bees don’t have a hard time fanning off the extra moisture if they need to and there is plenty of food around for them to eat while expending all that energy.  In the fall, however, they have less available foraging and are prepping to cluster up for the winter.  The more concentrated syrup, usually around 2:1 sugar to water, will eventually migrate to fondant which is mostly invert sugar and a little water.  People say these can help absorb excess moisture in the hive, but I would NOT count on fondant as a moisture reducer.  This brings me to my next point.  Get started making those quilt boxes right now, if you haven’t already got some for your hives.  A quilt box can be your primary avenue for moisture reduction.  As I have said before, moisture in the hive during times of intense cold will kill your bees faster than anything else will.  The basic principle is moisture heavy warm air rises to the top of the hive, condenses on the cover, and rains back down on the bees.  We all know what happens when we are wet and get hit with cold air…it feels way colder.  A quilt box provides ventilation to carry away the moist air and an absorbent material to insulate and absorb any condensed water that attempts to fall down onto the bees.  I spoke with a very knowledgable beekeeper in the spring about what he does here in Oregon to insulate his hives.  His response was unexpected…”Nothing”.  I know that it doesn’t typically get too cold for too long, so that may work for this area.  If you typically get freezing temperatures in the winter, I would imagine it would be a good idea to try and craft some kind of wall insulation for the hive.  Last year, I put my hive in my greenhouse, to protect it from the rain.  This year, however, I have five hives and don’t have room for them in the greenhouse.  Furthermore, I am convinced that I can come up with a plan that will both protect the inside of the hive from moisture issues and keep me from having to move them. As winter gets closer, I’ll try and let everyone know the steps that I have taken to protect my hives from the winter weather. For now, I think I have taken up enough of your time.

I hope everyone enjoyed their summer.  Now it’s time to get ready for your favorite fall sporting events, the holiday season, cold weather, and hot beverages. Until next time!